Private Lives, Public Spaces

Angel Juarez

Colloquium in Arts, Culture, and Media

Profs. Cherow-O’Leary and Caçoilo

Writing Assignment

Private Lives, Public Spaces

Identity is a strange notion, a way humans describe themselves by seemingly arbitrary elements put on by themselves and the outside world. Judith Howard takes a look at the different ways of how identities are created and how they relate to people in her journal, “Social Psychology of Identities”. This introspection of identities, how they are created, and how they affect those they are applied to can be used as a lens to look at an exhibition currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art. This exhibit, called “Private Lives, Public Spaces”, puts on display many home videos, never originally meant for any kind of public viewing.

Many of these videos can be looked at through these lenses that Howard introduces to look at these videos in terms of identity. Home videos, in general, are usually something just meant to be watched by the person taking the video or their family and friends. This isn’t to say home movies usually contain any particularly sensitive information that would make them “private”, it’s just the fact that they are usually made for more personal and sometimes documentation purposes. These home movies usually have no or a tiny audience and are never mass produced or published. So what happens when these kinds of videos are put in a new environment? In this exhibition, these videos now have a new and larger audience, if they ever even had any at all. This can open up discussion and interpretation of these videos and what they may mean in terms of the identity of these people. When filmed under the assumption that no one else would ever watch these videos, people would act normally, just as they are, their true selves. However, unfortunate as it may be, everyone can now be a spectator in these peoples’ lives, whether they knew about it or not.

One film I watched was called “Holland” and was taken by the Wise family in 1926. It seemed to be recorded scenes of the different places and vistas the family saw and visited while on a vacation to the country of Holland almost one hundred years ago now. One thing that struck me as interesting was the title used within the film itself. The title read “Scenes From the Land of Wooden Shoes and Windmills”, which was immediately putting an identity of sorts on the entire country of Holland. After this title followed a series of scenes of coastal towns, bridges, marinas and harbors, and other beautiful scenery shots native to the country. I did not see, however, any wooden shoes. There was one windmill I saw, but it was on screen for a few seconds only. For a country seemingly renowned by this filmmaker for its wooden shoes and windmills, they were surprisingly scarce. Was it perhaps because they felt the country was already well known for these products and they wanted to feature other highlights on their trips? Or perhaps they were just using this preconceived notion of the country to give the viewer context of what they will soon be saying. This seems to be a version of Judith Howard’s notion of interactionism. Howard writes, “The basic premise of symbolic interaction is that people attach symbolic meaning to objects, behaviors, themselves, and other people, and they develop and transmit these meanings through interaction” (Howard 371). This seems to be a prefect example of how this home movie has been affected by the national identity of the country of Holland. Perhaps this was the family’s  first trip to Holland and they only dubbed it the Land of Wooden Shoes and Windmills because of the reputation they received through interactions with other people. Maybe this family already had an established rapport of sorts with the country, and this title they gave the country was from their own experience. Either way, this notion of interactionism seems to be a very popular way of  assigning an identity to a country. This is something very common to see, like attributing sushi to Japan or vodka and mountains with Russia. There had to have been once time where these connections were made and, through interacting with others, these identities spread and cemented themselves though the collective subconscious.

Another interesting notion brought up by Howard is gender identity, which could be used to investigate two other films through this lens. These two films, “Mary Steichen Martin, W. Lon Martin, and Nell” filmed in 1927 by the Martin Family and “A Personal production” filmed in 1940 by Douglass Fairbanks, Jr. and Mary Lee Epling Fairbanks both seem to be about similar subjects; A very young girl. In the first of these two films, it showcases the family’s relationship with each other. The parents seemed very loving and they all looked happy as they played with their young daughter, flipping her through the air and helping her do handstands. In the second of these two films, however, the even younger child seems to be by herself for most of the film. What really caught my attention was a title card in the video that read: “Mummy says I must always act like a lady”. While Howard doesn’t go into the topic much in her journal since she acknowledges others’ discussions on this topic, but it is an interesting and important topic to talk about. In our society, gender is a social construct, as Howard says, that seems to be completely concrete and enforced at very young ages. From the color of young children’s clothes to the toys made for them, there’s a clear division between what boys should be like and what girls should be like. In the Fairbanks’ film, they show their daughter partaking in very feminine scenes, like wearing frilly dresses and having tea parties with her stuffed animals. However, in the Martin family’s film, it had a much different depiction of how they treated their daughter. For one, she was completely naked for a large portion of the film, she was only in a dress in the very. beginning. Furthermore, the way they were playing with her was more like playing with their child, not specifically their daughter or a girl. Flipping her through the air and helping her do handstands aren’t as explicitly feminine activities as much as tea parties are. This kind of treatment is interesting to see, as it seems to be more common for parents, even before the baby is born, to completely fixated their child’s identity on their gender, no matter how or who their child will grow up to be.

Identity is such an interesting and intimate facet in our everyday lives. Everything, from people to objects to whole countries, can have their own identity, whether made up by themselves or appointed one from the outside world. However, people usually don’t act like their true selves when they know people are watching or when they’re being recorded for something they know will have an audience. This is why home movies, usually intended to have a small audience, if any at all, is a good way to show peoples’ true nature. This, combined with Judith Howard’s journal, “Social Psychology of Identities”, can be a rather interesting and eye-opening way at seeing how we assign identities, how these identities can affect us, and how some identities can simply be engrained through society.