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.