3rd and (almost) Final Cut

Last sunday I finished the last major rough cut of El Trompo, it is posted on vimeo:

http://vimeo.com/9503078

or below:

3rd Cut El Trompo Best Quality from Helyx Chase on Vimeo.

the password is the same as the last two times and if you don't know it just email me (hhconnects@gmail.com) or Facebook me and I will let you know.

Also as far as the rest of the project is concerned I am posting the rough version of the timeline below:





As you can probably guess production has been pushed back a little farther than I originally intended. However, I promise it will be worth it!

Translations

Since the beginning TTP has presented me with a language barrier. My Spanish is conversational at best but I tend to understand a lot more than I can speak. In some sense I started preparing to travel to Nicaragua in January of 2009 when I traveled to Guatemala to take a 2-week Spanish intensive. Before I went buildOn requested that while I was in Nicaragua I hire a translator to accompany me so that I would not monopolize the program translators. My plan had been to only use buildOn’s translators for straight on interviews but I agreed to hire the translator despite the strain it put on my budget. On my first day in Nicaragua I met Javiera, we lived together for 2 weeks with our host family, slept in the same bed and were together for almost 24 hours a day. We grew quite close and I found her to be valuable in many more ways than I anticipated entering this project.
While in Nicaragua Javiera would joke that I didn’t even need her. I could generally understand what people told me during interviews and in my own conversations. However, having a translator I discovered became of great benefit to me when it came to speaking and translating my ideas into something that the people in the community could understand. While I can speak some Spanish, my grammar is rather awful and there are dialectic nuances within Nicaraguan Spanish that I do not know. Javiera was able to help me navigate that space.
When I returned to the States to edit the documentary I used only the recordings of translations on the tape and relied mostly on my own Spanish to edit down interviews, etc. I made an agreement with a friend who agreed to write up subtitles for me which has given me concrete translations from a Spanish speaker.
However, as I edit the piece I often find that the in-country translators tended to simplify the words of the community members. I listen to the community members speak and find power in the words and phrases they choose to repeat and the way that they repeat them, however, when our translators repeated the sentiments in English for the team they tended to leave out those repetitions and miss the intonations of the speakers. Additionally, while conducting interviews with my translator I found that she would often not translate sentences when she thought that they were not responding to the question in the way that I wanted them to.
As I move into final cuts I am left with one problem. How do I translate? My intention from the beginning is that the entire piece should be bi-lingual. There is no need in my mind to have a Spanish version and an English version. Additionally, the community in which I shot the documentary has many residents who are illiterate. My preference is that the entire piece should have spoken translations for all of the English and preferably the Spanish as well, because it is certainly unfair to assume literacy in the US as well. The piece I feel should be accessible to as many people as possible, when education and literacy present such a huge barrier to understanding “academic” concepts I do not want to continue this problem of academic/educational elitism.
And yet as I struggle to complete the piece I run into the technicalities of using that many double translations. To have everything spoken in both languages could potentially almost double the length of the piece, and I fear that it will not be able to sustain the increased length. Writing this reminds me why I want to, and need to continue to translate and make the piece accessible, and yet how do I make this all work?

TTP Summary

Thoughts on Aide Tourism

many well intentioned westerners enter the community thinking that they have all the answers. This community is strong, it existed before we came and it will continue to exist after we leave.

why must we always transplant our ideas on others, disregarding the answers they came up with themselves.

we live in a country with the largest wealth gap of any developed nation. Many of our children may graduate high school, but how many still cannot read? How many come out not knowing how to learn but only knowing how to perpetuate the machine.

everyday organizations from the US travel abroad and continue to support the colonialism the government. We have been brainwashed to see others as helpless, to see our privilege as the savior and to see our systems as superior, but are they really?

I create this project to tell a story. A story that can be compared to the millions of other similar stories, but also one that is completely rooted in the unique history of one specific community. This story is, I hope, a piece that pays dignity and respect to it's subjects in a way that continually challenges and pushes my reality. I am not a voice of authority or vast knowledge. I speak as an observer, an outsider. There is no quick fix to the problems that I present. However, my hope is that with more awareness we can re-think the way we see ourselves, and within that, how we see others.

Home Stretch = January

to do list for january:

FINISH The Trek Project

this means completing the editing of El Trompo
creating the map/timeline of Latin America
compiling the maps from the mapping workshops
finishing a documentation notebook of the entire project from October 2008 - January 2010


There is a second rough cut of El Trompo on vimeo-
http://vimeo.com/8583078

the password is the same as last time, if you want it email me at hhconnects@gmail.com

ALSO I am proud to present the *almost* final trailer for El Trompo,
check it out:

What does a Colonizer Look Like?

There are 4 elements at play in the definition of a country as a colonial power over another:

(1) the economic: appropriation of land, exploitation of labor, and control of finance; (2) the political: control of authority;
(3) the civic: control of gender and sexuality;
(4) the epistemic and the subjective personal: control of knowledge and subjectivity.

With regards to the US and Latin America the United States has some hand, if not a full fist, in all of these areas. I have started reading the book The Colonizer and the Colonized by Albert Memmi. The first section of the book attempts to define and depict the colonizer.

"Today, leaving for a colony is not a choice sought because of its uncertain dangers, nor is it a desire of one tempted by adventure. It is simply a voyage towards an easier life." Memmi goes on to describe the colonizer as one who leaves their country not simply for adventure, because if that was the case why would they not go somewhere among their own country men? "Our traveler will come up with the best possible definition of a colony: a place where one earns more and spends less". As he goes on it descibes the difficulty for a colonizer to leave the colony. After a few years returning to the "slow progress" of home, and more expensive lifestyle is no longer appealing. Additionally the colonizer has laid roots in their new home, and lost roots in their old one. Why should the colonizer then leave the colony, especially when their privilege makes life in the colony easier then it would have been in the home country.

This perspective on the colonizer brings me back to the expatriate community that I saw when I was in Guatemala last January. For the most part the people I met were white US citizens who for one reason or another (primarily political) had decided to leave the United States. While I understand the desire to leave the United States out of frustration, I also feel the need to stay out of loyalty and obligation to my people. One of the fellow students at the Spanish school where I was taking classes mentioned to me that all the expatriates there seemed to be lost. To me the idea of leaving the US in political protest seems to be in vein. First off, no change can come from a few individuals, that were likely to radical for the government anyway, leaving. Secondly, their efforts to escape the US government may as well be void because they have moved to a place that is, in many crucial ways, a colony of the US, or at the very least a place that the US holds colonial power over.

In his book, Memmi describes 3 types of individuals in the colonizer/colonized relationship. They are the colonial, the colonizer and the colonist. The colonial is described as a European (or for our purposes one from the United States) living in the colony but having none of the privileges of their position. "a colonial is a benevolent European who does not have the colonizers attitude towards the colonized", in the next sentance Memmi goes on to say "a colonial so defined does not exist, for all Europeans in the colonies are privileged".

What I am attempting to begin to examine here is what is the role and power that one posses in moving to an expatriate community in Latin America. How can one move in an effort to escape the imperialistic policies of the US while simultaneously re-enforcing that colonialism.