User:Shannon/synopsis

Braiding Sweetgrass

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s chapter of Braiding Sweetgrass: “Learning the Grammar of Animacy”, explores the effect of language on our perception of nature. English is a noun-based language - only 30% of the words are verbs. In the Potawatomi indigenous language, 70% of the words are verb - and nouns and verbs are both animate and inanimate. You hear a person with a word that is different from the one with which you hear a train. In Potawatomi, there are verbs “to be a Saturday,” “to be red,” “to be a long sandy stretch of beach,” “to be a bay.” The verb form “to be a bay” holds the idea that the living water has decided to shelter itself between the shores. It could do otherwise - become an ocean, a waterfall, or a spring. These verbs are possible when water, land, color, a day, are all alive - “the language sees the animacy of the world.” Places, songs, medicines, and stories are all animate in Potawatomi. The inanimate are mostly objects made by humans - “for a table, the language says “What is it?” For an apple “Who is that being?”” The same words used to address family, are used to address the living world. In English, all non-humans are called “it,” reduced to an object - “it” denies all other living beings “the right to be persons...worthy of respect and moral concern”. Kimmerer suggests that “a grammar of animacy could lead us to whole new ways of living in the world...a world with a democracy of species, not a tyranny of one.”

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

The film, directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, follows a search for the buried body of a murder victim following the perpetrator's confession to the crime. He claims not to remember the exact location, and the police convoy including the commissioner, prosecutor, and a doctor drive through the night in rural Anatolia, searching for the spot. In the darkness, which rolls over the stark hills, the lights of the cars draw long fiery lines in the night. As the search drags on, and daylight begins to come, we learn bit by bit about each member of the search party - about the police commissioner's impatience and quick temper, the chip on his shoulder; the prosecutor's image of calm and control, controverted by an inconsistency in examining a previous case; the doctor's fraught history with women and existential struggles. Subverting traditional narrative structures, the film focuses on how the examination of the crime brings to light more about the investigators, than about the victim or the perpetrator - telling the story through the surroundings.