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From: Kenneth S Nolley <[log in to unmask]> Original Sender: H-NET List for Scholarly Studies and Uses of Media <[log in to unmask]> Subject: Review of Seeing is Believing Seeing Is Believing: Handicams, Human Rights & the News. Produced by Katerina Cizek and Peter Wintonick for Necessary Illusions. New York: First Run/Icarus Films, 2002. 58 minutes. (VHS) One of the interesting developments in documentary practice of the last two decades has been the development of the camcorder and its widespread adoption by private citizens. Perhaps the Rodney King footage in 1991 first revealed to the general public the political power of this new little machine. In the last few years, camcorders have captured any number of dramatic moments, including most sensationally perhaps, the destruction of the World Trade Center. Indeed, in the public imagination, the twin towers have dominated the public imagination of 9/11 far more than the Pentagon and the fourth plane which crashed in Pennsylvania, in significant measure perhaps, because there were no camcorders trained on these sites at critical moments. Cizek and Wintonick’s film is overtly dedicated to exploring what one journalist in the film calls the greatest technological shift since the Industrial Revolution. Certainly the film is marked by the extraordinary amount of gripping amateur video that it contains, a good deal of which comes from a human rights campaign in the Philippines in support of the efforts being made by a group of indigenous peoples, the Nakamata, to regain the use of ancestral lands. Central to the campaign is an engaging and courageous videographer named Joey Lozano, who documents the Nakamata struggle and during the film helps them to learn to shoot their own video view of their plight. The hardware is made available to the Nakamata through Joey by a New York group called Witness, who are dedicated to providing handicams to human rights campaigns. The story as told by the film presents the Nakamata struggle with acceptance and sympathy, even as it develops an heroic portrait of Joey Lozano, for its sympathies clearly lie with people who have been traditionally disempowered. In the main, it seems clear that the film seeks to argue that the handicam is a critical tool of non-violent resistance for marginalized peoples, though its also raises other questions about the utility and power of this new magical box. Certainly the film reveals some of the difficulties that traditional television journalism has with amateur film in the comments made by television journalist George Alajiah and documentarian Leslie Woodhead, both British, who worry on camera about ways that handicam footage might be seen as a substitute for what they believe it is that professionals do better. And the film points toward other questions raised by the burgeoning employment of the medium. In addition to the applications of handicam footage with which the film seems generally sympathetic (as in making the case for the Nakamata in the Philippines, in documenting atrocities in the Congo, or revealing abusive care of the mentally ill in Mexico, and so on), the film also notes other uses of handicam footage which is seen either by the narrator or by participants in the film as negative and potentially dangerous (the right-to-life footage of the in utero fetus, video release statements by Osama Bin Laden, films of suicide bombers’ last moments that are referred to as “snuff film” by a participant, recruiting films for right-wing paramilitary groups or terrorist organizations, and arrestingly, the intimidating image of a neo-nazi youth in Prague with a handicam shooting footage of Ondraj Cakl, a videographer featured in the film for his work in documenting the violent activities of skinhead youths). Though the film does not argue so directly, it seems to suggest implicitly that the handicam itself is merely a powerful tool for any ideological position. The film also points out that all documentary footage, even the most dramatic, is subject to interpretative dispute, as noted wryly in the film by Alan Tieger, who helped prosecute the first Rodney King trial. Beyond these issues, the film raises the question of whether the handicam might actually endanger certain lives (of the Nakamata, particularly) more than it protects them. But the film does not ask another cogent question here—about the impact of omnipresent, ever-vigilant handicams upon personal privacy, a subject much discussed recently with regard to cameras on college campuses. In short, the film seems to me to raise far more questions than it answers, perhaps to beg some important questions, and quietly to stack the deck in favor of certain applications of the apparatus, even as it appears to dismiss others as flawed or pernicious. At the same time, the mere fact that the film engages the notion of oppressed third world peoples as film-makers, as observers looking back through a lens at the first world, is significant and novel enough to make this film a particularly engaging piece of work, and even the unanswered questions that arise out of the film are important ones for documentary practice. This is a film that I shall strongly consider using in the course I teach on documentary film. It would be a significant and useful acquisition for collections supporting documentary studies. -- Ken Nolley Professor of English Willamette University Salem, OR 97301 Phone: 503-370-6280 Fax: 503-370-6944