On communal trauma

I don't know how many people who will read this might be aware of my educational and research history, so I'm going to give a little bit of background before I start. I did an undergraduate degree in Film Studies and a master degree in Filmmaking. In both my degrees, one of the main points of focus for me has been a struggle between what is depicted on screen and reality, especially when it comes to depictions of a person's inner life. One of the points that has always set me apart from my fellow students is that I was just a few years older than most of them. This meant that while a lot of our cultural memories were the same or similar (at least, when it came to international events), there were large events in the world that impacted me deeper or differently than my classmates because I can more clearly remember them. One of these events is 9/11. This event indirectly has led me to a lot of what became my main research topic in my university dissertations, namely the depiction of trauma in (animated) film. As such, I would like to explore the idea of communal trauma in this weird time of mass illness and uncertainty.

Ideas around communal trauma are not often discussed in how we think about the world. While there are definitely part of history that are by definition traumatic and that effect a lot of people, such as wars and natural disasters, these are usually seen as things that happen to other people (especially in the western world). The Second World War was traumatic for the soldiers, for the people being prosecuted, for the grieving. But, it is not seen by our contemporary society as a trauma that is communal. The horror of the experience does not seem to translate into the idea that everyone alive has been touched by the disaster and has thus been traumatised to a larger or smaller degree. (At this point I think I should make it clear that communal trauma is not something that 'brings people together' by default. Devisions will remain, differences in ideals will not be eradicated simply because of a shared trauma.) The idea of how to handle trauma will not be applied to a whole society. There is no group therapy session for a community hit by a disaster.

Part of my research into trauma also went into the interplay between personal and public mourning. This of course is a very interesting topic in its own right, but there is a strong link to trauma that needs to be discussed. One of the main parts of research within the UK on this topic is related to the death of Princess Diana. This is both a public trauma and a personal one. Public for the whole of the UK, personal for her friends and family. The show of public mourning that happened after her death can be seen as a public display of communal trauma, and there has been no therapy for anyone who was a part of that communal display. The private trauma of her friends and especially her (royal) family was on public display for the world to see. This lack of privacy has led me to the question about trauma and grief that has kept me most preoccupied of all. Who has 'ownership' over trauma? Who is allowed to tell the story of a trauma?

The idea of ownership of a the story of someone's life comes into play here as well. This is something I consider a lot because no trauma happens in a vacuum. Everyone has other humans (or animals) they are connected to. If someone's trauma is connected to another person (which it almost always is), how much right does the other person have to stop you from telling the story? Or does the person who is traumatised have full ownership of that story and are they allowed to use it in any way that helps them? (Basically, if you have lost a family member in a traumatic way, how much of that can be a public story you tell if other family members of that person are also still alive?) I don't think there is a clear answer to all of these questions. If one was to look at ethics and moral philosophy you could possibly find some sort of answer which will be contradicted by another theory. Maybe, if western society had a more open way of talking about trauma and grief, this would be less of an issue. I want to talk about the effects of trauma on people, but every time I bring it up (especially when stating I want to do a PhD in it), people get worried about me. 

And now we are living through a pandemic with more people dying than most communities can imagine. But most of us just see the numbers without realising that attached to every one of those numbers is at least 1 and often many more people who will have to grieve and carry that trauma with them for years to come. We are now a society where trauma has become more widespread than ever. And we are still not talking about it.

On seeing myself on screen

Iris in the mountains as seen from behind during a vacation in France in 2011

Over the past month I have seen myself on screen more than I have in recent memory. This has everything to do with re-starting my #TinyAdventures journey by video blogging my day, but also because I am currently (finally) editing old family footage that I've been carrying with me for the better part of 4 years. The whole working from home video conferencing thing is also still happening. The old saying about the camera adding 10 pounds seems to be holding true. I am seeing myself from a different perspective and sometimes it makes me think that I need to lose weight to look good on screen. Of course, my goal has never been to be on screen, but rather behind it creating new things. However, as I don't really have access to anyone else at the moment (and I tend to feel awkward asking people to act), I am a character in my own work more than ever. Anyway, the thing I have been thinking about so much is the whole 'looking big' on screen. It is so easy to become self-critical when seeing yourself moving and walking and talking on screen. It is so easy to find all your flaws. But, to me it led to a contemplation of both optics (as in, camera lenses) and just generally the type of people who have made it their job to be on screen.

Equipment

A lot of how people look on screen can be brought back to the equipment they use. And with that I basically mean everything apart from the camera itself. It's the lenses and the lights that make you look good. This is why taking a good selfie on your phone is partly an art form in and of itself. Very few people will use external lenses when taking a selfie. More use external lighting, but that is also rare. And even the light you use needs to be right. Most fluorescent lighting has a tendency to flicker at a frequency that can be picked up by a camera (depending on a frame rate). LED or just old fashioned tungsten lighting doesn't have that issue, but can be more difficult to work with (tungsten especially) due to the space it takes up. The direction of the light influences how you look too. If you're only lit from above or from the side, sharp shadows will form. The lighting in a normal house is not designed to make you look good, it designed so you are able to do things without bumping into anything. The same can be said about camera lenses to a certain extend. The lens on your phone (unless you've got one of those multiple lenses in the back affairs) is there to capture things as they are. However, 'as they are' is effected greatly be the distance of the subject from the camera (phone) in question. (As someone with bad eyesight, the shifting of visibility and the distortion that can happen depending on the distance of the lens is something I'm intimately familiar with.) Using the right lens can make all the difference in how a person looks on screen. A wide angle lens will make a person close to the camera look extremely distorted and far wider than they actually are. It's hard to find a lens that completely accurately captures what we as humans see in a moment. This is why there are so many different types of lenses available for cameras. It should also be noted that cameras usually only capture a 2D representation of a 3D object (once again, there are exceptions). It flattens  everything it captures into one layer. Only the shadow and light can add depth to the image. This is why using the right lens and the right light can make you look more 'normal' on screen. Of course, we are inundated with visual representations of humans every day that have been made using external lighting and specialist lenses, and we have started to see this as 'normal' instead of the exception. But it is the exception.

Personal Appearance

The actors, presenters and even the reality stars we see on screen look so different from real-life that it is sometimes difficult to remember that, although they are real people, they are not 'normal' people. They are people who have shaped themselves to be on screen, to be aware of the '10 pounds' rule, to look as flawless as possible. We, the 'normal' people, probably have not built our lives around any of that. I know how to look okay on screen, but I will not put in the hours of work that professional screen personalities do. I can't afford to most of the time. I can't afford a personal trainer and dietician and make-up artist and wardrobe. You probably can't either. So I look 'normal' when I'm on screen. Maybe I wear slightly nicer clothes than I would otherwise do, but for the most part I do not change myself. Even the professional YouTube personalities and Instagram influencers work on their screen presence more than you probably realise. So what I am trying to get at is that even in spaces like YouTube or Instagram or TikTok, 'normal' is subjective. Being widely accessible does not actually mean that you get to see people under normal circumstances. What is being broadcast on most video and image based channels is highly curated content created to give a specific image of a person. As someone who tries to do the same, it would be hypocritical of me to say that that is wrong. But as people keep repeating, what you see online is not the real world. The online version of me is far more organised that the version of me I am in my personal life. I am a lot better at talking to  camera than I am talking to an actual person, most of the time. I will look shorter in real-life compared to how I look in videos, simply because the videos are shot from my eye level. There is so much that I have control over when it comes to my image online that I cannot control if you see me in the real world. That is an important thing to remember. The person who appears in a photo or video that appears on their own social media channel has a huge amount of control over that image before it is released to the public. That control is partly physical appearance, partly editing and a whole load of being able to make a choice in what people see. To be able to make those choices is a powerful tool that should be wielded with skill and is often invisible to the audience. I try to be open about who I am in my presence online, but I also know that I use a certain part of my personality to appeal to people to gain a certain amount of approval which I would not seek in real-life. What you see is not completely what you get, but it is close to it.

In the End

What I am trying to get at is that seeing a 'normal' person on screen is rare and not usually actually the case. I look bigger on camera than I do in real-life. So do many other people, partly through the mechanisms of the camera itself, but partly also because of the way they present themselves in front of a camera. A screen personality is always just a part of a full person, even if you are trying to capture the true essence of who they are. Nobody can be fully understood through the screen, if anybody can be fully understood at all. 

On Surveillance and the Movies

"Obedience to authority is implicitly deemed the natural state." - Glen Greenwald (2015, p.228)

In science fiction films the threat of government surveillance looms large. On of the better known of them is probably V for Vendetta (2005), not only due to it's origin but also due to the adoption of its iconography by the hacktivist group Anonymous. However, there is a definite inconsistency in the way surveillance is portrayed and how it is actually carried out in modern times. For this we can compare documentaries like CitizenFour (2014) to movies like Equilibrium (2002) and many, many others.

The dystopian view of V for Vendetta and Equilibrium shows us how the public can be controlled through several different means. In Vendetta control is exerted through constant monitoring and oppression of any opinions against the establishment. This includes having cameras placed everywhere and a police force and politicians who work together to remain in control of the British population. In the 1980s while Vendetta was written, England had a conservative government with Tatcher as Prime Minister. Alan Moore used his fears and the political climate as an inspiration. It can be said he was warning us. In the introduction to the graphic novel for V for Vendetta (1990) he states:

"It is now 1988... The new riot police wear black visors, as do their horses, and their vans have rotating video cameras mounted on top. The government has expressed a desire to eradicate homosexuality... I'm thinking of taking my family and getting out of this country soon, sometime over the next couple of years. It's cold and it's mean-spirited and I don't like it anymore."

The similarity with the way the media is portrayed in this comic and the way it is written about in Glen Greenwald's No Place to Hide is glaring. The media, especially in America, shakes hands with politicians and corporations on a daily basis. They even have a party to celebrate, the White House Correspondents Dinner. This in itself is not bad, but the lack of any kind of opposition the main media has to these people is harmful. The point is, Greenwald argues, that the media "is only effective if journalists act adversarially to those who wield political power" (p.210). The reality of being a journalist opposed to those in power can clearly be seen in treatment of Laura Poitras, the director of CitizenFour as well as several other politically charged documentaries. As a supposed adversary to the state, she has been stopped at the American border every time she leaves or enters the country. This has been done without any clear reasons other than her making politically charged films that criticise the establishment.

All of this does not even go into the actual surveillance of regular people. In the articles written by Greenwald, as well as the interviews and revelations in CitizenFour it becomes clear that the use of the internet has intrinsically changed surveillance both due to access but also due to the quantity of data available. The internet is how we get things done, it's how we communicate and it's how we share ourselves with the world. Now there are very few movies that deal with the internet as a surveillance tool, mostly due to the sudden increase of use and the abstract way the internet works in its current form. The way surveillance is depicted in film is mostly through tracking of mobile phones or though microphones and cameras placed around the home. Movies that use this as a premises are for instance The Truman Show (1998), The Lives of Others (2006) and the Bourne franchise (2002-2016). In all of these movies the dissident, the person who goes agains the surveillance, is the hero, but as discussed earlier this is not the case within the real world.

Equilibrium adds another layer to the control exerted on the people. In it people are controlled by making the way the world is with restrictions seem normal. Within the movie, emotions have been eradicated by the government as the source of human suffering. Anyone who continues to be emotional get taken by the police and eradicated. While Greenwald talks about politics, his premiss stays true to this point: 

"There are, broadly speaking, two choices: obedience to institutional authority or radical dissent from it. The first is a sane and valid choice only if the second is crazy and illegitimate. For defenders of the status quo, mere correlation between mental illness and radical opposition to prevailing orthodoxy is insufficient. Radical dissent is evidence, even proof, of a severe personality disorder." (p.227)

Those who do not obey or follow along with the crowd are seen as 'insane' in both movies and the real world. However, in film, the person who turns out the victor is usually this 'insane' dissident of the state. V in Vendetta, Bourne in his movies and Preston in Equilibrium are all a cog in the system before rebelling and being prosecuted for their disobedience. They overthrow the system they were a part of and change the political climate through their actions. The break with those who are surveilling them allows for their power. This can also be said of those who rebel against surveillance in the real world like Snowden. By leaving the country and getting political asylum, he has gained more power (even if this was not his original intent) that he would have if he had stayed. His message became clearer with the threat to his life/freedom that he exposed by being prosecuted by the USA.

The way people deal with surveillance in cinema is radically different from how we deal with it in reality, as the type of surveillance is also not the same. The use of the internet has changed what we are willing to expose about ourselves online and thus what the government and companies have free access to. This however does not take away that films can highlight our compliance with the status quo and can have an impact on how people perceive the surveillance of their personal information. Films like V for Vendetta have inspired and allowed for a movement against the real world surveillance by highlighting it in a fictional narrative. In the same way, CitizenFour has focussed our attention on the real world consequences of speak out against the government's surveillance and what kind of impact this surveillance has on normal people. Being tracked is the norm, being a hero isn't.

(It should be stated that I am of the internet generation. I've used the internet throughout my life and thus have a different view of privacy than people from my father's generation. (In this I can also state that I've had many discussions with my father about the definition and implementation of privacy.) I'm aware that everything I post (including this blog) is public to a certain extend and that anyone with malicious intent can access all my accounts if they wanted to. This is why my point on privacy is that it is extremely limited, namely, privacy is something that you will only have inside your head. Thoughts, as long as they are not spoken, are private; nothing else is. This is not to say that I want everyone to have access to everything I do on the internet or anywhere else, but I am aware that is how the internet works.)

On Susan Sontag and how she changed my education

I've gone from reading only fiction to reading some non-fiction and being obsessed by it. In short, I've discovered Susan Sontag. For the last few weeks I've been reading her books on photography, and finding that they are actually very easy to apply to films and TV too. And as I am a student of those two mediums, I now feel like I have a better or different understanding of what the media does in the world.


Sontag mostly talks about war photography, and how making an image is a contradictory thing to do. It is both trying to attract attention to what is happening and at the same time the person trying to get our attention on it (i.e. the photographer) is not doing anything. Sometimes this is due to inability but sometimes it also has to do with the need to capture the image and that need taking precedence over the lives of others.

Now, all this being said, the only reason this is something that I've been able to apply in the first few weeks of my studies is due to the classes I'm taking. We have been asked to make several short documentaries and we have been looking at detective TV shows. As I will be making my own documentaries, I've come to realise that ethics is something I will have to think deeper about and something I will have to consider in everything I film. As for detective shows, The fact that we are privy to a murder or other crime should bring us to question our own morals and ethics, even if the crime is fictional.

The deep thoughts of Susan Sontag are still going through the world in her books, but also in the classes that are thought in Art schools. At least, just looking at the books my flatmate reads (she studies photography), Sontag is still extremely influential. However, in my course, we mostly talk about Bazin and Dryer, which means star and author theory. As much as I understand their importance, I feel like looking at what is actually on my screen might give me more. So Sontag gives me the tools to think about what I am seeing, even though the war is not real, and why I am seeing it. She talks about the reluctance of showing death when it looks like something we know, but our readiness to show it when it looks foreign. So we go back in time, or to a place we don't know or have a story that is almost impossible to create the distance we need to comfortably look at what is going on. But none of this is being said in my classes. None of this is learn from my lecturers. Instead Susan Sontag is saving me.