On the outskirts of downtown Hanoi,
there's a neighborhood where a train runs through the front yards. To the average tourist there isn't much to see here.
But to a photographer, it's a blessing. It's gritty. It's poor. It's
real, man. And
to the photographers who come here, there's a well-known resident. He's the angry one -- the one who comes out yelling, swinging a broom.
Tourists are his enemy. He just wants them to go away.
But he has no power here. It's public property and the tourists aren't going anywhere, though that doesn't stop him from trying.
Because this is his home.
He's the poverty that we're trying to capture -- to symbolize and take home with us to show our friends, to hang in galleries.
He's the gnarled old face that we consider a great shot.
A window into humanity's soul.
But he absolutely hates us.
Today's story is a long time coming. For our last episode of season two, we wanted to turn the camera back on ourselves
and have you help us answer a fundamental question.
What is "Rare Earth"? It seems like I would know, right? Like, I make the series. Presumably if anybody knows what we are,
it's me, but I don't... at least not fully.
Before Japan neither Francesco nor I had made anything like this. Yet here
we are. We're not vloggers talking about our day
and we're not YouTube gossip videos talking from the safety of our living room about what bad behavior other YouTubers are up to.
We want this series to be different -- better even, because I believe in this platform.
Most people don't like to think of the world in terms of exploitation, specifically when it comes to tourism.
But a great deal of tourism relies on exploitation, at least to a certain extent.
Documentaries are no different. When we make videos on hard topics, what we're usually looking for is an emotional symbol -- something real.
The skull of a child to represent genocide, a poor farmer to show the world's
Inequality or elephant abuse as an analogue for our treatment of the environment.
We try to highlight the things that you, the audience ,would react to and understand, even if you've never experienced them.
But to do so, we have to film them and that's
exploitation. To put it another way, the difference between what we are on my end and what we are in yours
is that you don't have to see the man swinging the broom.
You don't have to choose to ignore him, because I've already done it for you.
So this video is dedicated to him, and to the open question of what we are.
What makes a story journalism? Is it the outlet that released it? Is it the subject matter? Is VICE a news organization
or do they make viral videos?
What makes a documentary if not staring into a camera and speaking in a somber tone? Is a
vlogger a person, a job or a style?
I don't know. I personally wouldn't consider myself a journalist or a real documentarian.
I make videos that are meant to help people understand the world.
But the world doesn't always want to be understood.
Inevitably we're going to cause offence.
I want to talk about something that happened to us in Japan. It's the background to a story that we really shouldn't tell...
Or maybe we should. I don't know
When researching I'd seen an NHK documentary about a place
that was so raw, so real,
it had to be seen to be believed.
A man had lost his cousin and was having a hard time coming to terms with it. In his grief
he built a telephone booth in his yard and when things were too tough
he'd head out and, as he put it, dial the wind. He'd talk with his cousin.
After the tsunami, tens of thousands of Japanese people were looking for somewhere to turn and he opened up his telephone to the public.
Many came, quietly and by themselves, to listen to the dead.
An incredible story, a beautiful emotion and something we can all understand.
But we won't ever make that video.
A website by the name of Atlas Obscura found out about the telephone and added it to their list of strange places to visit in Japan.
Someone then put it on Google Maps as a museum.
Naturally, foreign tourists began to arrive.
They weren't there to use the phone
They were there to capture the emotion -- to take away a piece of the symbol and bring it home with them.
And we were among them.
But we weren't wanted there. The owner quickly kicked us out and told us to never return.
She despised the internet for giving away her secrets and spewed out a number of racist terms against us on the way out.
She didn't want foreigners to know the telephone story. It wasn't theirs to know
But that's the question, isn't it? What gives us the right to talk about anything -- especially hard things --
foreign things. How can I discuss Cambodia's genocide, but not a telephone?
Is it because I met the person it's offending?
I don't know the answer, but I do know that by making a video on either story, I'm denying someone's wishes.
There's an old man swinging a broom in the background, but in not telling that story, I'm denying your right to hear it.
I'm essentially saying that the subject decides the documentation -- that we won't
investigate those who don't want to be investigated. And is that right or is that a cop-out?
Should we stand back from our stories, or are we a part of them because this is YouTube, because we lived it?
Was our video on Yasukuni Shrine
better because they told us not to film? Or was it worse?
I don't know.
For some, the answer lies in money -- an exchange of goods and services -- a sort of mutual exploitation.
So let's look at another example from when we visited the Hmong village in Phonsavan.
They've opened their doors to tourists in exchange for a few dollars and have built a small
Potemkin house for visitors to come and witness what they once were ... what there were before the tourists came.
And there's no denying it felt exploitative.
Children were pushed to play old games and tools of dead society were put to work for our cameras. Total cost --
six dollars. But it felt wrong. It wasn't real. The footage
we got was no different from filming in a museum. The emotion, the rawness of reality, whatever you want to call it,
it was stripped away.
But by paying them we'd turned them into actors. They were now showing us an act and
without that man swinging in the background, we realized we were painting a false picture.
Unless something changed, this story was going to be
incomplete.
But the moment the drone came out, all that changed. The community wanted to see our toy and
dozens of children came running out to play.
They were no longer acting because we were no longer paying. But over the next half an hour
we stripped away that surreal and got a face of genuine Hmong life --normal children, normal adults,
just playing with a toy.
It was by far our favorite part of the experience because we got to capture what we really came for -- true emotion.
We were able to exploit the village's reality without paying anything in return, and it made a better video.
So,
what is Rare Earth? Well, to me,
it's the symbols that define our world, not the individuals, not the people, but the symbols they represent.
it's the children who fell to the nuclear bombs, the rats who died for science, the folk legends that let us know our weaknesses and
the child soldiers who grow up to be heroes. It's all of us.
Which brings me back here, to the tracks of Hanoi, filming in a neighborhood where somebody hates me.
I've got footage of him, but I won't show it, because as important as he is to this story, he's better left unseen.
Perhaps the answer is that we'll always have to exploit someone, even if it's never really about them. After all,
he's just a symbol.
He doesn't need to be real. His existence only matters to me insofar as it speaks to something deeper -- the story around him.
And the only way to show that, as far as I see it, is to let him swing silently in the background.
Maybe I'm wrong. This is Rare Earth. Thanks for watching, everybody. See you next season.
If the train comes, you're gonna let me know, right?