Comment on Capturing the Friedmans/Michele Citron

Personal experiences are the things that shape us as individuals. More importantly, the way we choose to remember our personal experiences is what creates the silhouette of our character and facilitates self perception. Michele Citron confers her ideas of the divide between memories and the filmic portrayal of one’s life. She talks of her abuse as being shadowed by the camera’s ability to capture only the desired aspects of life, leaving the rest to fall by the wayside. Citron remembers sitting in the living room viewing home videos with her family, reviewing the novelty of having their youth and festivities documented and preserved. What she noted did not shine through was the way she knew she felt at the time these movies were made. Film cannot capture the essence of emotion that lies behind the eyes of a character who presents their desired self to a lens incapable of interpreting anything other than the obvious.
Home movies intercede to the distinction of what truth there is to personal memory and whether or not film can accurately imprison the past. Citron’s memories are not of happy family parties and expensive clothing, but they are of lower middle class struggles and secret incestuous incidences that ate away at her. Film, however, is able to quarantine one moment in time and give the allusion that there was nothing other than party dresses and parading for cameras. The notion of being able to record and re live your history as you may not remember it can fracture the very institutions you may have utilized to mold your identity.
The Film’s title, “Capturing the Friedmans” is almost a play on words, the way I see it. The focus of the documentary is the trials and incarceration of men convicted/accused of child molestation and abuse. There is an underlying meaning to this title that expresses the initiative presented by Michele Citron; the task of appropriately “capturing” the Friedmans’ story on film for people to consume and dissect. Another correlation between the reading and the film is the use of home video to cultivate and humanize an “other.” As mentioned by citron, the employment of home video in the movie “Philadelphia” gives Tom Hank’s character the chance to display the fact that even though he is different, he is still the same. Arnold Friedman is given the same chance to verify, that even though he is an “other” (hopefully) to us, he is still a person, someone’s husband and father.

Comment on Jupurrurla makes TV

Walipri people have a strict law of order and a system of keeping a ring of undisclosed information a secret from the various groups that are not permitted to be in “the know.” There are secrets kept from a variety of different groups, some depend on age, gender, and faction. Some of them are revealed to individuals during ceremonies as a right of passage, while other secrets are never told to the person that is left in the dark. The idea of secrecy allows for an immense power dynamic among the Walipri people. The clout of secrecy is a component of the law that defines order and keeps things under control. Without this information being not only secret, but coveted, Walipri oral tradition and the entire classification of society would break down.
The Walipri faced a problem when it came to showing ceremonies or revealing secrets on TV. There was no way around disturbing the origin stories or their view of natural law if secrets were to be disclosed to anyone who had access to television. To solve this problem there were many restrictions placed on films, which had to stay within the realm of what was thought to be “within Walipri law.”
One other module of Walipri “law” is the notion that deceased peoples are not permitted to be shown on film or spoken of after death, since photographs and films are taken of people who eventually die; it was a concern of the Walipri people what to do with the films that depict these people. It was determined that the videos would be handled meticulously and decisions would develop as to how to treat them based on their context. As for photographs of large groups where only some of the members had passed, the faces were simply whited out to still allow people to view what was deemed an important photo.

Comment on Through Navajo Eyes

The whole idea of giving unfamiliar media to a group of people and asking them to correctly represent themselves is, in my opinion, really productive. It is difficult to film something from a different cultural perspective when our own eyes are rooted in subjective nature. We had previously discussed the notion that the camera, in some cases, becomes the extension of oneself. If this is true, then giving that camera to a member of a certain group will give us a new take on the things that we may have been missing out on. I think this reading went really well with the one from Tuesday because this is the tangible part of a theoretical discussion. While I was reading this, I was reminded of the way paintings of the Battle of Little Big Horn were analyzed. The paintings done by the Souix were drastically different from the American versions where Custer stood brave and tall in the center of the battle while turmoil swirled around him. I think that what is extracted from a film has almost everything to do with the eye behind the camera and by viewing the portions of life that are deemed worthy of filming by the cameraman, we can learn the weight at which they are valued in a culture.

Salut Cousin!

Allouache’s film “Salut Cousin” depicts the tale of two Algerians, Mok and Alilo experiencing highs and lows in a slum of Paris. They are both confused about their own personal identities, Mok lies about his background and tries to convince people that he is from a lower class than he really is in order to gain some sort of credibility. At the same time, Alilo is the “country boy” who is confused about life in the “big city.” Because of this cultural collision, we get a humorous look at the ongoings of these two somewhat out of place individuals. This film reminded me more of an episode of “Perfect Strangers,” than anything. The comedic spin made it interesting, yet, at times, seemed to take away from the rich cultural issues that were at hand.
The transnational Identity exists within the Algerian people living in Paris. When we see Mok’s parents watching Algerian Television we are aware of their hunger to belong to their country which is ravaged by the Islamic Fundamentalist Revolution, they know they will never be able to, yet they also know that they will never feel at home in France.
Both cousins have Algerian commonalities that bond them in recognition of a “true self.” As they traipse through the nightmare of being an “other” Mok realizes that his stylish city clothing and aspiring rap career are nothing more than a veneer to project a sense of belonging.
Racism is a powerful theme in the movie, depicting it graphically in the scene where Fatoumata gets attacked by skinheads in the telephone booth. This contrasts the carnival style melting pot image that we are first shown. The Parisian dream is crushed for Alilo as he becomes conscious of the Algerian struggle that is not remedied by leaving home and living the fast life.

The Battle of Algiers

Gillo Pontecorvo uses realism to portray the events of the Battle of Algiers in a newsreel type fashion. The documentary style filming used here shows things in what we think is in inside look at the struggle against the French colonists, although we are still watching a scripted film. By using realism in such a graphic film it is hard to detach yourself from it.

The Algerian point of view is conveyed pretty clearly throughout the film. The scenes show a lot of very ordinary looking people as well as important leaders and we get a panoramic view of the Algerian population and citizens. By showing us the massive amounts of people protesting in tandem with scenes of regular Algerian city living, we feel a connection to the even nameless characters with the notion that they are the “everyman.”

Fanon’s discussion of what self determination means to the oppressed is illustrated in this film. The Algerians begin to have revolutionary cells within the Casbah and a war for independence breaks out. Fanon uses the idea of De Facto versus De jure styles of power. The whole idea that countries are set up in a European Governmental system gives the Colonial rulers De Facto power even when they are no longer the dominating leaders by law. By using violence and pure revolution as forms of self determination, the colonized are refusing to sit at the debate table and argue something that has been pre-structured. Although the Algerians “lost” this battle in terms of what happened to the FLN in this course of war, the French were ultimately pushed out of Algeria. Thus proving what Fanon says about Self determination as a whole.

Film As Text?

MacDougall addresses the notion that Ethnographic Film does not hold it's place in the scientific world as well as Ethnographic text does for some researchers. Text is distinguished from film by a definition of the terms as well as the reception they receive. The concepts seem to be centralized around the ideas of interpretation variants through visual and written anthropological mediums. It is argued that perception is skewed in film because the viewer can be distracted by other events going on in the scene. Rather than focusing on precisely what the film maker may want you to observe, you are left to shift your focus to background noise and other interactions within the frame. Text does not allow for this distraction because "...concrete details are held in suspension in the crucial moment to permit abstract expression..." Written word allows the writer to convey a single idea in full detail allowing the mind to focus solely on the text at hand, rather than the scenery or character interactions in the background.

Both film and text have equivalent amounts of leeway in interpretation. That fact was evident in our class discussion following a quiz about our last reading. Each person in the class read the same passage, yet we all extracted different themes and ideas and weighed the importance of individual points from a view through our own window.

The concept of Film-as-Text causes a paradigm shift in the way anthropology is viewed. Film focuses less on the theoretical stance that is offered in text, and more on the gathering of raw data which conveys an entirely different retrospective view for an audience. It is important to then disassemble detachment from a film if it is to be seen as text, and then read it as such. If film is used as a source of information in which anthropological data can be obtained, seeing it as a form of text with observational accuracy and realism is crucial to its survival.