In Her Own Time: The final Fieldwork of Barbara Myerhoff

Directed by:  Lynne Littman
Run Time: 60min
http://directcinema.com/dcl/title.php?id=225

This is a very touching film, and we (Christian, Emily and myself) were graced with the presence of Ms Littman for this viewing.  Myerhoff died, RIP, shortly after this film was made, according to Ms Littman, of a severe form of lung cancer.    It chronicles Myerhoff's search for some reprieve from her cancer, some meaning, and even a miracle.

As a participant-researcher she is brilliant.  In an attempt at reprieve she partakes and embraces an orthodox Judaism looking at her relation to religion in the face of death.  Considering the circumstances she is facing, this film couldn't be more about life.  She is so engaging and interesting it's easy to forget her illness.  One particular scene that I find brilliant is her interviewing "Sultana," in front of her bookshelf.  This scene is notable for not only the simple pointed and direct questioning, but also the camera work of Ms Littman.  The camera settles on a set of shelves containing numerous books – secular books.  Then Myerhoff asks her about her orthodoxy books as the camera pans to to several bookshelves of same size.  She's asking Sultana about the strictness of her religion and, trying to break her down a little.  As Sultana expresses her dogmatic view,  Myerhoff relates a quote to her.  With a big and understanding smile, she says, "When the heart is open, there's room for 'yes' and 'no'."  Later on, when Myerhoff is reflecting back on Sultana's stict and dogmatic adherence to this type of orthodoxy, she says, "when I look at this woman, it's across a vast and affectionate distance."  Again, the poetic nature of Myerhoff just pours out.  But, along with this, she looks at the people serving this religion and seems to be asking if the restrictions are actually a freedom.  Are they restrictions, or new possibilities to life?

I don't think Myerhoff needed to go find this strict form of religion, this spirituality.  She, in fact, exuded a spirituality on her own – she just needed to be reminded of her connection, I feel.  I'll never know, but I do know that in a brief 60-min, I found a wonderful spirit in Barbara Myerhoff.

Broken Pots, Broken Dreams

by Maris Boyd Gillette.

Broken Pots, Broken Dreams explores what the transition from state workers to private entrepreneurs means to the craftsmen and women of the porcelain workers of Jingdezhen, China.  Once a proud workforce who's historical memory of the porcelain craft is – "we made porcelain for emperors"– now all but forgotten. 

Narrated by the author and filmmaker in the 2nd-person – not normal in anthropological film – the author has said that she wanted her audience to try to "imagine yourself…."  Imagine yourself, laid off; imagine yourself believing in something almost religiously and then it all being taken away.  What would you do?  She wants the audience to imagine the hardships of her subjects.  It's sort of like that time as a child when you discover Santa is not real, or, possibly as a religious person, it is revealed to you that God doesn't exist.  I find that I sympathize with that which touched Gillette's heart – her empathy with her subjects – but I think that use of metaphor and editing would have produced a much more arresting film than her telling us to "imagine" that.


I found this film somewhat interesting as I am working in Eastern Germany with a culture who has similarly gone through a major political ideological change – from socialism to capitalism.  And, also relevant to me – this on a personal/professional level – is the transition and change of my career as a commercial photographer with the advent of digital technologies, and the transition of print-based media to web-based.  In both cases something fundamental has been changed in life.  To use a cliché, a rug has been pulled out from underneath.  However, it's only my tangential familiarity which made this film interesting.

Deep Inside Clint Star "My Porn"

With a sweet innocence Clint Star (aka Clint Alberta) focuses on issues of gender, identity and cultural heritage getting us deep inside Clint Star.  That's a terrible first sentence, and one for the cliche trash bin, but somehow it seems right for this film.  Not that the film is full of cliche's, and neither does it get us deep inside Clint, metaphorically, physically (thank God, since it is subtitled "My Porn"), nor very deeply on a purely emotional level.  What it does do however is utilize an innocence and an unrestrained, almost child-like abandon in it's style, revealing embarrassment, vulnerability, issues of ethnicity and gender and sexual identity–of his people: Canadian Native Americans. 

Problematizing ethnicity, people in Clint's film are refusing ethnicity.  The cliche Proud Indian line of ethnicity is what we expect, but his characters don't want to accept this.  It seems there is an embarrassment about it.  Tawny Maine, Native American in appearance, wonders about her Egyptian-Swedish ancestry.  Tawny's life seems to have been lived as someone she is not.  Using mostly talking-head interviews, and 1980's-90's music video-like cuts, Clint evokes memory from his characters as his storytelling line.  How is he framing scenes for us to read deeper into them?  What does he want us to read?  It's not always apparent on the surface, just like what resides below the surface of a persons skin is not always what we read on the outside.

We as Visual Anthropologists study visual representations.  The idea of memory as a narrative symbolic landscape representing a deeper truth is what I believe Clint is trying to do.  As a talking-head interview-type film, which can be quite boring and non-revealing, Clint's playful style and in-your-face sexual questioning seem to touch on a different and unseen plain of memory's landscape.  And, if we are able to realize this, we see below the surface of just Native American, of just gay and deeper inside the human that Clint wants us to see.