American Harvest: a superficial, patronizing, and smug film

What I sent to The Little Theatre after they responded to my brief online message that the film was deeply flawed:

Thanks for your reply. My husband and I have long been supporters of The Little and it is, indeed, our first choice for any film. I recommend it to my students and friends as well.

That's one of the reasons why I cared enough to send email about the film — it appears that a personal connection with the film-maker clouds the generally good assessment of films selected. I don't need to agree with films I see, but they should at least be professionally produced and edited. I'll copy below a longer review of the film which I've shared now with others. My husband and I spent a great deal of time talking about the film Saturday evening ourselves, then with two colleagues who also attended that screening. The next day, I bumped into a former student of mine at Eastman House and in talking, she asked what we had been doing over the weekend. When I mentioned the film, she immediately recognized it from a sociology class that had apparently screened it; she immediately critiqued the film for some of the same reasons I'd identified.

Beyond that, the interviewer's comments on documentary were not only without merit but showed a lack of perspective on such films. There is a wide range of documentary work done, with, say Michael Moore or a reenacted "documentary" at one end of the spectrum and something more like Fred Wisemann's films on the other. (Fred declares that he takes no position in his documentaries, but is frequently criticized for not acknowledging the supreme power of editing). American Harvest does, indeed, have a point — that of the difficulty getting cheap labor. Whether Mancuso did this intentionally or not isn't important.

Finally, a documentary that takes a perspective isn't less of a documentary. Should we be looking at documentaries on the Holocaust that show how the Germans felt at the time? Should we be looking at documentaries on global warming that depicts hunters who find that it's now easier to kill polar bears? Of course, documentary has a point — being fair, being authentic and accurate are the point. If that casts something in a bad light, we have to assume that it might be a fair assessment of the subject. No one has "the truth." But film-makers have a responsibility to accept what they have created and to acknowledge the messages being put forth.

If I'm impassioned about anything, the first thing that evoked it was the mediocrity of the film itself. I, too, want to learn more about the issues and was disappointed when the issues were treated so superficially. The Little's reputation is better than that... And I am surprised and dismayed that the reviews have been, literally, blind.

My thanks,

Loret

The review:

"American Harvest," a local production now at the Little Theater is a film about an important subject, the dependence of American agriculture on immigrant labor from Mexico and Central America. If there was any point in Mancuso's film, it was focused on the difficulties of securing cheap labor and how that problem threatens the price of food in our country.

Unfortunately, the film is superficial, patronizing, and smug. It is uncritically one-sided and suggests a strong if unconscious racism. It is a very bad and very misleading film.

The film is dominated by "talking heads," and every talking head who speaks with authority or addresses the "big picture" is a grower, produce broker, or other owner who employs or depends on migrant labor. Mancuso interviews a lot of workers, too, but they're never asked to speak to larger issues. Instead, they're led to parrot the cliches of "good immigrant" behavior: they're hard working, they love their families, they want their children to get ahead.

The growers thus get to deliver the message of the film: agriculture needs migrant labor. Mancuso may sincerely think he's being nonpartisan, but he takes everything they say at face value and only looks from their perspective. His film wouldn't be any different if it had been an infomercial for an association of agribusinesses.

As a result he missed almost all of the issues that those who work with migrant workers are concerned with — the difficulty of the work itself (16 hours a day, 7 days a week, often with toxins that preserve the food but injure the workers), the irregularities in stable work (what do workers do when they come to the farm and the farmer decides he/she doesn't need them?), lack of health care and workers’ compensation (agricultural labor has a very high accident rate), poor housing conditions (or lack of housing — many migrant workers sleep in orchards or worse)... The list is long, and this one could go on and on.

Mancuso hammers away at the theme of the hard-working migrant versus the lazy American. Does he recognize that he's suggesting that other poor people, African-Americans in particular, have only themselves to blame for their poverty because they're unwilling to work like the nice tireless Mexicans? Does he notice that by asking undocumented workers if they get welfare--a question to which he already knows the answer--Mancuso goes even further towards blaming other poor people for their own misery?

The film doesn't even look at the human reality of the workers themselves. Mancuso's hackneyed and patronizing images pile up until he begins to sound like an apologist for slavery. Oh, those nice Hispanics! They sing while they work! They love their country! They smile a lot! A few dollars seems like real riches to them! And they have hopes and dreams, too--it's almost like they were people just like us!

It's wonderfully reassuring (to those of us who could actually afford the higher prices for food which would pay for humanitarian conditions for farm workers) to know that these people just "love" to work and "insist" on working despite the heat, even when an employer wants them to take some time off. Why do they do this? Could the film-maker imagine that the workers need to make money and that they want to work despite temperatures over one hundred degrees because taking time off means no money for their families? Did he ever stop to think that the vaunted work ethic of nineteenth-century immigrants came from the same sources--poverty, insecurity, and desperation?

In reality, the film sees migrants as a necessary productive resource and little more. If cheap robots were invented that could pick fruit and vegetables, you can bet that the migrants would be out of work in a flash. And then what point would the film have? Our farms aren't providing work because they see any dignity in it; if working hard and "making it" is the American Dream, as the Pagano family points out in scenes from NYC, does the film offer any indication that the migrant workers will be able to have the life of the Italian grandfather and his family some day? Can you imagine the Pagano grandchildren willing to work as hard as the migrant workers?

What's more, the film completely ignores the continuing US role in creating the poverty and deindustrialization in Mexico and Central America that drives people to leave their homes for the dangerous trip to the US—NAFTA and our farm subsidies, to name just two examples. (A recent film called "Wetback"is a good contrast--it concentrates on both the human experience of migration and the political context.)

Mancuso doesn't address the discrepancy in the amount of money earned by the workers, the costs to the farmers, the costs of the markets and the prices to consumers. Factor in the costs they must bear themselves--transportation, housing, health care, sick days, pensions, and all the other benefits documented workers have and these workers don't--migrants earn a pittance even at ten dollars an hour. Yet Mancuso claims that we "need" to keep food prices down or it will actually cost us more of a percentage of our relatively high average incomes. And statistics show that Americans pay less for food in relation to overall income than many first world nations already.

Two scenes in the film are especially disturbing — the one in which Jamaican workers are encouraged to proclaim their love of hard work ("I just love to work!" and "Yes, we LOVE to work!") while they are clearly indicating they come for the money (two different men rub their fingers together in a gesture of money) and then the scene in which the Chiapas workers cross into the U.S., only to be arrested during filming. When the INS officer inquires about the situation, the film-maker passively indicates he came upon these people at the side of the road and doesn't know who they are. That's the truest statement in this film: Mancuso never understands who his subjects really are.

There simply isn't enough time to properly address the superficiality and inaccuracies of this film. Mancuso's "history" of immigration is inaccurate, and his Italian ancestors and all of those Polish, Irish, Greek and Jewish immigrants--not a Protestant among them--might find it hard to relate to the clip that includes praise for the "Protestant work ethic" that they were all supposed to have had.

In addition to all of that, "American Harvest" is simply a badly made film. Mancuso's editing creates an incoherent collection of some fine material combined with some that is just plain dumb and trivializes the people being depicted. One clip from an interview actually appears twice. The lighting in so many scenes is done badly; any beginning film student would be criticized for the repeated interviews of people seated in dark shadows (reflectors or doing the interview in another setting are both simple solutions). The viewer deserves to see all the people who are talking, to look at their eyes, their expressions and attitudes. The sound is inconsistent (some interviews sound as if they'd been recorded inside a large tin can) and the music is irrelevant in style and content. The film is entitled "American Harvest" and yet the filmmaker includes footage of stone masons and others who have nothing to do with harvesting. Clearly, a great deal of time, effort, resources and heart have been put into this film, yet it suffers dramatically from lack of critical analysis and the art of creating a narrative story with documentary elements.

All of this results in an infuriating and frustrating film experience. Taking the "facts" in this film as they are presented would do a great injustice to the real issues that farmworkers face. We DO need to understand the issues. Mancuso's film is not only badly done and wholly unsatisfying, it's a distraction from the things we should be thinking about and doing.

Loret and Michael Steinberg

Instead of going to this film:

See "Wetback: the undocumented documentary" - Ironweed Films, 2005

Go to
http://www.ufw.org/ for the United Farm Workers website
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0801791.htm for an article about Catholic Bishops calling for an end to exploitation of workers
http://www.abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=3777793 for an ABC News story on immigrant workers' fear in the face of wild fires
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/10/us/10migrant.html?_r=1&oref=slogin for NY Times article on immigrants and health care
http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/2006-07/IllegalImmigration2006-07... for an article on how illegal farmworkers' labor subsidizes our country's economy and our American lifestyles

Read
With These Hands: The Hidden World of Migrant Farmworkers Today (Rothenberg)
Coyotes: A Journey Through the Secret World of America's Illegal Aliens (Conover)
No One Is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border (Chacon and Davis)
Communities without Borders: Images and Voices from the World of Migration (Bacon)
The Human Cost of Food: Farmworkers' Lives, Labor, and Advocacy (Thompson)

The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers (Guskin and Wilson)
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"Do the unnecessary. Sing the songs that one doesn't expect out of
your mouth. Be uncomfortable. Be the sand and not the oil in the
gear work of the world."

-Gunter Eich (pinned up near Lotte Jacobi's desk)
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loret gnivecki steinberg
associate professor
school of photographic arts & sciences
rochester institute of technology

&

michael steinberg
attorney and author