I’ve been grappling with one of the focus questions in last week’s session. “These are our stories, our people’ (Mike King) Why is it important for Maori to be a part of film and media?”
One of the biggest problems with minorities is that their experiences are totally excluded from the narrative. Most countries have experienced colonialism; either as the colonizer or the colonized. Living in Canada, there were huge issues with under-representation of Aboriginal stories. I remember only studying the different Canadian Aboriginal languages for a few weeks in primary school – but instead learning about wars in Europe and the uprising of Canadian settlers against the British. I knew more about my friends whose parents were European immigrants than my own classmates of Aboriginal descent.
It’s crazy how easy it is for entire cultures, stories, experiences, ways of life – to disappear from a narrative. History can be told through very biased lens – it just depends on who is designing the curriculum, writing the history books, and publishing them. Countries like China and North Korea rewrite their history and limit their citizens’ exposure to things like film and media so it doesn’t clash. I was born and raised in Canada, I am a Canadian, but I know shockingly little about the Aboriginal cultures that are enmeshed in its history but ignored in its textbooks, skimmed over in history classes. They are Canadians, but Canada doesn’t recognize them. They were my friends, but I am ashamed to say that I couldn’t give them the basic respect of knowing their histories. I simply took for granted what I was told. I never questioned it. I took their apparent unimportance as a fact and delved into what I was taught – it was so easy to follow the trail of crumbs without even thinking of looking up.
The first step, I think, is education. Living in privilege is no excuse for being ignorant. As A. Cooper said in last week’s reading, picking a man who was an expert on Maori knowledge and history and took a respectful approach in his research to write the textbooks on the history of New Zealand was a critical step in the right direction. This is where it starts. But sadly, it’s not always the case. I think one of the benefits of our generation is that people can use their social platforms to include their stories in the narrative, especially if they have no other opportunity. Today, my friends of Aboriginal descent share news of previous rights violations, the denigrating treatment assumed as normal, and the stereotypes that are still upheld today. They have taken the narrative reins in their own hands and are rewriting it, person by person.
On a larger scale, film and media have a huge power to fill in the blanks of those who know little or nothing of Indigenous cultures or minorities. With a school curriculum overlooking the history of Aboriginals in New Zealand, and then only learning about the Treaty of Waitangi in high school, all I knew about Indigenous cultures was of the native Americans in movies. But film’s power was exploited in a harmful way. Only stepping back and looking in retrospect has shown me that the gaps in my knowledge were instead used to reinforce damaging stereotypes which would in turn, affect my own curiosity, respect, and understanding of Indigenous cultures. Like a sheep, I followed the herdsman in telling me through his camera lens and his director’s eye that Aboriginals all fit the cowboys-and-Indians narrative, one of savages that needed to be wrestled with, people of brute force and a raw, useless intelligence. The Indians were never the heroes. No one dreamed of being the Chief when they grew up; they wanted to be the white man. Even worse, when I came to New Zealand with almost no knowledge of Maori, one of the first things I was introduced to in English class was a short film on an abusive Maori relationship. The protagonist was a janitor, and the camera framed him as an unstable man defined by his poverty, trapped in toxic relationships. The white people in the film, however, enjoyed jolly temperaments and relative success. Without saying anything, these associations said everything.
I couldn’t believe how gullible I had been, so easy to accept these fictions as truths, until I read John Berger’s ‘Ways of Seeing.’ He spoke of the power of the camera lens as one of the momentous shifts in history. Film is a powerful medium; there is no room to meet the viewer halfway, as in literature. Film is imposing. It tells us, this is what you should look at, this is what is important, this is what you must pay attention to. Lighting, mis-en-scene, camera angles, and dialogue can validate stories and shift our understanding of people in society’s power structures. Film can reinforce stereotypes that pervade and drip onto our daily treatment of others. Just as damaging as the view of Native Americans was for years, are shows like Narcos or Sofia Vergara in Modern Family, nudging all its viewers towards the idea that all Hispanic women are like Gloria, that we are all maids like Jennifer Lopez in Maid in Manhattan needing rescuing. Movies can empower us. They recognize the legitimacy and validity of stories and by including them in the narrative, include them in history. We need more diverse role models, movies about all kinds of people, not the tiny slice of European stories that are distributed as the universal truth and the content everyone will relate to. What if Jennifer Lopez was the rich man and Chris Marshall was the maid? What if Fran, in the Nanny, wasn’t such a classic stereotype, and made us believe all women were like that? Why was Cece so punished for being an intelligent women, the perpetual villain, an obstacle between Mr. Sheffield and Fran? An ad against drink-driving came up while I was watching YouTube the other day, and a Maori man suggested driving home, while his white friend encouraged him not to and looked the camera straight in the eye and said, “Stop your friends from making choices they’ll regret,” (or something similar). These plots, these portrayals, these framings nudge us toward negative associations. It is one thing for people to be excluded from the narrative, and it is another to portray them in a way that harms our common understanding. It is corrosive and it changes the way we see people in real life.
The advantage of film is that it forces us to watch. It’s harder to bring in our own prejudice when the director is imposing the world exactly as they want us to see it. There is power in that. Governments and curriculum-planners, publishing houses and media and stories that go through a chain of people for approval, overlook or edit out the stories we are shaped with, they rewrite history from a different angle, and portray people in completely stereotypical or biased ways. Film is more direct – it is harder to avoid what the director is trying to tell us. I remember watching Whale Rider as a young girl and seeing an Indigenous culture on par with my own, even though it was starkly different. Clearly the director had a respect for Maori culture, for portraying them in a way that was quiet and respectful, let their own lives shine through. Just as Mihingarangi said, they can take their camera lens and put them on the people that get overlooked, that fall in the cracks and crevices, the people standing in the back in all of the shots, who the history books skim over or pan past. They can cast people in the light they deserve to be in.
As I’ve written this, I’ve collected my thoughts. I think there are two things to take away; to learn to recognize when film and media ignore or negatively portray the stories of others, and to acknowledge its power as a way of including everyone’s stories, even when the common dialogue excludes them. If textbooks and schools aren’t going to teach history, film and media can. To the future filmmakers, vloggers, scriptwriters – make use of your power to include everyone’s stories, and frame them respectfully, in a way that will educate us.
- Photo retrieved from http://newspaperrock.bluecorncomics.com/2008/05/cowboys-and-indians-images.html
The camera is as important as you say to how films work. I would like to see more art that doesn’t tell you where to look. An emerging way to experience art is through computer games, especially (I have in mind) VR. They let the audience choose how to interact and what to observe, which is an admirable thing to capture. Granted, there will always be curation even for a game about player actions, but control over where you look is a powerful tool. When a computer can track to how the user chooses to exercise that ability, it can make us more aware of where we spend our attention. My dream is a narrative that changes based on where the audience focuses.
To return from that tangent, I wonder if there is a way to give everyone the representation they deserve. The paradox is that even if we achieve it, we won’t be sure that we aren’t missing out on valuable perspectives. After all, it’s not like we can make an exhaustive list of the things we are forgetting.