[Reader-list] film on sonagachi wins oscar

[Danny Butt]

Greetings all,

I certainly wouldn't suggest that only 'authentic' subjects are allowed to
represent themselves. A film's "success" or "quality" relies on the
time-honoured practices of turning conflict and oppression in human lives
into narrative (the film is after all called "Born into Brothels" and not
e.g. " Sonagachi", so its a title which  deliberately plays on a set of
moral assumptions about choice and sex work that operate outside the setting
of the film).   Surely it is important to critically question the role that
media might play in displacing or reinforcing spectacular logics between
Hollywood and third world environments, and what the real possibilities are
for people connected to both environments to achieve social justice.

I think the separation of the "quality" of the film from such questions is
a dangerous move. That is not to say that the aesthetic should be reduced to
the sociopolitical, but neither is it separate, in that the "new
provocations" a filmmaker might discover are not uniform in their effects
across all parts of the network that has been drawn upon to create the film.

Thanks and regards,

Danny

On 3/3/05 7:01 PM, "Aarti" <aarti at sarai.net> wrote:

> And I would certianly be very
> uncomfortable with a position that said only 'authentic' subjects are
> allowed to represent themselves. You can make a film about what you damn
> well please. Whether it is a good or bad film (both in style and in
> content etc) is a totally different question. How you make the film is
> again a different question.
> 
> Secondly, there seems to some issue about the film 'not making their
> lives better'. or it 'only changing the director's life'. I'm not sure
> why this is problem. Why should it make anyone's life better?
> And if in 
> the process of making this film, the filmmaker discovered new
> provocations, why is this process of discovery in any way questionable?

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[ Lilith] laughed bitterly. "I suppose I could think of this as fieldwork -
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