The visual elements of motion pictures are powerful, I believe they contextualize each story and frame each character involved in it. What “I see” is as powerful to me as what I am verbally told. In my opinion, if well organized, images can tell a great deal… if taken out of context and composed in disarray, they can only distract. When Borat came to town (2008) is a documentary by director Mercedes Stalenhoef depicting a few episodes in the life of Lonela, a seventeen year old from Glod (Romania). I believe that documentaries aim to portray reality but there is a medium separating me from that reality (while possibly bringing me closer to it as well). Documentaries are viewpoints and they are saturated with subjective elements, some obvious, some subtler. Commenting on a film is not always easy for me. I am uncomfortably concerned about intertwined layers of meaning. There are technical elements that require understanding of equipment and filming techniques. There are limitations such as format, language, styles (I am watching this story from the lens of somebody’s camera; the story has been translated from a language I don’t understand into my second language through short subtitles; I, as a viewer, have limited ‘knowledges’ about the cultural elements involved in the depicted environment; I am biased about what I see and how I see it). Nevertheless, when I watch a movie, I try to ignore those ‘layers’ by simply stating my emotional reactions to it. Did I like it or did I not? In this case I did… and why was that? Well… let’s see.
From a visual perspective I found it beautifully shot, not only because of the composition of each frame but also because the images were not redundant, they complemented the story, they ‘spoke’ as well. The imagery pleased my eye and the subsequent story came across as being honest, personal, close to one’s heart. I could sense a director taking some time to observe, to establish rapport with the participants in order to make them feel comfortable with the camera … perhaps to the point of it becoming invisible to them (or at least to some of them).
I also tried to connect to those characters as if I were there in Glod (Was it the music? Was it the type of narration? Was it their search for love and belonging?) How can an emotional connection be possible if documentaries show me only bits and pieces of a reality? There are ‘different stories’ involved in one film: what was really happening, what the camera captured, what the director wrote about in her script, what she (or her crew) edited after the fact in order to weave the different sections. I witnessed only 59 minutes of what I assume were days if not months if not years of shooting. Then some questions arose: Did this director trick me? Was Mercedes Stalenhoef as opportunistic as Sasha Baren Cohen (Borat) had been portrayed in her film? Are the lawyers that came to town as deceitful as Cohen who omitted his ‘true intentions’ to the villagers of Glod? What was the motivation behind this film? Was it to show another angle to the same story? To vindicate the characters? To illustrate how they had been treated by different ‘cunning exploiters’? Or on the contrary, to prove that they are not as naïve as they seem? Or that they are uneducated? Or greedy but with no tools to succeed due to their ‘disempowered condition’? Perhaps the director had no clear intentions and tried to be as neutral as possible (to the best of her ability) showing me how life ‘happens’ in the ‘post Borat’ village of Glod.
I believe that in general, there is an element of ‘sensationalism’ in documentary filmmaking. Topics may be chosen based on shock value or viewer attention-grabbing tactics (otherwise they would defeat their purpose, no?) I guess I can live with that. What becomes more crucial for me is the degree of commitment to ‘the truth’ and the ethical approach to the characters involved in each story. In this case, I perceived a level of compassion in director Mercedes Stalenhoef. She came across to me as being respectful and sensitive towards the characters in her film. I never felt she wanted to ridicule them…. Unlike the Borat she showed me.
I enjoyed the way the different characters expressed their emotions, their contradictions, their passions and transgressions in, let’s say, a more genuine way. By genuine I mean, “honestly felt”, not scripted. In this film they had a voice, in Borat, they were given a caption: ‘abortionist’, ‘prostitute’. However, could they be professional actors and this story a fictional film? I guess that is possible. The docudrama Radian City (Brown and Burns, 2006) is an example of ‘enacted reality’.
When Borat came to town indirectly talked to me about context, about taking time to experience a moment in time from different perspectives in order to hear other voices. It might have helped that I watched Borat a while back. I laughed at times throughout that movie. I found it politically incorrect and awkwardly painful to bear at instances but yet ‘brilliant’ in its own ‘degradation’. By that I mean that I am not as critical of the results as I am critical of the method. Sasha Baron Cohen (SBC) managed to question my moral values and my double standards by ‘making fun of me’. He also reminded me what I am directly or indirectly capable of doing to others. Almost like putting a mirror in front of my face and saying, “look at you”, “Can you see yourself reflected here”? I may have answered “no” but … don’t I judge people often? Don’t I oversimplify other people’s cultures? Haven’t I played with many of the ideas Borat raised? I believe that SBC created Borat as a character that would reveal my ‘nakedness’ and project it onto the screen (thus the awkward feeling it generated in me)… Borat also embodied those lawyers that came to encourage the town of Glod to sue Hollywood… and who didn’t see the people of Glod as who they were but as who the lawyers wanted to believe they were. In the end the lawyers acted the same way if not worse than Borat and his creator Cohen. Was SBC trying to gain fame and earn big bucks? Or was he also questioning our society with more dramatic methods? I find Borat disturbing but I don’t disagree with the points he rose by questioning many of my own actions and reactions. How critical is our judgment beyond the obvious? Why did Borat become a box office success if we all felt it was so ‘wrong’? What did we not understand about Borat? I am sure there are different takings on this topic and that’s for me a lesson for intercultural relations. From a teaching perspective I would emphasize taken steps towards visual literacy by not only observing and experiencing the intercultural aspects of each character involved in a story, but also by dealing with the ‘language’ of film and the ‘messages’ derived from this medium. When Borat came to town left me with a good feeling precisely because of the human contradictions present in the whole story. I enjoyed the evolution of Lonela, negotiating with life, fighting her paradigms and working hard to become Carmen (or the mother or Carmen) without having to move to Spain.
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