Years ago I remember riding down a Brooklyn street in a truck next to a fellow crew member.  We’d just wrapped on a film and were driving back to the rental house to return gear.  Usually there are lots of laugh-out-loud stories to tell, sometimes with a bit of pain involved, as you make light of recent history and all the things that went wrong.  Having worked pretty long hours on the job, I felt ready to blow off steam with a few of the traditional painful-but-funny stories, but nothing came to mind.  Then I realized the tragic truth…everything had gone so smoothly there was nothing to joke about! No nightmares, no moments of pure panic, no spectacular screw-ups or heroic last minute saves – just solid planning and execution.

Coming back from Haiti had a similar feeling.  We had put in a solid prep on this and not too much took us by surprise.  But that doesn’t make a good story in the telling. So let me tell you a story about Shuma, one of our drivers, because it might suggest something about the differences between Haiti and the USA.

In New York, you can observe people flying into a rage for something as simple as getting stuck behind a slowly ambling sightseer, a car that hesitates at a stoplight, or a closed street.  Things aren’t supposed to go wrong.

In some parts of the world like Haiti, India or Indonesia, you can’t leave your house with the expectation that things will go according to plan.  If you do, you’ll soon go mad because there will not always be the same degree of control and resources, and you have to be prepared to improvise.

One day our excellent driver Shuma was driving a few of us on a highway north of Port au Prince in a not-too-well maintained rental car.  I noticed a bit of odd motion to the vehicle, but wasn’t able to put my finger on what it was.  It slowly grew, but I still couldn’t identify what it was.  After some time I noticed that although the car was going more or less straight, Shuma was rotating the steering wheel left and right to compensate for something.  I tried to communicate with him to figure out what the problem was, but even though he was clearly having to put no small amount of concentration into the job, he appeared singularly unconcerned.  Deciding to trust his instincts, I left him alone for a few minutes before noticing he was rotating the steering wheel a full 180 degrees between left and right, and was only barely able to keep from lurching into oncoming traffic.  I insisted he pull over and we immediately saw the problem – one tire was dangerously low and the lug nuts had come loose.

I couldn’t help but wonder if he was so accustomed to dealing with less than ideal circumstances that rather than highlight a problem, he was more inclined to soldier on and make the best of things no matter how out of whack they were.  Although I consider his approach to the problem a real failure of judgement, I was in a measure of awe at his calm and competence. Somebody you want at your side when the manure hits the fan. (Despite my admiration, at the end of it all I begged him that the next time he had a problem, “PLEASE TELL US.”)

I think Haiti gets a bad rap in the USA from certain parties that see Haiti in a paternalistic fashion, a place that can’t get its own affairs in order and consciously relies on the outside world to bail it out.  In my experience, Haitians are not the kind of people to sit around waiting for other people to come to the rescue.  Everywhere people were working together, self-organizing to do what they could to raise each other up – similar to the feeling in NYC after 9/11.  They are proud, in one sense, to have emerged from a society of slaves since – as they are fond of pointing out – only the strongest men and women were kidnapped from Africa. 

As a cameraman, each time I arrive in a new country, I watch people very closely.  How do they feel about cameras being pointed in their direction?   This has huge implications for what you will be able to accomplish as a filmmaker.  Many factors play into this, including culture, beliefs, trust, their perception of you, and other dynamics.  But broadly speaking, different countries do appear to have their own unique baseline attitudes.

For example, on the one end you have a place like the USA which is, relatively speaking, quite distrustful of cameras, and it can become difficult to find people willing to appear on camera.  On the other extreme are places like India and South Africa where the problem often becomes how to keep people OUT of the frame because they love to participate in movies.

This guy decided to have a little joke on us by “filming” us in return with a water purification device and a set of walkman headphones.

I spoke to a local about their attitudes and was told that they tend to be a bit suspicious of crews because they have seen themselves so often portrayed in a negative light, and I think there’s truth to that.  However, many more people welcomed us, and I think they sensed that we were able to give them a voice by documenting their struggle, and this made our jobs much easier.

As DP/cinematographer I tried extra hard to capture the story in a way that not only brought out the truth in as honest a light as possible, but also connect with people’s dignity and humanity.  I felt this imperative especially strongly on this project.  This is out of a concern that news coverage, in it its collective attempts to find stories with maximum emotional impact, carries a sort of meta-message of Haitians as permanent victims – a perception that I fear assists people in their impulse to turn away. “It’s bad in Haiti, always was and always will be – let’s change the channel.” 

Partly to counter this, I felt motivated to reveal how invested Haitians are in their own struggles to recover and rebuild.  I also looked for ways to show beauty and inspiration in Haiti – not to sugar coat the struggle, but rather to balance out popular perceptions and connect with viewers on a level that encouraged empathy and respect.
–
Brian Wengrofsky
January, 2011

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