Spun With the Wind
So earlier this week I posted my Gone With the Wind video. I made this video several months ago and it premiered at the Club Vivid show at this year's Vividcon. Reception of the video as a video has been largely positive which, of course, makes me very happy. There is, understandably, a certain amount of hesitation over some of the more politically charged implications of the video from source choices right through to execution. I think there are a lot of interesting ideas that people have been talking about and I want to work through some of them here.
I've not been keeping up to date on all the issues as I've been travelling but I'm hoping what I'll write will touch on a lot of stuff that people have questions about and possibly concerns with.
Let's start with the basic premise of the video. It's a Gone With the Wind (movie) video and it highlights Scarlett O'Hara's life in the South before during and after the American Civil War. In particular, the video's primary concern is how Scarlett uses men for her own gains - rightly or wrongly at various points in time - and how her emotional attachment to Ashley Wilkes becomes her undoing. The source is very shiny, there's excellent cinematography and the actors and their costumes are stunning to look at. Much of the pleasure of the video lies in reaction shots and melodrama, focussing heavily on people's responses to Scarlett and the epic crumbling of the world around her. The idea was to entertain with Scarlett's actions while underpinning them with emotional problems and ending the video on an image of Scarlett having a moment of realisation that for all her gains she has lost something dear. The video is not intended as a total criticism of Scarlett's supposed gold digging, but the voice of the video (the song) certainly approaches from a very particular perspective. Let me talk about that for a moment.
The song choice is potentially controversial on all kinds of levels. One level I was struck with straight away was the misogyny. Throughout the video, the voice of the video (our narrator) is frequently talking trash about our strong-willed Scarlett. Ideally, I'd have liked the voice of the video to have the POV of a specific character but the lyrics of the song prevented this and instead the POV shifts around a little - mostly shifting positions from being Rhett Butler's POV and the general POV of the male dominated society portrayed in the movie. This is intentional, not because I want to glorify the misogyny or attack Scarlett for not being some dainty silent wife who just sits around knitting and making babies - instead I wanted the video to act as a mirror of the society that is being portrayed and, in a sense, connect it to our own society where the issues aren't really all that more clearly addressed. The mashup where a modern song is mixed with classical provided, for me, a way to play around with these themes while hopefully keeping a certain distance from them in terms of my own perspective. You can decide for yourself whether that distancing was in any way successful. Certainly, as an individual, I sympathise more for Scarlett than I do the voice of the video and I'd like to think that despite the video's voice there are some stunning Scarlett moments shown in the video, but this video is about Gone With the Wind, not my own positions on gender roles.
Of course, the song can be controversial for more reasons than misogyny. There is the race problem. The movie, for obvious reasons, has a considerable amount of racial concerns and the majority of them are for the most part trivialised within the movie and set aside. Not being a video directly about race, I decided to not to focus on the race issue per se... this isnt a video that says "I ain't saying shea white supremacist..." Of course, by using hip hop and by using a song that in its original incarnation had repeated use of the word "nigga" there is always going to be a race element in the song that the viewer will have to deal with. Now, I do have to admit, when I first considered the song, I didn't give the race question a lot of thought. I was really just thinking of it as music in the general way that I listen to most music. It was only when I started playing around with the sources that I started to consider how the race issue could influence the reading of the video.
I think it's a very complex problem and honestly I don't think I did a lot in terms of my editing to try and nudge the issue one way or the other, I was after all character focussed rather than looking at the larger themes as a whole. It could be considered incredibly poor taste to combine this song with this source, that's certainly one reaction that I could see from it. Giving these racist characters West's voice and perspective could be seen as quite a slap in the face. It could also be considered a very radical statement on the music itself and the culture described by the music - equating, in a direct way, West's "gold diggers" to Scarlett (a slave owning racist) is a very problematic position and could also be very offensive. On the other hand it could provoke interesting thoughts on how Scarlett's struggle with status in GWTW has a correlation with the struggle for status described in West's song. That reading could suggest that there has been some social progress but not nearly enough - that West's "gold digger" now has the status problem face by Scarlett who was a second class citizen in her society... that's an interesting idea for sure when you consider how far below Scarlett the slaves were. I think that, on the whole, I found the racial implications of this video to be too complex for me to really frame them well so instead I focussed on the character studies in the source and used the music much like I'd used other music pretty much left it at that. I do have some intentional comparisons of racism and misogyny with the hideous "we want pre-nup" men but I don't dwell on the particularities of the race problem. To me it's an economic status video and the race issues add complexity to how we contextualise it ourselves.
I appreciate if people do read this differently, and I do genuinely apologise if I have offended anyone but certainly I am very keen on there being more discussions on how the race issues can manifest themselves in these sources. I'd like to think that despite being a white middle-class male, I can attempt to present a complex and emotional work which depicts misogyny and racism and be able to prod at it critically from a distance and learn from the experiences of those more intimately connected with the issues. If that is presumptuous, then I am sorry.
I find all the implications fascinating but I really don't want to push any one point. I focussed heavily on the movie from its own point of view and added in a modern twist. Along came all kinds of interesting gender and race issues and I'm totally cool with that being talked about. As for some nefarious authorial intention, well, who knows. Perhaps it is impossible for me to escape my own privileged perspective and that is the ultimate downfall of videos like this but I'd like to think that things can be learned from these videos that can expand our understanding of the myriad of problems we face.
I've not been keeping up to date on all the issues as I've been travelling but I'm hoping what I'll write will touch on a lot of stuff that people have questions about and possibly concerns with.
Let's start with the basic premise of the video. It's a Gone With the Wind (movie) video and it highlights Scarlett O'Hara's life in the South before during and after the American Civil War. In particular, the video's primary concern is how Scarlett uses men for her own gains - rightly or wrongly at various points in time - and how her emotional attachment to Ashley Wilkes becomes her undoing. The source is very shiny, there's excellent cinematography and the actors and their costumes are stunning to look at. Much of the pleasure of the video lies in reaction shots and melodrama, focussing heavily on people's responses to Scarlett and the epic crumbling of the world around her. The idea was to entertain with Scarlett's actions while underpinning them with emotional problems and ending the video on an image of Scarlett having a moment of realisation that for all her gains she has lost something dear. The video is not intended as a total criticism of Scarlett's supposed gold digging, but the voice of the video (the song) certainly approaches from a very particular perspective. Let me talk about that for a moment.
The song choice is potentially controversial on all kinds of levels. One level I was struck with straight away was the misogyny. Throughout the video, the voice of the video (our narrator) is frequently talking trash about our strong-willed Scarlett. Ideally, I'd have liked the voice of the video to have the POV of a specific character but the lyrics of the song prevented this and instead the POV shifts around a little - mostly shifting positions from being Rhett Butler's POV and the general POV of the male dominated society portrayed in the movie. This is intentional, not because I want to glorify the misogyny or attack Scarlett for not being some dainty silent wife who just sits around knitting and making babies - instead I wanted the video to act as a mirror of the society that is being portrayed and, in a sense, connect it to our own society where the issues aren't really all that more clearly addressed. The mashup where a modern song is mixed with classical provided, for me, a way to play around with these themes while hopefully keeping a certain distance from them in terms of my own perspective. You can decide for yourself whether that distancing was in any way successful. Certainly, as an individual, I sympathise more for Scarlett than I do the voice of the video and I'd like to think that despite the video's voice there are some stunning Scarlett moments shown in the video, but this video is about Gone With the Wind, not my own positions on gender roles.
Of course, the song can be controversial for more reasons than misogyny. There is the race problem. The movie, for obvious reasons, has a considerable amount of racial concerns and the majority of them are for the most part trivialised within the movie and set aside. Not being a video directly about race, I decided to not to focus on the race issue per se... this isnt a video that says "I ain't saying shea white supremacist..." Of course, by using hip hop and by using a song that in its original incarnation had repeated use of the word "nigga" there is always going to be a race element in the song that the viewer will have to deal with. Now, I do have to admit, when I first considered the song, I didn't give the race question a lot of thought. I was really just thinking of it as music in the general way that I listen to most music. It was only when I started playing around with the sources that I started to consider how the race issue could influence the reading of the video.
I think it's a very complex problem and honestly I don't think I did a lot in terms of my editing to try and nudge the issue one way or the other, I was after all character focussed rather than looking at the larger themes as a whole. It could be considered incredibly poor taste to combine this song with this source, that's certainly one reaction that I could see from it. Giving these racist characters West's voice and perspective could be seen as quite a slap in the face. It could also be considered a very radical statement on the music itself and the culture described by the music - equating, in a direct way, West's "gold diggers" to Scarlett (a slave owning racist) is a very problematic position and could also be very offensive. On the other hand it could provoke interesting thoughts on how Scarlett's struggle with status in GWTW has a correlation with the struggle for status described in West's song. That reading could suggest that there has been some social progress but not nearly enough - that West's "gold digger" now has the status problem face by Scarlett who was a second class citizen in her society... that's an interesting idea for sure when you consider how far below Scarlett the slaves were. I think that, on the whole, I found the racial implications of this video to be too complex for me to really frame them well so instead I focussed on the character studies in the source and used the music much like I'd used other music pretty much left it at that. I do have some intentional comparisons of racism and misogyny with the hideous "we want pre-nup" men but I don't dwell on the particularities of the race problem. To me it's an economic status video and the race issues add complexity to how we contextualise it ourselves.
I appreciate if people do read this differently, and I do genuinely apologise if I have offended anyone but certainly I am very keen on there being more discussions on how the race issues can manifest themselves in these sources. I'd like to think that despite being a white middle-class male, I can attempt to present a complex and emotional work which depicts misogyny and racism and be able to prod at it critically from a distance and learn from the experiences of those more intimately connected with the issues. If that is presumptuous, then I am sorry.
I find all the implications fascinating but I really don't want to push any one point. I focussed heavily on the movie from its own point of view and added in a modern twist. Along came all kinds of interesting gender and race issues and I'm totally cool with that being talked about. As for some nefarious authorial intention, well, who knows. Perhaps it is impossible for me to escape my own privileged perspective and that is the ultimate downfall of videos like this but I'd like to think that things can be learned from these videos that can expand our understanding of the myriad of problems we face.