Stranger with a Camera

Elizabeth Barret, in her documentary “Stranger with a Camera”, brings up the tragic 1967 death of Hugh O’Connor a Canadian filmmaker who was shot by Hobart Ison just after filming one of Ison’s tenets on his property in Jeremiah, Kentucky. This film seeks to tackle the issue of portraying both sides of conflict and has many interviews with people that were involved. Barret herself is a native of the Kentucky community in which this shooting took place, and through this documentary she tries to tackle the question of how the views of our own communities affect the image we have of outsiders and the people who live within our community. She wanted to film this documentary as an insider representing her community rather than a group looking into the situation from the outside. There was a severe poverty problem in the 1960s and this drove many filmmakers and newsgroups to focus on this poor area in Kentucky to show the contrast of the American Dream to the actual reality to the situation. However, not everyone in the community liked this media attention. They felt that it was giving an inaccurate image of Kentucky. One women in the documentary said she was upset that some of the films didn’t look past to the poverty to the actual people or the culture and said, “some of these films insulted me.” Many others in the community felt that volunteers that came seeking to help were actually causing problems and were trying to influence the people to share their ideals. Towards the end of the film Barret starts to question the media and if it can show an accurate representation of the reality of a situation. One person she interviewed said that cameras don’t lie because they only show what is truly there, but she also said, “it is never the whole story”. Meaning that cameras can only show what they see and not the whole truth and story behind an issue. Barret finally comes the conclusion that as a native filmmaker she must paint her community from both sides both good and bad and see past her own personal connections to the community. She states, “[t]his is my community. My life is here. As a filmmaker I have the responsibility to see my community for what it is, to tell the story no matter how difficult.” What she means by this is that she has to show the reality and the facts of the whole situation and not just the part that would protect or benefit just her community. Barret’s documentary tries to portray and accurate picture of what happened free from spin to paint both sides of an issue fairly with their good parts and their bad parts.