Jodie Mack's Illustration Presentation

Jodie Mack’s presentation was definitely the type of presentation that keeps you awake, alert and engaged. When she said animation, I was picturing cartoons so it was a surprise that animation can take on so many different forms. What I liked most about Dr. Mack’s work was that she used symbols that are well known but she does not define a character by an appearance, allowing the audience to put their own face in.

In the first clip, one symbol in particular stood out to me which was the outlined shape of a heart. The two C shaped pieces rotated sort of like a clock. To me, this symbolized the changing of love with the passage of time and that destruction of love and then new buildup are part of the natural cycle of human emotion and changing relationship.

I loved that Dr. Mack’s work doesn’t just have a message but also a purpose. If you looked at her work without hearing that all of the materials were recycled, you might think about how much paper was wasted in the construction of this artwork. In reality, Dr. Mack’s work is probably the most environmentally friendly among other paper animation work. 

Yard Work is Hard Work was particularly impressive to me because of the many components. Not only is the film’s images completely constructed from paper, it was filmed using very little digital software. I don’t know anything about cinematography or videotaping but the way she described making this video sounded agonizingly tedious but so sophisticated and impressive. And not only was this a film with a message and a storyline, it was also a musical that she wrote herself. The songs were even relevant to the plot line. Overall, that is an incredible amount of work and you can tell by viewing it that she spent a lot of time and effort and love on it. 

I really enjoyed the elements that played into the love story of Yard Work is Hard Work. Everything contributed and fit well from the wacky house and blue kitchen to the green theme and all of those elements pushed the story forward. Without those elements, this film would have been a story about everyone else who was hit by the housing crisis but the weirdness of this couple make it personal, relatable and lovably quirky.

Poetry by Garren Small

I feel like reading poetry and hearing the poet read his own work are two completely different things. Hearing it the way it sounded when it was written is so telling of the underlying tale that sometimes gets lost behind words. It makes the poetry have so much feeling and makes it real and relatable. Mr. Small makes his readers/listeners become his characters and have those conversations with them.

I particularly enjoyed the conversation poem because I felt like he was writing about experiences that happen to thousands of people every day. As outsiders who had nothing to do with the writing of this story, we can point out what may have been going on in the background that even the writer didn’t notice simply because this is a universal human emotion and coping mechanism.

I really enjoyed one of his themes of how love requires some courage. His poems captured love in so many ways like love for a deceased family member, love for a child despite an internal conflict over something external of that person, and love for someone you hardly know or have never met. And these are things all humans go through. We all find love for other people and it doesn’t necessarily have to be for someone we are romantically involved with. On the topic of courage to find love, I think there are multiple dimensions to it. Often we are told that we will find love when we least expect it but for many people, this is hard to grasp. Love is not like grades, you cannot work to achieve it. It takes courage to stop looking for love and effectively give up trying and wait for it to come along itself. It’s hard to let fate guide you into the next stage of your life. As a very logical person, it’s been very hard for me to accept that I have no control over love. It’s taken years to accept that I have to stop looking and just wait. Staying in a relationship also takes courage. Love is tested every day. Some days are more trying than others but there have been countless stories of couples that have stayed together through sickness, distance, poverty and loss. It takes courage to move forward with someone and conquer life’s challenges. Sometimes it’s easier to overcome those challenges by yourself because you don’t have to worry about the upkeep of a relationship in the process but maybe staying with another person, while difficult, forces us to grow together and get through the challenges faster, knowing there is someone there to support us. 

The poem about the father and his daughter on a train almost made me cry. Although the father seemed distant and worried about something unrelated to his daughter, you could hear how much he loved and cared about her, even if his words didn’t express it. I guess it got to me because it reminded me of my father because of the way the daughter looks up to him so much and just wants to be around him all the time. It was a really beautiful way of expressing love between a father and daughter, which, in my opinion, can be the strongest bond a little girl will ever have and will search for a man who reminds her of what she loves about her father.

Dr. Brown's "Brain Systems for Survival"

Love for survival, I think, had a different meaning in years past, maybe up until the seventies? Before then, people fell in love and got married and had children that they were supposed to raise in a loving environment and teach to be a person instead of just a human. Now, love is not a prerequisite to having a child. We don’t love each other with the intentions of raising more people that we love and who will love. We don’t love to ensure our species survive. We have sex so our species survives. We love because it makes us happy, or is supposed to at least.

But sex is still important, and not from an evolutionary or biological standpoint. It’s important because it’s part of the human experience, as is love. Sometimes they’re not synonymous. People have sex and fall in love because it’s considered normal. It’s an experience most humans relate to and for a person to fit in with society, they must have similar experiences, human experiences. And that’s the real continuation of humanity. We feel the same way about love as cave-people did. The emotion hasn’t changed, just the language used to describe it. So even though when we fall in love and claim that no one has ever felt this way before, our friends are sitting there listening thinking “yeah yeah, that happened to me too” and it probably happened millions of times before, just not exactly the same. You’re human. You can’t expect to feel a new emotion that’s never been felt before. But it’s still important because it makes you understand everyone else a little bit clearer, even if you don’t notice.

Dr. Brown also mentioned overlooking peoples’ faults when we’re falling in love. To me, that is synonymous with seeing a person for what you want them to be, not what they are or like looking in the mirror and having a false impression of what you see. 

Remembering some of my thoughts during this presentation, I struggled to define romantic love on my own. It can’t be defined as its own emotion because it differs from person to person and is often comprised of several other distinct emotions. My conclusion was that for me, romantic love is simply a state of dizzying confusion, the happy kind, I guess.

Slavery's Interior - Cinema and the Perfomative Traumas of History

While slavery seems like a difficult subject to compare love to, it is easy to find were desire fits into slavery. There is the desire of white people to feel superior to another race as well as the desire to find justification for actions so to be considered within their right to control another person’s life. The slaves’ desires were to be considered free and equal and acknowledged as human.

In the case of slavery, the white people decided to see black people the way they wanted to, as something less than human, rather than what they were, human. It’s kind of like how we see what we desire in our lovers. The white people saw black people as what they desired, not human, so that they could justify enslaving them.

As weird as it may sound, I’d like to point out the relevance of love among slaves. In the times of slavery, slaves had no rights and therefore were not permitted to be married. Since slaves didn’t pay taxes, there was no incentive to get married for tax benefits, and procreation was sometimes taken control of by slave owners. Those slaves who wanted to get married were experiencing the truest of love. in the face of the ugliness of that time, they found beauty in each other and love in their families. There were no benefits to falling in love because families often got separated and marriage was out of the question. When slaves fell in love, it wasn’t for socioeconomic reasons or social reasons, it was just love, plain and simple. And as horrible as that is, it’s beautiful at the same time, and so rare to see now.

Desire to be disgusted? We want to see these movies about slavery that depict some of the worst things that have ever happened to humans in American history. We watch these films because we want to know and understand and experience and yet we leave disgusted and annoyed at our fellow former Americans, feeling disgraced that maybe our ancestors were slaveholders. When we watch these movies, we know what to expect. We’ve already read about what has happened. But we desire to experience it as if we were there so we feel that pain. We desire that pain because it’s part of remembering, even if we weren’t alive yet. And I think that’s important. We should desire to experience that pain because without that particular desire, the memory of that period of time dies.

Lastly, the clip Dr. Reed played from “Give Us Us Free!” was very powerful. The African American actor was amazing at conveying desire. You could see it in his face. I don’t think there’s really an accurate way to describe that scene other than heartbreakingly moving.