What struck me immediately after hearing Alan talk and watching Intimate Stranger was the sheer labor-intensity of making this film. Not only did the filmmaker sift through a stack of his grandfather’s papers, photographs and mementos taller than himself (he motioned with his hands while up on stage), but with the limited technology at the time, he also made this virtually all by hand. Whether or not one enjoys the film, I think one has to appreciate the artist’s ability to create a complex portrait of Joseph Cassuto through this (what I imagine to be) overwhelming mess of papers and artifacts of a past life, and by piecing together family interviews and memory.
I found Berliner’s use of the typewriter to be the most intriguing part of the film. Throughout, he used the sound and images of an antique typewriter as a unifying device. This was very effective in tying together the often contradictory family stories. If my memory serves me right, he also did this in Nobody’s business, where he used a metronome. I was immediately reminded of Ellen’s Body of War, where the Senate votes and sounds ran throughout the film in a similar fashion.
Watching this film, I felt like I was being taken into a world that is mostly invisible to the American public. Both the choice to film with Super 8 and to utilize local gospel music gave everything a haunting quality, which went well with the theme of the “invisible” immigrant workforce in America- and the many disappearances that take place throughout the story. The subject matter of immigrant workers in rural Mississippi was appealing to me because I have worked organizing Central American immigrant workers, but in the very different context of New York. The main narrative arc seemed to be the young white female organizer going into the town to build a workers’ center, and leaving for the summer in the end. This was complemented by smaller narrative arcs throughout, telling the stories of various families and individuals. The organizer’s voice was used throughout to narrate the film, and to tell the viewer what happens in the future. While I understand the director’s time constraints made this narration a necessity, at times I felt the woman’s narration was overpowering the people’s stories.
Something that interests me is a process called intersubjective ethnographic filmmaking, a process negotiating authority between “researcher” and “subject” by allowing participants to influence the production process. While I found “Mississippi Chicken” revelatory and moving, I wonder how we can make films that give the subaltern subject more of a voice. I think Ellen’s Troop 1500 is a good example of this, as she trains the young women in the girl scout troop with camera equipment, and their own documentation of their lives is incorporated into the larger film.
While “Their Eyes Were Watching God” has been one of my favorite novels for years, it wasn’t until a month or so ago that I heard Zora Neale Hurston was not only a leading literary figure of our time, but also an anthropologist–trained by no less than Franz Boas, the “father of American anthropology”–and ethnographic filmmaker. It was her anthropological fieldwork in the Southern United States that provided much of the material for Hurston’s novels. By creatively fusing together rare footage of black Southern life from Hurston’s ethnographic field footage, a reenactment from a radio interview, scholarly interviews and biographical information, the film draws out the personal circumstances and historical complexities that shaped this brilliant woman’s life and ultimately led her to die alone, and in poverty, buried in an unmarked grave. I think the film was successful not only in creating a strong narrative arc around the life and death of this treasured literary figure, but also creating a sub-story of the history of U.S. racial politics.
In the context of Hurston’s life and racial politics in the U.S., the film raises larger questions about history and representation: Who has the power to convince us to believe one representation over the other? How does one undo monolithic claims to history?
WE LIVE IN PUBLIC attempts to reveal the serious threats that technology and the internet pose to our lives. The problem is that there is nothing revelatory about this concept. Most people who are remotely in tune with the development of modernity can see this process unfolding. Since the industrial revolution people have warned against humanity’s submergence under technology. And as time has passed and technology has advanced, we have fallen deeper into these trappings; this is clear.
What is frustrating about the film is that it scratches the surface of potentially interesting subject matter, while never truly exploring the nuances. Yes, we live in a world of continually decreasing privacy. But what that means to us in any practical sense is not made clear in the film. Yes, we are continually boxed in by digital interfaces such as computer screens and PDAs. But what this means to us physiologically, psychologically, spiritually and emotionally are not examined in any profound manner.
WE LIVE IN PUBLIC tells us what we already know about our lives in this digital age, but does nothing to illuminate what this life means or how to live it. As a study of megalomania, through the life experience of Josh Harris, the film is highly successful. But as an apocalyptic warning, it seemed trite.
I finally figured out a way to upload the video from our project a couple of weeks ago, so here it is!
As you probably know, instead of conducting a formal one-on-one interview, my group decided to have more of an informal, unstructured conversation. We (Rebecca, Jordan and I) recorded about 43 minutes of audio, and talked about various subjects. I decided to focus this 1-2 minute project on a topic of discussion that came up time and time again- feminism.
In this short piece, I wanted to visually juxtapose the internal world of women with the external world, and the meeting of both. To portray the internal world, and the meeting of internal/external, I primarily used scenes from Maya Deren’s 1944 silent At land, and briefly used Vittorio de Sica’s La Ciociaria (The Woman). To portray the external world, I used scenes from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, Prelude to War (Part I of Cappra’s Why We Fight series) and a 1950′s public affairs broadcast called War or Peace. I decided to use Deren’s work to portray the internal world of women because they were set in natural environments of the oceanside, forest, etc. and had a very dream-like quality to them. Throughout this particular film, Deren literally climbs back and forth between this natural world and the cold world of modern society. I chose violent scenes to portray the external world because war is often seen as men’s domain, and women are left out of this conversation, even though the greatest victims of war are often women and children. I also included several scenes to portray the meeting of women’s internal and the external world, such as the woman energetically giving a speech in Battleship Potemkin, and the end, where Deren climbs out of her internal world of nature up onto a table at a bourgeoise dinner party, dominated by men.
I absolutely LOVED this film, not just because Pac is a brilliant musician and a beautiful soul whose music I grew up with, but because it painted a complex picture of the artist and his work–his pain and struggle, as well as his triumphs–”in his own words.” Obviously, there must have been a lot of editing done on the narration, and the viewer can’t be sure to what extent the narration of the film was constructed. But I think that it was extremely powerful to to have Pac relay the story of his voice. There was a heightened level of emotional intensity maintained throughout the film, and a strong narrative arc. Although the film ended in his death, there was hope at the end in that Tupac’s music will live on and continue to inspire generations to change the world.
Jackie Salloum’s Slingshot Hip Hop is a powerful portrayal of Palestinian youth living inside Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel as they discover hip hop as a means of self expression and as an instrument for political change. The film follows DAM, the first Palestinian hip hop group, from their earliest development as teenagers in Lyd (a neighborhood inside present day Israel). We see them through a very personal journey of “becoming”, as the group starts off appropriating commercial hip hop from the U.S. (rapping in English), and later undergoes a political transformation that reshapes the message of their music, as the violence intensifies in Palestine.
While the main protagonists of the film are the members of DAM, as the medium of hip hop starts to spread, the viewer is also exposed to a number of other talented Palestinian artists, both male and female, whose lyrics draw attention to the atrocities of growing up under the occupation and a political message of justice, unity and hope for the Palestinian people.
Through these personal stories, we are exposed to a side of Palestinian life that we rarely see portrayed in the West. The complex social and political terrain of occupied Palestine is documented, alongside the complex emotional and psychological terrain of these young people. What I found most compelling about this film was that it shows these young Palestinians not as victims (or as “terorists”), but instead as actors engaged in the struggle to define themselves, transform their lives and that of their communities, as well as the course of history itself.
I was impressed, for the most part, with the various production elements. The access to the characters lives and the often dangerous situations they were undergoing was commendable. The one device that I wasn’t fond of was the use of the brother’s voice (Suhell Nafar) to narrate the course of the film, as it felt too contrived and in strong opposition to the more natural verite style of the majority of the film. However, given that the filmmakers were not “there” at the start of DAM’s formation, and had to rely on a combination of interviews with group members and home video to tell that earlier and formative part of the story, I’m not sure what other narrative devices would have been an option.
In a society where the dominant image of Palestinians (and Arabs in general) is that of the “terrorist” or “Muslim extremist”, this film is a breath of fresh air. This is definitely the type of film that I think has the potential to change people’s concepts of the “Other” and to move individuals to action. Check it out and let me know your thoughts!
For more information, visit http://www.slingshothiphop.com/
In lieu of an ethnographic film class offered by the anthropology department, a few students and I have gathered to start a biweekly “documentary salon” where we will watch and discuss ethnographic and documentary films, politics of representation, visual anthropology, etc. We met for the first time last Thursday evening, and screened feminist anthropologist/filmmaker Trinh Minh-ha’s 1982 film Reassemblage.
The film is a visual exploration of the women of a small Senegalese community, and at the same time, a reflection on and critique of ethnographic filmmaking and the anthropological representation of cultures. The film breaks with convention in several ways. First, Minh-ha’s representation of African women as healthy, happy, capable mothers and food producers living in a thriving community is antithetical to the typical Western portrayal of the malnourished, deprived, starving African mother and child. Second, she turns the camera onto the filmmaker–not physically, but conceptually–by questioning the filmmaker’s relationship to the subject. Minh-ha purposefully tells the stories of three Western, white presences in the African community, that of an anthropologist and his wife, a peace corps worker, and a group of tourists, to critique the historical relationship with the West, or the observer and the African, or the observed. Third, the film structure is experimental, utilizing repetition of narration and images, periods of silence and quick cutaways.
While I thought the film was effective in exposing the problematic relationship between the “objective” anthropologist or filmmaker and the subject, many of my colleagues did not think the Director was effective in portraying an alternative vision of African society. Several women were particularly turned off by the frequent use of the image of African women’s breasts, and another criticized the filmmaker’s choice of perpetuating the Western gaze of the rural, “primitive” village being all that exists in Africa, without touching on a portrayal of the urban setting.
While I think that Winterbottom succeeded in creating a strong narrative arc, the constant shifts between real life interviews with the former Guantanamo detainees and the reenactments were not, for me, successful in creating a rhythm throughout the course of the film. The three main characters were developed early on, giving the viewer a window into their daily lives, and this allowed the viewer to connect with these men, to form an attachment to them. By developing their characters, the later scenes of violence and torture paid off more.
For me, the most important aspect of this film was neither the political exposure of detainees being removed from international law, nor questions as to the legitimacy of torture itself. The film raises the critical issue of the long term impact of state terror–in this case, the U.S. and British states’ terror against the Afghanistan people, and others caught in the crossfire– on contemporary power struggles and reconstruction efforts.
In Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala, Victoria Sanford writes that “To understand transition from authoritarian rule and efforts to construct democratic society based on a rule of law, we must understand the Maya experience with terror and internalized structures of terror as part of individual and collective identities.” (13-14) That is, individuals’ experience with repression and terror have a tangible effect on the contemporary society. Dealing with past repression and state violence are an integral part of the peace and reconstruction process.
The memories of these three young men, as portrayed in Road to Guantanamo, is a lived reality of thousands of men, women and children who have endured both physical and psychological terror, dehumanization and torture at the hands of the U.S. government, affecting both the Iraqi and Afghan people’s ability to restore the rule of law in their country, and implement effective reconstruction efforts.
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