did anyone watch these two?
After watching 360 minutes of these boys lives, what to say? If you missed the show, its available online (but right now Frontline's site is down, and this show is clearly (gotta be) why), and here's a blurb:
Filmed over three years (1999-2002), "Country Boys" tracks the dramatic stories of Chris and Cody from ages 15 to 18. With the same intimate cinematic technique and sound design that distinguished "The Farmer's Wife," David Sutherland's new film bears witness to the two boys' struggles to overcome the poverty and family dysfunction of their childhoods in a quest for a brighter future. This film also offers unexpected insights into a forgotten corner of rural America {Floyd County in eastern Kentucky] that is at once isolated and connected, a landscape dotted with roughshod trailer homes and wired with DSL.
I am mostly interested if you have watched it, or part. I have a lot of thoughts around it, and not simply testifying to its power, but also the more problematic side of Sutherland's "portraiture" and the social impact and cost of such a stance. It was a very complex project, and yet I feel that the documentary, as-aired, entirely erased that complexity in favor of an eventually wearying/naive insistence on letting its subjects speak/be seen as if there was no camera. And I was enamored of these two, deeply, I just became troubled after awhile by the fly-on-the-wall angle, and wondered, as I often do with, say, war photography, how we, as artists and audiences, repsond to and consider the alleged "neutrality" (i.e. naturalization, invisibility) and "observer status" of the artist.
Like, simply, did Sutherland talk to these kids? Get at all involved? AND did he think-through the effect his presence would have on them, their lives, the footage he culled? I am sure he did, but none of that was shown. There were fascinating moments when I could discern the bit players conscious of themselves as actors for a far larger stage, and of course, the voice-overs, and I wonder about this shift... the very creepiness of voyeurism...
Plus, this film is a fascinating and utterly ripe expose of its other subjects: small-town America, Appalachia, boyhood, the role of parents: esp. the role of (absent or inadequent) fathers, the welfare system, popular Christian culture, NASCAR America, what the hell high school education means, class consciousness, conservative ideology of the free will/liberal focus on social conditions - played out up close and personal.
posted by Kyle at 11:03 AM
7 Comments:
Weirdly enough, when I think about the insistence on hope - both as an active daily factor and as a background ideology for people in tough times, I can understand why the Republicans reap so many votes even beyond the church-going evangelicals. If Bush represented hope, strength, Main Street wisdom, free will and independence, then that would be highly appealing (an "uplift")- esp. when this branding is coupled with a very real gap of knowledge as to the actual workings/agenda of the Republican Party and how it affects home, and the record of their candidate.
Less tortured way of saying it: the relaince on the individual's resources, the appeal to make your own destiny that the school relied on (with an apparent lack of corresponding attn. to the obvious ways that the card were stacked against these kids, which i don't think they ignored so much as downpayed) made a lot of sense. Seemed a necc. ballast against the miserable effects the confluence of the welfare state (a mom exploiting her kid for a monthly check) and mimum wage Walmart Pizza Hut et al (maximum toil/mimumum freedom) had wrecked on these kids, their families and county.
i'm glad you have asked for ruminations on this one. i don't have tv so haven't seen it but in that grand purveyor of 'good taste', the new yorker, i have seen this advertised so i will respond to your open letter with my thoughts on the marketing.
intense voyeurism. creepy voyeurism. full page ad: two white male teens walk in the middle ground away from camera along a raiload track. you can tell immediately from their clothes/hair (leather jacket, pony tail and work boots for one, nascar jacket, slight mullet and weight problem for the other) what demographic they are from, but the slightly blighted landscape beyond - a few beaten looking shacks, skeletons of trees on horizon - attest to the poverty. but what solidifies the feeling of 'other' is the acid washed photoshop work on the photo print itself. the boys themselves have been rotoscoped and left 'as is' but they walk in a landscape whose cyan shift has been raised and where reds have been sucked out so that the sky is yellow. white hashes scar the sky and hill on the horizon, supposedly from scratches on the 'negative'.
the whole effect is one very clever. i almost like it. but the cynic in me reacted strongly to the feeling of being manipulated....manipulated to associate with these two characters whose lives i, along with most readers of the new yorker, and with our various support networks of bourgeois intellectual establishment, will never experience.
the poster so shamelessly advertises a guilty glimpse into a world that we fear desperately: the world of 'knee-jerk' nationalism/religion, of welfare checks and super save meals. i want to yell and scream and rail against the hypocrisy, since neither PBS, nor the new yorker, nor whom they represent (me?!) will ever really try and change the true inequalities in our society...in humanity?
but, i challenge myself: perhaps this film doesn't intend to change anything. perhaps it is content in the facts, merely curious. perhaps we can watch this program and simply let it be....accept that they are 'they' and we are 'we'.
one wonders though about the secret hopes of the boys when they let a film maker into their lives. did they expect to see themselves on the discovery channel? did they think this would be their ticket out of the 'ghetto'? am i arrogantly projecting my assumptions that they aren't happy with their life?
all this from a publicity shot. man, we've got sophisticated.
the truth is: i would sense that the film does a decent job of showing two young men's ecology: their own psychological and emotional telos within the larger forces of 'eduction system', 'class consciousness', 'religion' etc.
wish i had a tv sometimes.
quid limnus (qidlm)
love
md
actually, marlowe, several PBS affiliates are tying in the release of the show with various campaigns/publicity for urban poverty disadvantaged youth relief/aid groups like Big Brothers etc.
this is to the side of the show, of course, but i think you are right that at best we watch, witnessing them, reflecting on us, on where us meets and avoids them, and what else can a work of documantary art do?
but like most PBS/Cable documentary work, this show was mute on the artistic angle, it actively avoided looking at how this as a carefully, exhaustively constructed "portrait" and not just some web-cam on their lives. to that end, i think the marketting - obviously edited/manipulated - is a relief.
any approach has its limits, and i dont want to criticize unfairly - i just found myself rdingup against this "transarency" in a six hour film where the filmaker says not so much as a single word.
i am thankful for watching it, and for its insights and glimpses into that world which i am not privvy too. i've seen more than one comparison btwn this show and "gummo" which is interesting in itself, given how the mainstream critiques disparaged and mocked that film.
i suspect as much. my reaction is perhaps a bit too cynical. problem is, we (all of us) have become so sophisticated re: marketing. we see the same messages (pleas/commands), the difference is whether we are conscious to them or not.
my judgement of the movie was precisely the intended response of the ad creatives who put the poster together, meaning that i quickly (in the flick of a new yorker page) understood the socio-psychological placement of the product. of course, the majority of their target audience, who would be as quick as me at pigeonholing the film, wouldn't leap to the next step of deconstructing the imagery as well their own emotional triggers.
as for the film itself, i hear your pain. my father wrote me an email having checked out my blog. positive and negative criticism, the latter about the prominent place of my 'i'. he'd prefer my thoughts about the external without the personal (see my post "je m'en fou"). i wrote back that i was hoping to subvert my 'i' at the same time as being honest about the 'outside'.
so what i mean is, a bit more honesty on the part of film makers (people?), especially documentary ones, about their own role in the process. i am directing a documentary about ghosts right now. half of it is heavily scripted, at least in intent if not in dialogue - i say, '"fuck it. it's all smoke and mirrors. my subjects' stories are as fictional as aragorn's and frodo's once they've been filtered through FInal Cut Pro."
a more intelligent example: filming a ghost hunt with 'real' ghost hunters, i was on 2nd camera and made a point of placing the whole crew in the frame - at least when it looked cool! of course, a sub-theme i'm playing on is that we are making a movie about something we can't see.....it's a documentary essentially about suspension of disbelief.
i think i've digressed far from your concerns. but perhaps not. you should pick up a camera.
zounds! bizarre homosequious (zbzhomsq)
love
md
behind the scenes here, i would say that about 80 to 90% of reality shows are scripted.
now this doesn't mean script, as much as directed.
"do this," a director will say. "can you talk about this?"
the real storytellers in hollywood are the editors. that's why there is such an insurgence for film kidz to jump onto this wagon.
editing is probably the most creative thing you can do in television.
i will definitely see the film, k. sounds good.
good luck with ghosts, m. i'll see you in a couple weeks.
p.
p - you should talk to dylan. he has the fascinating experience under his belt now. i am encouraging him to write about it.
m - yes, good luck haunting the haunters.
I'd love to comment on all this, but i've been mad m=busy. I have a newer version blog up at baraka.progressiveislam.org as a subdomain under progressiveislam.org.
Mind lining me?
It's called Baraka Bashment
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