Inuit Film and Law - Beginning to Read Film

Week Two - Monday, January 19, 2021

I'm thinking about how much I love to read articles and watch films and go to class and listen to people talk about the thoughts they have had about all of the above. I make notes as I listened. There is a final step in this exercise that's always hard for me. And that's to distill what I've heard or seen into one or two paragraphs, even one or two pages and then put in a binder (or up on the blog), somewhere where I can find it later. That final step, going from 80% to 100% is hard for me.

This is our third class. Rebecca uses the Whiteboard function on Zoom, and invites all to write on it. I haven’t had much experience with this whiteboard. Someone in the class tell the rest of us where to find the toolbar.

Rebecca suggests 2 group exercises. The first one is just to make a list of the objects that we saw in the film. She calls that indexing -- making objects we saw are made visible: a dog kennel, an amauti, knives, moss, a qamurti (sled), people pepper the screen with answers -- .

In the second exercise, we try to establish places where we found law in the film. Some of the people in the class are very good at this. They see inter-societal law, family law, real estate, proper and land claims, squatters’ rights, freedom of movement …. 

I get stuck on ideas around pleasure and the law. 

In the film a child playing with the young fox, a toy moose carved out of hard snow, a dog sled that a child might attach to a small dog. For some reason I'm thinking a lot about the children in the film, and laws of family relationships that involve care of them.

I decided I'm going to go out to zoom and play with that toolbar until I'm good at it, since I am inhibited here by my lack of technique. I see there's a place where you can star items, put an X through them, use an eraser, change the font colour, etc. This is hard for me now. In a couple of weeks, I hope to have mastered that whiteboard, or at least be able to approach it with no fear.

Rebecca asks us to consider the word truth as we find it in law.

She suggests that a good practice is to decenter truth (that practise of find out what is “true”) and instead use practices of interpretation about how others see things.

She also suggests that the text should be used with the metaphor that they are a dinner party conversation. At the end of the dinner party, I should still like the guest but not know them fully.

It's hard for me to remember that film is text. For some reasons I valorize literature and the law as a more important study than film and the law. Intellectually, I know this is not true, but viscerally I have that feeling. Why is ink on paper a better text?

During the lecture Rebecca has reminded me not to go to film with an eye to judge it. Rather I could learn to explore my relationship to this text and practise using my experience with the film to talk it about with the shared experience of others.

Arta