Framing Reality
The Work of Perceiving and Naming Our World
How does perception “make” our experience and reality?
Much of storytelling and filmmaking is ultimately about this question. After all, how we see determines how we live. If you’ve got the wrong frame on things, you’ll have a wrong perspective—and that skewed or broken perspective will ultimately color how you live your life.
Think of It’s a Wonderful Life, the classic holiday film. George’s framing of things “orients” him, often for the worse. When he sees his home, family, and community through a passive and negative lens—as a series of surrenders to the inevitable and unchosen—his life feels wasted. Clarence, the guardian angel, has to teach George a new perspective on things. He does so by giving George a radically new frame: one that staggers and subverts his perception of things.
It’s perhaps fitting (more than I realized) to watch Laura Dunn’s “Look and See: Further” in the month of January, when we are all tempted to various works of reframing and reorientation (some good, others less than helpful). Ultimately, this film series considers the Berrys’ vision of life, place, and work. In that focus, Laura teaches her viewers much about creation and its call to chosen perception.
The question we must ask ourselves is a question Wendell asks throughout both this series and his work:
What frame are you going to choose?
This post is part of a January series on Laura Dunn’s “Look and See: Further”—a cinematographic exploration of Wendell and Tanya Berry, and their agricultural community in Kentucky. You are welcome to watch the series along with me, but do not need to do so in order to participate in the conversation below!
