my first question upon seeing those Friedman films was, why would anyone film this? It seems like that year would be the one that the family would most like to forget. Its just the coincidence of a brothers fascination with recording video and a family tragedy coinciding. It creates a strange experience for the viewer. Already watching a home video of another family is strange, it almost feels intrusive, since home videos are usually made for the viewing of that particular family only, and they have a very specific meaning for that family, one that would not translate for a outside viewer. Also, an outsider watching these home videos, I think, changes the nature of the films from something personal and private to public. So on top of watching a medium that was never meant for your eyes, you are seeing an incredibly intimate family moment.
Michelle Citron talks about capturing happy moments, moments that people want to remember, birthdays, weddings, christmas, and here we have arguments, crying, agony. This provides a more intimate view of The Friedmans than if an outsider was filming them, or they were filmed with the intention of making them public. But since these home videos were films of family, by family, for their viewing we get a more intimate and open view of the family than we would otherwise.
The film really touched me, and I have to say i got a little emotional. When the more typical, innocent home movies were shown at the beginning of the film, they were incredibly similar to super 8 films of my own family. The Friedmans were a middle class Jewish family starting up during the 50s, and the father was a performer in The Catskills, playing in all the bungalow colonies and hotels in the area. My mothers jewish parents grew up in New York City, moving to Yonkers when they were first married, and then to Ellenville in the Catskills during the 50s. My mother was best friends with a girl who's father was a popular comedian in the area and she had different friends in the winter and in the summer due to the families who would stay in the bungalow colonies every summer. So seeing these family films that look so similar to my old family films, of a family with a similar background to my family, I felt like we could be related, or old family friends, or acquaintances that we would see at all the Bar Mitzvahs.
This is the trick of home films. All home films capture the same events, the same family antics, and so they all seem so RELATABLE. And that is why the later home films had such a strong effect, you already feel connected to the family and because of that, watching the family be torn apart in such a brutal way just feels like a punch in the gut.
3 comments:
I will build off Syd's opening paragraph because like her I also find the basic facts that these films were made and that the Friedmans themselves made them to be fascinating. I hadnt realized this fascination untill Syd brought it to the surface and I am glad for that.
Why did the Friedmans make these films during such a difficult time? I can think of a few possibilities.
1)The films may have provided for the Friedmans a way to prove their innocence for future generations, or to provide for some more evidence to judge them on.
2)Oppositley the films may have been made for strictly selfish reasons, functioning as a form of group therapy where the camera acted as the objective point of view.
In both these instances (and I believe there may me many more) the camera serves as a tool to be incorporated and fitted to the situation, as an aide. If looked at in this way I feel the Friedman's actions of filming can be seen in relation to many topics we have discussed in this class. They are their own ethnographers, creating athropological film artifacts to preserve their experiences for study. I find this a very interesting perspective, one that puts the Friedmans in a position deserving a certain amount of respect. They recorded their most painful experiences and rather than keeping them for themselves they let the world see them.
However,these thoughts serve only as possibilities. I feel a reference to another blog posting deserves to be stated here to further explain this statement. In that blog to which I am referring the person who posted it brought into view Michelle Citron's ideas on the ability of film to capture memory and the relative position to memory that film fills. Her opinion on this was that it cannot, at least not fully. The film may achieve the objective to a certain point, but it fails to accurateley portray the subjective. This point relates in that if anyone could know what motivated the Friedmans at this time it would be the Friedmans and I think it may be possible that they might not even know. But to wonder at it is a good thing and I hope this comment did that.
I have one memory that I'll never forget. There was a family that I grew up with, our parents were best friends so we were best friends. One day we were going through old video tapes that we had made and we were watching tapes of old parties and all the fun we used to have, swimming in the pool while our parents danced on the patio...that sort of thing. Well the next tape that we put in was the morning of one of the kids birthdays, and all the brothers and sisters (4) and their mom were downstairs opening presents and being really excited. Suddenly from the upstairs balcony overlooking the room they were in you hear their dad scream at them to be quiet, that he has a migraine and he's trying to sleep. My friends and I just looked at each other and turned off the tape. It was so sad, because not only did it show us what a crappy thing their dad did, but it brought up those awful memories that no one really wanted to think about again.
This is a lot like the Friedmans. They captured both the good times and the bad, but as to why I have no idea. As someone whose gone back and seen those bad times, they're not really memories that you want to bring up again.
I think the main thing that we have to think about when questioning why someone would film only the good times or film both the good and the bad, we have to ask ourselves if anyone else other then the family was really meant to see this? In Citrons article she talks about how people make home videos to show their innocence to the world. But, at least in my family and the ones I am close to, home videos are made for your families eyes only. Really why would anyone else want to watch them? They pertain to memories that only you recollect and that would probably only be entertaining to you. In the case of the Friedmans, had the docuementary filmmaker not approached them with the idea of making the film, the sons home movies would probably never have been released publicly and would have simply remained family archives, where they probably should have stayed.
Michelle Citron's text and "Capturing the Friedmans" are contradictory in the way that the home movies depict each other. Citron writes that only the good is shown in home movies and the dark, bad times are not filmed at all. In "Capturing the Friedmans", the movie opens with happy family movies, yet as the film progresses and the family has a catastrophic event, the home movies start to show real family discussions, full of accusations and blame. In Citron's life, she had a catastrophic event, her continuous incestuous molestation by her grandfather, yet her family movies never change; her movies are still happy and superficial. The Friedmans try to keep making the home movies goofy and superficial,they try to make the situation light and funny at times but they fail to cover up their sadness and aggression in the end.
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