Available Light Film Festival 2021

https://myscena.org/la-scena-musicale-team/
josephine-bacon-a-linguistic-legacy/

Rebecca bought tickets for the online “Available Light Film Festival” (February 5 to 27th) from the Yukon since she read the promise that you can “enjoy 70 films, live virtual events, concerts, artist talks, Q&As, and more.” She bought two tickets. This means we can watch the films once on her ticket and once on mine. We are having a hard time getting through all of the films just once.

We are on the viewing of our second film now. The first one we did two days ago was titled Call Me Human featuring Josephine Baçon, an Innu poet who lives in Montreal.  If  you are are interested in a one minute taste of the tone of this film click on this trailer.

One of the most amazing scenes to me is where she returns to the places she first slept in Montreal, one of them being the bathroom of a gas station where she kept warm overnight. The original gas station is gone, replace by a more modern one. She stands in the middle of a new gas station between two gas pumps and says, “One night we slept in a garage that was right on this spot. We (she and her sister) slept in the bathroom because we were looking for warmth. We had just come to Montreal and we had no place to stay.”

There was such gratitude in her voice for the warmth they found that night.

Some of Josephine Baçon’s poetry accompanied the film. I am sure that when I come across one of her books, I will pick it up and read it.

Rebecca is teaching about the Inuit film and law this semester. I am looking for films and books that I can learn from -- anything legal or social that I can find that is outside of the articles I am reading for the course. And I acknowledge there are more books sitting on the professor’s desk than I am ever going to get through. I am part way through four of those right now.

The second film was called Shiva Baby and Rebecca and I watched the trailer which said it is a comedy. We sat down last night at the big TV, Rebecca with her popcorn, me with a Coke and we viewed the film. I'm usually quiet during a film but I could hear myself saying to her after each segment, “Oh no, what is going to happen next.” The film is about a college-age student who goes to the event at the home of the deceased after a funeral where there is food and an opportunity to give condolences. There she meets her middle-aged lover and her former lesbian companion. Things can only go from bad to worse. Yes, someone's comedy but not the comedy of that girl that day.

If you are interested how Rebecca and I attend our festival, the films have to be downloaded (her job) and then they can be watched for a 72-hour period. The next two films that I have to watch have darker themes: political activists in Nigeria who runs into violence, and the second is about the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. I need to view these during the afternoon when I have more energy.

Arta

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

Inuit Film and Law - Class 2

Week One - Wednesday, January 13, 2021

In our Law and Inuit Film class, Rebeca asks us, “What is the archive of experience you bring to the class?” My mind slips away from what she is saying and though she is continuing to talk, I try to answer that question. I find myself trying to create too fulsome an answer. I think she just wants everyone in the class to use her question as a touchstone for later work in the class, so I bring myself back to the moment and pick up my pen, a pen whose present destiny is to take random notes. I like using the keyboard instead of handwriting. But I have dedicated a 3-ringed scribbler to catching bits and pieces of thoughts as I listen in class, and see if I can create a summary of the ideas instead of capturing every word she says.

Rock Garden on Back River in July 2006

In our sharing circle one of the participants notes that when she tells people she is from the North, they have no real idea of how to pin her location down on a map. 

Whoops. I don’t know her very well, but if she talks to me later in the class, I don’t want to be that person, and I decide to tune up my geography.

I am going to really look at the North, try to draw a map of that huge land mass; I feel I can learn to put some of the cities on a clean map, identify the rivers, the islands, the bays, and see if I can paint the Canadian present on the map as well as the Canadian past. 

So when I pick up a book to skim: Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family. I see a map at the front of the book and I pause and really look at the map -- I wonder if I could redraw that area with the names of the inlets if someone gave me a clean map. Back River. Thelon River. I haven’t ever taken a close look at these Canadian northern rivers before

I can see Rebecca’s face in front of me on the Mac screen -- leaning into the camera and then back, but her voice is in the background of my mind as I am thinking about how little I know about the geography of the North. She is now listing the films we will see: Nanook of the North, Atanarjuat, Kikkik, The Journals of Knut Rasmuseen, Before Tomorrow, Why White People Are Funny, Angry Inuk, and perhaps Map of the Human Heart. She is telling the class her syllabus is flexible -- the class will speed up and then slow down, depending on what we bring to the films and what we want to take away. I find myself anxious to throw myself into this material.

I can hear the class ending. She is asking the class, What is our responsibility to know the other?, and Can film help us in that journey?

Arta

Notes on Jurisprudence and the Law

Week One - Monday January 11, 2021

This semester, Rebecca is taking me to her class: Northern Jurisprudence and the Law. She has told all the participants, if they want to bring their mothers to class, go ahead.

 

I will be taking hand notes. I can't really type at the same time as I listen so I am having to trust my notes to get down the general ideas. 

She is saying that the course materials will be asking us to consider the following questions: What are the theories and practices that help with legal encounters? And with the intercultural encounters? 

Her questions will not be what is Inuit law but how do we learn about Inuit law through cinematic and legal texts? 

The class will interrogate the space of these encounters.

How do we listen to the storied encounters? 

How do we hear as others hear? 

The films we will watch are primarily texts from the south and the north about the North. 

The question I am going to keep asking myself is what are specific theories around intercultural encounter.  

I've been in another class with Rebecca that was theory-based. At the end of the day, the larger question amongst the students who were in the class was could any of us call ourselves theorists now that the lectures were finished.  Could we look someone else in eye and say “I theorize law.” The act of trying to say those four words caused a great deal of laughter among the class participants. 

In the class, I had studied texts that theorized law, but I couldn't say to others I theorize law. 

I theorize law. 

Is that what I am doing every time I interrogate a legal text? Am I theorizing when thinking about any text?

I don’t like to go into beak-out groups. Who does? All that to say, we were put in break-out groups: mix and match generated by the Zoom Goddess. Rebecca gave us questions to answer. 1) What is the farthest North you have been? What is the furthest south you've been? 2) What is your favourite film or film genre? 3) How many legal encounters have you had access to.

My answers were

)1 Hi-Level, Alberta;
2) My favourite film is often the one I am watching and can stay awake in. Presently that film is “The Two Glorias”.
3) Secwepemc, Tsuut’ina and I am going to try to flesh out this list 

Nyla, Nanook's wife
Image from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanook_of_the_North

When we were pulled back to the general session from the break-out group, Rebecca asked each group to share something they had learned during the break-out session. All of the answers made me begin to rethink my own answers, especially to question #1.

Next week we are to watch “Nanook from the North” before class, and the first 4 minutes of “Falling Down” (1993) starring Michael Douglas, which we viewed in class as well.

All the students are to write meditation on the class to Rebecca, one only she and they and see. Those meditations, they will use at the end of the class to make a summary of their experiences in the class about Northern Jurisprudence and film. That is worth 50% of their mark.

I am going to take my weekly meditations and blog them.  

No marks involved.

Arta