Community

Nostalgia // Hook

Hook was much more of a punch in the nostalgic feels than I expected it to be. It’s hardly the film I watched all the time growing up (unlike Homeward Bound) but Spielberg is like the god of nostalgia so I should have known. Spielberg is an auteur whose authorship is marked by media featuring kids, usually kids with parental figure issues, blending of fantasy and reality, and hard hitting nostalgia. Hook is the perfect cocktail of this Spielberg syrup, featuring Robin Williams as an adult Peter Pan. A boy meant to never grow up grows up? Take a twenty two year old on the verge of college graduation and impending real life adulthood who forgot to take her anxiety medication that day and you have a bawling mess.

So let’s get academic: what made Hook so effective, almost formulaically effective, at eliciting such emotion? What is this film’s place in children’s media? Why is nostalgia worthy of study in our exploration of children’s media?

It starts with JM Barrie’s Peter Pan. Every western child knows the story: an eternal boy whisks a growing girl off to Neverland where she can live out her childhood fantasies without the interference of impending adulthood. Mermaids, pirates, Indians, Lost Boys, and fairies co-exist in a world of conflict made to look like child’s play. But then Hook asks the question “what if Peter grew up?” And Peter Pan becomes an absent father, successful lawyer, scared of heights, middle aged man. With this set up, we know we are in for a journey to return to Neverland, to return to Peter Pan, to return to childhood. Hook is about embracing the wonder of childhood, letting go of the adult world, and learning that even in becoming an adult, you don’t really have to grow up. It plays on a deep collective fear: the fear of growing old. My personal deepest fear, and I had forgotten until I saw Robin Williams in the iconic clothing of Peter Pan and was in some way disturbed.

Based on personal experience of this film affecting me more deeply as an adult than as a child, this film is not a film for children, but it is about childhood. I’m not sure Spielberg has ever made a film for children, but he sure has made a lot of films about children. And it’s made him an incredibly successful director. In a way, every experience viewing a film is an experience of nostalgia. By experiencing far away places, happy places, fantastical experience, we are in a sense longing for them, since we are unable to fully experience everything in our limited time and bodies. But what is worse than having never experienced something, is having experienced something you cannot get back. That’s the special brand of Spielberg nostalgia that is so gut-wrenching: a longing for childhood, a universally experienced place, that is long gone. Hook reminds us of this but also allows us to go back and experience that lost childhood again with Peter, allows us to get lost in Neverland again. This is the fundamental link between nostalgia and children’s media, and why this film holds a special place in children’s media. The ultimate peril of adulthood is nostalgia for what was experienced and lost.

Diversity // Witch of Blackbird Pond

“Who would guess," he teased, "that I'd ever see you on a rooftop with straw in your hair?"

Kit giggled. "Are you saying I've turned into a crow?"

"Not exactly." His eyes were intensely blue with merriment. "I can still see the green feathers if I look hard enough. But they've done their best to make you into a sparrow, haven't they?”

***

Kit Tyler is one among the many beloved children’s books protagonists who doesn’t quite fit in the world around her. Displaced from her home in sunny Barbados, to the cold, puritan New England, The Witch of Blackbird Pond is the story of not just conformity and individuality, but of Kit’s navigation of personal identity in regards to her surroundings. For the most part, books like these feature an individualistic protagonist who must learn to navigate a “new normal” which is usually an oppressive institution or environment. Puritan New England is a prime example of this kind of new normal. For the young child reading this book, their New England is school, a new town, church, and other status quo establishments. As a kid reading this book, I identified all too easily with Kit. Craving warmth, understanding, diversity, and acceptance, I cared only for this girl and her older friend who were being accused of witchcraft. “Witch” became synonymous for counter-culture, unique, interesting, me. These narratives of witches among masses validated the moments when I couldn’t sit still in class, when I chose to read Harry Potter during sacrament meeting, or when I neglected my homework so I could play outside. Instead of understanding these things as normal aspects of childhood, I thought they were special parts of my identity, meant to be protected from the adult world and harsh institutions. Kit’s story made it clear that being a sparrow is the worst thing you could be.

Diversity, boiled down to it, is only Me and the Other. Children’s media that deals with themes of diversity, often neglects the Other, instead focusing on telling children that it’s okay to be Me. I can’t imagine any child reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond and identifying with the Puritans, or reading Harry Potter and wanting to be a muggle. Children want to be witches, they want to be anything but the status quo. At least I did. Instead of understanding institutions as man-made establishments that can be altered, I understood them as corrupted, unmoving monoliths that I must reject for my own personal identity. Instead of addressing the issues of public education, I decided to do my learning outside it, just like Kit is eventually unable to compromise her identity with the status quo and decides to return to Barbados. While The Witch of Blackbird Pond was and still is one of my favorite and most important children’s books, I understand now reading it as an adult that while it was nice to relate to tales of other “witches,” it might have been more productive, and more truly diverse, to better understand “the Other” rather than tales about “Me.” An example of media that I think better handles diversity, is Gabriel Axel’s Babette’s Feast, similarly about an outsider in a Puritan town. Instead of rejecting the status quo and flocking to those like her, Babette loves and transforms those around her, ultimately understanding the Other and never fighting them, but rather sharing a beautiful feast with them. This film celebrates both sides, celebrates true diversity, while still questioning the status quo and dealing with the same issues of individuality and conformity.

YouTube Sculpting

Artist's Statement:

White Trash. I've recalled seeing many videos circulating YouTube, usually under the title of "White Trash Fail." These videos show rural white America as violent, uneducated, overweight, reckless, moronic, I mean, you've seen them. I wanted to see if that was really all that was out there, though I must admit, by using this term which has a negative connotation, it makes sense that this is the sort of representation I would get. If I were to type in "ghetto" in a YouTube search, I doubt I would get very flattering representations of the black and Latino communities. But despite finding many of the typical "White Trash" videos, I found a lot of people proud of and trying to defend their white trashiness. That's why I chose to begin with The Apprentice clip, it shows a man trying to claim the label of white trash, but being told by dear old DJT that it is not something to be proud of. This sculpture ranges from people proud of their culture (though sticking to the label of redneck over white trash, something I found to be particularly interesting), people appropriating white trash culture (makeup tutorials, white trash parties), and ending with an alternative view of a community that is ridden with poverty, but hopes and desires to rise out of it. The homemade 4 wheel drive up BBQ banner was the most poignant part of this video. It represents both sides of "white trash:" a duct tape DIY spirit born out of poverty and resourcefulness and a desire to do the best one can in one's circumstance and come together as a community.

Activism

Response to Henry Jenkins' "Avatar Activism"

In his essay on how pop culture icons are appropriated for political activist means, Henry Jenkins points to two terms: "fan-activism" and "participatory culture." These concepts have added a dimension to civic engagement, political protests, and cultural divides that is based in semiotics. What pop culture references do, is act as a universal signifier. Films like Avatar, which received worldwide success, are perfect signifiers because they are multicultural icons, recognized across the globe, and signify a concept that is similarly universal. After V is for Vendetta, protesters wore Guy Fawkes masks, and with this simple cultural reference, their anonymity and cosplaying became political without having to say a word.

Popular culture is also a unifying force, bringing people together because of their common interest in certain media. Unification and solidarity is key in making grassroots political activism successful. Many people criticize certain political movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter because they are unable to develop a centralized group. A single media text with a strong icon or imagery (like the blue Pandorans in Avatar) is a great natural centralizer. Even if political opinions differ within the group, members of the Harry Potter Alliance can look to a text to help interpret injustice, just as Christians turn to the Bible or Americans turn to the Constitution. A central text is key, and why there is so much power in using pop culture.

Media Example:

Here's an interesting thing. Back during the Women's March on Washington I tweeted a thing that references Mad Max: Fury Road. In the film, these women protest by painting on the walls of their oppressor "We are not things." and "Our babies will not be warlords." I re appropriated one of these slogans as a tweet for the women's march, referring to some of the ideas in the film as a way to communicate frustrations in 140 characters or less.

Learning/Literacy

Children's Media: Play

As we discussed the topic of how play functions in childhood and children's media, I started with two questions. 1) Why is play so important for children? Why do we allow children the time and space to play? and 2) What does play look like for adults? In this week's response, I will take you through some of my thought processes, some of the conclusions I came to, and some media examples that support my ideas.

Between mandatory schooling and the occasional chore, a child's time is not bogged down by responsibility, but rather a combination of enjoyment and preparation. Enjoyment, because boredom is the single most terrible thing that can happen for most children, and preparation for the inevitable weight of responsibility that will replace all that fear of boredom. This is probably the basic understanding of what child's play is, but I propose there is something else going on that can extend past childhood and explain the actions and motivations of people of all ages. Certain things, of course, limit leisure and play time like poverty, societal roles, and other limiting circumstances, but each culture, person, and species practices a form of play time that seems to be crucial to developing into an adult and beyond.

Playtime is a testing ground. It's a time where one can simulate future possibilities in a safe space to prepare them for potential challenges. It's a time for creation, to practice building, making, taking and arranging pre-existing materials, developing skills and talents that will one day be crucial to becoming a productive member of the globe. As a child preparing to be adult, you play house, draw pictures, play board games, make up friends and worlds and scenarios. But as an adult, there is still an element of play. There is the type of play such as that in Jacques Tati's Playtime, where he proposes that most of the actions of adults are a type of child's play. If we as adults are doing the same thing as children, just on another level, then what are we preparing for? In Mormon theology, the answer is divinity, as I touched on in class.

So what is it when two young adults join together for a game of Jenga? Morgan and I did as such, and our conclusion? "I'm sure this is more fun when alcohol is involved."

Adults seek escape and release in their leisure time. Drinking, playing video games, exercising, watching TV-- these are all seen as breaks from our main lives which involve social responsibility. What if we were to see these responsibilities as play, the same time we see child's play as their responsibility? Shift the image of work as a necessary evil to work as the creative preparation to advance to a future version of ourselves? Playing Jenga as an adult was amusing with a dash of stress at best, but when it was over Morgan and I had things to look forward to which are the real playtime of being adults. I went home to clean a house, which to me is to create a home, a habitat, environment. Morgan went to hang out with her friends and boyfriend, which is to create memories, relationships, and joy. Playing Jenga was kind of like a church object lesson: sort of amusing, but you get the point real quick and want to move on.

That isn't to say you can't play games as adults, but it has to be self-motivated I think. It comes to mean something else. My favorite times playing games are playing strategy games with my family over the holidays. It's mostly an excuse to spend time together without ending in an argument about politics. I'm at the point in life where I am less interested in playing games than I am in creating them, which is probably how I ended up in film school.

Twine Poetry

Click here to read the poem TO MARGUERITE: CONTINUED by Matthew Arnold.

Artist's Statement

My twine poem combines two important elements to form a style of media driven by the remixing of existing elements. 

1) The Poem

I chose "To Marguerite: Continued" by Matthew Arnold as my source material. Initially it was the poem I immediately jumped to because it just so happens to be my favorite poem. Then as I recited the poem in my head, I realized that there were places in the poems I naturally separated that could lend itself well to the twine format of text existing on different pages. These separations were sometimes words, lines, or stanzas, or several stanzas. It was just how I read the poem personally, with a certain pacing that I wanted to reflect in how I chose to divide the poem. 

When I formatted it for Twine, I was more interested in using the clicking function to control the pace of the poem rather than to offer the audience choices like a traditional Twine game. By choosing how to divide the poem, whether or not to include additional elements like images or sound, I could further enhance the mood and tone of the poem. This is essential to remixing. Artists remix to provide new information or interpretation of an existing text. Often this includes both adding to the text and deconstructing it. For this assignment, I had to really deconstruct the source material before I could create something out of it. As I figured out how to break up the text, I realized a component of the poem that I love so much is the sensory descriptions. I knew I needed to pair a visual element to the poem to take it further. So we now have an element of changing the pace and breaks in the poem, making it digital and more cross-temporal, and now it was time to bring in added material.

2) The Images

I initially tried including stock images with the text but found that it didn't work. It made the text flat instead of dynamic. As I was searching for an image that would visualize loneliness, I suddenly remembered a painting by my favorite artist, Rene Magritte. Magritte's paintings often feature self-portraits that obscure his face in some way, distancing himself from the viewer. I thought of a particular painting where he faces away from the viewer underneath a crescent moon. Loneliness. As I continued to read and re-read the poem, I recalled several Magritte paintings that nicely complemented Arnold's work. Arnold's poem is about people as islands, desiring connection but separated by the sea, and an anger at the God that designed this. There are similar themes in Magritte's work, I think particularly of his work "The Lovers" which feature a couple kissing, but they have cloth over their faces and are unable to really touch. Arnold's poem predates Magritte's work by a hundred years, which further adds a cross-temporal element to my remix. This cross-temporal quality extends from Arnold, to Magritte, to myself, to the reader. While Arnold wrote the text, Magritte did the paintings, and I arranged and ordered them, the user/reader plays a part in taking in the text and images, deciding when to click, and ultimately deciding duration of experience and the meaning of the work. The time that separates all these contributing individuals, is in some ways like the sea that separates islands in Arnold's poem. We are connected through this art, through the universality of its theme, but can only really experience a trace of each other. There is no real inter-personal interactions, just  traces of ourselves left in our work that call out like the bird's song. 

Experimentation // Alice

In the years of trying to understand art, and what art is, and what qualifies as art, I have found the theory that most resonates with me at this point in my life is best summed up by Viktor Shklovsky: “The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar," to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important…” This idea is also theorized by Stan Brakhage, who points to the idea of making the camera like the eye of a bee or of an infant-- images without a habitualized meaning, images that force us to work in order to encounter them. Experimentation, like in the scientific world, is the catalyst for progressive movement in the arts and humanities. This movement tends to be cyclical: a work is produced, similar works are produced as a result, this method becomes tired, experimentation happens and a new kind of work is produced, repeat. This desire to break away from convention, to be avant-garde, often considered “weird” by the general public, is how culture evolves. Sometimes avant-garde is a return to tradition or a complete re-examining of fundamental definitions and frameworks. However it comes about, the avant-garde has found a new safe space in the modern era: children’s media. As we have counterbalanced child labor of the industrial era, we have assigned all sorts of effervescent and radical associations to childhood. Childhood is play, imagination, colorfulness, abstraction, impressionistic. These, as it turns out, are associations often assigned to art as well. We find it so important to allow our children to experiment in their youth: we give them paint and reward them with cheers and a photograph anytime they do anything out of the ordinary. Nothing is more amusing and worthy of celebration than a child putting a saucepan on their head. As adults, this kind of avant-garde behavior is seen as inappropriate and weird. As we have reserved this experimental behavior for childhood, we have also created a space for avant-garde artists to go: they can get away with pretty much anything if it’s in the name of child entertainment. And so Lewis Carroll wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 and Jan Svankmajer adapted it into the surrealist czech retelling Alice (1988).

Alice cleverly passes as children’s media simply because it is an adaptation of a classic children’s piece, but it seems as though Svankmajer had no intention of creating a film meant for children. His intention goes back to the purpose of art and the avant-garde: to take a well known story and make it new again. To take a century old medium and make it “unfamiliar.” To create art. Alice mixes live action and stop motion. Alice is both a young girl and a porcelain doll. Puppets, paper cut outs, objects, and humans are mixed together in a world more fantastic and bizarre than any rendition of the classic tale out there.

Although Svankmajer may have been less interested in creating a children’s film than he was in creating art, he definitely displays a fondness for children, and this film seems to act as an ode of gratitude for the way children are able to easily abstract objects on their own and for the safe space their imaginations have created for artists like himself. The beginning scene shows young Alice sitting outside with an adult. Alice is the prominent figure in the frame and the adult is unmoving with her head cut off by the frame. Alice then talks directly into the camera as the opening titles are shown. Not only does this immediate tip the power structure to Alice, even when the adult slaps her hand, but several conventions are being broken and associated with Alice. This child, this world, and this film are set up to be different from what we are used to. Alice is our gatekeeper, perhaps the artist himself, into a world more fitting for a girl bored with her life in the English countryside who isn’t scared of breaking the fourth wall.

This is a small example of the experimentation that is this entire film. It would be easy to encounter this film and simply write it off as ‘bizarre’ but the true gift of this film is when you fully examine it as if a child, engage with it, seek to understand it, and ultimately become part of the avant-garde tradition.

Documentation // Little House in the Big Woods

As a college student, I often find myself floating. I’m exposed to so many new ideas, concepts, and visions that I tend to often dwell in an abstract, intellectual world. As I lose myself in this world, I forget how important the physical world is. The physical world is the world I explored as a child as I ran barefoot in grass, stacked rocks, built snow forts, ate fluorescent orange mac and cheese, and grew bean plants in my backyard. My memory, another component of the abstract world, is unfortunately the only documentation I have of these times. But when I come across physical archival footage of my childhood, an old journal, a photograph, or a drawing, and immediately I am grounded. I am anchored down from the floating world and remember I was once a child in a small body that broke bones, scraped knees, and touched Earth. One particular physical artifact that does this, is my hardback copy of Little House in the Big Woods. The stories of Laura Ingalls transcend time because the pages contain more than ideas, they contain soil, labor, life, textile, and trees. This book is a reminder that the physical world and childhood cannot be separated, and that the documentation of this is what will keep us grounded as adults prone to drifting to the floating world.

Little House in the Big Woods differs from other children’s books in several ways that might account for its longevity. It’s autobiographical, yet the author distances herself from the narrative by telling the story in third person. The book starts with a very brief introduction then dives into descriptions of everyday life for the Ingalls family in their cabin in the middle of the woods far away from civilization. The book is filled almost completely with rich descriptions of smoking meat, churning butter, woodworking, sewing, telling stories, and fond memories of Ma, Pa, Mary, and baby Carrie. Laura Ingalls Wilder writes fondly about particular objects, like Pa’s rifle and her corn husk doll, spending as much time on them if not more as she does when describing her family. She offers a vivid description of the life of a young girl growing up in the Midwest in the 1870s. However, unlike The Diary of Anne Frank this text was written later on in Wilder’s life and is not a perfect documentation of a reality. By choosing to write in third person, Wilder is writing a character that is separate from her, one that is a representation of her memories of childhood rather than a representation of who she is. In fact, in Little House in the Big Woods Laura reads as a ghost or perhaps an extension of ourselves, the reader. She is not characterized in strong ways like other things in the book are. We understand Pa to be playful, humorous, and a bit rough. Jack the dog is protective and loyal, always watching out for the presence of wolves. It’s not as easy to characterize Laura, because perhaps the real life Laura didn’t think to characterize the gatekeeper of these memories or maybe purposefully left Laura ambiguous as a way of allowing her to be any girl-- any girl who might read this book.

This semi-fictionalization of the book Laura is an interesting example of how children’s media, that is, media intended for children about children, is authored by adults and may or may not truly depict the realities of childhood. Laura had to write her story from memories that were crafted sixty years prior and had to recall the rich details that are the grammar of this story. She has had sixty years to reflect on her childhood and filter it through age, experience, and a sea of other memories. Yet, Little House in the Big Woods is fresh and vivid. It feels like a current experience, even for a reader in 1980, 2004, or 2017. How is it that so many adults occupy a floating world and Wilder was able to craft a story about her childhood that acts as a bridge between childhood and adulthood, both for the writer and the reader? It is the precise act of documenting the bright, rich physical details from our childhood. The accurateness of chronology or words is immaterial, but her attention to the smell of smoking pork, the bright red calico dress, the taste of a lemon, and the sound of Pa’s fiddle shows that it is these very real, very physical things that are truly childhood, and when we document we are bridging the gap between that and adulthood. As adults we may conceptualize our childhoods, assign them judgment values, or extrapolate significance, but Little House in the Big Woods could not have functioned as a children’s book if Wilder had talked about the abstract meanings of her memories. Children quite frankly don’t care, they don’t know of the floating world yet except for the moments they escape to The Big Woods in Wisconsin, and even that still feels very real to them.

The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T

Platform/Structure

In their discussion of Platform Studies, Bogost and Montfort reveal new academic insight into “the underlying computer systems that support creative work” rather than the creative media that is meant to be played by the user. They break down their discussion by highlighting common misconceptions about what Platform Studies is or might be. As someone who has never considered that there could or should be an area of studies devoted to the technology that allows digital creative work to function, here is what I learned and found interesting.

Platform Studies is less interested in determining whether something is or isn’t a platform, though the criteria they give is “Is it programmable?,” but rather it asks the question “Is it an important platform? Is it significant? What is its significance?” Then you connect the social impact of the platform with its function as a platform. As I was reading through this, I thought of the website Neopets, where there is a feature where you can create a guild and a guild webpage using HTML. Using this website as a kid taught me HTML, and I have come to find that many of my peers have had the same experience. Neopets, specifically this guild feature, is not just a platform, but it is a platform worthy of study because of its potential wide impact on my generation. The way Neopets is designed and set up has not changed much from 2004 when I was playing it, and the set up requires the user to explore, learn, and even program some. Though technically there might be some noteworthy things happening with Neopets, what Platform Studies seems to be more concerned with is the cultural impact with a supporting focus on hardware/software. While this phenomena that I have identified could be studied outside the scope of understanding it as a “platform” what using this framework allows us to do is essentially marry social impact and technology in what Bogost and Montfort refer to as “soft” technological determinism, meaning that technology and social reception influence each other, rather than technology being the sole driving force of social change. My taking this technological humanities view, it is important to understand both the tech/digital stuff (though you don’t necessarily have to be a programmer as they point out) and connect these digital platforms with particular cultural trends and occurrences, as I have briefly illustrated with my Neopets example.  

Gif Cinema: Artist's Statement

Gifs are a medium that exists somewhere between still and moving image. It differs from cinema in that they are much shorter format and are looped, meaning that they repeat their sequence endlessly. Gifs are more self-contained than film but offer more information, movement, and versatility than a photograph. Gifs also only exist digitally, as they are a specific file format. A gif cannot be really printed and hung on your wall or played in a movie theatre. (Though one is a physical limitation and the other a convention.) Perhaps more so than the looping nature of the gif, is this aspect of gifs interesting to me. As with all mediums, there are certain conventions associated with and applied to the usage of gif images. They are used online, most often as a way of heightening or clarifying expression of language on the internet. Like emojis they can portray emotion or add humor and nuance. Some gifs are used as a way of digitally displaying sequences from cinematic media on the internet without the commitment and inconvenience of video clips. Like most new and emerging media, however, the practical use of the gif is only beginning to make way for the storytelling potential of the gif. In the producing of this gif cinema project, our class is joining those who seek to push the boundaries of new mediums. In my own interpretation, I wanted to play off of the traditional usage of gifs to create a narrative similar to how The Blair Witch Project uses documentary conventions to tell a fictional story. I also stayed in the vein of horror. The low quality, slow frame rate aspect of gifs allows for a lot of potential when it comes to horror, hence my gifs of the girl staring into the camera, or the invisible shape moving in the woods. Horror can be more terrifying if it feels real, so I imagined an internet user coming across a true crime/horror story and posting his or her findings on imgur/reddit. I wanted to mimic the way people present stories on the internet, often using gifs as evidence and a tool to build up and draw out the story. In some ways I was able to do it successfully, but the problem with gifs is that they must come from some sort of footage that begins as motion picture. I wasn't quite able to get the footage I wanted, so I had to be crafty and borrow some things from the internet, which worked out, because it's what my fictional author/narrator would have to do, and curating the gifs is part of the conventions of the medium.