Producing not displaying

Every time I thought I knew what she was talking about two paragraphs later I had to change my mind.  The concept of mimesis? What is that? I had better look it up.

I am thinking, “Okay this film must look something like “Over Washington” a PBS production that was stunningly beautiful in its depiction of the landscape and the people of WA State, that some people found incredibly boring, which I, of course, being a native of Washington State, loved. Then I am lost amid all that poetic talk about the “visual Poetics” and how they enable the “the flowing, the play of depth and shallows, the surging revelation

and concealments of patterns and shapes” (Deger 2007:114). Ohhh maybe I don’t like thick description…quelle horror!. And just when I am thinking that this is beyond me, the author speaks of the video as a way of producing culture, rather than displaying culture, “dictated by Western imaginations” (Deger:2007:116).  What caught me up in a wonder was that I want to acknowledge that cultures evole. They don’t always disappear. And just like thousands  of years ago, technologies are still under diffusion. This technology in the hands of cultural teachers can do so much good. I liked the way the film played into the concept of “Oral Traditions” by the use of the viewer’s imagination to create images that are linked to the water. Sometimes people forget that often have visual elments seen and unseen. That I understand and can appreciate.

Best words said:

“The point is that Gularri is not a film about Yolngu culture—it is film that seeks to produce Yolngu culture and identity by generating a specific experience of viewing that is immediately recognized by Yolngu as something other than the ordinary or everyday act of watching television”(Deger2007:116)

Deger Jennifer, Seeing the Invisible: Yolngu Video as Revelatory Ritual, Visual Anthropology, 20: 103–121, 2007
Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC, ISSN: 0894-9468 print=1545-5920 online
DOI: 10.1080/08949460601152765