Field Report #1 - Waiting For Godot in New Orleans & Baghdad in No Particular Order

Paul Chan’s Waiting for Godot in New Orleans and Baghdad in No Particular Order are both uncommon media pieces, but they are very different. Waiting for Godot and Baghdad both have community-oriented themes in them, but the mediums in which Chan shows the communities differ.
In Baghdad Chan follows pre-U.S. occupation Iraqi’s around their daily lives. The footage that he shot was then edited with no commentary by himself or anyone who wasn’t directly filmed while in Baghdad. Many of the scenes are long shots of groups singing, praying, and dancing together. There is also footage of a pro-Saddam rally, and other portraits of more ordinary life in Baghdad.
Waiting for Godot was a play put on by Chan and several organizers from New Orleans’s Ninth Ward and the Classical Theater of Harlem. They put on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in the middle of an intersection in the hurricane ravaged Ninth Ward, as well as at an abandoned house in Gentilly.
Baghdad in No Particular Order does just what its name implies; it shows pre-occupation Iraq in no particular order, allowing the viewer to watch without having a narrative or storyline to follow. It’s an interesting film in that when one thinks of a documentary, the thought of a storyline or a persuasive voice doesn’t ring as loud and clear as with a fictional film. Yet when Chan shows his film without a real guided message, a clearer and larger picture of Baghdad and it’s people appears. Chan allows the community in which he showcases be filmed and shown as they are.
Waiting for Godot in New Orleans is different in that it was a fictional story, but setting in a very real place, with such heartbreak and devastation carried along with it, makes it’s fiction questionable. The purpose of putting on the play in the destroyed neighborhood was to lift the community up and present something real to them where they live. To bring something to the people of New Orleans, when they’ve had so much taken away, could make even the most fictional of theater come to real and present life.
Both the film and the play were, in the end, about reality. Baghdad in No Particular Order showcased the real lives of Iraqi’s without as little bias as possible. To allow the viewer to see a true documentary, it felt as thought the viewer could learn more that way instead of being fed a message. Waiting for Godot in New Orleans was reality based in its community atmosphere and coming together for a real cause. Paul Chan does an excellent job of showcasing the real.