Through Navajo Eyes

Through Navajo Eyes is all about looking at the process of film-making from a different perspective. Sol Worth and John Adair were two writers/filmmakers and professors with a goal to teach unfamiliar cultures how to express themselves through film. They start off in the first chapter discussing some obstacles and questions they have encountered. They were concerned with what a film maker's mind chooses to shoot, why they choose to shoot this, and how they choose to portray what is important to them. This leads up to the following chapter where film is seen as a tool for communication. This shows that film can be considered a language. The idea alone that a film maker chooses what they want to shoot displays what is valuable to that person. It is a way to show others what they think is important but not necessarily in words, but by visual art such as film, drawings and photographs. After establishing the fact of film being a language, the next question brought up is, if film has many forms of languages. The text explains this best by a comparison of different groups. Since one group might see the film differently than another group, different languages are being established.

Later on, they revealed the methods of their research. They chose the people on the reservations by asking them to take a survey. They were hoping to have a good amount of men, women and children to see who would be the most capable with film work. They ended up choosing a young, male artist, mainly for the fact he was familiar with some forms of visual art. To me, this seems like a slight problem if they originally wanted to see how unfamiliar minds dealt with film. By the end of all their searching, they decided on many different types of people with help from the community.

What I found to be the very unique in this experiment was the assigned direction given to the Navajo. Since the Navajo are very attracted by movement and motion, they were told to make motion the topic of their film. I liked how the Navajo chose not only to shoot actual motion, but they chose to watch the motion of an event as well. They enjoyed watching the motion of a somewhat cycle of completion. This cycle doesn't always have an even completion but that is what makes their films stand out as different forms of languages. The Navajo student's films confirmed Worth and Adair's idea of film and communication; they go hand and hand to show one's passions and perspectives.