Spun With the Wind
Aug. 17th, 2007 08:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
absolutedestinySo earlier this week I posted my Gone With the Wind video. I made this video several months ago and it premiered at the Club Vivid show at this year's Vividcon. Reception of the video as a video has been largely positive which, of course, makes me very happy. There is, understandably, a certain amount of hesitation over some of the more politically charged implications of the video from source choices right through to execution. I think there are a lot of interesting ideas that people have been talking about and I want to work through some of them here.
I've not been keeping up to date on all the issues as I've been travelling but I'm hoping what I'll write will touch on a lot of stuff that people have questions about and possibly concerns with.
Let's start with the basic premise of the video. It's a Gone With the Wind (movie) video and it highlights Scarlett O'Hara's life in the South before during and after the American Civil War. In particular, the video's primary concern is how Scarlett uses men for her own gains - rightly or wrongly at various points in time - and how her emotional attachment to Ashley Wilkes becomes her undoing. The source is very shiny, there's excellent cinematography and the actors and their costumes are stunning to look at. Much of the pleasure of the video lies in reaction shots and melodrama, focussing heavily on people's responses to Scarlett and the epic crumbling of the world around her. The idea was to entertain with Scarlett's actions while underpinning them with emotional problems and ending the video on an image of Scarlett having a moment of realisation that for all her gains she has lost something dear. The video is not intended as a total criticism of Scarlett's supposed gold digging, but the voice of the video (the song) certainly approaches from a very particular perspective. Let me talk about that for a moment.
The song choice is potentially controversial on all kinds of levels. One level I was struck with straight away was the misogyny. Throughout the video, the voice of the video (our narrator) is frequently talking trash about our strong-willed Scarlett. Ideally, I'd have liked the voice of the video to have the POV of a specific character but the lyrics of the song prevented this and instead the POV shifts around a little - mostly shifting positions from being Rhett Butler's POV and the general POV of the male dominated society portrayed in the movie. This is intentional, not because I want to glorify the misogyny or attack Scarlett for not being some dainty silent wife who just sits around knitting and making babies - instead I wanted the video to act as a mirror of the society that is being portrayed and, in a sense, connect it to our own society where the issues aren't really all that more clearly addressed. The mashup where a modern song is mixed with classical provided, for me, a way to play around with these themes while hopefully keeping a certain distance from them in terms of my own perspective. You can decide for yourself whether that distancing was in any way successful. Certainly, as an individual, I sympathise more for Scarlett than I do the voice of the video and I'd like to think that despite the video's voice there are some stunning Scarlett moments shown in the video, but this video is about Gone With the Wind, not my own positions on gender roles.
Of course, the song can be controversial for more reasons than misogyny. There is the race problem. The movie, for obvious reasons, has a considerable amount of racial concerns and the majority of them are for the most part trivialised within the movie and set aside. Not being a video directly about race, I decided to not to focus on the race issue per se... this isnt a video that says "I ain't saying shea white supremacist..." Of course, by using hip hop and by using a song that in its original incarnation had repeated use of the word "nigga" there is always going to be a race element in the song that the viewer will have to deal with. Now, I do have to admit, when I first considered the song, I didn't give the race question a lot of thought. I was really just thinking of it as music in the general way that I listen to most music. It was only when I started playing around with the sources that I started to consider how the race issue could influence the reading of the video.
I think it's a very complex problem and honestly I don't think I did a lot in terms of my editing to try and nudge the issue one way or the other, I was after all character focussed rather than looking at the larger themes as a whole. It could be considered incredibly poor taste to combine this song with this source, that's certainly one reaction that I could see from it. Giving these racist characters West's voice and perspective could be seen as quite a slap in the face. It could also be considered a very radical statement on the music itself and the culture described by the music - equating, in a direct way, West's "gold diggers" to Scarlett (a slave owning racist) is a very problematic position and could also be very offensive. On the other hand it could provoke interesting thoughts on how Scarlett's struggle with status in GWTW has a correlation with the struggle for status described in West's song. That reading could suggest that there has been some social progress but not nearly enough - that West's "gold digger" now has the status problem face by Scarlett who was a second class citizen in her society... that's an interesting idea for sure when you consider how far below Scarlett the slaves were. I think that, on the whole, I found the racial implications of this video to be too complex for me to really frame them well so instead I focussed on the character studies in the source and used the music much like I'd used other music pretty much left it at that. I do have some intentional comparisons of racism and misogyny with the hideous "we want pre-nup" men but I don't dwell on the particularities of the race problem. To me it's an economic status video and the race issues add complexity to how we contextualise it ourselves.
I appreciate if people do read this differently, and I do genuinely apologise if I have offended anyone but certainly I am very keen on there being more discussions on how the race issues can manifest themselves in these sources. I'd like to think that despite being a white middle-class male, I can attempt to present a complex and emotional work which depicts misogyny and racism and be able to prod at it critically from a distance and learn from the experiences of those more intimately connected with the issues. If that is presumptuous, then I am sorry.
I find all the implications fascinating but I really don't want to push any one point. I focussed heavily on the movie from its own point of view and added in a modern twist. Along came all kinds of interesting gender and race issues and I'm totally cool with that being talked about. As for some nefarious authorial intention, well, who knows. Perhaps it is impossible for me to escape my own privileged perspective and that is the ultimate downfall of videos like this but I'd like to think that things can be learned from these videos that can expand our understanding of the myriad of problems we face.
I've not been keeping up to date on all the issues as I've been travelling but I'm hoping what I'll write will touch on a lot of stuff that people have questions about and possibly concerns with.
Let's start with the basic premise of the video. It's a Gone With the Wind (movie) video and it highlights Scarlett O'Hara's life in the South before during and after the American Civil War. In particular, the video's primary concern is how Scarlett uses men for her own gains - rightly or wrongly at various points in time - and how her emotional attachment to Ashley Wilkes becomes her undoing. The source is very shiny, there's excellent cinematography and the actors and their costumes are stunning to look at. Much of the pleasure of the video lies in reaction shots and melodrama, focussing heavily on people's responses to Scarlett and the epic crumbling of the world around her. The idea was to entertain with Scarlett's actions while underpinning them with emotional problems and ending the video on an image of Scarlett having a moment of realisation that for all her gains she has lost something dear. The video is not intended as a total criticism of Scarlett's supposed gold digging, but the voice of the video (the song) certainly approaches from a very particular perspective. Let me talk about that for a moment.
The song choice is potentially controversial on all kinds of levels. One level I was struck with straight away was the misogyny. Throughout the video, the voice of the video (our narrator) is frequently talking trash about our strong-willed Scarlett. Ideally, I'd have liked the voice of the video to have the POV of a specific character but the lyrics of the song prevented this and instead the POV shifts around a little - mostly shifting positions from being Rhett Butler's POV and the general POV of the male dominated society portrayed in the movie. This is intentional, not because I want to glorify the misogyny or attack Scarlett for not being some dainty silent wife who just sits around knitting and making babies - instead I wanted the video to act as a mirror of the society that is being portrayed and, in a sense, connect it to our own society where the issues aren't really all that more clearly addressed. The mashup where a modern song is mixed with classical provided, for me, a way to play around with these themes while hopefully keeping a certain distance from them in terms of my own perspective. You can decide for yourself whether that distancing was in any way successful. Certainly, as an individual, I sympathise more for Scarlett than I do the voice of the video and I'd like to think that despite the video's voice there are some stunning Scarlett moments shown in the video, but this video is about Gone With the Wind, not my own positions on gender roles.
Of course, the song can be controversial for more reasons than misogyny. There is the race problem. The movie, for obvious reasons, has a considerable amount of racial concerns and the majority of them are for the most part trivialised within the movie and set aside. Not being a video directly about race, I decided to not to focus on the race issue per se... this isnt a video that says "I ain't saying shea white supremacist..." Of course, by using hip hop and by using a song that in its original incarnation had repeated use of the word "nigga" there is always going to be a race element in the song that the viewer will have to deal with. Now, I do have to admit, when I first considered the song, I didn't give the race question a lot of thought. I was really just thinking of it as music in the general way that I listen to most music. It was only when I started playing around with the sources that I started to consider how the race issue could influence the reading of the video.
I think it's a very complex problem and honestly I don't think I did a lot in terms of my editing to try and nudge the issue one way or the other, I was after all character focussed rather than looking at the larger themes as a whole. It could be considered incredibly poor taste to combine this song with this source, that's certainly one reaction that I could see from it. Giving these racist characters West's voice and perspective could be seen as quite a slap in the face. It could also be considered a very radical statement on the music itself and the culture described by the music - equating, in a direct way, West's "gold diggers" to Scarlett (a slave owning racist) is a very problematic position and could also be very offensive. On the other hand it could provoke interesting thoughts on how Scarlett's struggle with status in GWTW has a correlation with the struggle for status described in West's song. That reading could suggest that there has been some social progress but not nearly enough - that West's "gold digger" now has the status problem face by Scarlett who was a second class citizen in her society... that's an interesting idea for sure when you consider how far below Scarlett the slaves were. I think that, on the whole, I found the racial implications of this video to be too complex for me to really frame them well so instead I focussed on the character studies in the source and used the music much like I'd used other music pretty much left it at that. I do have some intentional comparisons of racism and misogyny with the hideous "we want pre-nup" men but I don't dwell on the particularities of the race problem. To me it's an economic status video and the race issues add complexity to how we contextualise it ourselves.
I appreciate if people do read this differently, and I do genuinely apologise if I have offended anyone but certainly I am very keen on there being more discussions on how the race issues can manifest themselves in these sources. I'd like to think that despite being a white middle-class male, I can attempt to present a complex and emotional work which depicts misogyny and racism and be able to prod at it critically from a distance and learn from the experiences of those more intimately connected with the issues. If that is presumptuous, then I am sorry.
I find all the implications fascinating but I really don't want to push any one point. I focussed heavily on the movie from its own point of view and added in a modern twist. Along came all kinds of interesting gender and race issues and I'm totally cool with that being talked about. As for some nefarious authorial intention, well, who knows. Perhaps it is impossible for me to escape my own privileged perspective and that is the ultimate downfall of videos like this but I'd like to think that things can be learned from these videos that can expand our understanding of the myriad of problems we face.
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no subject
Date: 2007-08-17 11:26 pm (UTC)But given the reactions I've encountered from FOC when I've mentioned GWTW in the past, I have to wonder if it's possible to make a GWTW vid without a fair number of people being bothered by race issues, whether they were relevant to your story or not. Even with a white singer, hell, even if you used freaking "Danny Boy" for your song, I'm not sure you can get away with it. Race is way, way too problematic in the source text for any GWTW vidder to be able to escape it. I mean, *maybe* if your audince was composed entirely of white people who were not particularly experienced with confronting white privilege. Maybe. But certainly not with the audience we (currently) have. Maybe this is a good thing.
With regard to parallels to "Out Here", I think it's similar in one sense: within DS fanom, the Ray wars are still a sufficiently touchy subject that unless the audience is entirely Kowalski-leaning folks who have never been exposed to the Ray wars, some percentage of viewers willb be bothered. But IMO it trivializes racism to try to compare fannish shipwars to the slavery apologia that is GWTW. I'm not chastising your or h.l. for bringing it up, because I see how, as artists, you want to try and sort out what is and isn't possible WRT anticipating audience reactions to a given work, but the comparison makes me a bit uncomfortable.
Side note: Heart of Funkness had the same effect on me a Beethoven's Fifth of Gold Digger: uncomplicated squee at Club Vivid, increasing discomfort after the fact. In that case, though, I think Apocalypse Now itself problematizes race sufficiently that it's less squicky in the vid -- there's more of a sense of intentionality (yours and Coppola's) to the issue. I still can never watch that poor cow being killed, though.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-17 11:53 pm (UTC)I'm not sure to what degree one can ever understand an audience to that extent and whether or not it's always desirable to cater to them (in general I mean, not necessarily wrt the issue of race). That's an issue that is quite critical to a lot of the recent discussions and for me it's going to be something I will continually have to deal with in my work (given my tendancy to recontextualise).
no subject
Date: 2007-08-18 12:07 am (UTC)I do get it; I had thought I indicated above that that was a discussion I can understand and empathize with as a vidder. I never thought you were equating the weight of the issues, but it was something I felt needed to be pointed out.
Personally I find it fairly easy to understand and anticipate audience reactions to my vids just by being plugged into that audience. Within the VVC crowd and the other people I would estimate make up my regular viewership (large portions of my flist), I feel about 90% confident that I can predict how they'll respond to any given vid I'm making. Perhaps this is an absurd degree of confidence to have, but experience suggests that I have rarely been wrong -- unless everyone's dissing my vids in private chat (oh, that fannish paranoia will get you every time *g*). I stay current on meta issues that sweep through fandom in general and at least glancingly familiar with the topics that dominate discussion in the fandoms I'm in. So I know, for example, that there's a huge market for a kickass Martha vid among the people who watch my work, and that if I tried to posit in the vid that Martha was a better companion for the Doctor than Rose, many of those people would eat it up with a big spoon. Likewise, if I sent that same vid out into the wider world of DW fandom, it would be lambasted by the Doctor-Rose shippers (who are legion). These are things I know just from paying a general sort of attention.
I do not think any artist has a responsibility to promote only those viewpoints that will be comfortable (or even just plain popular) for her audience. The only responsibility I feel an artist has is to communicate intelligibly. The rest is gravy. Having said that, though, I am keenly aware of what I want from fandom as a vidder, and while I am not afraid of controversy, I also don't want to spend my fannish time in a defensive posture. My happy place includes political discourse, but it doesn't include rage. So I pick my battles, and will not be making the two incredibly seductive vid ideas I've come up with that would get me tarred, feathered, and run out of fandom on a rail. (: