Smart people saying smart things (II)

[swan_tower]

• CinemaVitas, “Equitable Cinematography: Director Lexi Alexander on the Politics of Focus”

This interview is fascinating to me because I know basically nothing about cinematography, except insofar as it’s related to photography. So I love it when somebody gets down into the nitty-gritty details about how decisions regarding lenses and focus contribute to inequality, e.g. the fact that women on average speak about 25% of the time in a film + cinematographic technique that puts only the speaker in a shot in focus = not only are the women on screen silent more often than not, but they’re probably blurry as well. Backlighting, specific camera angles — she compares it all to the practice of airbrushing magazine covers, only there isn’t the same degree of public awareness that this stuff is being used to erase women’s flaws and present a constantly-idealized image. Plus lots of interesting discussion on how the relationship between a director and a director of photography differs between movies and TV, male directors and the YA film genre, etc.

• Slacktivist, “We Need to Do Something about Rick Wiles”

On the deep and poisonous stream of anti-Semitism that runs through far too much of white evangelical Christianity. Key quote:

And it doesn’t really matter which “theory” a conspiracist starts with — Moon-landing hoaxers, anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers, young-earthers, chemtrails, fluoridation, Planned Parenthood, Antichrist OWG, blue helmets, black helicopters, whatever — the belief that the Key to Everything is “the startling news that the media isn’t reporting!” always leads, ultimately, to anti-Semitism.

This got me reflecting on my own childhood. My elementary school had a large Jewish contingent; I’m not sure how many, but my mother estimates somewhere between a quarter and a third of my class. It got watered down as we fed into junior high and high school, joining other elementary school catchment areas, but overall, they were almost certainly the largest minority in my area. Large enough that Jewish kids didn’t stand out as unusual to me — at least, not until those two years where they were all going through their Bar and Bat Mitzvah celebrations and I learned that being Jewish meant you got a special birthday party. (I probably went to more parties in junior high than any other period of my life.)

But at the same time, we were also in the neighborhood of this church. (In opening that page, I note that a section which used to detail a sexual abuse scandal within the church’s leadership has been removed. A scandal which, for all I know, could have involved kids in my class or my brother’s — the timing was right.) I don’t know how much of that anti-Semitic ideology is present there, or was thirty years ago. But it makes me wonder how much, despite the large presence and general acceptance of Jewish families in our neighborhood, there were still incidents that happened out of my sight or flew over my head. I know the guy I went to prom with gave me the first Left Behind novel to read; I didn’t get more than about ten pages into it because the writing was so execrable, but later I learned that boy howdy are those books anti-Semitic. And there were enough Baptist and evangelical Christians around that I have to imagine some of that was an issue in my community.

Short of randomly calling up my Jewish friends from sixth grade and asking them whether they got shit from our fellow students, I’ll never know. But it’s a sobering thing to consider.

Comments

[yhlee]

At Ara's elementary school in Pasadena when she was in kindergarten/1st grade, her best friend was a Jewish boy. He got teased by some Christian kids (including a minister's kid IIRC) for being Jewish and not celebrating Christmas. When his parents complained to the teacher, she refused to do anything about it. :( I remember suggesting that they escalate to the principal but the parents ultimately decided against it. I wasn't personally convinced that the fucking school was going to give them any satisfaction either, and it was their call, obviously. So yeah. :/

[swan_tower]

Ugh. I'm so sorry for that family, and for all the others like them.

I know at the very least, we didn't have a whole lot of "you're the odd one out because you weren't at school yesterday due to your weird Jewish holiday." The rest of us just envied the Jewish kids for getting extra holidays. :-P And in high school I literally had a guy I'd known (not well) since elementary school stare at me one day at lunch and ask "Why are you here?" because he'd assumed for years that I was Jewish; so many other people around us were, after all. But that doesn't mean there weren't still effects -- like ginning up Hanukkah to be more like Jewish Christmas, rather than its own thing.

[sovay]

So I love it when somebody gets down into the nitty-gritty details about how decisions regarding lenses and focus contribute to inequality

I loved this interview because I knew some of the general effects and means of that inequality (I had heard about backlight, for example), but not to the level of pervasive technical detail which Alexander analyzed. I see costume choices and camera placement discussed all the time in the male gaze, but I would love to start seeing the same casual critical eye to angles and lens width and lighting. I can see that kind of in-camera airbrushing more easily—I know more about it—in classical Hollywood films. It was illuminating for me to learn that it hadn't gone anywhere.

— the belief that the Key to Everything is “the startling news that the media isn’t reporting!” always leads, ultimately, to anti-Semitism.

My reaction to that is basically, "Yep," which I hate.

It is very difficult for Christianity not to be anti-Semitic. The entire raison d'être for the religion is the idea that the Jews were doing it wrong. Centuries of New Testament, New Covenant, the Christian Church as the new Chosen of God—even if generic-your denomination or church specifically teaches against an assumption of supersessionism, it's still there in the language. It's hard for me to tell if it's worse now than when I was younger or if I just find it harder to ignore; I suspect the answer is probably, as with most of our long national trash fire, both. But it's everywhere.

[swan_tower]

I can see that kind of in-camera airbrushing more easily—I know more about it—in classical Hollywood films. It was illuminating for me to learn that it hadn't gone anywhere.

Yeah, I can see some of the effects pretty easily in older films, where the women are wearing makeup an inch thick and they faintly glow when they're in the center of the frame. And I knew actresses in Hollywood these days are expected to botox the hell out of their faces and then still spend hours in the makeup chair. But a lot of the techniques are subtle enough that a non-specialist will miss them.

It is very difficult for Christianity not to be anti-Semitic.

This is unfortunately true, and a similar thing applies to Islam. Any time Religion B grew out of Religion A, there's going to be an implicit criticism that Religion A was doing it wrong somehow. I'm not sure there's any practical way to eliminate that -- but in the meanwhile, we can at least try to stamp out the egregious prejudices and bigoted behavior. I'm just not sure how one goes about changing the minds of people who believe all Jews are liars because they deny that Jesus is the Christ.

[rosefox]

My reaction to that is basically, "Yep," which I hate.

Mine too, mostly because of reading Eric K. Ward's "Skin in the Game". He's writing about white nationalism, not evangelical Christianity, but there's quite a bit of overlap.

[rosefox]

A friend of mine grew up in a similar environment. Another student drew swastikas on her notebook when she was nine.

Judaism and Jewishness are so unremarkable in NYC that I never encountered anti-Semitic slurs or dogwhistles growing up, and had to study them as an adult to know when people around me or online are saying coded anti-Semitic things. I'm sure there are still some I don't know. But we spent summers and weekends upstate, and I remember my mother getting into a fight with a neighbor who thought "jew" was an acceptable word in Boggle because it can be a verb as well as a proper noun.