My Grandmother and the Cuban Missile Crisis by Eli Masket
My ethnographic video piece, “My Grandmother and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” explores the impact of traumatic, life-changing, and historic events on individuals through the experience of my grandmother, Barbara. The introduction of this piece helps situate the viewer within the context of the period, during the early sixties in Miami. Images of nuclear tests are played over sunny archival footage of Miami to juxtapose positive emotions with the harsh possibility of a nuclear holocaust, which was nearly a reality for those who lived through the crisis in 1962.
The piece focuses not only on the lived experience of Barbara but also on how this crisis shaped her worldview and shocked her reality to the core. Also discussed is the idea of desensitization. Barbara posits that while such an experience was traumatic for her generation, were a similar event to happen in modern times, it would likely not cause as much of a shock to the youth. This is likely due in part to our massive exposure to such events, which was not the case in the past. As she puts it, we have become “numb”.
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