Life Writing

UMass Boston Blog by Patricia Polednia

Tag: video Essay

My Final Idea about Essays

November 29, 2015 / / 21 Comments

I never thought about the gender of essays. I always used the neutral terms like the essay, an essay or according to the author’s essay… But this is exactly what Cynthia Ozick is doing in her essay “She: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body”. Ozick is using the female possessive pronoun she in order to refer to the literary art form: “[…] I confess I have been trying all along, in a subliminal way, to speak of the essay as if it- or she- were a character in a novel or a play; moody, fickle, given on a whim to changing her clothes, or the subject; sometimes obstinate, with a mind of her own; or hazy and light; never predictable” (168).
I think Ozick is using this controversial gender topic in order to emphasize the basic component of the essay, which is the self sensation and reflection of the insight (of the author?) You can basically write about anything and anybody, the content has no limitations. Just like many authors we’ve read before, Ozick states the closest thing to essay writing is poetry, “The mind meanders, slipping from one impression to another, from reality to memory to dreamscape and black again” (166).
I think this sentence is a very good summary of our essay assignments during the semester. We started with writing a textual essay and evolved a particular idea into an audio one. Now, we have to make the next step and create a video essay. But this is easier said than done. You start your essay with a personal story and reflect on that in order to go on. But after working with your topic for a certain amount of time, you as the author who has experienced all this stuff, are blind to new openings or possibilities to develop your essay. This is why I really enjoyed the writing group discussions. You need a second or a third objective voice to be able to reflect and develop to the next step. The others have different associations with my topic, for example I believe I was the only one who had negative associations with ducks. This is the reason why I changed my subject of the video essay to disgust and feel much more confident. Ozick is right, I feel like a poet writing about my personal experiences and adapting them into different kind of art forms.

I think she will be my masterpiece.

At the end, it’s all about connecting with each other

November 23, 2015 / / 18 Comments

This week is about editing our video essays. It was a long and difficult journey to figure out how I should adapt my audio essay to a video one. I don’t want to screw this one up like I did with my audio essay. As a student you have a lot of pressure with Thanksgiving and the finals coming, so I need to prepare very well. But this is nothing in contrast to Penny Lane’s situation in 2010. She has made a video essay for her wedding. As a present for her husband Brain. With all the wedding guests watching it at the party. The essay is called The Voyager and shows the two Voyager space probe launched into the orbit in 1977, just one year before her birth. Lane combines her ideas of love and marriage with the historical NASA event, the love story of Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan and the dramatic explosion of the rocket in 1986. She uses the harsh contrast of cordial love and innovative technology to explain her view about commitment and relationships in nowadays society.
In the Atlantic interview, Lane said that the video is a meditation on the nature of love in an uncertain universe. The Voyager storyline or rather the golden record function’s is to connect irrational hope and cold hard reason in a metaphorical way. I really needed this information, because I was very confused why Lane combines her personal love story with the Voyager plot while watching the video. At first, I thought that Carl and Ann may be her parents and she is telling the audience the story of her love relationship, which just happens to be close to the Voyager event. She was born in 1978, so the math is right. I finally understand her point when she is talking about marriage while walking with her boyfriend on the boardwalk at Coney Island.
According to the Atlantic, Lane wants to explore the mature and intelligent vision of love with this film. But I really liked her last words, just before the song The Book of Life began (by the way very corny…). She said that we have to risk and open ourselves to connect with others, even if there’s the possibility of disaster. Nobody believed that the two Voyager missals would last that long, since they were supposed to last only two years! I enjoyed this positive look ahead, after the confusing beginning.

Visual Language in Combination with Powerful Images

November 14, 2015 / / 34 Comments

This week is about the very powerful language and images of the video essay. It is important to have a great balance between the spoken word, the soundtrack and the visual footage you use in an essay. You don’t want to bore your audience by showing them a picture of a duck accompanied by duck quacking. You have to find a way to tell your narrative along with powerful images.
Lisa Purpura uses a very strong visual language and metaphors in her essay called “Autopsy Report” from 2006. I honestly didn’t get why we should read this essay, when we talk about video essays. But as I was reading her poetical piece of writing, I pictured her detailed descriptions of the dead human body in my mind, comparing the mass of internal organs with the piled up groceries in the supermarket. I don’t know if I actually want to see what Purpura is describing, but her way of storytelling and use of language is very effective for the reader’s imagination.
One of my favorite video essays so far is Biss & Bresland’s “Dust Off”. I am fascinated by their use of powerful footage of the beautiful sensations of nature to visualize a very sad topic, the death of three young men in the pursuit of pleasure. In the first part, Theo dies because he inhales some toxic gas from the chemistry laboratory, which was supposed to make him high. Bliss and Bresland use the image of a snow storm to picture his story. The second part is about Curt, who dies in a car accident caused by speed driving. The directors depict the blue horizon/sky, showing the sun and the cloud of smoke from a rocket. The third and last part displays jellyfishes while talking about Elijah, who died of self-strangulation trying to have a more intense orgasm. There is no camera movement, the depicting objects move in slow motion. In addition to the great idea to actually NOT show what they are talking about, I also liked the recurring theme of the swing. Bliss and Bresland use a swing with three seats as a metaphor for the three dead boys at the beginning and the end. This video is epic! I think I am going to use their technique in my own essay…

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