aMarika is, as it were, aloof, divided. This has been demonstrated experimentally with evidence of America’s growing political polarization, and fictionally if you’ve lived in America for the past decade and especially the last four years. Easily readable examples of a country quarreling over a seam; American Selfie: One Nation Shoot Itself, a new documentary from Time Time, serializes some of last year’s most famous celebrities, such as with the bias of unlimited, fast-paced images, epidemics at the height of New York, like cemetery trucks, Trump’s motorcycles, Rally in South Dakota, and a crowded border outpost.
Hyper-partisanship is something the director of American selfies, Alexandra Pelosi, knows best – her mother, House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, is one of the most disgusting targets of the mega-sphere, and a frequent recipient of the President’s Twitter vehicle. The Democratic leader’s youngest daughter, 50, has studied 13 films as an interpreter of America’s cultural divide and conservative mentality. She embedded George W. Bush’s campaign bus with her debut film Journeys with George; From Coal Owners in Pennsylvania to Survivors of Hurricane Harvey in Port Arthur, Texas, to Coal Owners in Pennsylvania, an attempt to analyze the minds of Trump voters with a visit to the “real America” outside of the 2018 bubble (its 12th document for HBO).
American Selfie has evolved from a long tradition of his propaganda road-trip films, a mission he described as “taking America’s temperature.” During one year, when America’s gender card initially says, “Smartphones and social media have changed the course of American history,” during one year the film “tries to take a selfie of what America will look like in 2020”. Pelosi told the Guardian that there is a nationwide movement for social justice and black lives matter, especially through cellphone footage of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police in May 2020. American Selfie, hopscotching across the country from September 2019 to last month, reaches Minneapolis in the final part, but literally begins: tourists at Chicago’s Cloud Gate, explaining how to take the ideal selfie; Round-the-corner line at the Apple Store in Manhattan to launch the new iPhone in September 2019 – a few days before the film celebrating American tech consumerism, International Weather March.
The paradox is that Pelosi sees the film as a double-edged sword of a mobile camera that literally moves faster than a selfie. “For every pop star, every sorority girl who lined up for a new iPhone to take pictures of her whole life, a 17-year-old girl used that phone to start a revolution,” Pelosi said, referring to Darnella Frasier. , Frazier, who shot the assassination of George Floyd on what was supposed to be a grocery store trip, used his phone to show that we are all war photographers, to show the world what is happening, we can all use our phones for good .
While making American selfies, Pelosi came to see cellphones as an equal source of interference and concern from the American division. “Anyone I was talking to, whether they were going to vote or they weren’t going to vote at all or didn’t even know who was voting, would say: ‘Social media is destroying our mental health.’ “It destroys our conversation,” she said.
“People get very angry because of something they read on the internet that may or may not be true.” “People now have these devices in their hands that feed them toxic the wrong way.”
In his man-the-not-the-street-style interview for American Selfie, Pelosi riffs with the themes of two different concepts of America: one, a generally fact-based understanding of the racism declared by the Trump president; Another president and a fan of “America First”, the “Don’t walk on me” policies are embodied. With news cameras and numerous iPhones, often those films, both camps scream at each other – after Trump called Muslim Somali-American Muslim Somali-Americans back home at a rally in Minneapolis in autumn 2019. Black Lives Matter protests in DC, abortion rights march at the Capitol in February, and “reopen” protests in Sacramento this summer.
The bottom line between the two groups on the streets this year, she said, has widened further in the years since she started shooting. “It simply came to our notice then Facts, And we can all say, ‘These facts are here, now you can give an opinion about those facts, you will be allowed to be pro-gun or gun, you are allowed to be pro-life or pro-choice, but now we have a set of similar facts No. We are no longer acting in the truth. ”
Pelosi is a self-proclaimed one to stay away from hyper-connectivity – she doesn’t use social media, she says, unless she understands the ticket ok enough to know what her two teenage sons use (she has a new iPhone despite her objections after 12 years) .-Year-old raised money through lemonade stand); When the epidemic made the inevitable human interaction through the screen it wasn’t transferred to the iPhone until March of this year. Still, she has come to see the iPhone as a major threat to American democracy: “I always tell my kids: I want you to buy a gun rather than an iPhone,” she said. “Because a gun is something you control – I can pull the trigger and shoot you if I want to, but the iPhone is controlling you. There are tech companies that have algorithms for taking a few pills on your mental health, putting a few pills in your brain to excite or make you indifferent.
“I think phones are more dangerous than guns.”
Pelosi, however, can find some salvation marks in smartphones and social media: “It can be used for good, it’s your choice. You can use it to fall from the side of the Grand Canyon to take a selfie – many people have died trying to take a full selfie, you can use it – or you can use it to expand the message that you want to communicate or Any idea you want to communicate, ”she said, referring to Fraser’s filming of Floyd’s murder, the footage he made of the anti-black police brutality.
Asked about the difficulties of Parachute journalism Reporting on a number of locations for American selfies, Pelosi replied that she saw the film more as a collection of highly public events, – no beach in America, much criticized for falling into the community to quickly convince readers of the city. Than port in-depth pictures of different communities. “When you go on vacation, you don’t live there, but you feel like you have to find a place, right?” She said. Pelosi, who works with the handheld camera Sans production team, said she never felt like he was being interviewed; He said, “I only talk to people.
“I chose iconic events to see what people have to say,” he said, after the martial arts relaunch in El Paso where 22 people were killed by racist gunmen in August August 2019 up to the Super Bowl in Miami. “The word selfie has never been broad – it’s just a snapshot. This is all a snapshot. I am not writing a history book that you are going to study. This is a selfie; It’s just as disposable. “
What happened this year – taking this temperature, so to speak – different from past election-year road trips? “White America woke up this year,” Pelosi said. We can’t hide it, we can’t deny it now. We can’t pretend that we don’t have this ghost in our closet and we have to face it. ”
