The Arts in New York City

        The most common medium for art and communication, in this day and age, is mass media. Media in the form of newspapers, television, and films might be considered by some elitist artists as far too commercial to be real art. However, there are some forms of media that can be artistic in nature and form. One such form is the documentary. Documentaries are artistic in the way that it tells a story, expresses the feelings and sentiments of its subjects and the filmmaker, and informs people.

Documentaries are non-fiction films that focus on a person or event through interviews and narration. The purpose of documentary is usually to inform people. Last week in my anthropology class, I watched a documentary called “Living Broke in Boom Times: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty”. This film is actually three separate documentaries condensed into one for educational uses. The documentary basically covers the movement of the American poor in an attempt to end poverty. It follows a group of activists (Willie Baptist, Cherie Honkala, Liz Theoharis, and many others) through a ten-year journey (1989 – 1999) of attempting to gain rights for the poor people of America.
The documentary tells the stories of regular people who become homeless due to one circumstance or another. There is a prevailing American notion that if you cannot succeed in America, it is your own fault, you must have done something wrong, you did not work hard enough, and you do not deserve help. In “Living Broke In Boom Times”, we see that these people are actually people that do have jobs but their wages are just not up to the living standards. They are getting screwed over by the system where minimum wages do not necessarily cover shelter and food and other necessities of life. We rarely hear their side of the stories because the mass media does not show it. This documentary provides an outlet for their voices to be heard.
The documentary only runs around a little more than an hour. In that hour of film, the message of the “stars” of the documentary and the filmmakers are really captured. It enlightens people who did not know about the situation before. It also appeals to the emotions of the audience when you see these interviews of people telling their tragic stories. At the same time, it can also give the audience hope when we see that some progress is being made. By telling people about the situation in an informative way and playing on their feelings, the film is a profound instrument in changing the way people think about poverty and its victims in the U.S. That is what art does. Art exist to challenge people to think in different ways and to question things. “Living Broke in Boom Times” certainly does this.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007 at 8:34 pm and is filed under Wendy Deng, WRITING ASSIGNMENTS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.