Statement of Intent
“Cinema is not only a technology, it is a social practice with conventions that profoundly shape its forms. My particular interest, of course, is that cinema has been a primary means through which race and gender are visualized as natural categories; cinema has been the site of intersection between anthropology, popular culture, and the constructions of nature and empire.”
-Fatimah Tobing Rony; Race, Cinema, and the Ethnographic Spectacle (1996)
My intention is to inquire on the intersection of media and social psychology. In reckoning with historical legacies of exclusion, it is imperative to consider the narratives and monuments that have been forged throughout history and how the present is shaped by the past. The monuments we create are a reflection on ourselves; they expose what we choose to immortalize and what we tolerate. Whenever people ask me what I miss the most from the Philippines, my home country, I think of the architecture: the haunting, and dazzlingly beautiful statues and churches left behind by colonial Spain. These buildings signify an era that while no longer present in the technical sense, still looms over the politics of my country with great presence. Though they are ghosts of the past, these structures embody in the present our understanding of our identities and the virtues and principles we preserve. I grew up with these monuments to the past in the context of my country’s history with colonialism, and I fondly remember my childhood years being fascinated by their extravagance, especially at times when I look outside my window and feel the cold and dullness of Seattle, the city I live in now, from its concrete and utilitarian structures. However, these monuments also preside over my country’s socio-political structures in a way that erases our own culture of belonging, kababayan, and bayanihan. It is when we destroy these monuments that we reject our submission to the status quo that oppresses us, and weaponize our memories of who we are and who we try to be.
This project is a study of the oppositional gaze, and how to reclaim the form of narrative as a way of resisting mainstream archival/historian practices that for so long have been removed from their subjects. It matters to the subjects of the white gaze, archival gaze, hegemonic gaze, etc. to turn the gaze back on the archive and on the practices being used to try to perceive them. bell hooks began her definition of the oppositional gaze by recounting how slaves were punished for looking at their masters, and this project explores how those masters knew that by looking, i.e perceiving, one indicates recognition, and when one uses the oppositional gaze it is a declaration that you are perceiving the subject of your gaze as an object in your reality, and the reality in which you are an oppressive slavemaster was one that the masters wished to deny, thus punishing the slave for simply looking. For the purposes of this project I will expand my research onto different forms of media and limit my reference of films to a few sources.
Art created with a consideration of identity and positionality lends to a greater understanding of the world. When different perspectives come together we gain something that is a challenge to our own tunnel vision by showing our world from different eyes. Struggle is universal, and it is the power of media and documents of our history that we experience what we would not otherwise be able to; from that we might gain a better understanding of the issues other people face so as to understand the struggles we ourselves must reckon with. Because the patrons of cinema seek a sense of reality in the image while also allowing an escape from reality, cinema is particularly relevant in appraising how reality is reconstructed in the cultural-ideological sphere and how that reconstruction then reverberates into the world.