Film-makers make films...

I found Stranger With a Camera to be an emotionally evocative and intellectually stimulating insight into the political, moral, and cultural considerations with which all individuals involved in media production are forced to acknowledge. In it we see a multi-layered collection of stories unfold in various ways, from the tragic tale of the Canadian film-maker, to the exploitative reality of a mining community, to a personal journey of a film-maker attempting to reconcile her identity as artist and community member. There were a number things that I took away from this film, but a few lines stuck out in my mind as challenging and provocative.

Near the middle of the film, Barret said (I don't know if this is verbatim, but it is the general sense) "This town's images were mined just like its coal." A clever and punchy line, but it provokes a larger question for me: in reproducing the troubling and problematic images that had come to define her community, was Barret just participating in the recycling of her community's exploitative history? In fact, Barret herself is in some ways an outsider, as we see when she draws the sharp distinction between the part of the community in which she grew up, "the county seat," and the working class community her film surrounds. I suppose the main distinction between Barret and her media-producing predecessors is that she is more connected to the community she is representing.

Another moment that particularly stood out to me was the very last line of the film where Barret more or less said, if I remember correctly, "It is my job as a film-maker to represent the lives that I portray as fairly as possible." However, I wonder if 'as fairly as possible' is very fair at all. Even Barret's representation, which I assume is supposed to be less problematic or exploitative than the images produced 30 years prior, reconstruct the story of Hugh O' Connor's death by emphasizing the lives of the community he attempted to film, especially the life of Hobart Isom. Of course, there are several practical reasons for this emphasis, Hobart was the murderer, Barret wanted to focus on the town in which he lived, etc. However, I think there are ways in which we can consider this emphasis as a narrative of excuse. It almost seemed that Barret was trying to say that Hobart was provoked into this murder by the inundation of media attention his community was forced to endure. Yet, at some point, again if I remember correctly, it came out that Hobart was very worried about taking pictures of his property due to its very poor condition and his fear of it being seized. In other words, there were economic considerations that fueled his ire, in addition to the community's history of exploitation.

Yet, for all of my criticism of her bias, the way in which she positioned herself in the narrative as a film-maker was very refreshing for me. Often times in media production, the personal interest and role of the media-producer is ignored or rendered invisible in some effort to construct the illusion of objectivity. However, Barret positioned herself right in the middle of her narrative and revealed her role as its architect. To this end, I thought the way she had one of the authors of the New Yorker articles about O' Connor's murder actually in her film, reading his own representation of the story to be quite refreshing as well.

In short, this documentary was not just about the story of Hugh O' Connor. I think it was the story of all documentary film-makers who are interested representing communities in which they do not live. Barret acknowledged her role as film-maker, outsider, architect and the possibly disastrous or wonderful consequences inherent in that position of power. In that way this story is both didactic and admonitory, refreshing and troubling, problematic and valuable.