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.
5 comments:
You're right. The two men using a young Navajo artist is going against everything they wanted. Even the idea of theirs to select a film maker amongst the entire group was not what they seemed to initially try to accomplish. When they stated that they wanted to teach film making to those who did not know the art, it was implied that they wanted to see what sort of creativity would be employed by the navajo artuers. What really occured was the artist familiar with video technology mind was already filled with typical Western conventions of Visual Arts. This sort of film maker would not explore his native customs and would be much more likely to explain his film in the mold of Western Narrative. In this sense, the entire mission was bungled.
I agree as well. I think that the filmmakers had too much control over the filming process. The true purpose of an indigenous film is to get a culture to express their most important values and beliefs using video as a medium. The people who provide the equipment and teach the indigenous people how to use it shouldn't have such an active role in the filming itself. In this case, Adair and Worth chose who would do the filming, not based on how well that individual might have understood the culture, but instead based on his familiarity with the camera and other equipment. He then
instructed that individual to concentrate the filming on movement and motion, which they deemed most important to this culture. I think that knowing this makes it hard for us to really believe that this is an accurate representation of the Navajo culture.
i was alittle disappointed with the actions of Worth and Adair, their opening chapter was so well developed with recognizing obstacles and struggles, questioning stuff that we take as the truth, the film itself. they mapped out all these interesting questions and thoughts that had me rethinking the whole filming process in anthropology. discussing the filmic language, and wondering if it was like human languages, different and how would that effect their original thesis. As diana stated, Worth and Adair were concerned with what is chosen to be filmed and how that plays into the importance of it to the film maker; and in some sense i feel that they never really gave up being the film maker. they started to go against their original goal of film-making from a different perspective, because as stated on page 46, "in some cases, although our code of filming and filmmaking was so strong that we at first unconsciously urged it upon the Navajo..." the fact that the Navajo went with what they foudn to be importnat, the motion, gives them means to self define who they are.
i'm in agreement with the second comment by exsphere02run, i really don't think that Sol Worth and John Adair, should have have an active role, it takes away from their original goal and takes away from what is real for the Navajo. it seems almost over stylized and western when this should be as accurate as it could possibly be to what is important to Navajo, to better understand what is valued for them. i'm not sure "Through Navajo Eyes" is an accurate title for a documentary that doesn't seem completely genuine to their culture.
I also agree- like in Turner's article, the indigenous people have to figure out how to create their own movies from their own point of view alone and for the first time to get true results. Especially in this text, Worth emphasizes that he wanted to see films created by people completely new to a video camera and to film.
"Through Navajo Eyes" is about an experiment with film that sought to do just what the title implies, see the world through the lens of the Navajo people. In their attempt Adair and Worth actually addressed much wider ranging ideas than just this. Primarily their study sought to develop the idea of film as a language and the many questions that grew out of that.
The part that comes to mind in this moment is that concerning the development of an effective "language" in film to be parrallel to the presence of verbal language. Adair and Worth were very interested in the possible existence of specific rules and structure in the realm of visual communication. Specifically the "rules" Adair and Worth were discussing could be placed as synonomous to grammar in verbal language. The discovery of this sense of visual language could garner possible advances in the way people consider visual communication inside and between different peoples and groups.
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