Baldwin states on page 35, “It is said that the camera cannot lie, but rarely do we allow it to do anything else. . . The language of the camera is the language of our dreams.” What do you think he means?
I marked this passage too - the omitted part says “the camera sees what you point it at: the camera sees what you want it to see.” When two people experience exactly the same thing, they perceive it very differently, through their lens and persective. We cannot say “that did not happen”; we can only say “that is not what I saw”. And our lens/perspective is a sum of what life has shown us up to that point - on any given day, we might have the state of mind to aim the camera slightly differently but rarely do we aim it at something that does not affirm what we have chosen to “see”. This is why I enjoyed this book - the camera angle captured something I have not seen before and it was valuable to view from Baldwin’s perspective.
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I’ll one other thought to the points you so eloquently made which is that even our mood or open mindedness when viewing a movie can alter our perspective.
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It seems Baldwin is referring to the plays and movies he discussed that misrepresented all Americans, but particularly Black Americans. Scripts have been interpreted in such a way to feed into the white view of life, disregarding the age-old trauma of African Americans.
We can convey any viewpoint, message or information on how at a precise moment in a photo. With film we can tell any story. And we rarely ask ourselves is there another viewpoint, message, or story or what is portrayed is accurate, true. We tend to assume what we see and/or hear must be accurate. So when a Black person is betrayed a certain way on film, we assume that must be an accurate representation of a black person as if that is the only way the person is betrayed in most photos or films by a stereotype, e.g., a porter, happy (especially as a second class or marginalized person), or uneducated. But a white person can be rich, educated, talented.
I think Baldwin means that we see what we want to see. We record the history we want to record as we want it recorded. No one perceives the same picture, phrase, or event exactly the same; we either idealize what we want, or we twist the facts to fit our own narrative. Humans are inherently flawed.
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Molly’s point is spot on as to what’s happening now in the attempt to rewrite some of our history especially as it relates to non-White people.
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I loved that passage…to me, it means that the movies he spoke of told a glossed over, romanticized story.
The camera sees what people are willing to show. Nowadays, people take selfies with filters and angles to put everything in its “best light”. People use social media to show the glossy and polished version of themselves and their lives. The camera often shows the truth, but rarely the “whole truth”.