Stranger with
a Camera Poverty was not new to Eastern Kentucky in 1968; absentee mine ownership, mechanization, unemployment, strip mining, decaying company towns had left more than half the population living below the poverty line. But it was the politically charged atmosphere of America in the 1960s that transformed these creeks and hollows into symbols of persistent poverty, a standing rebuke to the American Dream. Barret traces how a courageous expose by a local lawyer, Harry Caudill, generated front page articles in the New York Times, a BBC documentary and Charles Kuralt’s classic documentary, Christmas in Appalachia. Social activists eagerly appropriated these striking images, notably white and rural, not black and urban, to win support for Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Barret explores even-handedly why her two protagonists reacted so differently to Appalachia’s sudden, unsolicited nationwide media visibility. Hugh O’Connor, a promising young director for the highly respected National Film Board of Canada, followed its founder, legendary documentarian John Greirson’s exhortation that cinema can be a pulpit for social change. O’Connor’s murderer, Hobart Ison, a respected if eccentric landowner who rented run-down cabins to coal miners, experienced the outside exposes of poverty as attacks on the very roots of his identity. Feeling powerless to rebut what he saw as negative media stereotypes of his community, he justified the murder as a kind of semiotic self defense: “I had to do it. What would he have done to me, picture-wise and all?” Many locals agreed with Ison that the issue wasn’t poverty but the right of outsiders to holdup another people's culture. Ultimately Ison served only a year in jail for his crime. In the 60s Ison’s argument about “outside agitators” was already familiar in the South from White Citizens Councils attacks on the Civil Rights Movement. Today it resonates strangely with certain strands of post-modern cultural criticism. The publisher of a local newspaper, however, argues that cultures blind at the same time they illuminate; self-representation is no protection against self-delusion. Elizabeth Barret presents a third point of view as a community based filmmaker trained at Appalshop, an innovative center set up to allow Appalachians to represent themselves in the media. She revisits the tragedy 30 years later to understand her own community’s response to this landmark event. It becomes clear that no one film can ever fully represent a community, the class, race and gender differences which divide it, the dynamism which is constantly transforming it. In the end, Barret comes to the conclusion that a filmmaker’s responsibility is to be as true to the complexities of a situation as she can. By this demanding criterion, Stranger With A Camera is itself exemplary. Read a review of this film from Cineaste magazine by California Newsreel director Larry Daressa
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ALA Booklist Editor's Choice Award for best video of 2000 including the prestigious "Top of the List" award. “A well-paced
and true-to-life parable, exploring a difficult subject for those of
us, artists and filmmakers, who are drawn to social justice work in
communities quite often not our own.” “A thoughtful
and disturbing documentary . . . especially relevant today with the
blurring of entertainment and news. Barret has composed her investigation
as a haunting narrative, but without losing sight of reportorial fairness.” “Stranger
with a Camera
is a powerful case study of the moral and political dilemmas that confront
filmmakers who wish to expose the ills of our society." “The ethical
dilemmas of documentary filmmaking have never been presented with such
dramatic bluntness as in Stranger
with a Camera.
As a teacher I will find it tremendously helpful in persuading students
to face the consequences of their actions.” "A personal and
poetic interrogation of the very genre of documentary. This tragic event
raises troubling questions about responsibility, exploitation, and what
it means to "take pictures." Stranger With a Camera ponders
these questions with a poignancy that does not flinch from an honest,
fair-minded, and ultimately self-reflexive point of view. A film immersed
in Appalachian place and culture, it is also a far-reaching study about
images and power relations." Prod./Director:
Elizabeth Barret Stranger with
a Camera is a co-production of Appalshop and KET, the Kentucky Network,
produced in association with ITVS, with funding provided by the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding provided by the MacArthur
Foundation.
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