Response to Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991)

This past week, we were assigned to watch “Daughters of the Dust” by Julie Dash.  It’s a movie that centers around a group of people on an island off the coast of South Caroline (I believe), called the Gullah.  The history of the Gullah people is fascinating in that their people were brought to America as slaves, but ones that had a desired skill set, namely being able to farm rice.  They were able to hold on to their traditions from West Africa.

The movie was a bit hard to get through.  Mainly, the production quality was hard to watch, but the story was okay.  The people from the Islands were getting ready to sail north to the main land to live a life integrated with the rest of westernized America.  Most everyone was willing to go, but there was a matriarch/great grandmother figure who could not leave behind where she was raised and the traditions and spirituality she so whole heartedly believed in.

I jotted down some notes during the film, and what I was able to get from the movie was that history and culture and tradition are something I have always thought about and wondered about holding onto.  As a Filipino-American, I don’t really know my language, or my mother’s dialect.  I don’t have many Filipino friends, and grew up with islander (Guam)/American influences.  And as soon as we moved to the states, it really become a more caucasian-American world for me.  So I drew upon that feeling of my history and culture diluting through the generations.  My great grandmother was adopted, I’m thinking my father’s side has Spanish blood in there somewhere.  What are my roots?  the origin of my family name?  Spain, after all, did colonize the Philippines for 300 years or so.  And my families names are Spanish sounding names.

Side note: One thing I do hold onto, though, is our food culture.  Hello!  Of course!  I need more cooking lessons to have a broader range of dishes to feed my future children, but they will have lumpia, adobo, palabok, pancit, and tinola!

Here is my response below.  It’s a photo of (L to R) my maternal grandmother, me (that haircut sucked), my great grandmother, and my mother.  It’s the only photo I have with that many generations.  It’s from about 1988-1989.  I could tell you my thought process as to why I chose to photograph it this way, but I’ll let the audience do some work with that this time.

If anything – When coffee really is what saves the day

Me: [complaining about my work or feeling bad, in general]

Husband: If anything, you have that Gusta Crema blend we just bought.  That should make you feel better.

Me: True.  

Response to Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960)

***SPOILER***

So, I watched “Breathless” for class and I had fun watching a murderer and pregnant woman ignore the fact that they were going through some serious issues and skirting these issues by floating about Paris and bedrooms almost lightheartedly.  I’ll be honest and say that I didn’t really know how to respond to it all, but I did think of a photo I took of my friends.  They were eating ice cream and they must’ve seen something puzzling because they have this weird look on their faces mid-bite.  The juxtaposition of something as simple and playful as eating ice cream against the “suspicious” looks on their faces started to stick out and remind me of the movie.   Anyhow, here it is.

Print of the moment

I’ve been printing at home a lot and bought some “good” paper. I added a border to this that made it look nicer. So far, happy with how it’s printing. Wish I could print even bigger!

The Routine

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Response to “Seven Beauties”

This week we presented our work that was the response to Lina Wertmuller’s “Seven Beauties” (1975).

***SPOILERS FROM THIS POINT ON***

The movie was hard for me to get through.  The main character, Pasqualino Frafuso, was deplorable (the only word I could find to encapsulate how much he angered and irritated me).  The movie is visually stunning, and the acting by Giancarlo Giannini is great, but the subject matter is rough.  He’s just a jerk and a-hole.  He smacks his sister around, basically degrades his sisters, covers up the murder of his sister’s pimp boyfriend, and rapes a woman tied to a bed in a psychiatric hospital.  And he calls himself honorable.  All this before he is  captured by the Nazis.  So when it gets to the point where he’s been captured by the Nazis and, in order to survive, makes the decision to seduce the female Nazi commandant who runs the camp, I just kind of rolled my eyes – him and his “tool”.

Don’t get me wrong.  The film is good.  It’s different.  It’s gritty and showcases quite beautifully, desperation, pride, cowardice, and inhumanity.

Photo of the moment

Mango and carrot smoothie.

Fantasy – Response to Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation” (2003)

This was my response to Sofia Coppola’s film “Lost in Translation”  (2003).  I went through something similar when I was about the age of Scarlett Johansson’s character in the movie and in a relationship where my partner worked and I didn’t, so I had a lot of time on my hands.  I related to the feeling of feeling alienated and the challenge of trying to acclimate to a foreign setting and culture (for me, Hong Kong).  Many things that were more routine, like grocery shopping, stumped me.  What was the name of a grocery store in this new land I was living in?  Where could I get a box Cap’n Crunch cereal?  It was was an overwhelming adventure and total learning experience.  Things are different now and I’ve moved on from all of it, but I don’t regret a thing.

The image below is a 2-image collage I did.  The main photo is of Grand Central Station in New York City.  Then second image is me in the middle in grey scale.  I was trying to put across that I felt different in this very busy world, just like the character did in the movie.  The printout of this looks a little more pink and overall very pastel-colored (I had trouble with my print settings and calibrating).  One critique was that it looked more fantastical and whimsical, more than alienating.  I didn’t take that comment badly.  In fact, it just added just another viewpoint that could work.  I think part of art and photography is what you bring to the work in addition to what the artist intended.  You can’t really help that.

Growth Struggle

Spine