| Paul Evan Hughes
MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts Goddard G1 Packet04 Dear Ruth, I hope that this packet finds you well. I’ve tried to make some headway in the physical products of this project, including both audio and video with this packet, while continuing my reading and writing. I’ll admit that with the unseasonable temperatures, the temptation to sit outside and barbecue has won over the desire to sit in front of the computer and edit video on several occasions. I’ve also been on the road, taking Susan to my family farm for a few days. As I’m studying the collision of the real world and the digital world, I’m quite tempted to just let this whole thing slide in favor of hanging out with real people for a while. I’m trying to find a happy medium. I will address the various aspects of the project first, and then I will respond to your last packet response. Video:
Photographs:
Audio:
Webdesign:
Reading:
Writing:
Take care, Ruth.
May 03, 2002
Response to Ruth’s Packet 03 Response: Video "When I looked at the tape, I really got the sense of what you say you are trying to do, to visually give the sense that after 911 "everything seemed to freeze." The only problem I had was that in my VCR the whole thing was full of static? Is this just the tracking in my VCR or the copy of the tape that you sent? I trust that the original is fine." I’m glad to see that my intent is coming through: internal stillness, outward motion, the sense of being trapped in a moment. I myself see no static on either the DV original or the VHS copy I sent to you, so I expect it’s just a simple tracking issue on your machine. I’ll view my tapes on a friend’s machine soon to see if the issue persists on alternate hardware. "Since you're dealing so much with still, or almost still images, the framing of each shot is crucial. You often seem quite aware of this, but what are you thinking about in terms of composition, of formal elements--of balance of shapes, of positive and negative shapes as you take these shots?" I’ll admit that the creative process is largely an instinctual endeavor for me; I seldom shoot anything with the conscious realization of why I am shooting it. I’m trying to move beyond unconscious, aesthetically-driven shooting. Only after viewing the stills and motion footage do I see recurring themes: foreground stillness and blurriness coupled with background motion and focus, images of stark contrast, reflected light on glassy or metallic surfaces. I find myself playing with the edges of the image; much of the “action” in my images takes place on the periphery. One of my friends also pointed out the presence of strong diagonals in many of my images. These are things that I never consciously decided to include in the images, but now I’m starting to analyze why specific compositional arrangements appeal to me, why I’m drawn unknowingly to a view, and why I decide to commit it to film. "I think it might be helpful to look at photographers as well as cinematographers who were masters of composition. The first name that comes to mind (beside Kubelka that I mentioned last time) is the Japanese director, Ozo (again, I hope this spelling is right). Babette Mangolte, an independent film maker who also shot for Chantel Ackerman's early work is also worth looking at." I’ve found listings for Ackerman and a Japanese director Ozu: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/163486/ref=br_bx_c_1_9/002-0833951-4977621 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/166814/ref=br_bx_c_2_9/002-0833951-4977621 and I’ve found one entry for Babette Mangolte:
Are there any of these films in particular that you’d recommend? "I'd also like to hear more about how you're thinking about proceeding with this. Will you be randomly collecting more images and sound. Do you usually make story boards for your work? Will you start editing soon, or wait till you've collected a lot of material? What are your thoughts about your editing process, or is it premature to discuss this? I can't help thinking about this when I look at the stills, or even at your tape, which is in part a compellation of stills. I wonder about the rhythm, i.e. the duration of the camera on each image, as well as the sequencing of the shots." Since the last packet, I’ve collected about twenty more minutes of footage. I still don’t have everything that I want, but I’ve started to experiment with editing the footage that I already have together, just to get a feel for how the video interacts with the audio track that I’ve created. I very seldom create storyboards; the last time I did was for my first screenplay, “Monkey and Manny,” a science fiction comedy that I wrote in undergrad but never produced because of technological restraints and the fact that I didn’t have access to a monkey. I don’t know if storyboards would be helpful for this project; my arrangement of video elements is largely intuitive, and although I hope the audience can infer a narrative from the visuals that are presented, I don’t yet have a firm understanding of how the specific clips will fit together. I usually just drag and drop elements into place within the video editing program until the procession appeals to me on a visual and emotional level. In terms of rhythm and duration, I’ve decided in this project to use dissolves and fade-outs between shots… I feel that this mingling of images helps to heighten the disconcerting, dream-like qualities of the images themselves. To me, straight cuts from scene to scene imply a certain level of conscious looking. Most of the shots that I’ve acquire so far are from the physical level at which I am seated right now. Most of the shots are in fact within fifteen feet of this chair. I guess the question of what the audience is seeing is answered through my own eyes. I want them to see what I have seen every day for the last seven months. I want to reenact the dreamlike, confused state that I felt through a very purposeful use of fading and dissolving, as if I just can’t keep my eyes open at that moment. "Who will be your audience for this tape?" This simple question made me sit here and think for longer than I had expected. It should be easy to answer, but it was something that I really hadn’t thought about. I don’t know if not considering my audience in the creative process makes me somehow remiss as a filmmaker. As with much of my work, this intuitive process is something that I must later consider and analyze either during the process or afterwards. At this point, although I would like to present this work during the next residency to my Goddard peers, and I would eventually like to make it available online for members of my online community, I would have to admit that my audience for the moment seems to be myself. This project means so much more to me than creating something for others to view. It’s been the source of much introspection and quite therapeutic to me. I know that I need to work through the emotional trauma of last fall, so I sat down to make something that would force me to confront the issues head-on. "As I read through the response, on p 7 you state that, "It is becoming so very difficult to stay on task…I'm not sure if I want to stay on task anymore?" Do you want to say more? Is this video evolving in different directions that you anticipated? Are you feeling tired of it though you've just barely started it?" Technological frustrations certainly made me want to give up for a while, and I had a hard time dealing with a shift in project direction. Coming into this project, I had envisioned a large, documentary-style production that would have incorporated much more material from my dyingdays.com authors, dealing with the events of 9-11. I soon realized that this project was no longer specifically about September, or my authors’ reactions. This project has developed into an inner exploration, and I quite greedily decided to focus on myself instead of others for once. Although I still stress about the logistics of this project, I have gotten my “second wind” and I am confident that I can see it through to completion. Photos "The framing strategies that you've used here look very similar to the video. In fact a few of the images look identical, so I assume that you've used them in both forms." The still images were shot using the still function of my digital camcorder. The function takes a still image on the digital-8 tape and records it for five-seven seconds. Because I wasn’t sure if you’d take the time to view the photographs webpage, I decided to include those stills right on the VHS tape I sent. The grainy quality of those images comes from the fact that they were shot on tape and not recorded directly onto the high-resolution memory stick of my camera. "How much do you want to pay attention to the symbolic content of the image? Obviously a phone is loaded with meaning and important to your video. But in these shots, I focus more on the form of the phone (which may be appropriate to give a sense of frozen time, or starring at it). But occasional shots, like netsymley01, or netfingerease also have objects with less obvious, but significant, symbolic content. I wonder how you want to play with the objects or juxtaposition of the objects to create meaning." I’ll admit it, sometimes I take photographs just to make people wonder what the symbolism of the particular image is. Creating images with symbolic content isn’t a main concern for me, as my Susan series shows. I’m driven more by finding images that appeal to me in terms of their composition, texture. I like to take photographs of the things in close proximity to myself. Very few of the stills that I took were arranged in any way; for the most part, the images are as I left the items. I don’t know if I have a subconscious talent for arranging things in ways that I’ll later find interesting to photograph, but sometimes I amaze myself with the beauty of the simple things I see right there in front of me, items set in place through no conscious decision. I think the key is in what I choose to actually photograph and present to the viewer. I see most of these items every day, so I take them for granted. Sometimes it amuses me when my friends ask what a particular image is (like lava01.jpg) and when I tell them (It’s just a lava lamp.) they can’t believe they didn’t see it in the first place. I’m reminded of Irving Singer’s discussion of realism versus formalism in Reality Transformed. In the act of photographing these items, am I re-presenting reality to my viewer, or am I taking something I found right in front of me and through the act of photographing it and presenting it fundamentally changing it or imbuing it with meaning? Perhaps the realism/formalism dichotomy lies within the viewer. "As I photographer, I think of lots of folks that your work reminds me of, makes me think about, but will desist, unless you are interested." I’ve never had any formal photographic training, and my art history courses never really covered photography. I’d love to know more about the artists that my work reminds you of. I’m very interested in seeing other artists that work along a similar vein. "I assume that these are stills taken from your video camera. Did this seem to work as well as a still digital camera, or have you never tried the later? It probably doesn't matter much, except in terms of the quality of the resolution if you wanted to actually print these out. Also, are these just for me, or is there a link so that readers of your site can find them? If so, did you get any feedback?" These stills were indeed taken using my Sony DCR-TRV 740 digital 8mm video camera. The camera has two still modes, that I briefly discussed above. The first records still directly on to the digital 8 tape while the camera is in camera mode. The camera will capture a still image and record it for five-to-seven seconds on the tape. The quality is fine for viewing on smaller images, but noticeably worse when shown on large screens. The other still mode involves recording high-resolution images on to the memory stick within the camera. I have an 8mb stick, which holds about fifteen images at the highest resolution. Most of the images on resurrender.net/photo.html are recorded in this format. The camera can be set to take lower-resolution images on the memory stick, which allows over one-hundred stills at lower resolutions. I’ve used a digital camera before, a Sony Mavica from my undergrad fine arts program’s office, which recorded stills and short (15-30 second) video clips on a regular 3.5” floppy disk. Each has its own advantages, but I prefer the new camera. During the residency, there was a digital video workshop where the three presenters discussed the pros and cons of digital video and certain features of new cameras. All three shunned the idea of using a digital video camera as a still camera. I don’t see what the big deal was about; I’ve actually used my video camera more as a still camera, and I’ve not found the layout of the camera controls to be problematic at all. I had no intention of buying a stand-alone digital still camera, but I got a fine one built into my video camera. As for my photography website, there is a link on my personal homepage art section, resurrender.com/art.html, under photography. I’ve had a few friends discuss the images with me, but most of the time people are too timid to start a conversation about any of my art. I do include resurrender.net/photo.html on the update list of resurrender.net each time I add more images, but so far there really hasn’t been a lot of dialogue with anyone about the images. Response to your responses, or the next installment of our dialogue "One of the issues that I think we will continue to mull over is the degree of narrative in your work. In this regard I was struck by your comment on p 5 that you were "much less likely to directly tell a story, because for the most part, I don't know the readers." What does your familiarity with the readers have to do with the level of narrative you include in your work? I actually thought it might be more logical to use more of a traditional narrative structure for readers less familiar with your work as narrative is always accessible." Because the majority of the readers of my journals and online writing are complete strangers, I prefer to write about events in my life in a public forum in a private way… Allusions to events, but not descriptions of events. Focus on atmospheres of emotion and texture, but not specific discussions of places or times or people. I know that narrative does not necessarily imply specificity, but I am much more comfortable describing an evening through smoke and desire than through placement in space/time. "The other issue that crops up at the beginning of your response is the use of autobiography. The more I see your work, the more I am understanding that it serves as a means of self-exploration for you and that you approach your journaling with a lot of personal integrity. I still don't think that we explored this issue of the use of autobiography as thoroughly as we might have on the frank list serve by the way and would appreciate your comments there…" Only these past few months have I really begun to realize to what extent autobiography is a driving force behind most of my creative processes. I don’t know if I’m even still subscribed to the Frank listserv… I haven’t gotten any mailings in months. Maybe I’m doing something wrong. "Thanks to for filling me in on the background to Lilies. I'm honored that you shared it with me. This and the several pages proceeding it make me want to reflect further on the whole issue of public/private as well as the way that you form communities, but am not sure what to say. Firstly I am impressed by how successful your sites have been. Why do you think that your site grew so fast? What do you think that you do that attracts people to your site? I ask this out of curiosity and admiration, but more so because I honestly think that it's helpful to understand and reflect on what you know, what you do that works. Then as you grow, you can think about how you want to move, develop from your strengths and experience." The initial popularity of my first website came from three main elements, I would guess: the “If I had a monkey” list, the Official Unofficial Singing Saints Webpage, and my first journal project, that would later turn into [dyingdays], the third book I published. I did what most new webdesigners do: listed my site on the major search engines with a variety of keywords and meta tags meant to bring in traffic. The monkey page drew a ton of hits to the site because of its irreverent humor; no one seemed to be doing anything remotely like it, and the list quickly became a cult hit across the St. Lawrence University campus. The Saints page had a smaller fanbase, but still drew significant amounts of traffic because people were curious to get the inside scoop on the happenings of the university’s male a cappella group, told with all the blunt sarcastic humor that I could muster. The journal also drew a lot of traffic, I suspect because I wrote nightly entries about SLU and the people I knew there, and quiet a few wanted to see what I was saying about them. After graduation, the biggest traffic boost came from my starting a message board at illout.com, which brought with it almost four thousand (at the time) new viewers to the page. At the time, puce.com also had a message board on illout.com. Puce is known in certain internet circles as the webcam girl who doesn’t get naked in front of the camera, although people always watch her hoping to get a glance. She was a featured camgirl on stileproject.com, a daily collection of highly offensive pornography, images of dead people. Much of my network’s traffic trickled in from the stileproject audience, which went to puce, went to illout, and ended up on my site. Many have stuck around, occasionally posting on illout and submitting material to ifihadamonkey.com and timeforkink.com, although puce.com no longer uses the illout message board system and puce is no longer a stileproject webcam girl. I think the enduring popularity of the expanding network of sites lies in that move in 2000 to attempt to integrate the pages with a message board system. We have an expanding audience and a growing community because people come to illout for many reasons, find resurrender, and decide to contribute writing and become authors on the pages. Then back to the board, community members discuss new pieces that I put up on the pages. It is a cycle of give and take. People find the pages because of the board, and people find the board because of the pages. I think what I’m doing right is attempting to appeal to readers on several different levels. I have dyingdays.com for people to write journals and poetry and rants on. Silverthought.com is a growing science fiction-based community. Ifihadamonkey.com and timeforkink.com appeal to wry, mean-spirited humor. Resurrender.com contains all of my writing and personal information. Singingsaints.org and singingsaintsalumni.org create an online environment for a fifty-two-year-old a cappella tradition, and have become a community in and of themselves. Tying all of the sites together is resurrender.net. I don’t know what I want to do next with this network, but right now I am leaning toward letting resurrender.com fade away and not renew it. I am looking into new domain names for my new personal site. It’s not that the idea of surrendering again no longer appeals to me, but it is a part of my life that I am now comfortable in letting go of. I have not yet really explored a page based on visual art… Most of my pages are text-based. I am interested in developing a community where visual artists could present their work in still and video form. "I also am thinking about what you said about Lilies on p 10, that you "reserved the clarity for this piece because I know that my psychology needed to tackle these relationships…." So you are making a decision here about what is public and what is private. My next thought is if there are other strategies that you might explore when creating public journals, strategies that perhaps might allow for deep psychological exploration, while obscuring the personal details….Hmm, but then I come back to the point that there may be a type of personal exploration that it feels appropriate to do publicly and other type that feels, and needs to be more private. What do you think? As I read on I note that you state that the introspection that occurs in the public journaling process is "a distinctly uncomfortable process." Is this because you are sharing it, because you're addressing painful, difficult material, or both? In any case, I definitely have a sense that you are exploring, pushing the boundaries of the public/private." The events in Lilies were hybrids of real experience… By that, I mean that the “relationships” turned out to be misconceptions based on perceived interactions between online personas. It makes for an interesting analysis because these were private interactions carried out through very public media: message boards, internet messaging, chatrooms, webpages. For example, from the beginning to the end, people were watching the developing and dying relationship between Lindsay and myself on the message board. I’m ashamed to say it, but it all feels so much like an interactive soap opera now. I meticulously documented our ups and downs, and the internet people who read about “us” became an integral part of the relationship itself. I no longer want to have that audience reading about my private life, so I ended my “She” journal, buried it on the resurrender.com/writing.html page, and took down public links to it from resurrender.net. Although I still have public journals on free open diary and livejournal, I’ve separated myself from the audience that I took years to develop. I have no real answers about why I don’t just stop writing online and get a paper book to record my thoughts in. I suppose it is a combination of exhibitionism and the fact that I know Susan loves reading my entries about her. This public/private conflict is something that I suspect I will be exploring during my entire Goddard experience. Online journals "As an aside I wanted to tell you that your packet has a distinct olfactory element to it as well." My apologies for the smoky scent of my packet. This apartment already had decades of smoke in it before I moved in, I suspect, and I’ve done nothing to remedy the situation. Something about writing up these packets turns Paul into a chain smoker. "Seven million hits and five books! I'm impressed. (I'd love to hear more about the books by the way). Though you say this journal is for yourself you're again sharing it on-line." I’m flattered that you would be impressed with my post-undergrad accomplishments. Sometimes I feel like I just haven’t done enough yet; I always have to move on to bigger and better projects. It was that desire that drove me to pursuing graduate education. If you’re interested, you can find out more about my books at:
"Do you ever think about playing with or changing any of these? What does Susan think of you sharing this? So many artists use their lovers as sources of inspiration and many describe their relationships in their work, or paint their loved one. How are you relating to this tradition? Journaling seems like its so direct, unmediated by paint or fictional style." I have from time to time written journal entries that are a departure from my usual style, like the “Closed” entry was from the last packet. It’s been so long now that I can’t remember many specifics, because most of the experimenting took place in the [dyingdays] journal of 1999-2001. I feel that I somewhat slipped into a comfortable rut with my last major journal, the She journal, which juxtaposed musical lyrics and IM chat dialogues with impressionistic babbling from myself. I’m not yet sure which direction my journals on open diary and livejournal will take. I am very aware that Susan is my main audience, since she is the person who first introduced me to open diary. She has been an inspiration since I met her years ago, a senior at St. Lawrence taking her very first studio class because she knew that it would mean so much more to her than one more psychology class. She’s presently taking classes to become a medical illustrator. I have so much respect for her because she walked away from five years of studying something that she hated (but her family and boyfriend approved of) and is now living a life filled with painting and drawing and exploring her own writing talent. Our journals aren’t linked together, but we draw inspiration for certain pieces from each other, our experiences in real life together. I’m not sure how I fit in with the tradition of using my lover as inspiration, but it is something that I intend to explore as this relationship develops. Remediation and Dhalgren "If I may, I would like to jump into challenging the main tenant of Remediation. Let me start with a book that I recently read, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, by Jonathan Crary." Thank you so much for bringing this book to my attention. I bought it after getting the packet response (along with Manovich’s The Language of New Media, which I hope we’ll have the opportunity to explore together) and I’ve read a little over half of the book so far, including the segment that discusses the camera obscura. I think I can now see that technological advances do not actually coincide with changes in the way we “see,” and often are subsequent developments to shifts in societal vision. I’d never really questioned the fact that photographic technology was a direct descendent of the camera obscura. I found Crary’s description of the actual device, with the viewer actually inside of the box, fascinating; I’d always assumed that the camera obscura was some sort of small, portable device. I very vividly remember the first time I saw the camera obscura effect, standing in one of my parents’ darkened barns on a bright summer day, behind a door with nail holes allowing light through. There was an image of the road outside projected on my chest, although I believe it was backwards and/or upside down. Crary’s comparison of the camera obscura viewer standing directly inside the device to the operator of a photographic camera looking through the device made me start to question some of the tenets Bolter and Grusin set forth in Remediation. I don’t believe that they have it all wrong; in fact, I think that much of their book is a thoughtful analysis of technological evolution, but I see now that they do not really consider societal changes, philosophical re-evaluations of the “observer.” They do discuss a tendency (in our “Western” culture, which, I realize, marginalizes much of humanity by ignoring “minority” cultures) toward the desire for transparent immediacy/hypermediacy in emerging new media. The “way we see” that they predominantly discuss is an increasingly divergent system, one that splits into two desires: the desire to present an experience that is seamless and indistinguishable from reality (transparent immediacy), and the desire to heighten the realization that the viewer is interacting with a technology (hypermediacy). An example of transparent immediacy is virtual reality, which seeks to immerse the viewer within an environment the re-presents the real world to them. It’s a rather difficult goal to attain at this point in technological evolution, because of the very machinery that the viewer uses for the experience. Bulky headsets and gloves make the viewer acutely aware that they are not in another reality, but experiencing one projected by a technology. An example of hypermediacy is any CNN broadcast. There is an array of individual screens displayed on the television, each presenting a different set of information to the viewer. Scrolling stock market tickers, headline tickers, split screens presenting an in-studio anchor discussing something with an in-field reporter, all presented with computer graphics and a soundtrack, make the viewer intensely aware of the new media experience. There is no question that the image on the screen is presenting a bevy of information, not attempting to convince the viewer that they are within the image. To continue using the CNN example, Grusin and Bolter discuss the shift from news broadcasts being predominantly an anchor sitting before a camera reading the news from paper and a teleprompter to a multimedia experience, where the viewer looks around the screen and is engaged with different information segments all at once. They do not, however, discuss why that change occurred on a societal level. At what point did our vision shift to this busy, hectic arrangement from the simple arrangement of the past. Are technological developments responsible for this shift, or have there been shifts in the way we as a society observe that caused the technology to follow suit? I guess those are the answers that I’m searching for in this study of new media. Similarly while some authors, such as Mitchell, argue that digital photography allows for a questioning of objectivity of the traditional photograph, after all everything can now be manipulated, others would argue that photos have been manipulated since the nineteenth century, though some of the public may have been naively unaware of this… I just recently watched a film called “Photographing Fairies,” which discussed the infamous images of the young British girls sitting near a tree with ghostly, luminescent “fairies” that appeared early in the last century. Even at that time, photography was malleable and the images that were presented could be manipulated to convince a whole populace that fairies did exist, although the photos were later discounted as a fraud, with paper cut-outs used as the fairies. I’ve found a distinct thread of paranoia since last fall when discussing current events with people on my message board… Many simply can’t believe that the U.S. government is not creating the bin Laden videos for propaganda. New media certainly brings with it so many issues of what is real and what is manipulated. I’ve manipulated probably hundreds of images myself, including the cover image of the a cappella album “Yardwork” that I executive-produced. What did I change? The changed the length of my hair and added a goatee to my friend’s face to more correctly portray how we looked when the album came out as opposed to when the image was taken a year before. An end: part four: the machinery of night "My question to you would be about the relationship of your fiction to your journal writing. In both cases you're exploring relationships. I even note some of the same imagery, particularly around cigarettes, and stylistic devises, such as focus on close-up details. The couple in the first scene here is much older, but is there a way to explore relationships through the fictional characters that you develop as well?" An End is a peculiar example when analyzing my fiction writing because
I make no attempt at all in this project to hide the fact that I’m using
experiences from real life to create fictional experiences for the book.
In my other major work, enemy, although some of the characters shared interests
and physical characteristics with myself or people I knew, I really was
trying to write a fictional piece completely separated from my own life
experience. AE is written in increments of twenty entries per section,
with five sections overall. I blatantly pirate my journals and other
writing for use in this book. I’m a character in the second and forth
parts of the book, and other people from my “real” world are re-presented
as characters. The book shares many stylistic similarities with my
other current writing because I am attempting to create a synthesis of
this moment in my life with the overarching speculative-fictional storyline
of AE. Because I don’t allow myself to edit the book until the end
in this project, it has created some interesting troubles and quandaries
in the creative process. The female protagonist was modeled on Lindsay,
who is no longer in my life. How do I continue to write the Lily
character without letting my anger and loss that I still feel for Lindsay
interfere, or do I integrate that anger and loss into how I present the
character? Do I want the audience to be sympathetic, or share in
my emotion? Susan has recently started reading the book, and became
quite upset when she stumbled across passages that dealt with my relationship
with Erica, presented as interactions between the Paul character and Hope
Benton, a character named by Erica as a synthesis of both her favorite
name (Hope) and the first word of her favorite band’s name (Benton Falls).
Susan felt a threat to our relationship when she read those passages, even
though they were written last July and August when I was seeing Erica.
Things are okay now, but I had to explain that that was the emotion of
the moment, and she shouldn’t interpret that as a threat to the emotions
that I feel for her or the relationship that we’ve formed since February.
Goddard G1 Packet04 Annotations. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity
in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990.
Singer, Irving. Reality Transformed: Film as Meaning and Technique. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998. • The segment of the book that I’ve just completed reading is Irving
Singer’s analysis of Woody Allen’s 1985 film “The Purple Rose of Cairo.”
Although I admit that I’ve only seen part of this film a few years ago,
I found his discussion of the movie in relationship to the realism versus
formalism rift that he had covered in an earlier chapter to be helpful
in understanding the concepts. In the film, a woman from the Depression
era falls in love with a character from a film(-within-the-film) called
“The Purple Rose of Cairo.” The man from the film very unexpectedly
steps out of the screen to be with the woman. Singer explores the
difference between the “perfect” world of PRC and the awful conditions
of the reality of the Depression time within which the woman lives.
She has fallen in love with an illusion, and that illusion decides to breach
the boundary between the real world and the illusory world of the film
to be with her. In many ways, I felt this storyline eerily mirrored
the events I experienced and described in the “Lilies” piece. I interacted
with Lily online, but when she decided to shatter the walls between the
online world and the real world, it was a remarkably frightening and different
experience. In PRC, when the woman actually follows her “movie love”
back into the film to be with him in his world, she discovers that all
that perfection is not what she expected. In a humorous anecdote,
she even discovers that all of the champagne that the characters were drinking
was actually ginger ale, because, after all, they were just actors creating
a film. PRC explores quite vividly the difference between reality
and perception, and Singer discusses this in relationship to both the realist
and the formalist perspectives. Realism would imply that PRC-within-PRC
is a re-presentation of an actual world, and that is the world our heroine
believes in to the point of falling in love with it, and the male lead.
The formalist perspective would argue exactly what happens: they are actors
creating an illusion on the screen through the director’s vision presented
to the audience, and it is the transfer of that vision that creates any
meaning at all, illusory as it is. When the real world and the perceived
world collide, it is a wreck, a revelation of illusion and false hopes.
I experienced that first hand in my interactions in the online world.
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