Monthly Archives: November 2015

The video essay “Dust Off” effectively made me very uncomfortable, which was my first reaction and feeling while watching it. While the music influenced this, it was hugely the visuals as well, which I admit I didn’t quite understand why some were used at certain times.

The third part stood out to me most at 4:00 with the jellyfish. This part was on a boy who died of erotic asphyxiation, and the underwater shots made me think of suffocation and darkness. The content of what she was talking about was eerie enough, but the visuals showed another side to what she was saying–how the boy felt. She didn’t say what it felt like when he died, or how he was feeling–just the facts of how it all went down. The underwater visuals showed a suffocating and trapped feeling, the jellyfish signaling your brain to think of “danger” in something that looks creepy and unsafe and that can hurt you.

That followed by the ending scene (which was used as the same clip to open the video essay) really brought the entire video full circle. It shows three toddler swings in the park–one for each boy who died. They’re covered in snow. Without having to say it, these swings make the viewer think of childhood and innocence. Without needing to say it, the viewer is made to understand that the boys who died were just children. The swings in the snow show the loss of innocence and death, often associated with snow and winter.

The video essay uses visuals to show what isn’t being said, and to give the viewer a feeling while listening to her words. The feeling is uncomfortable and strange, making the viewer uneasy to show what isn’t being said. What’s being said are facts–the visuals and music show the real feelings of these stories, just how messed up and uncomfortable and tragic they really are.

When watching the video essays, the way the essays actually sounded didn’t differ to me greatly from the audio essays–perhaps because in a way it’s still an audio essay which is being said orally, but this time videos can be added to enhance the words this time around. “Grandpa” used home videos in its essay, showcasing the idea of family and the family the speaker never knew. The only thing different from this pattern was the beginning clip, where everyone is sitting at the table and fully painted. The speaker is blue, while everyone else is red–this visual is used to help show how the speaker feels he doesn’t really belong in either ethnic identity and the alienation he feels in his own family.

In “That Kind of Daughter”, very abstract and unconventional images were used. Truthfully, I found this video a bit dull from the monotone voice combined with the little variety of images, but the impact these visuals had was still interesting, especially at 3:09 when the speaker keeps rearranging the pieces to make different kinds of men. This visual was able to give a new meaning to what was being said, showing the different men that the speaker had just blown through in her sleeping and how similar they all were by being made of the same exact parts.

“Mangoes” was my favorite, and I found the visual variety in it to be very enhancing to what was being said. At interview was weaved throughout the essay, like at 1:30, where the landlord talks about how “gay” it is for men to wear baby holders. Using the interview helped bring in tonal changes and different perspectives to what the reader was saying, using someone else’s words to progress his own essay. This contrasted with the many videos of his baby helped show the two sides of his essay, from being “gay” and not being present as a father to how close he was with his son. In all of these essays, the videos helped enhance what was being said by giving visualizations that could often show double meanings to the words being said.