https://theartofappropriation.wordpress.com/
Here is the link to my final project
https://theartofappropriation.wordpress.com/
Here is the link to my final project
Hi, everyone! This is the final version of my appropriation film “A Story of the Divorce of the Last Emperor”. Eventually I get the access to add the English subtitles to my video. Sorry for posting so lately on the blog.
At the beginning of the video, there is a silent video clip of the emperor and his concubine at the court for the suit of divorce. This clip is originally recorded as the last emperor, Puyi, acted as the witness in a military court for Japan’s aggression against China. Watching the video, I suddenly got the idea that maybe I could use some of the elements in this video in my appropriation film so that the viewers could see the scene in which the emperor and his concubine, Wenxiu, made their presence in the court for the divorce suit. That was the original idea of this project!
After some searching of lots of documentaries on the life of the last emperor and his concubines, I found a short video clip of Li Yuqin, the fourth wife of Puyi, also the last concubine of him as an emperor. This video was originally a short interview with Li Yuqin carried out in the historical museum of Manchukuo. I thought that maybe I could use it in another interview in which the hostess can asked this concubine some questions about the divorce of Puyi and his second concubine, Wenxiu. As to the contents of this appropriation film, I think I could use the contents of another documentary in which the hostess tells a lot about the divorce of the last emperor. So the hostess’s voice will be appropriated in my film as the voice of Li Yuqin, the last concubine of the emperor. I will play the part of the hostess in my interview and I will ask Li Yuqin some questions about the divorce. So I write all kinds of questions according to the materials of the documentary and then recorded my voice, appropriating it into my film.
With the audio clip of my film, I begin to edit the video. I try to make a match between the video and the audio so that the viewers can experience the real scene of history as they hear the voice telling the story of the past. I cut some related scenes from various sources and then combine them together to make the appropriation film. This process could be kind of challenging since sometimes we cannot exactly find the materials to match the real story. We have to fill the gaps of history by using some other materials related to the topic, though not exactly get to the point. Also as I am watching a lot of videos on the stories of last emperor, I see that there are lots of documentaries using the fragments from some historical films or TV series to fill the gap of history. These scenes are, after all, the fake ones. I understand that some of the programs intend to inspire the imagination of the viewers by doing that. But I do think that there exist the possibilities to use the real documentaries to represent history in a faithful way. What I am doing in my appropriation film is to use all kinds of real materials to tell the story of the past.
Post Illa Verba: https://postillaverba.wordpress.com/
My final project attempts to recontextualize marginalia by transposing them (via Photoshop) onto other, unrelated texts. Part I juxtaposes commentary on William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience with a mathematical treatise on analytical methods. Part III juxtaposes the notes from a student’s copy of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room with pages from Woolf’s collected letters, specifically the letters written immediately prior to her suicide. (Part II, when it is completed, is going to be a juxtaposition of a graduate student’s — not my — notes on a critical essay transposed onto a piece of poetry.)
I’m concerned here with the conditions of display and with the issue of context: should I tell the stories? Should I cite the source text? Part III stands better alone; Part I doesn’t.
Some brief larger thoughts this is intended to raise:
1. Do marginalia have to be authentic to carry some sort of affective value? The Photoshopping is sometimes, unfortunately, still clear — how does this affect the way it is noticed?
2. Marginalia as “co-reading”: how aware are we of the effects of marginalia/commentary on our reading of a text? Does this change if it is our own vs. others’? Does the quality of the marginalia change that? Does having our attention drawn to it change that?
3. Marginalia as anything other than individual, temporary, & intentional — i.e. the scholar’s research into their subject’s personal library, the annoyance at other people’s notes in a used/course book — are a function of the current market for books: cheap, often resold/circulated, paper texts.
For this project, I appropriated one of eight oral history interviews with Lottie Kaplan Spitzer, a woman who immigrated to the United States and worked as a garment worker and union organizer in Chicago during the 1910s. The original half-hour interview, collected by Senior Honors and the Feminist History Research Project and made publicly available through the California State University Long Beach’s Virtual Oral/Aural History Archive, covers Spitzer’s experiences navigating the job market, learning skills in various garment factories, and enduring the long hours, meager wages, and harassment that many workers (particularly women) were subject to at that time.
By dicing and reordering audio from the original interview, this project offers a reimagined oral history that dramatizes the sometimes hostile work environment that Spitzer experienced as well as her response and relationship to both the individuals and conditions of that environment. The conflicts in the original interview (such as slapping her boss in response to sexual harassment and disappointing her highly educated father by working in a factory) are spun to highlight the presence of men’s power in her life but also her defiance of that power.
While I have spent some time removing background noise, the audio could still use some refining to clarify the voices and hide “the stitches” between audio clips. Though, I appreciate some of the moments where the cohesiveness of the storytelling voice falters and becomes disjointed.
As for the theoretical implications of this project, some questions that are currently on my mind include:
This project features archival video and audio footage of chimpanzees performing in a 1950’s circus act. The original video clip is from the 1950’s, produced by Castle Films and was 8 minutes and 24 seconds long. I went in and chose those parts of the footage I wanted to use, and sliced and rearranged them so my final product is just under four minutes long.
Incorporated throughout this video are audio clips from multiple interviews of primatologist Jane Goodall, as well as interviews of other animal rights activists and philosophers including Charles Magel, Wayne Pacelle, and Peter Singer. The audio clips used date from the 1970’s through the present. The video footage has been fragmented and video clips have been moved out of order, slowed down, or sped up at various points for desired effect. The audio clips used seek to work in ironic juxtaposition with the original video content, and raise questions regarding “speciesism,” keeping wild animals in captivity, and the use of such animals for human entertainment and profit.
The ultimate goal of this project is to explore the historic use and presentation of wild animals in entertainment while causing viewers to reflect upon the exploitation of non-human animal species for human profit and entertainment.
I felt that the project as I conceived it was slightly overambitious for a novice with this software. There were many other clips I wanted to include, and an entire extra segment strictly exploring the use of elephants in the circus that I may very well add as a second “chapter.”
Here’s a link to an in-progress draft of my project. My goals are to create an experience similar to Tracing the Decay of Fiction: Encounters with a Film by Pat O’Neill: an interactive database narrative that promotes interactivity and the awareness of several choices that the user could make (Baron, 160).
In my project, I wanted to allow the user as much choice as possible when exploring a single archival document: a 1972 Mcdonald’s employee training video. When it wasn’t possible to provide choice, I tried to reveal my process in exploring the video.
When navigating the project, click on the blue links to either follow my exploration, watch the whole video, watch Mcdonald’s commercials from the 1970s, or go see my description of how the exploration was made so that you could, possibly, create your own exploration.
Through this project, I hope to examine the limitations of choice and the various ways that an archival video can be experienced when it is dissected and examined subjectively.
Note: There are a lot of bugs. I haven’t yet figured out how to link directly to internet sources—these failed links are observed by the links highlighted red. Also, some links don’t connect to the correct story element, leading the user to a blank page that says: “click here to edit”. If you hit a dead end you can click on the curved arrow in the left hand corner to backtrack. Also, most screens have a “go back to intro” option (but the link may not always work).
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