The Story of the Weeping Camel (2003)

The Story of the Weeping Camel--directed by Mongolian director Byambasuren Davaa and Italian co-director Luigi Falorni. Distributed by THINKFilm
Release date: 6 September 2003 (2003-09-06) (Toronto Film Festival)
Nominated for an Academy Award in 2005 Best Documentary

The Story of the Weeping Camel is a "narrative documentary" featuring a real nomadic family that live in Upper Mongolia, in the Gobi desert. (Above China.)

They live in tents supported by a wood frame, richly decorated inside with so much colour, all the woven tapestries and creations of their hands (or someone else's). The camera's eye simply observes all the details of the way they live with curiosity, as we are curious. Unlike modern surroundings, their surroundings are beautiful, and these people are beautiful and richly decorated as well. They live with camels, goats and sheep. They grow up touching animals, touching their world, the woolly camels...everything is so much more tactile, and full-on that way. Even the woolly camels are so beautiful! I was fascinated to see how they lived.

The Story takes place during the seven weeks in spring in Mongolia when the camels give birth to their calves. The last camel gives birth to a white calf, a beautiful white calf, but the birth was difficult and the mother really did reject the calf. The other mothers are bonding with their calves, but the unwanted white calf just cries! The family keeps the calf alive by milking the mother and feeding the calf her mother's milk from a hollow horn, all the while gently trying to help the mother and calf reunite. The mother had been traumatized by the birth, and doesn't want any of it. They are so gentle too, and persistent-- but they don't force anything. Neither do they give up, either. Eventually they send the two young boys into a larger settlement to find a musician to help with a "Hoos" ritual to help the mother accept her calf. Also, they attempt an earlier ritual first where they bring offerings to a place they build with a post in the ground, a raised place, and I've written down exactly what they said (in English anyways, the entire film is in subtitles as they speak Mongolian). It's so cool. From DVD Chapter 7:

"We, the Mongolian people, honour nature and its spirits.
Nowadays, mankind plunders the earth more and more in search of her treasures
This drives the spirits away...that should protect us from bad weather and from diseases
We have to remember that we are not the last generation on earth...
Now we'll pray for forgiveness so that the spirits may come back"

ALL people used to think this way. According to the quick research I just did, the Mongolian people are generally Buddhist. A "Lama" led this ritual. (FYI-"Dalai" means Ocean, so "Dalai Lama" means Ocean of Wisdom.)

Also I really enjoyed what they said about TV when the young boy was asking his Dad for a TV after seeing it for the first time on his trip. His grandfather said:

"You don't need that. You'd spend the whole day watching the glass images.
That's no good."

The "ger" was so colourful, and perfect for the conditions of the place, the windstorms that arose. The film showed it naturally, you could imagine being comfortable there, living there yourself. In an interview afterwards (on the DVD) Luigi Falorni says that it was a conscious choice not to create the film of the "exotic nomad", which included the shock of butchering an animal etc, or the other common portrayal was the intellectual and critical examination of their culture, as in women's roles, etc. When the Mongolian director Byambasuren Davaa told him of the ritual that they had, the Hoos ritual to bond the mother to a calf she has rejected, he loved the simplicity of the story. I loved the way they made this documentary too.

I am just so curious about how we are meant to live, how these people live, and they were so magical in their realness. They were just natural, the mother singing to her little toddler, as I do, when I follow my instincts. All the beauty in the documentary was a beauty we find through everything. And that I also yearn for that is missing in the modern life that we have chosen.

When they came to the town, with it's material benefits, you also just lost all that colour they had, and beauty they had in their nomadic lifestyle.

I am fascinated by what I know we are missing.

Here is what looks like a Mongolian website about itself: http://www.mongoluls.net/mongolia.shtml

Ten Black Sins
To kill any animal. To steal, betray. To exploit other people. By mouth. To lie. To swear, scold or call names. To slender. By spirit and heart. To be greedy for status, money and fame. To envy. To be stingy. To be mistrustful and unsociable.

Ten White Charities
Always save the life of any animal. Be generous and openhanded. Talk with good manners. Don't gossip. Be peaceful. Don't lie -- only tell things that have really occurred. Don't say bad words. Don't deceive. Don't have a disputing heart. Don't allow a greedy spirit. Don't have a bad opinion about other people.
--from www.mongolulus.net

Turning off the TV

The other night, we turned off the TV instead of letting it blare during the evening like we usually do. It was really amazing to notice how, when our minds are not engaged in this passive form of entertainment, how the family starts to talk, and play, and entertain themselves. I loved listening to the family sounds pick up just because the TV was off.

It really makes me question having that thing on all the time. I find interacting with my family so much more valuable.

We made crepes (said "crapes"), a thin pancake, and made them into wraps filled with vanilla ice-cream, and drizzled with chocolate sauce. I think it's the making of something that in-itself creates the good energy. It brought back the happy family time I spent with my family-- they were always making something. That empty space, with no TV blaring, gets filled with something far better.

It's often the parents that put the kids in front of the TV -- because you want to involve their attentions, instead of you having to tend them, and maybe you are busy doing chores and don't want to be distracted. Also, ironically, they often can't just run outside because the space outside is full of cars and strange people. So it's we who mind their attentions this way, and teach them to love it. It takes the fight out of them, as it occupies them so. As it keeps the adults out of trouble...

P.S. (Added June 13.) Like in Pink Floyd's "The Wall", it's the Moms that bind the children. Why do I often turn on the TV? It occupies children that are cooped up in 4 walls and being very demanding on the mother. It's not how "educational" the show is, it's the nature of TV being too giving, you sit there passively, not creating or using your own imagination. This is the way we adapt our children to city life and TV-- mothers do. But it is great to just be aware of this, and just try to listen and be honest with yourself about when you are meant to turn it off...

Advertising

My young son Luke watching TV passively


I just ran into a great quote that expresses what I always felt about advertising:

"Societies need to consider the powerful impact of advertising on young children, for whom all information has an educational and formative impact. Children constitute an important market for consumer products, but society has a responsibility to educate them, not exploit them."

--United Nations Development Program

This was quoted in a paper called "See Change: Learning and education for sustainability" [Jan 2004 by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment], which I had picked up at the Kaipatiki ecological project a long time ago but hadn't had the focus to read it until now. Packing away thing, I opened it up, thinking of this, and saw this quote. The material in it is perfect for what I need to learn right now. It is further study in depth on all the issues that concern my mind, every waking moment. Advertising, people's awareness, this sleep humanity is in right now-- compared to how we have been in the past. It is so lovely to see something spelled out which previously felt like a secret underlying truth which no-one else saw.

The full report is at here.

And here is the cut-and-pasted section on Marketing and Advertising-- how it shapes our psyches (especially young psyches). It is my personal view that we need to create a wall or protective barrier by conscious choice, and help our children learn how to do so as well-- as in turning off the tv most of the time. Here is the fabulous report chunk (with only the footnote numbers deleted due to their decontextualization on my blog):




5.4 Marketing and advertising

Marketing explicitly aims to influence people. It involves planning the conception, pricing, promotion and spread of goods, services and ideas. It is often used by businesses to create awareness of, and desire for, their brands and products. However, marketing techniques are also used by many non-commercial organisations and government agencies to sell their messages to the public. Tools of marketing include market research, advertising and public relations.

Market research is used to understand the needs, wants, desires and values of people. Marketers often claim that they are merely finding out what people want and matching this with what they have to offer.

This is because most marketing is based on the assumption that it exists “(1) to discover the needs and wants of prospective customers and (2) to satisfy them”. In reality, many organisations also begin with what they want to sell and try to develop a market to suit.

A major part of marketing is advertising. Advertisements come in many different forms, “from the tiniest classified newspaper advertisement to a TV spot, from a small leaflet to a massive outdoor sign, from a message on the Internet to a letter delivered to one’s door, or a sponsored cultural or sporting event”.

Advertisers assert that they are providing information to consumers to enable
them to make informed decisions. Simple forms of advertising, such as classifieds, may meet this goal. But the most pervasive forms of modern advertising, especially those used on television, aim to influence and persuade people instead of informing them. Advertisers often play on people’s emotions to build connections between products, brands and people (see also section 6.5).

Advertising long ago discarded the practice of selling a product on the merits of its useful features. Modern marketing builds symbolic associations between the product and the psychological states of potential consumers, sometimes targeting known feelings ... and sometimes creating a sense of inadequacy in order to remedy it with the product.

Advertisements do not make people buy things, but they are incredibly influential in shaping human behaviour. Marketers use techniques that they have learned from psychology, sociology, economics and anthropology to shape consumer preferences. In doing so, they often help to socialise people as willing and wanting consumers. As an example, think about the marketing of four wheel drive ‘sports utility vehicles’ (SUVs) in New Zealand. These vehicles were initially used almost exclusively by farmers and commercial operators such as builders. Marketing has been used to successfully sell them as ‘urban safari vehicles’, playing on symbolic associations that have been fostered and developed in people. It is not their useful features that are marketed. Who wants to buy a vehicle that is generally more dangerous, polluting, difficult to park, and more expensive to run than the average car? It is their image as masculine and adventurous off-roading objects of desire that is marketed, even though they seldom leave the sanctuary of urban streets. The irony is that the beauty of New Zealand’s environment is often used to market these vehicles. There are countless shots on television screens and in the print media of SUVs doing damage to dunes, streams and riverbeds. Similarly, images of New Zealand’s 'clean and green’ environment are often used by many businesses to brand and sell their products to the world.

Increasingly, advertisers are targeting children to shape consumption preferences early in life and to take advantage of the growing amount of money that people are spending on children. For example, American children between four and 12 years old spend over $24 billion in direct purchases and influence another $188 billion in family household purchases. An average ten-year old in America has now been socialised to learn 300-400 different brands. In Britain, characters from a Japanese card trading game called Pokemon are far more recognisable to the average eight-year-old than animals and plants. There are therefore growing concerns about the impacts of advertising and marketing on children. Societies need to consider the powerful impact of advertising on young children, for whom all information has an educational and formative impact. Children constitute an important market for consumer products, but society has a responsibility to educate them, not exploit them.
– United Nations Development Programme

To reduce children’s exposure to marketing, countries such as Denmark, Greece, Belgium restrict advertising to children. Sweden and Norway totally ban it.

The Swedish government believes that “children have the right to safe zones” and that advertising can compromise their safety and well-being. This sentiment is strongly supported by the majority of people in Sweden, as well as by their national association for advertising agencies.

Marketing and advertising to children is permitted in New Zealand, although there are voluntary codes of practice in the advertising industry to moderate some of its effects. While there is little research on this issue, a recent survey suggests that there are major concerns among parents about the levels of advertising to children on television. Among those surveyed, there were strong feelings that television encourages children to want products they do not need. There was also a strong sentiment that advertising should not be regulated by the same people who sell products to children.

The current framework for advertising in New Zealand is mostly based on self-regulation by industry. This framework, and how it relates to the environment, is
examined in a background paper to this report.45 There is a code of practice for product claims related to the environment, but there is no code for how the environment is portrayed in advertisements. There is also a lack of consideration
given to the effects that saturation advertising can have on people. This is despite the fact that advertising expenditure in New Zealand, as a proportion of GDP, is one of the highest in the world. New Zealand ranked third in the world for advertising expenditure in 1996, and the amount of money spent on advertising has steadily increased since then. In 2002 it reached $1.5 billion per year and in 2003 it was predicted to exceed $1.7 billion. What sort of culture is all this advertising helping to create?

As noted above, advertising is just one tool of marketing. Marketers use a variety of techniques, such as product placements in movies and using celebrities and role models to shape consumer desires. Public relations skills are also used by businesses, government agencies and non-governmental organisations to ‘spin’ their stories and manage their images in the media. Public relations usually involves intensifying (playing up) some messages and downplaying others that could be detrimental to an organisation’s reputation. There is a growing awareness among the public about the ‘greenwashing’ that many organisations use to shape their environmental image. This may undermine the effectiveness of some public relations skills, while contributing to a fundamental lack of trust in big business and government to be open and honest about sustainability.

It is important to keep in mind that marketing techniques are not just used by commercial enterprises. For example, government is showing a growing willingness to use social marketing to achieve outcomes related to sustainability (see section 4.1). It has also been suggested that ‘demarketing’ can be used to encourage people to reduce their consumption of some goods or services.

There is a major potential to market the messages of sustainability, although it is important to consider that social marketing is very expensive. It is also important to question how effective government agencies can be at getting their messages across when people are already swamped by so many other marketing messages in the commercial media. In some areas, such as road safety, there is good evidence that social marketing can be very effective.

However, social marketing campaigns need to be carefully researched, planned and organised as well as well-financed to capture people’s attention, and to avoid switching people off.

ENDQUOTE

As you can see from the photo of Luke above, and know from personal experience of course, watching TV is a very passive experience. I would just like to add one more note to the wonderfully well researched think-piece above-- as I learned in university communications studies, Marshall MacLuhan's "medium is the message" theory-- perhaps the actual message is less important in forming an impression on our minds than the technology of the message. My personal intuition confirms this as well, in the case of television, I can feel the harm to my children is more the passivity of watching tv than what is actually on TV. They aren't doing something, living, doing something challenging-- they are passively being entertained; and that's a message that should more often than not-- be avoided.