Thursday, November 29, 2007
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.
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There are two sides to every story and this article definitely showed that. Just like you with the example from the paintings of The Battle of Little Big Horn, different people from different cultures are going to see things in different ways. I loved that in this article the anthropologists really gave the Navajo's a lot of credit for how they were making thier movies. They thought that the Navajo's were doing a wonderful job and really using the camera and ediitng techniques to their best abilities, maybe even more successfully then the anthropologists themselves. Like when they talked about how the Navajo people were able to combine the panning images really well when editing the film because they loved the idea of movement and felt that it was so important. Unlike the reading we had on tuesday when the anthropologist said outright that the Kayamo man was making a lot of ediitng decisions that he would never have made himself and that looked wrong from a Western viewpoint, these anthropologists really loved and respected the films the Navajo were making which is extremely important.
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