From Word To Word

The Dinner and a Doc group met on Saturday night to watch The Real Dirt on Famer John, which is directed by Taggart Siegel.  We accompanied it with homemade mushroom soup, with a beautiful sourdough bread that I bought from a new vendor at the market, with apple cider from a farmer for whom I used to work, and with some desserts that people brought despite my explicit instructions that they bring nothing at all.

This was the first time I have screened a film that I have never seen before.  I chose it because it connects well with the discussion group that my wife will be running in a few weeks, because it has been recommended to me by many people, and because I wanted to see it myself.  I had intended to preview it so that I would have some idea of what I was going to inflict on people, but, as is usually the case, other things were more pressing.  So, as we sat down to watch, I was truly in the position of a viewer, as I very seldom am any more, and enjoyed the experience very much.

Among other things, I began to realize the amount of knowledge that has been lost, not only the general population’s loss of knowledge about working the earth in any way, but the farm community’s loss of knowledge about how to work the earth apart from the chemical and industrial techniques that are gradually destroying the earth itself.  Though he was a farmer all of his life, John had to relearn almost everything in order to begin farming organically.  So completely had the previous generations accepted the superiority of chemical farming that they had not modeled any other approach to working the earth, leaving their descendants almost completely ignorant of the farming practices that had been universal only several generations before them.

It seems to me that this same loss of knowledge is a fundamental problem facing many of those who would seek to live differently in their homes and their communities.  It is not only a matter of identifying the areas where we would like to live differently, and it is not only a matter of finding the will and the resources to make real changes in these areas, but it is also a matter of recovering knowledge that would have been commonplace to our great-grandparents but that is almost completely lost to us now.  I have not the least idea of how to grow an organic backyard vegetable garden, for example.  I am beyond my expertise at every step, relying on books, on friends, on google, and often, when these things fail, on my own experimentation.  This knowledge is no longer commonplace, and there is much else that has similarly passed from the common knowledge of our communities, to their detriment.

The second idea that I appreciated in the film was its insistence on the role of the dirt, of the land, of the earth itself.  In the initial few scenes of the film, Farmer John takes a handful of dirt, eats a sizable mouthful, and declares, “The earth is good today.”  John is obviously playing to the camera, as he loves to do, but the gesture reminds me of my own impulse to do just that while planting my apple trees.  The words ‘good’ and ‘earth’ in such close conjunction also remind me of a book I have just read, Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, which represents the earth in ways that are often similar to the film.  This second connection was further reinforced by a later scene, where John’s elderly uncle approaches tears as he describes how the new housing developments have “poured concrete over all that good earth.”

It occurs to me, watching these moments in the context of my own recent experience and reading, that our culture has lost, and has long been losing, this almost spiritual sense of the earth.  Distanced as we are from working the soil, manic as we are about cleanliness, we are unable to conceive of soil as something living, as something that we might put into our mouths and eat, as something good and wholesome and even spiritual.  In The Good Earth, Buck several times depicts the earth as healing farmer Wang emotionally and psychologically.  Whether he is suffering from the lust for a woman or from the anxieties of his family, the remedy is always to walk barefoot behind his plow, to turn the earth in his hands, to lie along the freshly plowed furrows and sleep in the sun.  He is always cleansed by this connection with the land.

It is not, as the examples of both farmer Wang and farmer John show clearly, that this connection with the earth is easy, for working the land is always a great and never ending labour.  It is only that this labour is wholesome and good in a way that cannot be replicated in any other way.  There is no substitute for real dirt, for real labour in the earth.  Not that this precludes other sorts of labour, of course, but that the other labours need to reconnect themselves to the labour of the land.

I am reminded of C. S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, when he is staying with a tutor, preparing for his university entrance examinations.  Lewis relates how he would go to his tutor in the garden and how his tutor would take the book in his dirt covered hands and guide Lewis through whatever difficulty he was having.  Lewis is horrified at this disrespect of his books, buti I always saw something apt in this story.  The intellectual, at least in this instance and in my ideal, is not someone whose hands stay clean, literally or figuratively, but someone whose hands are as used to working with earth or with food or with wood as they are used to working with the word.  If our books are too clean, our hands are probably too clean also, and we have failed to make our thinking a real part of our living.

I changed the location of the Dinner and a Doc event last night.  We had been meeting in a local church space, but I decided to try hosting the meal and screening at my own place.  I really enjoyed the change.  Some friends brought their young daughter with them, much to the delight of my eldest son, and the kids circulated freely through the house during the meal and the film, their parents following dutifully behind.  My mother brought a crisp of freshly picked sakatoon berries, which beautifully finished the meal after the homemade potato soup.  The atmosphere felt less constrained and more intimate.  I think that I will repeat the experiment in August.

The film this month was Jennifer Baichwal’s Manufactured Landscapes, which introduces the photography of Edward Burtynsky, famous for his images of industrial, fabricated landscapes.  The film follows Burtynsky as he visits various sites, mostly in China, and photographs the disturbing and yet somehow beautiful landscapes that are the by-product of industrial humanity.  The images are often vivid: a slow tracking shot that moves down a seemingly endless factory floor; derelict ships half-dismantled on a beach; mountains of hand-sorted recycling; people demolishing their own cities, brick by brick, to make way for ships in what will be the reservoir of a new dam.  There are no descriptions that can do these visuals justice.  They need to be seen and experienced.

The effect of the documentary footage and of Burtynsky’s own stills, especially when they are layered over each other in succession like they are in the film, is to defamiliarize industrial humanity, to make strange the economic and social systems that have become normalized for most of us.  There is an overwhelming sense of estrangement from the photographic subjects, as if they have been discovered on an alien planet or the set of some fantastic film.  The film constantly forces the viewer to confront the strange, unnatural, inhuman ways that industrial humanity transforms its own landscape.

The phrase that kept ocurring to me throughout the film is from Ivan Illich.  In several of his books, Illich talks about how social relatations and institutions have become “industrially deformed”, and though he does not explicitly use this phrase in relation to the modern manufactured landscape, I do not think he would object to my using the idea in this way, because the industrial landscape is inextricably linked to other industrial relations and institutions.  It is not that one produces the other, but that they both produce each other, reinforce each other, construct each other as normal and natural ways of being.

By forcing us to confront the strange and unnatural landscapes of industrial humanity, therefore, Baichwal’s film and Burtynsky’s images should also force us to confront the strange and unnatural relationships, institutions, and systems that produce these landscapes.  I am not simply making the obvious argument that our consumption causes us to manufacture landscapes that are unnatural.  I am making the less obvious argument that the defamilarizing function that Manufactured Landscapes plays should force us to see how our own immediate landscapes have become industrially deformed also, to see how the suburban housing development, the strip mall, the parking lot, the gated community, and much more of our own landscape is as deformed in its way as the strip mine and the interminable factory floor.

To make industrial humanity strange for us at the distance of China or even of a local mine is certainly a necessary and useful function, but it falls short  if we do not recognize the implication that our own landscapes and relations and institutions need to be made strange as well.  Burtynsky makes this connection to himself more than once, commenting on the industrial implications of his photography and supposing that he had perhaps used fuel from one of the oil tankers rusting on a beach.  There is no point, however, when the film challenges its viewers to make this connection for themselves.  In the end, it is still possible to finish the film with the sense that our office jobs and tidy homes and ordered towns somehow escape the deformation that industrial humanity has imposed upon its landscapes.  It is still possible to avoid the fact that our own landscapes, though perhaps cleaner, safer, and healthier, are often just as unnatural, abnormal, and inhuman.

This possibility need to be eliminated for us.  We need to be confronted with the strangeness of what we have created ourselves to be.  We need to have our lives made alien to us so that we can see what they have become.

The Atomic Cafe, directed by Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader, and Pierce Rafferty, is the film I screened at tonight’s Dinner and a Doc. It is a remarkable film, a kind of collage that satirizes the whole of an era’s relationship to the atom using only the era’s own documents. There are no contemporary interviews, no editorial voiceovers, no expert analyses, only footage from the early atomic age, edited together in ironic and often humorous ways. This approach represents the source material in such a way that it can only satirize itself, and it forces the viewer to see the ironies in the official propaganda, the media hype, the well-intentioned education, and the opportunistic money-making that surrounded the cultural effect of the atomic bomb. The film makes unavoidable the gap between reality and what the average citizen is usually told.

I realized tonight, however, that this kind of satire only becomes effective when it is too late to be really useful. The culture in the United States during the fifties would not have interpreted much of The Atomic Cafe ironically. For many people at the time, the culture of the atomic bomb was still too present and too real, and the voices that were constructing this culture for them still held too much authority. In fact, to the degree that the editing made the irony unavoidable, mant people of that era might have found the film untruthful and irresponsible. In order for people to see and accept the irony of the film, they needed to be separated by time and culture from what was being satirized.

This is an important idea for me, because it helps explain why irony and satire are not more dominant modes in Western culture today. The problem is certainly not that there are no opportunities for them, as the success of satirical news shows like The Daily Show and the Colbert Report can attest. The problem is that the broader portion of people in our culture are still too enmeshed in their own culture, still too subject to it. They do not often see the ironies of their own political, economic, and social existence, and they do not often choose to accept these ironies when they are forced upon them. It will likely take the next generation, looking back through the lenses of our own media, to point out the absurdities in our ideas of terrorism, or national security, or ecology. Of course, by that time, it will already be much too late.

This past Saturday was Dinner and a Doc night again. We ate homemade carrot soup and watched Errol Morris’ Fog of War, which made a good combination in my estimation, since each reminded me of truths that I have a tendency to forget.

The soup’s story began longer ago than you might expect. Last year at about this time, my mother-in-law continued a tradition of her late husband’s by planting a substantial vegetable garden. She planted tomatoes for me to sauce, potatoes for me to store, strawberries for me to jam, and some other things, including a few carrots. Now, to be clear, when I say that she planted a few carrots, I mean merely that she planted more carrots than any single woman with a mostly absent son could have reasonably hoped to eat in a decade. She had bushels of carrots. She had far more carrots than she could dig or I could process. Fortunately, a friend mentioned that she could cover the undug carrots with some leaves and the carrots would stay fresh until the spring. So, we had a reprieve of several months, but for the past week or so I have once again been drowning in orange vegetables that neither of my sons will even eat.

I added the tops to stock until I had emptied my freezer of soup bones. I froze more bags of sliced carrots than I want to contemplate. I put carrots in one form or another on the menu three times last week. I made six different carrot soups to put in the freezer, and I brought a massive pot of my favourite soup to this month’s Dinner and a Doc. The recipe comes originally from one of the Moosewood cookbooks, its primary flavours being mint and yoghurt. Speaking only for myself, it was one of the best tasting soups that I have ever had, though its consistency could perhaps have been better.

It was also a reminder, albeit an ironic one, considering that the carrots were not exactly in season, of a truth that I always seem to be forgetting and relearning: seasonal ingredients, because of how suddenly they are harvested and how quickly they need to be used, force me to cook creatively and to discover new and interesting ways to prepare food. I had never realized what could be made with a carrot until this past week, and I have had similar realizations with everything from strawberries to garlic scapes to kale over the years. Seasonal ingredients force a kind of seasonal preparation that almost disappears with supermarket shopping, where almost everything is available all the time, and this seasonal preparation fosters culinary creativity and a connection to the seasons in a way grocery store produce does not. This is the truth that the carrot soup recalled to me.

The truth that the film recalled to me also begins some time ago. When I was first designing Documenting Justice, the documentary course that I teach, I had been told of a particularly relevant film, Seeing is Believing by Peter Wintonick. The film explores the use of the camera, particularly the handicam, as a tool or as a weapon in situations of social injustice. While it does draw attention to the problems inherent in the assumption that we can believe the filmed images that we see, its central thesis is essentially that the visual images produced by the video camera do inspire belief in a way that make handicams a powerful weapon. To phrase this thesis in a way that the film would not, the handicam is effective as a tool or a weapon precisely because most people are niave enough to believe in what they see.

I few months later I saw Fog of War for the first time. I enjoyed it very much, and it remains one of my favourite films, even through what was my fourth or fifth viewing on Saturday night. The film is really an extended interview with Robert S. McNamara, and it is structured around a series of lessons that he draws from his tenure as the United States Secretary of Defence during the cold war and the first years of the Vietnam War. What struck me on my first viewing and again on my fifth was one of those lessons: it reads, “Sometimes both seeing and believing are wrong.” This seems a simple and obvious statement, but I seem always to be forgetting it.

I keep forgetting McNamara’s lesson for at least two reasons: first, because the niave view, that I can actually believe what I see, is the dominant assumption of my culture and its media; and second, because the more critical and cynical view, that I see only what I want to believe, is the dominant assumption of most critical discourses in my culture and its media. Yet, what McNamara recognizes, and what I seem to be continually relearning, is that, while seeing and believing may function together to reinforce a particular perception of the world, both may be wrong. I would even argue that both are always wrong, in every case, to one degree or another. No amount of seeing, whether through the gaze of the camera or the data of a scientific instrument, and no amount of believing, whether in the goodness of humanity or the omnipotence of God, will suffice to guarantee the rightness or truth of anything.

This does not mean, at least to me, that we cannot know rightly and truthfully. It merely means that we can have no guarantee of this, and that both our seeing and our believing need to be characterized by a fundamental humility. I need to be humble in this sense, not provisionally, not because I have yet to find what will guarantee my seeing and believing, but absolutely, because I recognize that I will never be able to find this kind of guarantee. Though I am sure that McNamara did not mean to say quite this, it is nevertheless the truth of which Fog of War reminds me each time I see it.

I held my monthly Dinner and a Doc event last night, screening Laura Poitras’ My Country, My Country (Independent Television Service / Praxis Film Works, 2006). The film follows an Iraqi doctor as he prepares to run in the 2005 Iraqi elections, providing both surprisingly intimate footage of the doctor’s family and more general footage of the election preparations among local Iraqis, private security contractors, coalition forces, and UN election workers.

Poitras’ representation of the complex questions raised by the occupation and the elections is sincere and thoughtful. There is no defense of a particular politics, either Iraqi or American, only a sense of living alongside a family and a nation as they experience how democracy will emerge in their own situation. The fear and anxiety of the people living through these events is clearly portrayed, but so is also is the courage and even the humour, like when the Doctor’s teenage daughter asks that he pay her for her vote, or when a scene of a military administrator casually handing out $80,000 in cash to a contractor is followed by a shot of a helicopter gunner’s helmet, the camera clearly focused on the words “panic button” printed on its side.

One of the themes that Poitras emphasises particularly throughout the film is that of the election as a “show”. She includes several scenes where American or international officials openely use the word ’show’ to describe the election, and uses one such instance to draw attention to the word directly. The scene is of an American officer training Iraqi police in how to respond to the potential security issues that the election might pose. The officer begins by telling the trainees that “policing in a democracy is different,” and then, referring to the election, he explains that they will have “front row seats to the greatest show in the world.” One of the trainees questions him about his use of the word ’show’, asking whether the election will be “just a show.” The officer assures him that it will be for real, that it will be “real history,” but the trainee is still clearly confused as to why the word ’show’ is being used.

What is at issue in this scene, I think, is a difference in understanding about the nature of spectacle. The officer understands the staging that any election entails, the international interest and investment in this particular election, and the degree of mediatization that this particular election is likely to generate. He understands that, to a greater rather than to a lesser degree, the election is a show. Even so, this understanding does not pose a problem to him. His understanding that the election is a spectacle does not prevent him from believing in the election as an election. He may not have believe that it will necessarily produce a good government, but he still believes in the idea of the election as such, despite its spectacular and mediatized nature. He sees no paradox in calling the election both “the greatest show in the world” and a “real history.”

The Iraqi trainee, however, does not understand the nature of spectacle in the same way. He may suspect that the whole election is just a show. In fact, this is his first suspicion when the officer uses the word. However, he does not see how it can be both a show and a real history. The two ideas are separated for him; their coincidence is as strange for him as it is natural for the officer.

Yet, I think that the officer is preparing his trainees more fully than he knows when his first lesson in democratic policing involves the dismantling of the line between spectacle and reality. While all political power, whether democratic or otherwise, is essentailly staged, it is perhaps unique to democracy to admit this and to insist on its validity despite the fact. Where other forms of political power tend to conceal the ways that they are staged, democracy presents itself precisely as a show, but demands that we believe in it nevertheless.