BCTELA

Theresa Rogers  

Theresa is a professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia. Her areas of interest include youth multiple literacy practices and critical
perspectives on young adult literature. See theresarogers.ca.

Genre Play, Positioning and Critical Interpretation

For the past several years I have been work- ing with colleagues in various school and non-school settings involving youth in a range of arts and media activities.1 One aspect of this work of potential interest to English educators is the way film (video) production can be seen as a new literary form. With more emphasis on multimedia in schools, it seems timely to consider filmmaking, in particular, as a valid and endlessly imaginative form of literary interpretation among students.2

The youth whose work I will share here range in ages from 15 through 19 and have attended or are attending alternative secondary schools and/or are participating in a community anti-violence program. In various ways they have all been alienated from structures and contexts of traditional secondary schools. These alternative school and community sites provide environments that are a better fit for the youth and more open to video work as an impor- tant multimodal or “new” literacy practice.

I like to think of video production as a new form of reading and interpreting literature that is more engaging for a wider range of youth. Video produc- tion breaks down some boundaries between in- school and out-of-school lives. Indeed, some would say multiple literacy practices “travel” across our institutional boundaries (Leander, 2003) as is evi- dent in our work. We are mindful that youth are already very often critical consumers and producers of new media—showing us over and over again that they have things to say and the tools to say it, and their films are created in the intersections of these available resources and perspectives (see also: Burn and Parker, 2003; Goodman, 2003; Sefton-Green, 1998 and 2006; Soep, 2006).

Yet most classrooms continue to privilege print literacy practices (Moje, 2000; O’Brien, 2005), which are historically entrenched in schools and are seen to carry power as a path to higher education. It may also be fair to say, and I would include myself here, that English teachers are more comfortable with print literacy. We love to hold books, to carry them, devour them, talk about them, review them, and store them safely and forever in our hearts and book- shelves. Not all of our students are so enamored.

 

Four Films: “The Blue Bouquet,” “The Making of Othello,” “Hills like White Elephants,” and “Billie Holiday”

Four films described below illustrate the ways youth used film to interpret literature. As part of this process, they played with genre and positioned themselves in new ways in relation to their work, their peers and teachers, while critically interpret- ing literature.

The Blue Bouquet

The first film is a very short version of the story “The Blue Bouquet” by Octavio Paz (1976). In this haunting and dreamlike short story, Henry wakes from a nightmare and hastily dresses to face the reality of remote Mexico. A lost soul from the American middle-class, a stranger to a wife he left at home, and now alone in a squalid hotel, Henry is warned to stay put for his own safety. However, on a brief walk through the area he is threatened by a peasant bearing a knife, which (he tells the incred- ulous American) he will use to cut the eyes from Henry’s head in order to present this macabre offer- ing of “a bouquet of blue eyes” to his bewitching girlfriend Consuela.

The student, Jake, who directed this film re-interpreted it as a kind of morality play by identifying the hotel owner as the bystander, Henry as the victim, and the “peasant” as persecutor (actually labeling them that way in the credits). The film is initially set at the school (borrowing the principal as the hotel owner/bystander) and moves to a nearby abandoned and graffiti-saturated parking lot where Henry is accosted by the peasant in a reenacted mugging scene. “Henry” pleads for mercy, saying “I have brown eyes.” Jake used hip hop music as a soundtrack (“Multiply” by Xzibit), and exaggerated the fighting by employing quickly repetitive views of the interaction during editing.

In this interpretation, the story becomes less a stylized and lyrical short story and more an action-oriented and messaged film. By incorporating the school principal into the action as a character, Jake repositioned himself and his cast members as having at least momentarily reversed the power structures of schools. They also embodied the story with their own contemporary understanding of violence by recreating the mugging scene and using contemporary rap music. And finally, by placing the film in a space that represented their identities (street-oriented, tough, masculinist) they created a contemporary re-interpretation that traveled across traditional, institutional and spatial boundaries, providing a rich opportunity for talking about literary interpretation. That is, they effectively re-interpreted the story by shifting to a contemporary setting that reflects aspects of their own experience, and providing a kind of moral commentary on engaging in and witnessing violence.

 The Making of Othello

This film by a student named Scotty is introduced with a filmed discussion between himself and a friend in which he explains that he ran into a “casting problem” while filming the play “Othello” by Shakespeare. He decided to do a documentary about the problems of casting in filmmaking, noting that it would be “a different kind of film.” Clips from the documentary itself can be viewed at this website: web.mac.com/theresa.rogers/iWeb/Site/Othello.html

The documentary focuses on issues related to using a cat to portray Desdemona and a dog to portray Othello, resulting in a very humorous transformation of the story. Bits of a script rewritten from a contemporary perspective are overlaid with a serious discussion of lighting, voiceovers, and quality of the technology available:

Actress speaking to Desdemona (a cat): You two make a very good couple and Othello is very hot… but rumour in the dog pound is that he’s been sneaking out late at night.

Narrative voiceover: Here the cat would have an overlapping voice, which is a voice-over.

Actress to cat: Oh, and where is the marriage chew toy you gave him and how long has it been since he’s chewed it?

Narrative voice-over: In this part of the film I would put a voice-over to make it sound like she [Desdemona] is talking.

In this film, Scott has fully positioned himself as a filmmaker who quite seriously comments on the familiar problems a director might face even in the absurd case of using animals as the main characters. At the same time he has rewritten the script for the animals, so the result is a quite sophisticated and layered parody.

Hills Like White Elephants

“Hills Like White Elephants”by Ernest Hemingway (1927) is mainly a dialogue between a young woman and a man waiting for a train in Spain. As they talk, it becomes clear that the young woman is pregnant and that the man wants her to have an abortion. Through their tight, brittle conversation, much is revealed about their personalities. At the same time, much about their relationship remains hidden. At the end of the story it is still unclear as to what decision has or has not been made, or what will happen to these two characters waiting for a train on a platform in Spain.

Two students, Nikki and Scott, decided to film this story with Nikki as the director and the two of them as the main characters. They realized it would be difficult to film in a train station so their setting is more pastoral, shifting the mood. The film employs fairly sophisticated filming techniques; for instance, the film begins with a shot from above that slowly moves down toward the couple speaking “to bring the audience right into the set with you.” The rest of the film includes some of the dialogue and some voice-overs of shots of the couple in a field.

What is most striking about this film is that in the middle of the film a sonogram image of a fetus dissolves in and off the screen, and at the end are pregnancy help lines. According to Nikki she didn’t realize when she first read the story that it was about abortion, but after she storyboarded the voice-over line, “Once they take it way, we can never get it back,” she realized she needed to put in help lines at the end.

In this way the film becomes a hybrid genre combining storytelling and public service announcement (PSA) ele- ments. The choice of music—Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”—contributes to what they referred to as the “seri- ous” and “sorrowful” tone of the film. Hip hop, they felt, would be “too youth” for their purposes. Nikki and Scott updated the story and its themes and repositioned themselves to speak about serious issues with peers (unwanted pregnancy) through their re-interpretation of the film.

Billie Holiday

This film was made by a young woman (“Kim”) who par- ticipates in an after school anti-violence program. This was one of the first films she made and while it is quite simple in its approach, the result is powerful. Billie Holiday’s performance of “Strange Fruit” is well known and available for viewing on the web. The song is based on a poem by the same name written in by Abel Meeropol (pen name Lewis Allen)in 1937. He wrote it after seeing a photograph of the lynch- ing of two African American men in Indiana. The lyrics begin: “Southern trees bear a strange fruit, / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, / Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze, / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”

In Kim’s film, the song begins and the images shift between stock photographs of Billie Holiday at work and thvideo of her singing, using a "grainy" editing effect. As the film progresses, Holiday appears to become older and more despairing, both in the photos and the video. At one point the screen goes dark, and in the last scene there is no sound, creating an eerie and foreboding feeling.

While the film is made entirely from Internet images, the overall effect of the short film is quite a moving statement about Billie Holiday and her embodiment of the poem's sorrow, as well as the tragedy of its content. As Kim says, she wanted to capture the melancholy and show how Holiday was interpreting the words and her reaction to them-"to tell the story of her essence," which she thought people might not otherwise see. For her, the important element was how Billie Holiday interpreted the poem and how she (Kim) could impose another layer of interpretation to shed light on Bilie Holiday, who is a compelling figure to Kim. Here again, there is evidence of sophisticated re-interpretation across genres and media (poem to song to film) in order to create a unique critical reading.

Conclusion 

These four examples are just a few of the many films youth have made in these classroom and community centers. I believe these more literary films illustrate the playfulness and creativity the youth bring to their work and the ways they use filmmaking as a mode of literary (re)interpretation. In these films, they use image, sound, and text in sophisticated ways to express their understanding. They juxtapose genres, reposition themselves in relation to literary works and to others, and create new sites of interpretation. For these youth in particular, filmmaking provided a way to engage in the reading of literature in unique ways and afforded alternative modes of expressing critical interpretations.

What is also apparent in their work is that they have a sense of the literary elements of voice, perspective, tone, symbolism and mood that can be exploited as they move across written text and multimedia. That is, filmmaking helps students, especially those who are less engaged in the curriculum, to become more sophisticated "readers" of literary works.

Notes

1 A three-year (2001-2004) youth literacy project with teacher (Andrew Schofield) and university colleagues (Kari Winters, Anne-Marie LaMonde) that integrated arts and media into all areas of the curriculum, and a current project that includes a community anti-violence program in which students created videos. In these settings, I have been most interested in the way youth engage in genre play, identity positioning, and critical expression through arts and media production (e.g. Rogers and Schofield, 2005).

2 While there appear to be more opportunities for students to engage in filmmaking in special courses and after school programs, it is less often that film is integrated directly into course work. Meanwhile the technology is becoming more accessible and, indeed, many students already have access to digital video cameras and computer software. For our projects we used iMovie software and Apple computers. With as few as one or two digital cameras and two editing stations (Mac computers) we found we could fully integrate media production into the classroom curriculum. 

Resources

Inpoint at Pacific Cinematheque in Vancouver (www.inpoint.org) offers workshops and downloadable worksheets on studying and producing films (e.g. the language of film, storyboarding, filming, editing, permissions, etc).

References 

Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin, Texas: University of Texas.

Burn, A. and Parker, D. (2003). Analysing media texts. London: Continuum.

Goodman, S. (2003). Teaching Youth Media: A critical guide to literacy, video production and social change. New York: Teachers College Press.

Hemingway, E. (1927)"Hills Like White Elephants." In Men Without Women. New York: Charles Scribner and Sons.

Holland, D., et al. (1998). Identity and agency in cultural worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. Press.

Leander, K. M. (2003). Writing travelers' tales on New Literacyscapes. Reading Research Quarterly, 38(3), 392-397.

Moje, E. (2000). "To be part of the story": The literacy practices of gangsta adolescents. Teachers College Record, 102(3), 651-691.

O'Brien, D. (2005). "At-risk" adolescents: Redefining competence through the multiliteracies of intermediality, visual arts, and representation. Reading online www.readingonline.org/newliteracies/obrien/ (Retrieved 3/20/05).

Paz, Octavio. (1976). "The Blue Bouquet" from Eagle or Sun? New York: New Directions Publishing.

Rogers, T. & Schofield, A. (2005). "Things thicker than words: Portraits of youth multiple literacies an alternative secondary program". In Anderson, J., Kendrick, M., Rogers, T. and Smythe, S (Eds). Portraits of Literacy across families, schools and communities. Lawrence Erlbaum Pubishers, pp 205-220.

Sefton-Green, J. (1998). Digital diversions. Youth culture in the age of multimedia. London: UCL Press.

Sefton-Green, J. (2006). "Youth, technology and media cultures". In Green, J. and Luke, A. (Eds) Rethinking learning: What counts as learning and what learning counts. Review of Research in Education. Washington, D.C. American Educational Research Association.

Soep, E. (2006). Beyond literacy and voice in youth media production. McGill Journal ofEducation, 41(3).