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.
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2 comments:
I like the connection you drew between Citron's experiences with home movies and the way that home movies were used in the movie "Philidelphia", as mentioned in the "Capturing the Friedmans" film. I think that these two ideas contrast each other. While Tom Hanks' character in "Philidelphia" used home movies to show how he was a normal person, even though he seemed different to others, Citron believes that home movies do not show people for who they truly are and what they were feeling. I agree with Citron on this matter. I think that home movies tend to only show the happiness and special occasions that a family experiences, and omits all the hardships and difficulties that it faces. This is because people don't wish to recall painful memories, and so there is no reason to document them on video. I'm wondering if Citron's opinion is biased because her past contained serious issues which could possibly only be resolved by remembering them and accepting them.
I think that home videos should remain the way they are, and we should rely on them for happy memories, rather than an accurate portrayal of a family.
You have a great point about not being able to capture the true emotion of a film subject. Both the article and the film involve home movies that depict the perfect happy families in fun settings, while something much deeper is going on internally. Though film can never fully capture the reality of a moment, both of these examples, when explained after-the-fact, are incredibly enlightening. Though they are different forms of media, they both are able to convey similar points and, sadly, have similar themes. I thought Citron’s style of creating two different stories, one more technical and informative and the other more emotional, was a really interesting way of engaging the audience. At first I thought that it would be tedious to skip pages and have to follow two separate things, but they came together nicely to form an interesting merge of histories. The film also formed a history of its own when showing the family that was and what became of them after the crimes were revealed. I really liked that both the makers of the movie and the book used actual pieces of past, rather than trying to recreate or re-tell the stories without anything authentically visual. The fact that they used this technique made it easier to get to know the characters and become emotionally involved in their stories. Both stories were really emotionally intense and left me wondering about all of the parties involved and what their lives are like today.
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