Blog post #3: Stranger?

The documentary Stranger with a Camera struck me as a very unique telling of a story that is often misconstrued or exploited based on who is telling it. Documentarian Elizabeth Barret tackled a moral dilemma of documentary from the perspective of someone who has been misrepresented by documentaries herself. I was intrigued by the way that she approached the retelling of the moments leading up to Hugh O’Connor’s murder. What strikes me about this moment is the amount of media and information used to demonstrate what happened without telling the viewer what to think. At about 35:00, we start to see interviews from local people who knew Hobart Ison (O’Connor’s killer). We hear accounts from nearby women, the coal miner who O’Connor wanted to photograph, and members of O’Connor’s crew who were there. Throughout the audio interviews, we also see photos and videos of Appalachia, some taken by O’Connor’s crew, which do not demonstrate the people of the area with the same hostile and exploitative lens as before. This is done carefully to avoid perpetuating the very stereotypes that caused the tragedy. Throughout the film, Barret is dealing with the tension of documenting Appalachia (as a member of the community) and its misrepresentation, without misrepresenting it herself. She approaches this similarly to how I think Coles would based on his recollection around page 80 of his book Doing Documentary Work (1997). He recalls a time in which he was speaking to a woman who had experienced the exploitation of documentary work many times already. She tells him about how they come into the process of documenting with preconceived truths and biases which impact how they represent the people. Obviously this results in misrepresentation. Here, Coles struggles with the balance between sticking to his line of questioning (which is based on preconceived notions) and just listening and watching the people he is trying to represent (Coles 81). Barret’s self scrutiny presents in evaluating her own position as both an insider (a member of the Appalachian community) and an outsider (someone who grew up in a county seat town, and a filmmaker). She creates this careful balance that allows for a story to be told, while using the information she gains to inform how she does her work. Within the documentary, she tells us about her experiences as a documentarian. Because of what she has seen, she can better tell the story of a people misrepresented.