When editing a film, part of the fun is being able to take some inconsequential or unrelated media and creating something, perhaps, with a semblance of order and meaning. That or spend an abhorrent amount of time playing around with clips trying to achieve that goal. Nevertheless, what I've assembled is at the bottom.
The idea my group wanted to touch upon was the image of "caged" cats, a phrase used by the irresistible (well in Elizabeth Taylor's portrayal a definite YES!) Maggie "the cat" from Tennessee Williams "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof", a play about a dysfunctional Southern Louisiana family, the character's personal problems of greed, avarice and indifference, ruins their rather rich and lofty life.
The "Cats" in this case refers to the women in the play, of how they struggle and manage to maintain a semblance of the "good, normal", i.e. happy, family. At its core of course is love--love given and taken, but as usual, denied to them, hence the hot tin roof, a metaphor for the discomfort and torture people go through, or put themselves through, to achieve what they think they need.
I hope that this compilation of edited film from "American Beauty", "Brokeback Mountain" and "War of the Roses", which was the discussed and chosen films for the presentation, shed some light, directly or indirectly, upon the theme of disenchantment in the individual in today's society, a society that cherishes and seduces individuals with a puritanical idea of the nuclear family and measures success of it by materialistic yardstick of shoes, new cars, big white-picket fence houses and bubblegum music of technological conviences. Popular Culture ain't it great?
Just so You know, I am not a terribly great editor. Its not that I have no knowledge of it, I just lack the technical know how to accomplish the flashy in-your-face, fly by in 5sec montages most people of today are used to. However, I did pick out the scenes carefully, with what my group has decided to discuss in relation to the text for the class, but more importantly the theme of the isolation and alienation. I tried to show the precieved life, the one of disillusions and disgust or dispair in the characters to one of empowerment and purpose--from exisentential "nauesea" to the inrevocable fight (i.e. violence) for salvation. Notice in "American Beauty", the patheticness of the Kevin Spacey character's life, how he "might as well be dead already", the closed and tightness of Heath Ledger's character, his indicision and fear, not just for himself but from other's opinions (kind of like Brick's), to the entrapment of the wifehood in the Roses's family. The question that's asked in all these films is whether the characters irrevocably dragged themselves in or were they led there, but then by whom? Thier lover, wife, husband, family, society? Those questions are answered seperately in each film. Nevertheless, each film is rich in its myraid of visual imagery of "caged" animals, animals subjagated to closed tight spaces, like a framed picture, or sheeps being herded or a tight exquiste porcelean Japanese statue of a naked, open woman.
3 years ago