Nadia Gill comments on Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao, director of Nomadland, a movie about American nomads – a subculture with which Zhao was unfamiliar. First, setup:
Zhao’s success has come at a time when critics are questioning the legitimacy of filmmakers telling stories as community outsiders. Last year, the filmmaker Lulu Wang publicly criticized Ron Howard’s decision to direct a film about the Chinese pianist Lang Lang. “As a classically-trained pianist born in China, I believe it’s impossible to tell Lang Lang’s story without an intimate understanding of Chinese culture and the impact of the Cultural Revolution on artists and intellectuals and the effects of Western imperialism,” Wang tweeted. [Persuasion]
Which is understandable, especially for oppressed minorities, But Gill gets to the heart of the matter:
Zhao and her trio of films about the American West teach us that identity alone cannot predict who is able to see and share the truth. Some abilities are hidden from plain view: They are of the heart and the mind. If we wish to create a rich environment for storytelling that enhances our understanding of communities that are not our own, we would be wise to care more about the filmmaker’s character than their identity.
Being a member of a culture does not necessarily bring perception to the observation, to the story; sometimes, the cultural myths serve the interests of the elite all too well in obscuring important truths. For example, my understanding is that the Catholic hierarchy has long hosted, and shielded, pedophiles and the like; it’s not a new phenomenon. But revelations to the general Catholic public of same is relatively new, which means the myths of the holiness of the Catholic hierarchy obscured for decades or even centuries, rather than revealed, the truth of Catholic culture. A Catholic film maker from fifty or one hundred years ago might have made a film in ignorance of that very real problem.
I understand Lulu Wang’s concerns, but there can be tremendous value in the viewpoint of the outsider, who may see that which the member of the culture has been trained to not see. And I think Zhao is getting at that with this:
In an interview last year, Zhao explained her philosophy: “I find that sometimes when I go into a community that’s not my own, or a community that has a lot of issues attached to it, I have to resist wanting to say something about how I think they could be better, or how I think the government has wronged them.”
And perhaps not erasing those myths from the story is part of it.
