The poor are not our intellectual property. It is time to look at our own culture and practice of exploitation, writes Quentin Fottrell
DURING THE height of the Fairytale of Kathmanduaffair last week, I became increasingly uneasy about the orgy of faux-intellectual muscle-flexing surrounding it. With the focus now moving to the film's merits and Cathal Ó Searcaigh's misunderstood psychology, the Nepalese boys were left in the dust. The film and its protagonist were flawed, but it taught us one salient lesson: the issue and practice of exploitation were just too big for us to handle.
We must now clean up the mess left behind, steeped in an atmosphere of divisiveness, circular arguments and, when they fail, personal attacks and recrimination.
Once again, we are back to where we started, in a dark place of grief, anger and confusion.
The boys were exposed in a film about exploitation. They did not sign consent forms. But even if their parents had signed them, it still would have been non-informed consent. The boys did not know they would be featured in a film about exploitation, their exploitation.
There was no attempt by Vinegar Hill Productions or RTÉ, though it was discussed, to hide their identities. Ó Searcaigh gave his consent. The boys, of all people, did not.
We in the media are supposedly above exploitation. We are, allegedly, astute observers of the human condition. Who could stand in the way of that? Or a Golden Bear or Pulitzer? To lord it over the great unwashed, we need raw material. We need clay.
We turn our all-powerful, well-connected, well-funded Cyclops eye on the poor. Angels with dirty faces make great close-ups. Informed consent? Individual rights? They couldn't possibly understand the complexities of that. This is for the Greater Good. This is journalism. Or, better still, art. And, so, the poor and vulnerable become our intellectual property.
Perry Ogden's Pavee Lackeen, the 2005 cinéma véritéfeature about Traveller girl Winnie Maughan (10, at the time), used Winnie's real name and blended her life experiences into a partially scripted and improvised film. Though her life story was mined for this artistic/social manifesto, she did not get a writing or producer credit. It won heaps of awards when it toured the festival circuit in 2005.
The production notes describe an "unflinching portrait of a marginalised community often living in Third World poverty". An unflinching portrait of artistic colonialism was more like it.
Winnie was filmed sniffing a substance. The production notes asked: "Do you like the way the film presented you?" (Not, ". . . your character".) This is what she said: "The film made it look like my head was all over the place and I was doing things that I wasn't supposed to do. Some people will think it is real and I don't want that. I want them to know that I wasn't really sniffing petrol, it was just apple juice."
So much for debunking stereotypes. Ogden also said he was "friends" with the Maughans. These conscience-salving qualifications are not enough. They needed to delete the scene. Period.
Deliver Us From Evil, by Amy Berg, followed convicted paedophile and former priest Oliver O'Grady around Dublin.
The internet trailer still includes 2004 footage from an inner-city Dublin primary school. The children are recognisable. One has a name badge. Over these clips, O'Grady talks about being aroused by children in their underwear. The film-makers allegedly got access to the school by telling them it was a film about multiculturalism. Imagine the formal enquiries about parental consent and barrage of lawyers' letters if this happened at Blackrock or Mount Anville.
We print journalists are also at it. When Shannon Matthews (9) was found in Yorkshire last Friday after being abducted, the London Independentpleaded for her privacy and, on the same page, quoted a neighbour who overheard something Shannon said. The Independentran with it.
The Sunoffered a reward of about £50,000 (€64,000) for information, which pales next to the £2.6 million surge of funds and worldwide media blitz for the blonde, middle-class Madeline McCann with professional parents.
The Irish Museum of Modern Art's Mapping Lives, Exploring Futures was a well-funded outreach programme to involve children from Bluebell, Rialto and Inchicore in the arts. But a book on the project uses startlingly sentimental and patronising language: "Poverty and disadvantage thrive on making the ordinary, extraordinary. The playful, dangerous. Tranquillity, chaotic. Opportunity, a barrier."
What pretentious guff. Some of the pull-quotes say more about the editors than the kids. Here's one: "You try livin' here. F***in' kip. Then you'd go to art classes or anything." This from a book criticising cultural domination.
We have a practice of poets and film-makers, artists and journalists, rambling the world or poor neighbourhoods seeking fodder for charitable, artistic or intellectual canons without enforced guidelines and legal requirements on the process and end result, under the guise of middle-class respectability and political activism.
We all make mistakes. But we now need to look at the culture in which we work, the choices we offer our subjects, the words we use. And, if it is clay we seek, we should look no further than the "moral" force behind our own, at times questionable, footprints.