5 - Stereotypes and Hegemony in "The Celluloid Closet" and "Reel Injun"

Stereotypes and Hegemony in "The Celluloid Closet" and "Reel Injun"
by Melanie, Jason, and Christopher

Conformation to what is deemed normal VS Being different

          As human beings we all belong to a category of people that define who we are in a sense but with this in mind we are all unique and different, no one is the same. Specific groups may be created because the color of one's skin to one's own personal beliefs, but do these levels define exactly who we are and how we should act? People that are different from what is considered normal are crucially criticized by society and categorized (put in an identified group of people) which tend to be largely stereotyped. Social types of people are accepted because they willingly choose to follow the rules of society while everybody else is confined to a specific stereotype that won't allow social acceptance. Who says what is normal? The answer to this is: the people in power, they can fashion the world however way they want by using hegemony. These people decide what is acceptable with the power they hold and by allowing certain things to be shown in cinema or not. An example of this can be found in The Celluloid Closet; restrictions were set against the portrayal of homosexuality in movies because the people in power found this to be an unacceptable group of people.

Homosexuality in The Celluloid Closet

      

The Celluloid Closet is a 102 minute American documentary film released in 1995, directed and written by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. The film is essentially based on Vito Russo's famous book with the same name. The Celluloid Closet is a combination of clips from many influential Hollywood films that illustrate in detail the depiction of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) characters in cinema. Between each clip are layered interviews with different filmmakers and actors commenting on these clips and their own personal experiences of this subject. In film, homosexuals were portrayed as weak, mentally and physically fragile, malicious and powerless. They fell under the category of sissies, victims, and villains in the film industry. These characters and their fierce stereotypes significantly influenced the viewers of film for decades. We build our identities partly through the gaze of other people, which may lead to stereotyping and potentially violence.

Stereotypes are ideas, images, or definitions, widely agreed upon and believed to be correct rather than social types, where people live by the rules of society. Stereotypes refer to what is, as it were, within and beyond the borders of normalcy (white, middle-class, heterosexual, male). The rules are designed to exclude certain groups that people are condemned to, consequently gays like the sadistic queer, the neurotic faggot, etc. Gay iconography, (gay stereotypes) inflexibly classifies homosexuality and keeps it isolated. In the movie The Celluloid Closet, homosexuals live from and generate hatred, fear, ridicule, and ignorance. Resulting our civilization to read people and divide them into four different categories, a role, an individual, a type and a member. The level identifies humans from their everyday occupations and what role they play in the world. Next is the individual who is affiliated to social structures. A type falls into the following category. This is where a person is recognized as complex or unique. The final status is a member. A member is when someone is assigning general qualities and criteria to a person. Divisions in society such as class, gender, race, and sexuality determine the inclusion to a group. Thus, the LGBT characters from The Celluloid Closet.

However, homosexuals are an invisible minority. This sexual character of homosexual difference is not physical; and therefore cannot be seen, unlike African Americans and females, for example. As a result, the synecdoche comes into play. Synecdoche is taking the part for the whole (ten sails rather than ten ships). The fact that these characters are gay in the film signifies that homosexuality is supposed to explicate to the viewer everything else about the personality or actions of gays. Moreover, gayness can be an erratic position. "Fluidity threatens the rigidity of categories and the maintenance of heterosexual hegemony". Hegemony is defined as the dominance, especially by one country or social group, over all others. People criticize society according to their own views of the world; they make their way of life appear “natural” and “inevitable." An example of hegemony in the film is when, middle-class, heterosexual, male are thought to be superior to homosexuals. Hegemony through stereotyping works via ethnocentrism. This means that the norms of one group are the norms for everyone, and the assumption that some social groups have inborn and unaltered psychological characteristics.  The concept of ethnocentrism is evident in The Celluloid Closet because some heterosexuals do not understand homosexuality and feel as though it is wrong. In some countries homosexuality is considered a crime, because it does not conform to heterosexuality. Many filmmakers and actors in the film claim that heterosexuals think that homosexuality is a phase that they will simply grow out of. They believe that men were meant to be with women because that is how it is supposedly should be. Like homosexuals, being Native was once believed to be an aspect of oneself that could easily be erased over time but through the movie Reel Injun we can see that this is not the case.

http://www.actupny.org/documents/whfight.html

Histories Portrayal of Natives....Reel Injun

        Reel Injun, directed by Neil Diamond, is a documentary film that demonstrates the depiction of natives throughout film history. This movie was made in Canada in the year 2009, it runs for 85 minutes. Many stereotypes have been linked to this race of people because of their representation in film; Diamond goes about this documentary trying to give the viewers the real story of who these beings are. It is stated very early in the film that cinema was made for one main reason: to capture something foreign and fascinating to our society which happened to be the lives of the Indians. At the beginning of cinema Natives were portrayed at stoic, un-stoppable and spiritual people. One of the main people linked to this specific depiction is Crazy Horse (the better translation is spirited horse). Crazy Horse was a Native warrior who today is an embodiment of what the Natives were capable of doing. After his death the Natives were forced onto reservations where their language and freedom was taken away.

             The battle between the "white man" and Natives have been a constant struggle shown in cinema. In reality these struggles are the struggle of hegemony: the dominance of the ever expanding colonials over Indians. One event in particular is striking: when the seventh Calvary opened fire on the last free community of Natives on the Pine Ridge reservation leaving 300 woman, children and men dead (this event is an example of ethnocentrism: belief in the superiority of one's own ethnic group over another). The romance of this occurrence was shown in movies because it is a demonstration of the power and domination over a once beautiful and populated group of beings. After their near extinction, the Native population had become a hero in a period called the Silent Era. In this period the Indian community brought their own views of who they were into cinema to capture their fast diminishing race of people known as the noble savage.

            As North America encountered a tragedy called the Great Depression a new hero was presented to up lift the nations broken spirits: cowboys. During this period many changes were made to movies that consisted the "brutal savages", it became very popular for white men to be used as main Native characters (above anything else Natives found this funny), actual Indians were used as extras (they would talk in their actual tong but once it had been translated many years later it has realized that the Natives had been making a fool of the actors right on screen), and every native portrayed was a plains Indian Native (there was no distinction between the different tribes). By the way Natives were represented in cinema the population was lead to believe that all Natives were horrible head band wearing, horse riding murderers who should be feared above anything else. Yet when we look at them today a majority of them don't even ride horses and they never actually wore head bands (this was introduced in films so that the heads bands could hold the actors wigs on). This last fact is an example of stereotype: what is being shown on screen is a widely held image of a Native. The difference between us and them is the color or of skin and the starvation we have for power over everything, other than that we are like them in every way.

            600 years ago the word Native or Indians was foreign to the people we now identify it with, however, it should be realized that these people are not Natives or Indians...they are older than this concept. Over time these human beings have adapted these names but all this shows is how they are beginning to forget who they are as human beings, they are doing this by preserving something (the name Native or Indians) forced upon them by an intruding race of men. It is easy to forget who we are and adapt something forced upon us. A prime example of this is a man called Iron Eyes Cody. He was known as the most famous icon of a good Native but it was discovered later on in his career that he was in fact Italian, not Native. As time went on and the cameras had stopped rolling for him he kept the image of being a Native to such an extent that he would actually play his movies repeatedly in his home...he believed he was what he saw on the screen until he died. He forgot who he was and became accustomed to something else.

            Iron Eyes Cody was also the beginning of a new Era for the representation of Natives, the Hippie Era. The Hippies put forward a facade that screamed Native. They loved these free spirited people but what they put forward was what they saw in movies, it was all fiction. Sacheen Little feather openly criticises the hippies for that one reason (because of classic but un true stereotypes of Indians), they were not even demonstrating the Indian culture correctly. In this period Natives also became the stand in for oppressed people, they finally started trying to assert themselves politically which gave other races of people (blacks, woman, ect) the strive to do the same thing. Everyone is made to believe that all men are supposed to be free, then why weren't Natives given this opportunity?

            It is more recent cinema that allows for Natives to be portrayed correctly. Atanarjuat is a prime example of this. This film is directed by an actual Indian who sees this movie as his opportunity to speak to the world and a way to record history the real way. A new image of Indians is put forward; the running naked man that can be found in the film is not an actor because an actor wouldn't do that, he is a representation of all the Native people who have been unjustly represented until this point in time. They are not asking to be portrayed positively all the time (a naked man running is obviously not the best image), they are asking to be portrayed humanely. The white man tried and is still trying to force hegemony on these human beings but once the Natives did not conform to their ideological ways colonials tried to suppress them furthermore by presenting stereotypes. With this in mind they have still stayed true to themselves and have never changed. They are and always be different.

 Compare and contrast

        

          Being different is nothing to be ashamed of. We have the choice to choose the life we want even if it brings good or bad consequences. Everybody gets judged about the life they are living or their appearance but there is nothing wrong with that. Accepting yourself is important weather you fit a specific stereotype or have a different lifestyle than others. For example, in Celluloid Closet, gay people were not accepted by society and they were thought to have a mental disability but with this criticism in mind homosexual kept being them self. In Reel Injun, the natives never changed themselves even though they seen differently because of their past. Both stereotypes were seen differently by others as abnormal human beings, the way they had been portrayed in movies was affecting our views of who these people actually were.

          The movies Celluloid Closet and Reel Injun teach us how we live in a world full of discrimination, however, it can be realized that this prejudice never ends. The way the director makes the movie, they have the ability to make the homosexuals look like the bad guy but with the help of iconography, they can make them look like good guys.  In Hollywood, the truths in films use to be changed to deem the movie appropriate for viewers (when films would be made, the director would take control and transform parts of the film to make it appropriate). For example, in Celluloid Closet, the director would make a movie about gay bashing and murder into anti-Semitism and murder. This is one demonstration of how easily it is to hide the truth from the viewers watching the movie. Some people and countries around the world have a problem with ethnocentrism and are not yet able to accept one another when it comes to race or appearance. We only think of our own well being not others without taking consideration of how the targeted people are feeling.

         By simply seeing these kinds of documentaries, our visions of the world can be transformed. As ordinary people, what is being portrayed in films does not affect us as much as those who fit the stereotypes being described in certain films. We become emotional at certain points of the film and accept what is happening, but for those who it concerns, like the gays and natives, they become victims. In Celluloid Closet, the gays who were being laughed at would cry or commit suicide for not being accepted. In Reel Injun, the actual Indians are not able to watch parts where their own kinds were being killed during cowboy movies. One out of many uses of a documentary film is to influence the world population to try and live together so that everybody can be seen as an equal or to demonstrate the people going through hardships so that we may show compassion. There are places that acknowledge what happened between the cowboys and Indians. In Navao, anybody can experience the life of a cowboy. A camp was made to give a positive portrayal of the natives by giving white boys the opportunity to act like Indians and fight like Indians. Those who where once discriminated by others are now being remembered.

         The overall message being sent to us through these films is to accept one another no matter what. We are all different in our own ways and even though the society we live in today may push a certain depiction of how we should look or act to be “perfect”, be happy in whom we are as unique human beings. We need to take the time to get to know the people around us without discriminating each other in order to better our society.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QvMqcFot9U

Who do we want to be as human beings?

      
           Everybody is different, we all hold our own beliefs and follow our own morals. Just because some people may not all conform to societies view of normalcy does not make them a lower race of people then another. Cinema is used to help teach the world the ways of life but how can this happen if you don't even feel like you belong? Cinema has begun to evolve by allowing more diverse stories to be told (allowing homosexuals or Natives to tell their own stories). Since this has become the norm, the world is beginning to become a more inclusive place for everybody. Prejudice must stop for a better future. Stereotypes should not define who we are, we should be able to create this by the actions we make individually.





4 - Editing

Editing in Baraka and Microcosmos
by Alexandra, Zach and Laura

Baraka: A Unique Way Of Editing

The method a documentary film is edited can guide the viewer to the ultimate meaning of the film. In both Baraka and Microcosmos, the idea of the unknown in our world is developed without the use of words, rather by the use of juxtaposition. This allows the audience to have their own opinion while they are shocked by images most do not see with their own eyes.

Baraka is a non-verbal film that has no actors, no script, and no voice-over and shows us images of landscapes, people, and animals from 6 different continents. It was directed and created by Ron Fricke and Michael Stearns, two Americans, in 1992. It is one of few movies shot with a high quality 70mm lens. Fricke, Sterns and their three-man crew filmed the beautiful images from 24 countries in a span of just 14 months.

“Baraka” is an old Sufi word that is roughly translatable as “a breath of life” and/or “a blessing”. This word, which happens to be the title of the movie, describes the images seen in the movie very well, especially those in the first section of it. In this first part of the documentary, we see mostly beautiful images of the great, untouched elements of nature our planet has given us, like the Iguazu Falls in Argentina.

The second part of the film was mostly images of the interaction, good or bad, that humans have with nature. This is seen by the incredibly busy traffic in downtown New York (pollution) and by the extermination camps of Auschwitz in Germany (man mass murdering man). The third and final part of the movie was all about preserving older cultures, death, and rebirth. The images that show us this, respectively, are the Kaaba, an important sacred area situated in Mecca where millions of Muslims go to pray, the burning of dead bodies on the side of the Ganges river in India, and the final shot of the stars, the same one as the movie opened with. To my teammates and I, the movie in its entirety represented a full cycle of life, starting with birth in the stars, nature, animals, humans, evolution of technology, death and finally, rebirth. But, since there is a lack of spoken words, there is room for different interpretations in guessing what the film’s meaning really is; the creators really leave it up to the viewers to decide for themselves what it signifies.

The main concept discussed in class this week was juxtaposition of images and how just the simple fact of showing one image before another can completely change the meaning of the second image. This is a concept first demonstrated by Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov in the early 1900s.

The shot of the man’s neutral face throughout the mini-film is always the same, but by adding different images before his face is shown tricks our mind into believing that he is for example, hungry, when the soup is shown, or sad, when the girl in the coffin is shown.

The most powerful juxtaposition of images in Baraka, to me, was when the three men were shown shoveling coal into a big burning oven, and then the image of the ovens in the concentration camps in Europe and Asia were displayed, where an unimaginable number of people were murdered for no valid reason. This came as a shock to me, seeing men doing their everyday jobs and then actually seeing that the end result of their actions was for a horrible cause.

Another concept discussed in class was the different dimensions of film editing, the first one being graphic relations. This relation describes the image’s shape, color and dynamic. For example, in a lot of the scenes in the movie there was an element that was red. I am thinking in particular about when an aboriginal person’s face was shown, close up, and he had a red line painted down his nose and right before we saw the reddish, brownish bark of the trees in the surrounding forest. The second dimension is the rhythmic relation, which relates to how long the image is shown on the screen as well as its speed or rhythm. In Baraka, many images are shown for an extended period of time to make us reflect on the issue that is being shown. For example, the traffic in New York City is presented for quite a long time and at a fast pace, just long enough for us to think about the pollution all the cars cause. The same rhythm was used in the scene following this one, where we saw thousands of people going up and down escalators in the Big Apple. Spatial relations come next, which compare and contrast two points in space. The comparison between the two ovens in the same scene described above proves this. The last dimension of film editing is the temporal relation, which permits to move back and forth in time, or even expand it. To my teammates and myself, the movie from beginning to end is a temporal relation, since we viewed it as a cycle of life, like previously explained. During the whole viewing we were constantly travelling through time in different areas in the world and experiencing a few minutes in each country’s cultures. In sum, all the different kinds of editing brought to these images in Baraka is what really makes the film unique and builds its story. 

Microcosmos: Le peuple de l'herbe

Microcosmos: Le people de l'herbe – the original French title – is a documentary from 1996 filmed by Claude Nuridsany & Marie Pérennou. The film took fifteen years of research, two years of equipment design and three years of shooting and won multiple French César Awards awards. The word microcosmos refers to the microscopic world that we may not be able to see from the naked eye. In fact, this film revolves around the life and interactions of an insect in its natural habitat. Whether it is in a pond, underground, or in a tree, we are flooded with images that are very shocking and eye-opening.

 

Microcosmos begins with a fast paced lyrical song as the viewer is swarmed with aerial visuals of clouds and the sky. The film suddenly transforms to a close up look of a grass field and insects begin to appear. At first, we believe the film will be identical to Baraka, until we hear the voice of the narrator. Although the narrator does not say plenty, the quality of what she says is vital to the visuals: "Time passes differently here". During the film we get an idea of what it sounds like – noise of other insects – and what it feels like – their daily struggles – to be a bug. To couple the sounds of nature, a musical track plays that connects closely to each scene. For example, scary and intense music plays when we see creepy looking insects and playful music plays when we see bugs that seem funny to watch (Refer to video below). All in all, the sound of the film sets the proper mood and intensifies the image for the viewer.

The film also utilizes everything a camera can offer. Microcosmos was filmed with the aid of specially designed cameras called microcameras which allowed the directors to get clear and crisp close-up shots. The resulting image put everything in perspective and bugs began to seem life-sized. Nuridsany and Pérennou’s filming provided each and every angle of an insect’s habitat; from below, from above, from side to side, and so on. In one scene, everything was even seen from the point of view of a bee through its eyes.  This creates a connection with the audience and guides us to the understanding of a bug’s life. Since time passes differently in nature, numerous different editing effects involving the frame rate were done in the documentary. Some effects fall under the category of rhythmic relations where the length of what is shown controls how long we observe the image; slow-motions of ladybugs flying, time-lapses of flowers blooming and accelerated motions of plants eating insects. Another dimension of film editing is spatial relations where two things are related through similarities or differences. In several of these relations, we observe the differences between what we see and what we don’t see as humans. In one case, the directors’ use a close up of a bug in the dirt and then all of a sudden pan out to a forest trail which is all we would normally see (Refer to video below). In addition, a prominent dimension of editing is graphic relations where two images’ dynamics are compared. An example of this is when a trail of caterpillars are walking in a line then, moments later, we are shocked with the image of a mass of caterpillars that are swarmed together in a distraught pile. This image describes the discrepancy between an organized and a chaotic life of a critter.

Image after image, Microcosmos leaves its audience with different reactions. Most would have an aesthetic response where they believe the images are breathtaking. However, in a deeper sense, some may have a political response and believe we must pay more attention to things that may not be so obvious to us like nature. In the end, both Baraka and Microcosmos make us question what we used to have when ancient cultures and untouched nature was so pure before human’s evolved - an example of a nostalgic response. Keep in mind, although nature seems like such a large concept, it is “beyond anything we can imagine and yet almost beneath our notice”.

Reflecting on Both Films

Baraka and Microcosmos are films that have a very unique factor that we don’t get to see on a regular basis. With the lack of narration and the abundance of sound and images, it provides the audience with their own point of view, emotions and thoughts on the clips that are being displayed. These films have a special interactive dynamic that lets the audience become more engaged and concentrated on the hidden parts such as, culture and nature around the world. Most of the population doesn’t see what really happens in specific parts of the world, therefore, these films provide us with an educational aspect which informs us on the different realities of this world. These two movies help us acknowledge the fact humans may be taking over nature which can possibly be destroying our world slowly but surely.

 

Nature is what is keeping us alive at this very moment. It is providing us with help and in return we take advantage, abuse it and use it for our well-being. After viewing these two films, the images and clips were an absolute shock to me. We live our life like we’ve been told and only pay close attention to what is happening around us and what could possibly be affecting us. However, in these films we see what happens right under our feet without having an utter clue. In Microcosmos, we get to watch the lives of different insects in depth, for example; the inside of ant’s homes, spiders living in a bubble underwater or the birth of a butterfly. This movie truly shows a beautiful side to nature. As for Baraka, we get to see mostly negative effects of the use of nature for example; dump sites causing pollution, cutting down trees for no reason, blowing things up or using a large quantity of space to practice a certain type of religion. With the way our society is treating nature or going against it, rather than being at one with it, will soon result in a complete disaster of our world. After watching these two movies I had a nostalgic response to them and was reminded of a well-known disaster involving the drastic events of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that caused much of a catastrophe to the whole world. It was as if people didn't take enough precautions to avoid such disasters, and yet, till to this day, people still don’t try to do something to protect our world.

Click here to find out more on the BP oil spill

After much research, the directors of these movies took years to film in order to send out a specific message and get a political response from their audience or in fact or in fact make us recognize what our human race is doing to our environment. They are also trying to make us think hard and figure out what is the pattern and the things we are doing wrong in our everyday life. These shocking images will hopefully grasp everyone’s attention with a positive outlook on nature rather than negative and with any luck engage us into doing more for our environment.

With the high tech cameras available for our use today, Baraka and Microcosmos were two films with clear and crisp images. However, the editing used by the producers allowed us to see the world from another point of view. In both films, the main focus was to compare and contrast, use different angles, and hear only music throughout the film to create a personal opinion from each individual viewer.