ahmedvisanthro

[ahmedvisanthro]

Film Proposal: Uncle Charlie

The Film Title: Uncle Charlie

Genre: Participatory documentary

Duration: 10 minutes

Filmmakers: Fatemeh Yazdani, Ahmed Bakr, and  Nadin Helmi

Synopsis

In the middle of the street on the way to and from St. Stephen’s Basilica Church stands a man wearing a police uniform and carrying a sword. Some people think he is a living person who poses as a statue, others guess he is a guard or a knight. It is also said if you rub his belly your wishes will be true. By and large, they all agree that he looks funny and is worth a photo in their albums.

However, we only saw a mystery standing on the corner. Several questions were racing in our heads. Who is he? Where does he come from? And why is he standing there? We tried to answer those questions by observing people’s interactions with the statue and sometimes by conversing with them. We explore that there is no right answer and it is up to everyone to decide which story to believe.

Project description and theme

Observational Footages from the statue and its milieu, the tourists' interactions with it, and the tour guide rounds

Interviews with the tourists about their first impression regarding the statue and also their guesses about the statue’s representation

Interviews with CEU students who pass beside the statue daily to go to the campus 

Interview with a Hungarian expert concerning the history of the statue

 Treatment

Sequence 1 - Establishing

Fading into a low angle wide shot of the center, between the two historical buildings in Zrini Steet, with the background noises of the street, and accompanied with the church bells rings, the camera brings us down (tilt shot) to a wide shot of the back of the fat policeman statue known as Uncle Charlie facing St. Stephen’s Basilica. Followed by over the shoulder shot from the back of the statue showing people interacting with a man (statue). the statue is introduced through a medium shot and the scene is faded in the film title (Uncle Charlie).

Sequence  2 - Introduction (the luck myth)

A series of shots (medium/long) show the tourists interacting with the statue and taking photos with it. A series of short sound bites of the people highlighting their assumptions about the statue’s identity.  The Final statement “I do not know who he is” takes the audience to a shot showing a tour guide stands next to the statue with a group of tourists telling them about the myth behind the statue. The introduction included a shot showing a line of women taking turns in rubbing the statue belly and whispers in his ears.

Sequence  3 - Curiosity (Who do you think he is)

Interview with the tourists who were taking photos with the statue. The filmmakers asked them two questions:

Why did you take a photo with the statue?

Who do you think he is?

The sequence ended with an observational long shot of a kid moving around the statue with his bicycle and checking the statue sword and cloths and then left the frame.

Sequence 4 - I know a fat old policeman

A steady medium full shot of the statue while the image is fast-forwarded, showing the tourists interact with the statue by making funny gestures and taking funny photos with it. A song plays on the background “The Laughing Policeman - Charles Jolly”

Sequence 5 - Why is he there?

The sequence starts with a man approaching the statue alone and taking a self-photo as if they are friends. The scene followed by an interview with Erzsébet Barát talking about the broader context of placing the statue in downtown Pest. The sequence ended with an over the shoulder shot from the back of the statue which shows a young man hesitates to approach the statue, but finally, he decides to stand next to it and puts his arm around his neck as a close friend.

Sequence 6 - What has he done for this city?

The sequence starts with an interview with a group of young teenagers singing and laughing while the statue is visible on the background. The protagonist stated that he wants to know who the fat policeman is and what he has done for this city.  The next interview is conducted with a CEU student from gender studies department who tells a story about the real character who the statue is representing; policemen or gendarme who collaborated to deport Jews people to the concentration camps. The sequence ended with a low angle shot of a father standing beside the statue with his children and measuring his foot size with the statue. further, his son followed his act.

Sequence 7 - It is just an object!

An interview with a  CEU student from the legal studies department who expresses the fact that the statue has no significance in his opinion and it is just an object in his everyday life. The interview followed by a series of shots at the time of nightfall. The final shot shows the statue in the semi-empty street at night. On the background, it can be heard a man is encouraging other passers-by to go to the strip club.

[ahmedvisanthro]

Camera and the City

Dziga Vertov’s movie is his manifesto on the power of the movie camera, not as a teller of fictional stories, but as a capturer of reality. This power to capture cities in motion and to jump from one life situation to another. He centers a lot of the scenes not only around the real stories but the camera filming those stories.

The film is a love letter to the city - but not the symphony of one city. This city is actually Kiev, Kharkov, Moscow, and Odessa.

That’s when he takes us to the editing room and we see the power of the editor,  Elizaveta Svilova, for the first time. This display of the behind-the-scenes was new for his time and it was followed by a show-off of all the editing tricks they had. He shows us the real power to construct meaning out of the realities he films.

I liked to think about this part a lot in the period we were editing our final film project. While writing about the camera and centering the film around it, Vertov, in the end, did not only show the power to capture reality, but the power to create it in the editing room. Does that mean he is not different from fictional filmmakers? That he failed to actually capture the reality he was boasting about? I don’t think so. Editing does not take away from reality but reveals the fact that we construct its the meaning, and the meaning of our interaction with it, on a daily basis. A documentary film is just that fact put on display.

[ahmedvisanthro]

The Magic of the Camera

Making a film for the first time was a thrilling experience. It is entirely different from telling a simple story in one picture or even presenting a single perspective by taking a few seconds or minutes of footage. I have done that before, but making films has always seemed like magic. Now I see how it comes from the more real magic of collective vision and hard labor. Even though our experience was shorter and smaller than the big documentary productions, I now have a much better idea about how that works. I actually love that it was an equal collaboration of the three of us, with no assigned roles or dominance of one vision. Aueterism is overrated, the real magic comes from collective work.

We were also making an ethnographic film. The power of storytelling and the multiplicity of voices inside the ethnographic text are at the heart of the debates within anthropology, but in film, it is a completely different game. I learned that takes more care and more thought to tell a story visually, to connect different shots into a clear narrative that also makes sense visually and thematically.

In writing, it is easy to let your voice dominate the rest, to silence your informants completely no matter how much you talked to them. However, I believe that, while the final cut is still constructed completely by us, the different subjectivities we encountered have a bigger presence in moving picture that we would not be able to silence even if we tried. What filmmaking allows more to do is to artistically play with the dialectic between these different perspectives. This is the power of montage.

I only hope to continue exploring with ethnographic filmmaking, because I feel inspired and my eyes are opened to new ways of exploring people and the objects in their lives. I should also thank my partners, Nadine and Fateme, for making this experience fun, smooth and fruitful. Maybe our next movie will be together as well.

[ahmedvisanthro]

Visual Analysis: Salesman

Salesman by Albert Maysles, David Maysles & Charlotte Zwerin

00:00 to 1:48

 The directors of Salesman, proponents of cinéma verité, use their shots and editing to give a taste of what is a daily experience for the two traveling bible salesmen in this opening scene. The medium shots that include most of the characters show us the closeness of the situation, with all the characters setting close to each other, so that the salesman can show his product. The close-ups work to show us the emotions of the characters: like the bored child sitting silently among the adults and then playing around, or the mother trying to get over with the situation as soon as possible. The focus in the end, however, is on the salesmen, trying to their hardest to present the merits of their product from every angle to an uninterested costumer. The final close-up of Paul’s unsatisfied face as the mother explains why she cannot buy the bible seems to show his usual feeling while doing this job, cemented by the introduction of his name as the framing shot of his character.

[ahmedvisanthro]

Justice for Nature!

Written in collaboration with Fatemeh Yazdani (find her here)

Shocking, breathtaking and traumatic. These were our first impression of watching Safari; a semi-staged documentary directed by Ulrich Seidl about a Namibian hunting lodge which provides the experience of hunting for wealthy tourists. The camera follows an Austrian family killing endangered animals such as zebras and giraffes just for entertainment. The film has been conducted based on observation and interview so that the camera follows the hunters-tourists in the entire process of haunting; going to the zone, looking for the prey, stalking, adjusting the rifle, and shooting. Furthermore, it contains several interviews with hunters-tourists and the owners of the lodge in order to elaborate on their points of view about the hunting industry as a way of enjoyment.

The film is started with a long shot of Namibia nature while a hunter-tourist standing in the center of the shot playing trumpet; which implicitly tell us the initiation of an unequal battle; culture vs. nature. Indeed, Seidl places human agents in the focal point of the symmetrical shots in order to show how the domination of culture over nature within the human-centric anthology leads to the disaster.

The film includes some provocative and brutal scenes including taking trophy photograph with the carcass of the prey and decorating it for the sake of the pride. The most irritating scenes were filmed in the lodge when the black employees should skin and dismember the dead body of the animals.

The servants, who do everything else for the white hunters after the rifle goes off, from skinning to the taxidermy, are not included in the human agency at the center of the world. They are even excluded from having a voice in the film; in his damnation of how the Austrian tourists appearing his film think, Seidl interviewed every one of them, but only let his camera gaze at the black workers, watching as they silence work on the animal bodies, or even filming them chew on the leftover meat they are given. Maybe Seidl wanted to show us how they are not allowed much say in this arrangement, to cement that it is still mainly white agency impacting the planet and other humans living on it, but it would have been interesting to listen to what the Namibians have to say about their position in this hierarchy.

Therefore, we see Safari constructing a reality that is best understood at the intersection of two principle concepts; Anthropocene and Colonialism. The movie is structured exposing two hierarchical relationships; the supremacy of the human being over non-human agents and also the superiority of the White over Non-White, specifically black local people of Namibia.

According to the Anthropocene as a geological epoch, human agency has been placed in the center of understanding and interpreting the world. The story we see of the hunting lodge is just one intensified example of how putting that human agency in the center has pushed life on Earth out of its metaphorical orbit: the story of tourists who traveled all the way to Namibia to add to the endangerment of whole animal species, not out of necessity, survival, or even utility, but just to satisfy the desire to take life, to feel the thrill of causing destruction with a click. With human agency placed in the center of the world, everything else is collateral not only to our needs but also to our whims, which can later be justified as ‘helping the elderly animals’ or ‘keeping them from overbreeding’.

[ahmedvisanthro]

The Aestheticization of Others

In Anthropology and the Savage Slot, Michel-Rolph Trouillot explained that post-structuralist anthropologists of the 1980s have focused on a textual critique of the representation of the ‘Other’ in old anthropological texts, through undressing the claims of objectivity, exposing the role of metanarratives in shaping the texts and deconstructing the racist tropes in them. However, they were not able to break apart the ideal slots of ‘the Savage’, ‘the Utopia’ and ‘Order’; the origin behind all of the textual tropes. He identified these slots not only as the foundational core of anthropology, but also the founding myths of the West that created the discipline. I wonder if the reproduction of these slots, which Trouillot warned of, can be present in other media outside anthropological texts.

Although she is not an anthropologist, I thought of Leni Riefenstahl’s photos of the Nuba people in Sudan. Susan Sontag’s critique pointed to the ‘fascist aesthetics’ in the famous photos and I can see it: the idealization of the Nuba bodies and the emphasis on perfection, purity, authenticity, and strength. These are the same aesthetics present in the most prominent works of Nazi propaganda, of which Riefenstahl herself was a pioneer.

However, as noted by James C. Faris, Riefenstahl’s photos connect to a history that precedes fascism, a history of imperialism and the photography of native peoples by colonists, as well as the anthropologists who accompanied them. These photos also mediate an older fantasy, one that comes from Trouillot’s slots. It is the fantasy of the ‘noble savage’; the ‘Other’ against which the ‘I’ of the West defines itself. Riefenstahl’s fascist lens, which glorifies the white bodies of the German Nazis as the masters of civilization, also glorifies the bodies of the Nuba as masters of nature. Such photos and similar idealized depiction of ‘others’ respond to the fantasy of the utopic state of nature, a fantasy that still attracts western tourists who need a little escape from the contrasted civilization.

While Faris follows Riefenstahl’s work connection to colonial photography of the colonized and attempts to depict the ‘real’ life of the Nuba through his documentary, he still cannot escape the tradition of othering behind him completely, still displaying the natives before his camera. In Reassemblage, Trinh T. Minh-ha resolves to film everything without much interference, showing the parts of the life of Nuba women. Her style is akin to direct cinema, if not for her narration. Does Reassemblage offer a better answer to the question of representation? I do not know. Trouillot said that anthropology should shift its focus to the study of people as people, instead of looking for cultures to fill the ‘Other’ category. I wonder how that can be done with the ethnographic film medium.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2003. “Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness.” Pp. 7–28 in Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World, edited by M.-R. Trouillot. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US.