Reflexive Essay

Visual Anthropology: Video Reflexive Essay

“Walk Like A Man” was a short film created by myself, Francesca Wicks and Natalie Freeman. We both took Visual Anthropology Theory and really enjoyed the module. By the time we had begun SE555 we already had spoken about maybe exploring this subject in the video module.

The first relationship that is evident in the whole creation of the film is mine and Natalie’s. We live together and have talked extensively about the subject greatly stemming from her involvement in her dissertation. Our house became a hub of talking about the subject with other housemates and friends that visited. We wanted each of the men that were involved in the film to be related to us in one way or another, we felt there was no point in trying to detach ourselves from the film and deny our involvement so we decided to involve ourselves in every way possible without actually being a character in the film. It happened that each of the people that appeared in the film came forward to us after hearing the idea behind the film and asked to be involved. Speaking of the film had evoked further thinking and thought on masculinity.

 

The research that surrounds the subject generally supports the argument that someone’s social/cultural environment dictates what being a man is. Therefore we wanted to look a little further into how our society is shaping what makes a man, a man. We watched documentaries such as “A call to Men” Tony Porter, Philip Zimbardo’s “The Demise of Guys” and “Tough Guise: Men, Violence and the Crisis of Masculinity by J Katz. These documentaries suggest that there is a masculinity “crisis” evident currently. Men feel that they don’t have a place in society and they don’t know how to be. They are taught, through media and stereotypes to be both sexually and non-sexually violent to women. The article “Toward a new sociology of masculinity” Lee et all (1985) argues that since the second wave of feminism in the 70’s, masculinity has come under much scrutiny. “Man, Masculinity and Manhood Acts” Shrock et al (2009) argues that a man’s cultural and social background has a direct effect on the man they become, that there are different types of men.

 

After reading much literature on this subject and talking about it extensively, I was not convinced. I thought surely this can’t be the case. Men can’t be having a “crisis”. This led me to thinking how will I raise a boy to a man in this situation? I do feel that a boy needs a strong (strong referring to being prominent in his life not necessarily physically strong!) male figure in his life to help him to learn from, this is not to say women cannot raise a man, but I do feel that somewhere in their family or extended family there does need to be a male role model. Because I am not a man and therefore do not have direct access to a man’s thinking, we wanted to know what they were thinking. We wanted to see if from the men we interviewed could we see even just a hint of the “crisis” that men in the documentary were talking about.

I initially would have said that our participants were not “the other” as they were all personal to us and related in some way, and we were not from a far off exotic country, we were doing “Anthropology at Home” (Jackson 1987) but through doing this journey that this module has put me through I think my opinion has changed. I honestly feel that everyone that is not you is “the other”. Not in an early anthropological racist or demeaning way but in a sense that you can never understand a person fully that is not you. So they become the “other” but in an intriguing way.

The process of this film has been an organic one; it feels like it has just fallen together at the right time and the right place. It definitely feels like it came together naturally. Hugh Brody claims that the less manufactured a film is, the more accessible and genuine it is for the audience (Brody 2011) When the process started we only had an idea. Men started to contact us being interested and the ball started rolling.

The changing, morphing and developing nature of the film reminds me much of Pickering’s “the mangle of practise”. Many things that we had first envisioned for the film and ideas that we wanted to create fell through quite late on and we came across other difficulties that changed the direction of the film. We became fully aware of the constraint that time places on you and the possibilities that we could achieve in terms of the film itself.

All the way through this process Berger’s article “Ways of seeing” was always very prevalent in my mind. The way in which individuals perceive their world is so subjective relating to their discourse. Therefore I was very clear in the understanding that men’s understanding of Masculinity will also be a direct result of their own discourse and will be subjective.

We decided from the beginning of this process that this is not a film that tells men how they should be feeling according to our subjects, it is just to get the audience thinking about the topic and asking themselves “how do you feel about it?” this film is also designed to evoke conversation. I don’t believe that it is representative of men; however I do feel that it is representative of the men that were interviewed. In the same breath I also struggle to say that it is representative of the men involved when each man only got 2-3 minutes of interview. If we were able to make an hour long documentary then I feel we could have included much more of the footage and we could have represented them fairly. This leads into the question “is it truth?”

 

Whilst watching ethnographic material, we, as anthropologists are forced to ask ourselves is it a true representation of the subject matter, is it truth? I’m not sure that the quest for truth is necessarily important, I believe that it is the filmmakers representation of their time spent filming their subjects. It is our job whilst watching the film to be aware that it is one person’s vision captured. Therefore I believe that the idea of “truth” is unobtainable, when I ask myself is my film ethnographic, I am faced with a double edged sword, as on one hand I feel that everything is ethnographic as it is a representation of someone’s ideas and words but in a traditional MacDougal sense, it is not ethnographic as it was not purely observation. After being involved in the filming and editing process I have further begun to question all representations that I see in popular media discourse and documentary programmes. I can see how easily a character can be edited to seem a certain way or be seen to saying certain things out of context. I feel that our film has a very Errol Morris-like composition. Morris’s films are characterized by “intense personal interviews”, with interjecting “dramatic re-creations” and a “keen sense of complexity, irony and black humour”. (Bloom 2009) I feel this film was inspired and emerged by discourse.

I feel like due to the reaction of this film, it could be used for advocacy purposes. Throughout the process of the film both men and women have engaged with the topic. The film has had a positive impact on the characters involved and beyond! Friends have been talking to friends and boyfriends about it and have come back to us and told us of being a child and experiencing situations that they feel have shaped them as a man today or situations that they never noticed before but are noticing now, where they have heard themselves saying “stop acting like a girl” or girlfriends saying “he was crying like a girl” I also feel that this film has definitely had an effect on us. As we began this process our teacher asked us to explain our marks, this is now one of them. I now question my own personal stereotypes that I have subconsciously absorbed from media and my reality.

 

 

WordPress Blog address: https://walklikeaman2012.wordpress.com/

Vimeo address: https://vimeo.com/40397806

 

References

 

• Porter, T (Filmed Dec 2010, posted Dec 2010) ‘A call to men’. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/tony_porter_a_call_to_men.html (accessed 03/02/2011).
• Zimbardo, P (2011) ‘The demise of guys’ filmed March 2011, posted August 2011. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/zimchallenge.html (accessed 26/08/2011).
• Katz, J (1999) Tough guise: Men, Violence and the Crisis of Masculinity. Media Education Foundation, Massachusetts
• Carrigan, T, Connell, B & Lee, J (1985) Toward a new sociology of masculinity. Theory and Society. 14:551-604.
• Walsh, F (2010) Male Trouble: Masculinity and the Performance of Crisis. Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke.
• Shrock, D & Schwalbe, M (2009) Man, Masculinity and Manhood Acts. The Annual Review of Sociology, 35:277-295.
• Jackson, A (1987) Anthropology at Home. Tavistock Publications Ltd. New York.
• Bloom, L (2009) Errol Morris: Interviews (Conversations with Filmmakers). University Press of Mississippi. U.S.A