Class notes
Required reading:
Required viewing:
Smoke Signals (dir. Eyre) - viewing Wed. 14 January 2009, 18:00, Classroom A
Contemporary History, The Redemptive Imagination
Written assessment:
Quiz 11
Written assignment due:
web response paragraph
Response paragraph prompt:
The movie Smoke Signals (1998) is primarily a personal story, told as a way to make sense of the meaning of family and loss. But throughout the movie, various themes appear that we've seen before in this course:
- Culture and cultural identity as created and transmitted by mass media (see the clip about "how to be an Indian");
- The influence of the past on the present - and the ways that, as William Faulkner described it, the "past is never dead. It is not even past";
- The use of stories and story-telling as a way to make sense of the past.
Compare the use of "story" as a way to make sense of history and culture in Smoke Signals and the secondary readings we've worked with this semester. What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of each?
1 comment:
During the semester our secondary readings were not only classical works of historical academics but with readings like the life of a slavery girl we also got to know the story telling genre and the sense of how it transmits culture.
The movie smoke signals gives us an insight, not an overview, to Indian life, how Indians are perceived within the American culture, how they see their place in American society, how life in reservations is like, how real Indians look, and what traditions they have.
When reading a classical historical text you will never get the same idea of how something was as trough a movie or storytelling of any source.
What is good about history texts is that you can transmit a lot more information, cover a greater variety of topics, put a lot more in context, go a lot more in detail and say everything that and take as much time, or space as is necessary to get the whole picture. Right now I am imagining how ridiculous it would be if the Indian main actor from the movie would stand up and start having a speech that goes something like this : Us Indians, weve been living in reservations since….our culture dates back till….nobody would want to listen to him. Historical texts are not there to entertain but to teach us something whereas movies like smoke signals and many other movies can be seen as both entertainment and a historical document to give knowledge about a certain topic.
The disadvantage of historical texts is that they often attract only a small public, not everybody is into knowing all the details and or the whole story.
But storytelling on the contrast has its advantages and disadvantages as well.
The probably greatest advantage of storytelling to classical “textbook-style” documents is the first person view on concrete events. The person narrating can transmit emotion, negotiations, and little details for example that Indians are supposed to be stoic, often point out the whole picture of a certain time period or event. In smoke signals we can for instance as already mentioned get to know fragments of Indian culture which cannot be explained by a book. The disadvantage here is that people that are unconscious uninformed about Indian history in America before seeing the movie, may now be confused that the Indians seem to be a not very popular minority among “real” Americans.
A story often doesn’t tell enough it only gives you the most important information you need or it can even leave them out, but on the other hand it can transmit different valuable information. It’s up to the person whether he wants to hear the whole story or just one story.
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