2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Milking and scratching: Hand-Made Films, February 20, 2006
This review is from: Milking And Scratching (DVD)
This film, which is really a collection of five short films is both compelling and introspective. As the former privet chef to Malcolm Forbes, Calvin Klein and Gloria Vanderbilt Naomi Uman was able to demonstrate the relationship between the source of food and the source of life. She also examines the role of women as sexual objects, explores the nature of the creation of films and experiments in telling a narrative through light and movement on the screen.
In the first short film, Leche, Uman portrays the life of a contemporary farming family in Aguascalientes, Mexico as a timeless life style of living off of the land. While this can be a hard, even cruel life at times, the film seems to glorify its simplicity. It shows the poverty and lack of education of the featured family in an almost positive light through scenes like a grandmother making cheese and children learning math by counting bottle caps. This is in stark contrast to her second film, Mala Leche, which shows members of this same family some years later after having moved to Pixley, California. This film shows a mother shopping for groceries at a Food Depot, and Alcoholic father who gets through life with out speaking English or being able to read or write in any language. The town of Pixley is centered around a large dairy in which men work twelve hours a day six days a week... this seems to represent the evils of modernization and capitalism. In stead of the quaint black and white footage of the former film this one presents life the way it is for many American families, in all the colors of modern slavery. Though illegal families are not allow to get social security the film makes a point of showing they are still given tax payer i.d. numbers. This short film shows how the green breast of nature can be exploited for profit.
The third film, Removed, shows clips from 1970's pornography with the women shown only as white empty spaces. They are portrayed as hollow and less than human. This makes a very important statement about the role of women not only in media but in their everyday lives where they may feel invisible and only textile objects deriving worth only from their use and not their identity.
Finally, Hand Eye Coordination gives an interesting look at the way in which films are made and opens a unique window into the creative process while Private Movie is the illumination of a life through light and movement. It conveys emotion while leave the literal interpretation of the action on screen very open to individual divination.
All in all I thinks this is a great DVD and would recomend it to anyone interested either in film making or Mexican-American relations.
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