Caged In - My Video Mashup

An artistic endeavor through the medium of video. That's what the goal was this week. This threw me for a bit of a loop because video is the medium I have tampered with the most, but always in more of a documentary manner, opposed to artistic. Not that documentary content isn't meaningful, but mine was always more just for fun, to document trips and experiences I have with my friends. 

The most difficult part of this assignment for me was coming up with a theme, or a message that I wanted to convey with it. I've never really done this through video before, but once I got the idea, it was pretty smooth sailing. 

I used some clips from those personal trips in my mashup as well as some from archive.org. I used visuals from a choir trip that someone filmed with a 35 mm camera while they were in college a while ago. I don't recall the exact year, but I liked that the older footage and fashion contrasted with the modern clips of my friends and some other people I found in the archives in California, 2017. 

I think the variation of footage helped reinforce my overall theme and message about the expectations of beauty placed on women. This is not a new idea, but it is one that we haven't solved yet. We're still being told, explicitly and implicitly, that we need to change the way we look if we want to be taken seriously in business, we need to wear red lipstick because men respond well to it, aging is bad and we should be ashamed of our aging bodies because only the young are beautiful, and hundreds of other damaging messages. 

The audio samples you hear overtop of my original piece from last week, are also from archive.org. All of them are taken from shows that target women as their audience, offering beauty tips, business help, and helping them be more attractive to men. These are all women speaking. We still haven't managed to cleanse the internalized misogyny that has infiltrated our culture, even with all of the progress we've made. Women and men push these narratives of women's value resting in the hands of men.

Women are still treated like objects, caged into the limits of what lies on the surface. I included some animal clips to compare with those of the women close to me to show this impact. While I know the worth, value, and depth of my amazing friends, I have also seen them all devalued by men who don't even know what they're saying, and fall victim to the physical expectations society places on them. In this way, women aren't treated like or taught to be equals.

This comes from my experience even in the privileged position I was handed in life as a white woman. I can't begin to imagine the experiences black, latinx, asian, and other minority women face in America. We can't stop fighting for equal treatment until everyone is accounted for, and changes need to be made on all levels. No one will be truly free until everyone is.

I know my small video mashup won't even start to save the world, but it was nice to feel like I had a voice in some way through this medium. I made an effort to edit along with the music, trying to guide the cuts along with major changes and beats in the song. I didn't do this at all times but made the effort for some portions. I also tried to keep it moving constantly so it didn't get boring to look at. 

It's a pretty quick video but there probably could be a bit more variation in video sources that I used just to mix it up a bit more. 

Overall, I really enjoyed this project, and learned that there is always an opportunity to have a voice through art. Even if only three people watch this video on YouTube, it was still a way for me to express myself and make personal connections with messages that are important to me.