naivete and stereotypes...

It has been awhile since I have posted anything on here because I have just been so busy lately. Something happened recently however that I feel I need to share because it deals with misperception and stereotyping. My fiancé works in home health care. She hires people to go out and tend to patients. The other day she had a problem with a patient because the patient's son did not like the attendant that was assigned to his parents. The reasoning behind this was because the attendant was Hispanic and spoke choppy English. The patient had trouble understanding some of the things that the attendant would say. The son, who has always been very nice to my fiancé, suddenly got very angry with her because she was the one who hired this attendant. My fiancé did not know it would be a problem and told him that she would fix it. When she was asked how she could understand the attendant she said it was because she could speak Spanish. My finance is half Mexican. The son was dumbfounded because she does not look Hispanic and she did not have an accent. He said that she could not be trusted by him anymore and that he wanted to talk with someone higher up in the company simply because she was Hispanic.
Having told that whole story the point of it is this:
This sort of racism shows just how naive people can be. His views on Hispanic people are that they look and talk a certain way. That is obviously untrue if you look at my fiancé. He focused on the stereotypes of that race. Everyone has perceptions about how people from different ethnicities because of stereotyping. This was just something that is very close to me and I felt I needed to write about it.

who's to say...

I have finally read an article I had been meaning to read for the last couple of weeks about a photographer named Edward S. Curtis. He is best known for photographing Native American Indians in at the beginning of the 20th century. His photos are iconic. They show noble “red men” on their horses or simply standing in their supposedly authentic garb. To me the photographs look too perfect to be truly authentic. It seems near impossible for Curtis to have gotten these pictures by simply standing around and shooting what he saw. The author of the article mentioned that he wondered how much money he gave to the Indians to get them to pose. I thought that was a funny and thought provoking. Also, did Curtis have any say in what they wore? Did he shape our ideas of how we see Native Americans? All of the Indians in his photos look like the stereotypical Hollywood Indians from the old westerns. Of course who is to see what is real or what is not. In my opinion I just don’t really believe that Curtis captured the vanishing Native Americans. He most likely captured peoples’ imaginations instead.

it's in the eye of the beholder...

I feel that we all have similar, natural feelings toward certain features of a person. We all subconsciously are looking for specific things in a mate. Whether it is for child baring purposes or simply sexual satisfaction we have similar wants. We are all born with that natural attraction so that we can procreate. I believe that these natural feelings are mixed in with social learning. Every culture is has different social surroundings that can shape their beliefs or in this case their feelings of attraction. Things such as wealth can shape what a person finds attractive. Women in Europe used to be seen as attractive if they had a fuller figure as apposed to American standards now with our stick figured models. It was believed that the more plump women ate more and therefore were wealthier. They were a part of a higher social class making them more desirable. I do find it interesting what we find attractive and what we find repulsive. What I touched on was very broad. I can not even begin to imagine why one guy may be attracted to blondes and one guy is attracted to brunettes. It could be because God made us all different and we can not all be attracted to one thing. I really do feel though that attraction is based on a mixture of natural and social leaning. We are born with one and bombarded with another so how could it not be.

representation in narratives...

I just have a short blog about representation. I watched an Italian film the other day in one of my film classes. It was about the oppression of Italians from the Nazis. The entire film was very realistic. It was in fact a neorealist film. It was a fiction film based on historical events. The only thing that was not truly based in reality was the portrayal of the Nazis. Now don’t get me wrong. I would probably portray the Nazis this way had I made this film. I am not saying that they are being portrayed poorly, but it is a little more caricature than it is reality. Every character in this film seemed like maybe they could have existed. The Nazis, however, were portrayed as these almost over the top villains. They were very one dimensional characters. They almost seemed like villains from a comic book which I thought was interesting. Their leader in the film was very flamboyant. There was a very visible contrast between the Nazis and the freedom fighters when they were in the same scenes. When they were separated it was almost like watching two different films based on which characters were in the scene. I find interesting that even this film that was supposed to portray a gritty reality made the Nazis look like these very unreal characters. It is just another way that people portray things the way they see them even when it may not be the whole truth. I do want to stress though that I am not sticking up for the Nazis. This is simply an observation in the subject of representation.

African documentaries and documentaries about Africa...

It is hard to establish what is and is not actually an African documentary film. I believe that if the film is made by an African then it is an African documentary. This is also the case if a narrative film is made by an African. If it is made by an African filmmaker then it is an African film regardless of what the content is. If an American makes a documentary about Africa then it makes sense to call it an American film about Africa. Now of course any documentary about Africa regardless of who makes it can be thought of as an African film. I would just call a film about Africa. The content of the film or what the film is about is a completely different category from what who made the film.
It starts to get really complicated if you ask whether or not the film is African depending on how it represents Africa. A film about Africa that is made by an African may represent Africa untruly if they are trying to make a propaganda type film. They may want people to see things a certain way which are not necessarily true. It also works the other way because a filmmaker from another country could portray Africa just as it is to the African people.
I will break it down now because I am almost starting to loose myself. What I am basically saying is that there are two major categories that a film fits into. It can be categorized by who made it or what it is about. Now whether or not the content is accurate it does not matter based on these two categories. However, I do not want to sound like I do not care how a subject is presented so I will end with this. I believe that it is the responsibility of the filmmaker to represent a person or a culture accurately as best they can. They must research as much as they can and try very hard to not fall into biases and stereotypes.

The Searchers

I don't have too much to write about right now. I was not even sure what I was going to put on this post until about five minutes ago...so here goes nothing: I watched The Searchers in my film history class this past Tuesday and I saw a lot of stereotyping of Native Americans throughout the film. The most predominant stereotype I noticed was the thought of Indians as blood thirsty savages. The "bad guy" Indians had brightly colored war paint on their faces which was almost laughable. This film depicted your classic cowboys and Indians battling. It was the white heroes versus the dark skinned villains. I really couldn't feel happy being on the side of the good guys simply because of the way the Indians were represented. This film was of course made in the 1950s, but that kind of representation of Native Americans would not be accepted today. Whenever there were Indians that were depicted as good, they were also represented as being obviously uneducated by western standards. They were a sort of comic relief. So those are my thoughts on the misrepresentation of Native Americans in older films.