Imagined Community

Reflections on the documentary film “Home”

An Accidental Encounter

I have been haunted by the idea of the imagined community ever since an accidental encounter many years ago.

I was paying a month-long visit to see a life-long friend in Europe. He was an expatriate Canadian who migrated to work in Ireland, his ancestral home. One day, towards the end of my stay, I phoned my dear Uncle Victor and asked him for directions to his hometown. He told me to travel to Trieste then south towards a river called Canal di Leme. This would bring me close to a tiny Italian village, impossible to find on most maps, called “Villa Sossi.” He told me that when I eventually arrived in town I should knock on the first door that I find and say “Victor is my Uncle and Carlo is my father. Are we related?” With youthful folly, limited directions, and wishes for success tinged with ambivalence I could not fully understand until much later, I departed on an inner journey which has helped me come to better appreciate my uncle, family and who I am.

An Imagined Community of the Smallest Scale

Benedict Anderson writes eloquently about the idea of the nation in his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. He defined the nation as an “imagined political community — and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (Anderson, 1991, pp. 5–6). I learned of Villa Sossi mainly through long-form oral narratives from Uncle Victor, a gifted storyteller. Although they were not technically Homeric in form, his stories of war, and tragedy seemed epic in scope, especially from the perspective of a beguiled youngster. Victor did not share many photographs or letters, the typical artifacts used to communicate the historic nature of a place. In retrospect, it appears that the lack of physical representations helped contribute to the mythical nature and epic qualities I subconciously imputed to Villa Sossi. Conveying a sense of place based largely on oral description and almost completely divorced from tangible artifacts forced me to conceive of this place as a mental construct without physical form. As a result, I was forced to create my own personal imagined community. Villa Sossi, its people and their lives, felt like a living breathing entity to me, but only within the inner space of my mind. Anderson’s national scope was shrunk down to the scale of a village.

Despite its inherently abstract nature, the imagined community of Villa Sossi embodied itself most concretely in the form of my Uncle Victor. He also appears to be the source of most of my dissonance in terms of my own sense of national identity. More specifically, despite his thick Italian accent and social mores shaped largely from this distant land, Victor’s national identity is essentially a duality. He was born and raised Italian, but normally identifies himself as being Canadian after several decades of citizenship.

I recently came to what may be considered a rather simplistic realization. People have a tendency to replicate the behavior of their parents and caregivers but within the context of their own lives. In a more concrete example, the way a child behaves in her life would have a tendency to be remarkably similar to how her parent would behave faced with the same circumstances.

Following this notion, one reason I find the idea of the imagined community so intriguing is the analogous development of a perceived duality in the conception of my own personal national identity. More specifically, after spending a couple of years in England and adopting a more detached view of myself that appeared to have come from being a visitor in that foreign land, I came to the realization that my national identity is also dual in nature. I feel like I am Canadian in that I value abstract notions like equality that are enshrined in our Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. For example, section 15 of the Charter enshrines equality rights in the provision of government services (Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 1982, section 15). Simultaneously, I also came to the realization that I feel stereotypically Italian in terms of being more effusive than many people I know. By visiting Villa Sossi, the stories and images that filled my childhood imagination became real. And what also became more real was an associated sense of confusion about my national identity — again, this sense of duality in who I am, where I come from and how they shaped me. I feel that from living abroad and experiencing the social milieu of Villa Sossi, I have replicated my uncle’s fragmentary sense of his own notions of national identity but within the different context of my own life.

Anderson’s conception of an imagined community is explicitly political. He conceives of the nation as being an imagined mental construct connected to a shared sense of political identity. Anderson specifically chose the word “limited” because he believes nations have “finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations” (Anderson, 1991, p. 7).

However, in the process of making my personal documentary video “Home,” it appears that in terms of my imagined familial community, the only thing that was limited was its shared original geographical boundaries. My uncle, father and the inhabitants of Villa Sossi all share this common place of origin and the behavioral norms, emotional ties and cultural references that make up its social fabric. And one of the most intriguing developments has been how unlimited and universal everything else that results from it has appeared to have become.

For example, what I feel is one of the most poignant scenes in “Home” is when I meet my older cousin Eufemia for the first time. She welcomes me, the nephew of Uncle Victor and son of my father Carlo, to Villa Sossi. Towards the end of the greeting she becomes overly emotional and starts to cry. The imagined community of Villa Sossi had become fragmented due to poverty, hardship and the scourge of war, leading to the departure of her sons and daughters. But somehow my presence helped it become a more emotionally complete place, at least for a few fleeting days. As the relative of two of the community’s sons, my return activated a number of latent emotions that had rested below the surface for many decades. And the palpable presence of an emotional undercurrent between myself and people I had never met before indicated how relatively unlimited the intensity of our emotional connection had become. Through my visit, the imagined community of Villa Sossi became more tangible.

Creating a Personal Video Documentary: Interrogating the Past and Its Effect on the Imagined Community

Our presence effects an environment, it is just a matter of degree. Two experiences after finishing “Home” made me realize how the creation of a well-intentioned historical artifact aimed at developing familial understanding had unintentional consequences.

First, after my trip I screened “Home” for my Uncle Victor. His reaction was almost entirely negative. It took me some time to begin to understand his response. Although television is characterized by McLuhan as being a cool medium (McLuhan, 1963, 36), its relative “hotness” in terms of extending one single sense in high definition (McLuhan, 1963, 36) created a visual depiction of Victor’s past that appeared to be too “real” for him. Screening footage of people unseen for many decades produced images that Victor perceived as living ghosts. These distant relatives were alive but the demands of life weathered them, changing his deeply ingrained impression of their last encounter. I think this experience was simply too real for my uncle. His imagined community, almost exclusively experienced through memory, was more comforting than a concretely captured audio-visual representation.

Second, upon revisiting Villa Sossi, I had a better appreciation for the impact of the documentary-making process on its subjects. The first time I visited, I had just finished a broadcast television production course, purchased equipment and needed to explore this story. Years later, my sensitivity to the potentially negative effects of media on people’s lives made me hesitate in shooting more footage. Somehow, I had begun to conceive of the act of capturing and manipulating media footage as negatively altering the imagined community I had physically entered. A sanctity in human relations is better preserved when sensitive questions are not asked and awkward silences are allowed to resolve themselves at their own pace. A compelling filmed artifact of a special community is valuable. But is it more valuable than leaving a beloved community in its pristine untouched nature?

Conclusion

Benedict Anderson conceived of the nation as an explicitly imagined political community. However, my own experiences with Villa Sossi have demonstrated how this concept can shift to smaller, micro-level communities that are connected through emotional rather than political bonds. My Uncle’s difficulty in engaging his imagined community at a more concrete level raises a difficult challenge — how can we help him successfully move between these two levels of community?

References

Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. New York, NY: Verso.

Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982) Schedule B to the Canada Act 1982 (U.K.) 1982, c. 11, Constitution Act, 1982, which came into force on April 17, 1982.

McLuhan, M. (1963). Understanding media: The extensions of man. New York, NY: Signet Books.