Current Forum: Session 1: Images and Representation	Read 12 times 	
Date: 15-Jan-2001 07:15:31	
Author: SIMMONS, DAVID C. <dcs7316@garnet.acns.fsu.edu>	
Subject: A Way of Seeing 	
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       Several interesting comments have been made so far about stereotypes. In this post, I 
intend to discuss how stereotypes are linked with visual culture, particularly the 20th-Century art form of film. I will use Battle at Elderbush Gulch as my primary example.
       Lippmann explains, “For the most part, we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by culture.”  We can see how this works in Battle at Elderbush Gulch (Griffith, 1913). Not only in CONTENT do we see the Native Americans portrayed as “the bad guys” but also in FORM. The content lets us know that they are savages (they eat dog, after all, while our friends, the white settlers embrace the dog as one of the family.) The form performs a similar maneuver by positioning the spectator in a space that more clearly approximates that of the white settlers. We see close-ups of the settlers, which involve us in their intimate family moments. The Native Americans, on the other hand, are more likely to be seen in long shots, which provide a distancing space (as Timothy Mitchell, in his article “Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order” explains, sets up two spaces: the one who watches and the one who is watched.) We also have a POV shot from a member of the white family, while shots from the Native Americans are, without exception, objective (no POV shots to let us see what they would see.) Thus, content and form (if the two can even be separated–Bordwell thinks they can’t) redundantly reinforce the dominant culture’s ideology of race, including several of its stereotypes.
       Once this “otherness” is coded not just in storylines (which are easy to pick out and reject) but in the very way we see the film (which, often, is not as easily discerned), there soon emerges a way of seeing ingrained in spectators, which crosses over from film watching to the way we see the world. Again, as Lippmann has written: “we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by culture.” Thus, film not only reflects the dominant ideology, but it also generates it, including the very act of seeing, itself.