by Crystal Noelle Rand
Purpose statement:
This project idea was born out of a self-actualizing transformation of my own individual power after bouts of feeling estranged from my own community/family. I recognized that feeling powerless can cause a form of detachment from others, alienation, etc. When you’re in this space, you don’t acknowledge the possible harm you can inflict towards others – feeling powerless can cause many of us to act in repetitive cycles that enforces the same environment that fostered our need to hide our vulnerability. Accountability as a theme for us, makes us not only transform our inner power but allows us self-compassion. We recognize how these cycles helped us and our ancestors cope but also how it dwindled this inner power.
The idea came from my own understanding of how to care for others in my community/realm. I recognized a lot of my own generational cycles and how it can harm others and myself in that process. I also identified similar patterns in others’ mindsets through our communication of shared experiences. I wholly believe in psychological warfare that causes us to enact the same violence on ourselves and others. This warfare only encourages capitalism to keep its place in the world as our communities are continuously traumatized by it. We reinforce the system when we aren’t able to connect/empathize with one another and internalize our pain. In this, we alienate ourselves from our own community, forgetting that we have a place in the world.
Freire’s framework gave me a place to work off of in terms of building empathy with those both in my community and outside of it. A place where shame and guilt cannot take space quietly, but where care and compassion can exist loudly.
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Accountability in Third Cinema; How can Third Cinema films foster an environment where accountability is brought up in our respective communities? How do we recognize our power as someone who can be both a victim and a perpetrator?
Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” framework introduces the idea of the problem posing method. The problem posing method, as we’ve seen, is a method that many Third Cinema films use to reimagine the binaries of the “oppressed” and the “oppressor”. The “Us vs. Them” trope is visible in these ways from the point of view of the oppressed especially as a traumatized individual. Yet, the problem posing method introduces a way for us to see how we’ve internalized both the oppressed and the oppressor within us by awakening the power of empathy within us.
Through the problem posing method, we can account for our own communities and families through recognizing our own generational cycles. Third cinema usually shows the protagonist(s) facing a series of challenges that are presented to them in a colonized state/nation. Often, we, the audience only sees the protagonist’s (and their communities’) view point, not realizing that behind the protagonist is a wave of generational trauma and a history of colonialism that brought them to the point they are at. Colonialism perpetuates a mindset in which an individual cannot leave their position in the world and renders them weak and powerless. Third cinema challenges this mindset in colonized groups to mobilize their communities.
Films like “Our Fires Still Burn: A Native American Experience” (available via Alexander Street in many libraries), Levi Reckert (director) investigates himself and other Native Americans on how they navigate their lost identity and familial cycles. A Native American man discusses a specific moment in his life where his mother, as she was drunk, ripped up old pictures of her family. Her act of destroying family memories continues a cycle in which white supremacy forces the mother to assimilate to American white culture. The man, trying to reclaim and account for his familial past and roots, explained that it was hard to match up the ripped pictures. He also explained that the idea of the pictures being “ripped” represented how his mother and her community must have felt – half of her being in the white world and half of her being in the Native American world.
The loss of culture within someone’s family not being accounted for as they move throughout the world contributes to the erasure of their culture. While not initiated by them (but by white supremacy), the obligation to heal their familial past becomes theirs. The effects of a loss of culture can end up in assimilating into whiteness. Sometimes that can result in having disdain for Native Americans who are still connected to their culture or at culturally Native American objects/rituals, etc. which the film also touches on. The man empathizes with his mother’s reactions to erase these memories. Yet, he also understood his mother’s reaction as a limit-situation, a continuation of these communal and familial cycles to survive in a white supremacist society. While considering her world view, he accounts for his family’s past and for the wellbeing of his community. By reattaching these pictures and reclaiming his past, he makes this his limit-act for future Native American generations to build off.
And in other films like “No Crying At The Dinner Table”, Catherine Nguyen’s parents recount the memories of their time in Vietnam. The generational cycle of not being open with their emotions or communications led their parents to hold in memories of death and loss of their family. A cycle they learned in order to deal with the grief bestowed upon them. Her mother explains that a cycle she learned in her culture was that in Vietnam, parents didn’t show their love through physical intimacy. She explains it wasn’t until her adulthood that she attempted to stop that cycle with her own mother and children. The mother, accepting the role her culture played in her relationships with her children, takes accountability by opening up about her past and considers how it affected the way she shows affection to her family.
Because of the effects of their trauma, both parents repeat the cycle of closed communication with their two children. Yet, Nguyen also takes accountability through the making of her film by giving her parents and her sister space to discuss their past and how it traumatized them. In her film, she fosters an open environment for her family to reconnect to each other, thereby making new cycles of communication. The film ends with the two generations in her family reconciling their wounds and letting their emotions run free while sitting at a dinner table where notably most families don’t speak and eat their food in silence. The individual stories told from different places in the house leads them to the dinner table, a collective symbol for the family.
Nguyen invites us to the dinner table where empathy is opened up to her family and to the audience. We the audience are left to wonder; what cycles are we continuing in our own family? How are we contributing to these cycles that existed before we were born?
In “Nuyorican Dream”, a Puerto Rican family living in Brooklyn deals with addiction and poverty as a communal and generational cycle. Roberto is the only child in his family to get a college degree and become a teacher. Through his successes of breaking these cycles, he recognizes the institutional dealings that have set his family up for cycles of addiction and poverty through the school system. He acknowledges the school system’s role in keeping his family in poverty as they put them in the lower education/special education classes without addressing their roots as a part of the Puerto Rican diaspora to New York.
While his siblings recognize that drugs are a damaging component to their family, most of his siblings continue the cycle and accept that it is a part of their life. Accepting the harm of continuous drug-use on their family deflects the accountability to break this cycle especially as it inflicts trauma on their children and their mother. While they acknowledge the cycle of addiction, they see their experiences as individual experiences rather than a part of a globalized issue that is created to keep most communities of Color in poverty:
When people lack a critical understanding of their reality, apprehending it in fragments which they do not perceive as interacting constituent elements of the whole, they cannot truly know that reality (Freire, 104).
And since they don’t recognize how their reality is designed by the system to continuously leave them in poverty, their agency feels lost to them. Without a sense of control, the siblings harm their children in the process of their cycles. Roberto, empathizing with his siblings’ situation, makes an effort to ensure the students in his community and his nieces and nephews have him as a support system.
The challenge within many of our communities is that we can often sense our oppression but not often the harm our communities can inflict on one another. To find the commonality of our oppressions within those of us most marginalized, we can then work our way up to liberation:
Critical consciousness, or its derivative, transformative potential, could be used to inform the structure and content of urban education to address oppressive conditions for those most impacted. (Jemal, 2017)
The problem posing method asks us to consider why and how trauma may have formed someone’s way of thinking. When the problem posing method is enacted in our communities, it asks those of us who aren’t in the same position as our previous generations to empathize with what they had to learn to cope with their conditions. We’ve accepted the conditions in which our cycles were born and told ourselves “it’s just the way it is.” It asks us to unlearn these generational cycles and replace them with limit-acts that lets us imagine a world of liberation. Our limit-acts push us to imagine a world where these cycles are healed.
I propose that we, as Third Cinema filmmakers, submit films that investigate our own communities to the respective film festivals that host it in our communities. For someone to harness community accountability, being honest about what generational cycles they may have inherited requires deep subconscious digging. It requires them to be vulnerable, to be able to reach out to others in their respective community and how they might have inherited similar cycles. While everyone’s intergenerational trauma may differ, where they stem from is the same – it’s not a coincidence that we all experience the same phenomenon in different ways.
A few film festivals that encourage filmmakers to interrogate their communities:
Hosted in Porto, Portugal – one of the main aspects they ask of filmmakers is to present the community and/or family as “problematic” with “connections (focused on interpersonal and community dynamics).” They allow for experimental filmmaking and home-made films to different ways of screening works (exhibitions to video installations).
Hosted in New York City – asks filmmakers to submit pieces that show “redemption” of their communities or surroundings from a social justice lens. Aims to uplift BIPOC voices and other marginalized communities through the screenings of works to create “space for unifying conversations”.
Sources
Films:
Collyer, Laurie. Nuyorican Dream, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyKRDYmeo5I.
Geyer, Audrey. Our Fires Still Burn: A Native American Experience, video-alexanderstreet-com.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/watch/our-fires-still-burn-the-native-american-experience?context=channel:filmakers-library-online .
Nguyen, Catherine, director. No Crying At The Dinner Table, https://vimeo.com/482032869 .
Articles:
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.
Jemal, A. “Critical Consciousness: A Critique and Critical Analysis of the Literature.” Urban Rev 49, 602–626 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-017-0411-3
Film festivals:
https://familyfilmproject.com/en/festival/introduction/
https://www.justicefilmfest.com/about