A Comparative Analysis

Comparing Australian and American films is both easy, because there are so many American films known and available to choose from, and difficult because Australian films are not widely circulated, promoted or advertised outside of Australia. Through my recent explorations into the realm of Australian film, I have discovered a few gems that stand up against many American knockouts and are able to hold there own in the Hollywood climate. Australian experiences, while taking place on a separate continent, are no different in emotional strength than many American experiences. Films tap into these emotions and are able to connect to audiences regardless of their nationality. In the case of this comparative analysis I am going to collate the likeness of experience, emotion, and familial dynamics in two coming-of-age films from the United States and Australia.

Black Balloon (2008) and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993) are both films that explore the difficult subject of autism and the ways it affects family lifestyles, emotions, responsibilities, and development. Both Black Balloon and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape use teenage boys dealing with an autistic sibling as protagonists to drive the evolution of learnt lessons and accepted love. The boys are faced with adversity that they have been familiar with since they were born or their brothers were born, but find themselves dealing with it very differently when their attitudes and desires start to change as teenagers and they are dealt much more familial responsibility as a result of it. The films are incredibly similar in that the drama is ignited by the autistic brothers’ unpredictable and often unmanageable actions, outbursts, and curiosities. Charlie, in Black Balloon, and Arnie, in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, have multiple moments throughout the film that stimulate commotion and chaos that not only affect and disrupt the families and communities within the film, but impact and challenge the audience as well. While these tense moments create anxiety and stress, they are also, in many cases, the reason the plot evolves, develops, and spawns opportunities for new relationships and personal reflection. The ways in which the characters deal with these events showcase a continuous learning process through humility, compassion, tolerance and forgiveness.

A point of interest in both the films is the overwhelming sense and power of female agency in both the stories. Becky, the teenage girl in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, and Jackie in Black Balloon, both convey assured acceptance of the teenage boys and their autistic brothers. They are compassionate and free-loving without judgment or criticism. They provide support and emotional outlets to the boys who, at various points in both the respective films, are on the verge of lashing out because of the injustices of their situations and their desires to lead “normal lives”. The girls are genuine and sources of strength and wisdom in both the stories providing security and praise to the boys who are in desperate need of it. The mothers in both the films are also very dynamic characters. Both women, despite their own struggles and vices, represent the core of the families; central to the reasons things are looked after and people are loved.

The concept of the “dysfunctional” family is explored in both the films as well. Their own circumstances as well as the pressures and judgments of the communities they find themselves within challenge both families. The tagline for Black Balloon is “Normality is relative”, which could work easily for What’s Eating Gilbert Grape as well. Gilbert Grape’s family is quite a bit more dysfunctional with his obese mother who will not leave or look after the house, his stubborn siblings, and the loss of his father to suicide, however, there is normalcy in the way the family is growing and learning and loving each other. All the things they feel and convey to the audience are integral to the narrative and also to the process of growing up and accepting yourself and the ones you love. Autism, in this sense, is just a complexity of both the stories that adds detail and depth to family expectation rather than an excuse for character development and coming-of-age.

While representing two separate countries and cultures, the films to not necessarily promote or showcase blatant American or Australian traits. Without the accents, the stories could be internationally interchangeable. Focused more on family values and the trials of growing up, the films use universal themes to get their messages across instead of elements of specific national identity. This said, there are certain landscape and lifestyle traits that do act as national subjects, representing each respective country and providing opportunity for the national audiences to make deeper connections.

Black Balloon was criticized for using stereotypes of the ocker father and the tireless mother and was said to have “darkened sooner than you would expect for an Aussie drama” which made some audiences uncomfortable watching the film. The landscape is representative of Australian suburbia and mirrors modern “western” style family landscapes in most ways. Comfort and freedom is sought by venturing into the bush away from civilization, and the ideologies behind Australian spirit and tenacity provide an emotionally and narratively strong and positive ending.

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape is set in a small American town, which is associated with typical American fried food, motor-homes, and the free landscape. Again, the characters drive or run out into the country and the open space to get away from the stresses of their lives. The film forays into other themes of corporate takeover and the demise of family run businesses and honest independent entrepreneurship; themes that are central to American culture.

Both films deal with the concept of acceptance and societal judgments and expectations of a certain degree of order and normality. In challenging these conventions, both films bring to light the raw importance of family and love, tolerance, and compassion for those we care about which transcend the borders of national film. Both Black Balloon and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape are films that showcase emotions that the human race, no matter the nationality, can connect to. National cinemas, while influenced by culture, politics, and social systems, are integral to other national cinemas in inspiring comparative differences and sharing common and universal themes of natural human nature and emotion.

Commodifying experience: Representations of Stories that are not Ours

A Concept Analysis:

The entertainment industry functions to identify with a public through familiar sentiment and experience. While many motion pictures project fantastic storylines that are hard to relate to for common audiences, they usually establish strong universal emotions that are received and understood by the spectators. Over exaggerated and unrealistic storylines can be compensated for through themes of sentiment like love, sadness, longing, anger, etc. Phillip Noyce’s film Rabbit-Proof Fence recounts an unbelievable tale of three young, half-caste girls escaping the Moore River Native Settlement and walking some 1600km home to their families in Jigalong. Based on actual events and true life stories of 3 Indigenouns women, sensitivity is essential in the recounting of such emotional circumstances, consequences, and realities. This particular series of events is difficult to relay to, and provoke identification with, audiences who have not experienced the struggles of many native indigenous peoples. The commodification of experience is a controversial issue that questions genuine empathy, accurate representation, and the exploitation of struggle.

Empathy is a selling agent as well as a powerful method of rousing activism. When promoters of the film Rabbit-Proof Fence created a “marketing campaign that asked its audience to celebrate, deplore, feel, and reflect upon, in equal measure, the experiences of the girls,” their goal was to breed a reaction that would spark sympathy and the sensation of shared experience to give the film powerful emotional resonance. The problems with empathy and sympathy are not in their sincerity, but in the idea that these experiences, struggles, and emotions, cannot be fully understood or shared when one has only identified with them through the medium of a film. In the case of Daisy, Gracie, and Molly, their experience seems almost cheapened if, for example, a Caucasian, middle-class, North-American audience can draw emotional equality from an experience very far from anything they can even begin to comprehend. The concept of owning or associating oneself with an experience that is not entirely personal can create a dissonance between the sentiments and actions of the actors of the specific experience and the spectators consuming the experience.

The idea of ownership of experience, as described by Tony Hughes D’aeth, is ultimately reasserted throughout the entire story-building and filmmaking experience. Who has agency within the experience? Molly and Daisy who are still alive and speaking openly about their real-life struggles? Is it the filmmaker Phillip Noyce who has re-created the story through his own personal lens and gaze? Or is it the audience who decides what holds emotional importance, and what they will do with the knowledge they have gained or been reminded of? Accurate representation is dependant upon who holds agency and who is responsible in the re-creation and the event. Recreating a story, whether it is for commercial response or social movement, still involves the re-creation of an experience to sell, exhibit, and consume. Representations, identities, and raw emotion will change according to who is making this re-creation and their personal identification with the film and the cause driving it.

Film as part of the culture industry must grapple with ideas that are positive as well as negative. The most influential and striking films revolve around uncomfortable, emotional, and very difficult issues. Rabbit-Proof Fence provides the grounds for devastation and the ability of the filmmakers to create an audio and visual experience that will shake an audience whether they have any association with the real events. It is almost disturbing to think that people are profiting from a commodity which trades on traumatic memories, but maybe these are the kinds of stories that need to be told in order to make social progress and a more conscious society.

Drawing from class material, The Good Woman of Bangkok is a film by Dennis O’Rourke that exemplifies the vulnerability of the subject and the dissonance that is created between the audience and the reality of the experience. The question of ethics is obviously in question in this case, but the representation of the Thai prostitute’s life and person seems more appropriate to the idea of commodifying experience. Using the “interventionist”, “observationist” and “participatory” gaze, two terms researched by Linda Williams in her article on “The Ethics of Documentary Intervention”, this documentary is aiming to provoke emotions and reactions from those who watch and consume it. Whether or not the documentary was made to fulfill a political or problematic social agenda, it succeeds in bringing an honest and serious issue to light. The filmmaker and the camera use Aoi, the Thai prostitute, to get to the core of the issue and, in a way, exploit her emotions, opinions, undesirable lifestyle and mental state to dramaticize a problem for audiences that are very far removed from the realities of the lives of women in sex industries in lesser developed countries. The article suggests that there can be “no morally pure position” in the documentation or representation of another. Any story that is not our own could then be understood as a commodification of experience that provides a subscribed lens through which audiences are instructed to see situations, people. events, and emotions through.

Rabbit-Proof Fence and The Good Woman of Bangkok identify with their audiences through the establishment of emotional response. Audiences can relate to the depth and the drive of love and family in Rabbit-Proof Fence as well as find themselves compassionate and empathetic towards Aoi and the sacrifices she makes for her family in O’Rourke’s documentary. Providing the opportunity to make connections with the characters and events despite potential distance between our life experience and “theirs” is what connotes a strong and emotional film for most. Commodifying experience is not inherently negative as it can provoke thought and create a consciousness that may not have been there in the first place. Critical inquiry as to why events, people, and experiences are represented certain ways is crucial to a respectful and informed opinion of the implications affecting the subjects of our entertainment.

Ethics in Documentary Filmmaking

The documentary.

Who knew such a word could carry so much weight, ability to influence, and potential to be dismissed? The art of “documenting” requires conscious positioning within the story being investigated as well as an acceptance of great ethical responsibility.

Interested in the documentary stream myself, questions about proper technical and moral procedures provoke ideas that extend beyond the subjective opinions of what I could /would ever want to document. What responsibility does the filmmaker have towards the people they film? How does the filmmaker redress the unequal balance of power that exists between them and the people they collaborate with? What is the relationship between ‘fact’ and ‘truth’, between ‘actuality’ and ‘reality’, between ‘knowing’ in the sense of being informed and of ‘understanding’ in the sense of being made concerned? Representing ‘others’ and representing ‘reality’ to make a case or to suit the interests of agencies that are supporting or funding the filmmaking activities raise debates about ethical representation and film theory as a social-change medium. The process of filmmaking and the construction of a narrative based on the “real” are far more constrictive and potentially destructive when they are not fictitious.

The Good Woman From Bangkok raised a number of these ethical questions. Denis O’Rourke’s decision to play a participatory and intervening role in the documentation of a Thai prostitute’s life for the purpose of self-discovery after a failed marriage prompts many questions of power, purpose, reason, and representation. All aspects of the film could be argued to be positive in the sense that it relays a message to a very blind and ignorant audience about the objectification and financial insecurities of women in third world sex industries, but also negatively in the sense that the film itself objectifies these women and was made by participating and contributing to the system that is creating this inequality and abuse. Can one document or reveal without participating?

The questions that rise out of projects dealing with “real” people and situations requires a sensitization of the author about their role and the limitations that are sometimes inevitable as a documentary filmmaker. Grappling with such questions does not necessarily mean ever finding any answers, but remaining conscious of such complications is probably a vital process for self understanding of the people, places, and issues filmmakers want to document and make public.

Indigenous Representation

Indigenous representation in the film industry is a problem that extends beyond the parameters of Australian cinema and Australian Indigenous discourse. As a problem that has only really recently come to light in academia and popular culture, skewed representation is just starting to build support and appeal networks across nations that construct such images and identities. Among these nations, Canada and the United States of America are large contributors to films that objectify populations, promote out-dated stereotypes and discriminate statistically against indigenous participation in the making of such representations. There is a strong “culture of forgetting” that acts as a convenient amnesia with regards to settler and indigenous relations in history and a lack of recognition of indigenous identity as being Australian identity. Assimilation and the policies that justified the destruction of indigenous identity, culture and dispossession have slowly been integrated into narratives concerning and/or involving indigenous peoples, however there are still many instances of racism and discrimination through written roles, casting, and representation in feature films.

The struggle for honest and politically correct representation is not something new or innovative. In 1972 Marlon Brando’s performance as Vito Corleone in The Godfather was praised and selected as the Academy’s selection for Best Actor. Brando turned down the Oscar and boycotted the award ceremony sending instead an American Indian Rights activist to advocate the issues surrounding the depiction of American Indians by Hollywood and television. Australia and Canada have had similar lobbying groups and many academics have written on the subject, but there is still not as much critical thinking, analysis, or action working towards stronger and more positive Indigenous representation in these film industries. This weekend’s Indigenous Film Festival (MessageSticks) is exemplary of the kinds of information, images, and attitudes that need to infiltrate into more international communities to change the perceptions that have been constructed by decades of colonialism and racism.

Follow this link to watch Sacheen Littlefeather refusing to accept the Best Actor Oscar on behalf of Marlon Brando for his performance in "The Godfather" in 1973 -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QUacU0I4yU