A year and a half ago a haunting and beautiful documentary emerged in Quebec. Une tente sur mars (A Tent on Mars) takes a meandering visual stroll through the Northern Quebec mining town of Schefferville and surveys the effects of industry on the local Innu people. It is a quiet and disarming poem against colonization, with some unsettling scenes of intoxicated aboriginal people and a very quixotic sequence involving a rambling anthropologist in a garbage dump with black bears prowling in the background.
What is most captivating about this 2008 film by Martin Bureau and Luc Renaud is its approach to storytelling. In typical Quebecois fashion, standard formulae are abandoned in place of a lyrical, non-chronological approach that emphasizes the aesthetics of mise-en-scène and a soundscape that is sometimes heavy-handed, but overall, hypnotic and dream-like. Art Threat had the chance to ask the filmmakers a few questions about the project.
The consumer is supposed to do what they’re told, no? It is an old and well practiced arrangement. They make the stuff, and the rest of us buy it, eat it and use it. Especially, it seems, with technology where few of us have the know-how or courage for that matter to repurpose and reinvent the complicated digital gak that increasingly defines our lives.
Even the fun machines like video games and computers come to us with built in assumptions about how we are expected to behave with them, what we will do with them, and how our lives will be altered to integrate these objects into daily practices. We listen to radios. We play video games. We watch televisions. Just like we’re told.
But there are those among us who do it differently. Hardware-hacking is a growing movement to reclaim creative control of our relationships with technology. “Shape your tools, or you will be shaped by them”, so their motto goes. Televisions become oscilloscopes. Radios become synthesizers. Outdated video games become means of composing unique musical scores.
I’m about to fly off to the Maritimes to visit family for the weekend, so here’s a quick plug for a short film by our friend and media activist extraordinare, Liz Miller.
Novela, Novela looks at the making of Sexto Sentido, a groundbreaking Nicaraguan soap opera that regularly deals with controversial issues such as sexual orientation, rape, abortion and domestic violence in the context of a predominantly Catholic country that is the second poorest in the hemisphere. The doc explores the impact the incredibly popular program has had on audiences, as well as the young actors and screenwriters involved in the production.
The video embedded above is the 7 minute version of the film. If it tickles your fancy, you can get a copy of the full 30 minute doc, which includes an episode of Sexto Sentido, over at the film’s website.
Originally published in the Spring 2010 issue of POV Magazine.
Einstein on the screen
Recently, Disney, the largest children’s entertainment firm in the world, offered rebates on its hugely popular educational DVD set Baby Einstein. While the company refused to acknowledge the link, many point to the ongoing lobbying efforts by the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood as the reason behind the company’s capitulation. Apparently, research shows that little Abdul or Suzy can’t learn much at all from screen media, that is, if they’re under two years old.
Disney had marketed Baby Einstein to eager parents and created the impression that toddlers could indeed benefit cognitively from screen media, maybe even picking up a little physics along the way. But the information proving the contrary was all in the documentary Consuming Kids by the Media Education Foundation, an organization of academics and media makers based in Northampton, MA who produce educational documentaries on topics ranging from homophobia in hip hop culture to corporate greenwashing. Their documentary had warned of such marketing ploys.
This begs the question: if babies can’t learn from screen media, can the rest of us learn from documentaries?
Michael Moore’s latest film, Capitalism: A Love Story takes aim at the elite bankers and CEOs who are steering America’s economy into the gutter, and among the bad guys he goes after is none other than the world’s largest and most brutal retailer, Wal-Mart (now re-branded as Walmart). Moore exposes Walmart’s dirty practice of taking out insurance claims on its employees and cashing in on their deaths without telling their families.
So it may come as a bit of a surprise that Moore’s anti-capitalism, anti-Walmart documentary goes on sale today…in Walmart. Yes, you can buy the DVD at your local low-wage, environment-destroying, human-rights abusing Walmart, as well as at Amazon and other video retailers. Moore thinks that the reason Walmart is happily carrying Capitalism: A Love Story is due to the fact that they are uber-comfy in their position of ruler of the world. In an email sent out today, he writes:
A year and a half ago a haunting and beautiful documentary emerged in Quebec. Une tente sur mars (A Tent on Mars) takes a meandering visual stroll through the Northern Quebec mining town of Schefferville and surveys the effects of industry on the local Innu people. It is a quiet and disarming poem against colonization, with some unsettling scenes of intoxicated aboriginal people and a very quixotic sequence involving a rambling anthropologist in a garbage dump with black bears prowling in the background.
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