Line of Flight - Thesis Excerpt

An Excerpt from my MFA Thesis, "Line of Flight: Women's Private Conversations Made Public."

Women’s Private Conversations Made Public: Inside the Exchange of Line of Flight

Line of Flight, is a multimodal piece designed to explore and investigate how women photographers, filmmakers, and writers navigate gendered experiences as working professionals. This work publicly expresses and challenges unarticulated assumptions concerning women’s experiences through the use of textual-visual interplay, repetition, interview and framing. The piece articulates their problematic gendered experiences and brings those encounters into the public sphere, a space from which they are normally excluded or marginalized. The act of placing these private conversations into public spaces serves to confront a point of erasure in our culture: the process whereby women and a multiplicity of women’s voices are often ignored, dismissed, and unattended to. This dialogue highlights often unarticulated assumptions many of us have.

Line of Flight confronts viewers with the subtle moments that shape us—injurious experiences of the everyday. As a documentary work, Line of Flight serves as a vehicle for confrontation, reflection, and continuation of these vital conversations. The visual media in the pieces is constructed to represent the ‘everydayness’ of the women’s lived experiences while simultaneously limiting the expression of said experience, paralleling the ways in which the women are limited and silenced in their own lives. Through a series of twenty-one animated gifs, looping cinemagraphs, and textual pairings, the audience is afforded the opportunity to look and listen to the complex multiplicity of voices presented in the piece.

CHAPTER III – THE CINEMAGRAPH AND GIF

I began to visualize the women’s conversations with me; their stories were fragmented but related, jarring yet consistent, singular yet repetitive. My piece needed to simultaneously represent the silencing these women encountered while actively combatting said silence by bringing their thoughts to the fore in a public space. The visual media I created in conversation with the women’s contributions would represent the ‘everydayness’ of their experiences while simultaneously limiting the expression of said experience—paralleling the ways in which the women were limited and silenced in their own lives. I determined that my approach to visual representation would be both simultaneously overt and covert. The content I captured would immerse the viewer in particular expression of femaleness, while the form of media I utilized would serve to challenge, critique, and expose the acutely gendered treatment of the women with whom I conversed.[i] To do this, I filmed incessantly in seemingly mundane and quotidian locations, capturing local women throughout their days. The homogeneity of the area reflected my own inherent biases.

My camera felt at once banal and uncomfortable and exploitative. This process allowed me to continue to turn a mirror on myself and my own assumptions. I soon discovered remarkable moments that mirrored the narrative of my interviewees, emerging suddenly and disappearing just as quickly before my lens. Insidious, repetitious, not fully articulated, these interactions were fleeting and best represented through the development of gifs and cinemagraphs.

A gif file displays multiple frames in succession in order to generate a short, animated clip. This animation loops continuously from beginning to end. Often deemed the cousin of the gif, a cinemagraph is derived from video footage in which a singular part of the image is left in repetitive motion. Co-created by female photographer Jamie Beck, the cinemagraph exists as a relatively new, under-theorized form of media. While cinemagraphs are typically used within the realm of advertising, Line of Flight showcases cinemagraphs as a way to integrate the media into a more critical, artistic form of representation. I utilize the cinemagraph here in order to highlight a specific event (and subsequent emotions experienced in said event) by insisting my audience is aware of its existence.[ii] Both gifs and cinemagraphs confront viewers with incessant repetition as well as a visual point of erasure. We can see only a few specific moments within particularly limited movement in said moments which generates both an point of emphasis and feeling of entrapment.

This mode of production is quite purposeful as the cinemagraph centers on instants that may otherwise have been overlooked. These particular formats provided a form of representation that captures and mirrors my participants’ own experiences. Not only does the temporal structure of the cinemagraph affect the perception of the content, but the use of selective, looping movement also infers specific meaning within the image.[iii] While we are accustomed to viewing still images, the combination of movement within cinemagraphs is often unanticipated.[iv] Due to the unexpected emphasis of singular movement within a cinemagraph, reactions to the work can often be unsettling and many viewers see the media as surreal or uncanny.[v]

Engendering this reaction was purposeful and important throughout the piece as reaction to the uncanny reflects a “sense of unease provoked by the commonplace; an emotion that rises from silence, solitude and obscurity; and even a confusion between animate and inanimate things.”[vi] Not only is this reflected literally (via isolation within the gifs and cinemagraphs) but it is reflected conceptually in this piece as well, through the women’s descriptive experiences. My use of this media is deliberate in that the cinemagraph is an unsettling vehicle through which my audience becomes privy to a series of disconcerting interactions. Reaction to the mode of viewership here reflects the interpretation of the media presented in the cinemagraphs; it is purposeful, uneasy viewing of ultimately troubling content.

Through selective animation and repetition, cinemagraph and gifs best articulate the idea of the incessant and inescapable by allowing a living moment to be experienced endlessly. Repetitive movement within the cinemagraph gives the impression of time passing. However, upon closer viewing, one will find a singular moment immortalized in the looping image.[vii] I created this visual repetition purposefully, to mirror the continual gendered experiences of my participants. Each repetition signifies new action until the observed movement becomes an element of the past, creating a future then, that becomes a “...common and inevitable repetition of the movement.”[viii]

A. Collage: Text and Visual Pairing

As a documentary piece, Line of Flight requires and encourages the act of speaking, looking, and listening: I spoke to each woman, I looked (literally and figuratively) to represent our conversations publicly, and I requested that audience members interpret and listen to our conversations, presented to them in the exhibition. In order to visually incorporate the dialogue conducted with my participants into the piece, I chose to position my original media in conversation with short, poetic excerpts from said dialogue. I parsed and selected quotations meant to work in concert as recognizable adages, while remaining specific enough to provide insight into the variety of encounters the women experienced.

This process mirrored the limited ways in which women are allowed to speak and express themselves publicly. The fragmented pairing represents the unnerving bifurcation between women’s public and private conversations. Traditionally short in duration, gif and cinemagraph file formats also served to create a fragmentary viewing experience that functions as a means of subversion. This process disrupts the normative public discourse by forcing an audience to encounter the series of curated, fragmentary, expressive visual moments.[ix]

33. Tram Nguyen, "From SlutWalks to SuicideGirls: Feminist Resistance in the Third Wave and Postfeminist Era." WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 3-4, 2013: 158.

34. Meaghan Niewland Framed In Time: A Cinemagraph Series of the Everyday & Grounded Theory of Cinemagraphy, chrome-extension://oemmndcbldboiebfnladdacbdfmadadm/www.niewland.com/cinemagraphs/Framed_In_Time_Niewland_MRP_2012.pdf, 7.

35. Niewland, 2.

36. Niewland, 10.

37. Defines the uncanny as “that of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar”. Robert Belton, "Gender and the psychopathology of everyday life in the photographic projections of Wyn Geleynse." International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, vol. 14, no. 4, 29 June 2017: 300.

38. Belton, 300.

39. A similar project, Framed in Time, by Meaghan Niewland, consists of a series of cinemagraphs made to capture the essence of everyday life. Less specific than the media I created in Line of Flight, this project “encapsulates fleeting moments of the everyday to unmask events that typically remain imperceptible” Niewland, 14.

40. Ewelina Wozniak, "Jamie Beck's Cinemagraphs in the context of the dramatic theory of literature." Przestrzenie Teorii , no. 17, Oct. 2015: 93.

41. Larson, 65.