Field Report #1

This past Saturday, I was able to attend the screening of Charles Burnett’s film, “Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation”. Since we watched another one of Charles Burnett’s films on Monday in class, (“Killer of Sheep”), it offered me a new way to view the film and take into account previous recollections of scenes and styles from the previous film. First, I will just give a brief summary of the screening.

Burnett’s film “Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation” follows the story of Samuel Nujoma, Namibia’s first President. The movie follows him from when he is a teenager all the way up to his formation of the political movement, SWAPO, which in turn “Liberated” Namibia. Through watching this film I found many similarities in style of the two films.

Overall, this film had a much more modern day Hollywood feel to it, obviously because of it’s more recent production, but still carried over that same style of timing of Burnett’s. In “Namibia”, I found that many of the sequences of shots seemed to draw out a little longer than normal with more varied framing of shots just to convey more detail in what was happening in the scene. This reminded me of the scene in “Killer of Sheep” with the men carrying the motor down the stairs and out to the truck. Most of the scene could have been cut out but Burnett seems to do this to illustrate the rigor and strain going on in the scene.

Also upon seeing this film I had this weird perception of the film as if it were nothing more than a Hollywood narrative style version of the “Baghdad in No Particular Order” Video and website that we interacted with, except instead of Baghdad it’s Namibia. I think that something like a narrative film could actually be a third tier or level of something like the “Baghdad” duo.