In My Blood It Runs

In My Blood It Runs’ Review: ‘I Want to Be an Aborigine’
In plain vérité style, the documentary follows an Arrernte Aboriginal family in Alice Springs, Australia.


Dujuan in “In My Blood It Runs.”
Dujuan in “In My Blood It Runs.”Credit...Sentient.Art.Film
Teo Bugbee
By Teo Bugbee
June 11, 2020

In My Blood It Runs NYT Critic's Pick Directed by Maya Newell Documentary, Biography, History1h 30m
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Colonialism is a war that began hundreds of years ago and never ended. Its modern tactics and its weapons are noted with precision in the ferocious documentary, “In My Blood It Runs.”

The film follows an Arrernte Aboriginal family in Alice Springs, Australia, focusing on Dujuan, a 10-year-old boy, and his mother Megan, as they navigate his education. In plain vérité style, the documentary exposes how language and school are corrupted to become bludgeons for the system built by settlers.

At home, Dujuan is a gifted healer who speaks three languages, and he is a gentle comfort to his mother. But at school, his teachers are white, and they mock Aboriginal spiritual beliefs while teaching a whitewashed version of colonial history. Dujuan is disengaged and angry, and his grades, attendance and behavior suffer. Megan’s fear is that Dujuan could be taken from her and placed in juvenile detention, and as Dujuan’s aunt warns him, if he goes to detention, he’ll either leave it for jail or a coffin.

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The director Maya Newell gains access to both worlds that Dujuan traverses — home and school — and the trust that she seems to have built with all participants is vital to the success of this film. In both settings, her subjects rarely acknowledge the camera directly. She captures natural behavior, whether she observes care or cruelty. Voices rarely raise, but the film still vibrates with fury.

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In the final minutes, Dujuan is given an opportunity to express what would satisfy him, which he does in language simple enough that even his teachers should be able to understand:

“Leave black kids alone.”

“Stop killing Aboriginal people.”

“I want to be an Aborigine.”

In My Blood It Runs
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. Watch on The Future of Film Is Female.

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The Seven Basic Plots
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The Seven Basic Plots
The Seven Basic Plots, book cover.png
Author Christopher Booker
Language English
Published 2004
Pages 736
Preceded by The Great Deception 
Followed by Scared to Death: From BSE to Global Warming 
The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories is a 2004 book by Christopher Booker containing a Jung-influenced analysis of stories and their psychological meaning. Booker worked on the book for thirty-four years.[1]


Contents
1 Summary
1.1 The meta-plot
1.2 The plots
1.2.1 Overcoming the Monster
1.2.2 Rags to Riches
1.2.3 The Quest
1.2.4 Voyage and Return
1.2.5 Comedy
1.2.6 Tragedy
1.2.7 Rebirth
1.3 The Rule of Three
2 Precursors
3 Reception
4 See also
5 References
6 External links
Summary
The meta-plot
The meta-plot begins with the anticipation stage, in which the hero is called to the adventure to come. This is followed by a dream stage, in which the adventure begins, the hero has some success, and has an illusion of invincibility. However, this is then followed by a frustration stage, in which the hero has his first confrontation with the enemy, and the illusion of invincibility is lost. This worsens in the nightmare stage, which is the climax of the plot, where hope is apparently lost. Finally, in the resolution, the hero overcomes his burden against the odds.[2]

The key thesis of the book: "However many characters may appear in a story, its real concern is with just one: its hero. It is the one whose fate we identify with, as we see them gradually developing towards that state of self-realization which marks the end of the story. Ultimately it is in relation to this central figure that all other characters in a story take on their significance. What each of the other characters represents is really only some aspect of the inner state of the hero himself."

The plots
Overcoming the Monster
Definition: The protagonist sets out to defeat an antagonistic force (often evil) which threatens the protagonist and/or protagonist's homeland.

Examples: Perseus, Theseus, Beowulf, Dracula, The War of the Worlds, Nicholas Nickleby, The Guns of Navarone, Seven Samurai (and its Western remake The Magnificent Seven), James Bond, Star Wars.[2]

Rags to Riches
Definition: The poor protagonist acquires power, wealth, and/or a mate, loses it all and gains it back, growing as a person as a result.

Examples: Cinderella, Aladdin, Jane Eyre, A Little Princess, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, The Prince and the Pauper, Brewster's Millions.[2]

The Quest
Definition: The protagonist and companions set out to acquire an important object or to get to a location. They face temptations and other obstacles along the way.

Examples: The Odyssey, The Pilgrim's Progress, The Lord Of The Rings, King Solomon's Mines, Six of Crows, Watership Down, Lightning Thief, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Voyage and Return
Definition: The protagonist goes to a strange land and, after overcoming the threats it poses or learning important lessons unique to that location, they return with experience.

Examples: Ramayana, Alice in Wonderland, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Orpheus, The Time Machine, Peter Rabbit, The Hobbit, The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, Brideshead Revisited, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Gone with the Wind, The Third Man, The Lion King, Back to the Future.[2]

Comedy
Definition: Light and humorous character with a happy or cheerful ending; a dramatic work in which the central motif is the triumph over adverse circumstance, resulting in a successful or happy conclusion.[3] Booker stresses that comedy is more than humor. It refers to a pattern where the conflict becomes more and more confusing, but is at last made plain in a single clarifying event. The majority of romance films fall into this category.

Examples: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, Bridget Jones's Diary, Music and Lyrics, Sliding Doors, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Big Lebowski.

Tragedy
Definition: The protagonist is a hero with a major character flaw or great mistake which is ultimately their undoing. Their unfortunate end evokes pity at their folly and the fall of a fundamentally good character.

Examples: Macbeth, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Carmen, Bonnie and Clyde, Jules et Jim, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, John Dillinger, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Citizen Kane.[2]

Rebirth
Definition: An event forces the main character to change their ways and often become a better individual.

Examples: Pride and Prejudice, The Frog Prince, Beauty and the Beast, The Snow Queen, A Christmas Carol, The Secret Garden, Peer Gynt, Groundhog Day.[2]

The Rule of Three
Main article: Rule of three (writing)
"Again and again, things appear in threes . . ." There is rising tension and the third event becomes "the final trigger for something important to happen". We are accustomed to this pattern from childhood stories such as Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Cinderella, and Little Red Riding Hood. In adult stories, three can convey the gradual working out of a process that leads to transformation. This transformation can be downwards as well as upwards. Booker asserts that the Rule of Three is expressed in four ways:

The simple, or cumulative three, for example, Cinderella's three visits to the ball.
The ascending three, where each event is of more significance than the preceding, for example, the hero must win first bronze, then silver, then gold objects.
The contrasting three, where only the third has positive value, for example, The Three Little Pigs, two of whose houses are blown down by the Big Bad Wolf.
The final or dialectical form of three, where, as with Goldilocks and her bowls of porridge, the first is wrong in one way, the second in an opposite way, and the third is "just right". [4]
Precursors
William Foster-Harris' The Basic Patterns of Plot sets out a theory of three basic patterns of plot.[5]
Ronald B. Tobias set out a twenty-plot theory in his 20 Master Plots.[5]
Georges Polti's The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations.[5]
Several of these plots can also be seen as reworkings of Joseph Campbell's work on the quest and return in The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Reception
Scholars and journalists have had mixed responses to The Seven Basic Plots. Some have celebrated the book's audacity and breadth. The author and essayist Fay Weldon, for example, wrote the following (which is quoted on the front cover of the book): "This is the most extraordinary, exhilarating book. It always seemed to me that 'the story' was God's way of giving meaning to crude creation. Booker now interprets the mind of God, and analyses not just the novel – which will never to me be quite the same again – but puts the narrative of contemporary human affairs into a new perspective. If it took its author a lifetime to write, one can only feel gratitude that he did it."[6] Beryl Bainbridge, Richard Adams, Ronald Harwood, and John Bayley also spoke positively of the work, while philosopher Roger Scruton described it as a "brilliant summary of story-telling".[7]

Others have dismissed the book, criticizing especially Booker's normative conclusions. Novelist and literary critic Adam Mars-Jones, for instance, wrote, "He sets up criteria for art, and ends up condemning Rigoletto, The Cherry Orchard, Wagner, Proust, Joyce, Kafka and Lawrence—the list goes on—while praising Crocodile Dundee, E.T. and Terminator 2".[8] Similarly, Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times writes, "Mr. Booker evaluates works of art on the basis of how closely they adhere to the archetypes he has so laboriously described; the ones that deviate from those classic patterns are dismissed as flawed or perverse – symptoms of what has gone wrong with modern art and the modern world."[