Film Summary
After visiting Brazil for the first time Lannie, a 23yrd
old young woman begins to write a letter to her mentor
about all the internal feelings she experienced while
abroad.
As she begins to write, only her voice morphs into
her 9-year old self and the letter is told from her point
of view as a child.
She recounts the memories of watching
television, playing dress up, dancing with her grandfather
and cooking with him as he told her stories of being in
Italy.
An image, that represents her memory, of visiting
the Berlin Wall as a teenager triggers Lannie to morphs the
letter writing into her 15-year old self.
Her stories
become more fragmented and less about herself and more
about growing into a young woman of color.
As Lannie
begins to recounts a brief story of kissing a boy for the
first time while living in Germany.
The images and the
story of that memory is interrupted by the sound of a
trumpet, which, like the image of the Berlin Wall, triggers
her voice to morphs back into her 23yrd-old self.
Lannie,
now an adult, questions her mentor about why he left the
country and how it is he felt more American away from home.
While on screen we see images of her trip to Brazil,
although she only mentions it once. At the end of the
letter she recounts a story of a Brazilian woman who
questions her being an American.
The sound in the film,
and the letters ends totally fragmented and disjointed.
The film ends silent, on Lannie 9-years old playing with a
group of children, making mud pies.
Throughout the film Lannie is writing to her mentor all the
things she can remember from childhood to the present that
has built who she feels she is as a person.
In the end,
its not her memories that make her aware of how she formed
her identity, but a stranger who places on to her what her
national identity is and what it represents.
Main Character
Lannie is a 23 year-old young woman, who is confronted with
what national identity could mean in a time of war and
chaos.
As a child Lannie was always trying to figure out
who she was, either comparing herself to a pop-icon or a
famous poet.
Like all teenagers Lannie began to understand
what it meant to be woman and struggles with female
identity and sexuality through her young adult years.
The
film is contemporary; hence Lannie is being confronted with
the U.S. domination of Iraq and all other atrocities
against humanity her country has committed in the past and
currently.
While abroad she finally gains a sense that she
comes from a place of culture and learns to appreciate
being American because abroad she can actually be tied to
an American culture and not sub-divided into a ethnic
national identity.
Settings
All large portion of the film takes place in the
contemporary setting.
a contemporary setting.
My location shooting takes place in
However there are scenes that act
as flashbacks and these elements should be old 1980’s
urban, city.
The young Lannie scenes are shot in a old
brownstone house, the house will be old not modern, to
evoke a sense of nostalgia or sentimentality for older
things, i.e. the bathroom scene will have an old style sink
basin, and a bath tub not a shower.
Why This Film?
Doing Dreams is an exploration into understanding self and
national identity in a global context.
Doing Dreams is
based on my experiences abroad, as well as the writing of
James Baldwin.
Although James Baldwin never preferred the
term ex-patriot there is something interesting in his need
to leave the U.S. work outside of the country, and coming
to terms with loving America but not being excepted in
America.
Personal Film
This film is a personal comment on how I feel deeply
saddened and lost at what being American means in the
world.
In an effort to extinguish feelings of resentment
towards my country I want to create this film.
The film
for myself acts as a personal documentary in coming to
terms with being American and looking for a re-construction
of how my culture or identity has been formed.
I am not
naïve and understand that culture is learned, identity is
constructed often unconsciously.
This film is an attempt
at reconstruction, searching for a link, an answer to
what’s wrong with my American culture hence my national
identity I reject.
Personal Influences
My research in understanding similarities between
people of the African Diaspora living in the America’s
introduced me to the powerful ideas of race and color in
Brazil.
This exploration into Brazilian culture presents
two huge factors in my thesis film.
I.
After visiting Brazil I yearned for a society in
which on a basic human level, Americans could reach
a point of understanding, allying the various ethnic
cultures and heritages of our country into one
hegemonic unified nation.
However this is
impossible in our nation because of a term
introduced to me by Angela Davis “psychic racism”
meaning imbedded in our psychological makeup is the
notion to hate based on ‘race’.
II.
A great thing I felt about Brazil is the pride some
people feel about being Brazilian, not in the
extremely loaded term of being patriotic but
appreciating the culture.
In Brazil, the first time
I actually felt American and not African American
was interesting and comfort ting.
These two
factors together made me excited to reach American
again and grow to appreciate American culture.
Yet
the crux in this feeling is what ‘America’
represent, what our image is allied with, as much as
I was happy to finally be tied to a ‘unified’
culture abroad, along with that, I represent that
war, injustice and inhumanity.
Essentially my film
is an effort to express my feeling that individuals
should take responsibility for how their culture
effects our world.
Why James Baldwin
As stated earlier I want utilize the figure of James
Baldwin in my film as the mentor, the wise person.
James
Baldwin author and poet, and activist, utilized his persona
essays to speak from his position as an American male
growing up in Harlem.
He was born in 1924, religion and
writing would be his muse of escape from the pressures of
Harlem.
To escape racial pressure in America he left for
Paris in ______ to write.
The essays that have struck a
cord for me to help give influence into this film are “My
Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of
the Emancipation”
from the book The Fire Next Time and “The
Discovery of What it Means to be an American”
from the book Nobody
knows my Name.
Two essays the qualify for my project in
that they consider being a person of African ancestry in
America, and nationality.
In “My Dungeon ShooK” I want to
use the essay as if Baldwin was writing to all young people
of color in American, including me, so that in the film I
can treat my letters to him as a response.
Insert quotes
Moreover the films main character is a writer, I choose
this art form because I wanted to center the film around a
letter being wrote to mentor a older person, a wiser
person.
James Baldwin for me presented a good example as a
writer who stayed connected to community efforts yet
struggled with being apart of the community and the larger
community of America.
The main character in my film has
come to realization that she is an American and not just a
Black American, that she belongs to a unified nation but
only abroad.
Influences
Julie Dash Daughters of the Dust,1991: Conceptual and
Visual
Issac Julien Looking for Langston, 1988: Conceptual
Helke Sanders The All-Around Reduced Personality, 1977:
Visual and conceptual (need more research)
Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Visual and Conceptual
Julie Dash
Julie Dash’s Daughter of the Dust is influential in its
conceptual elements of recreating a past or a history for
an audience.
The filmmaker also used a West African was of
story telling, her film is told through a Afrocentric lens.
I want to utilize this same technique because although I am
American, and my film centers around the longing for
understanding nationality, American culture is fragmented.
The main character can never find
Dash’s film combines a
painterly cinematography that further enhances her use of
shooting in tableau.
Each shot and scene is effective in
that the frame is composed so that a story is told in each
shot.
Characters are revealed greater with this effect,
the audience can invest time with a character in tableau.
Isaac Julien
Looking for Langston originally contributed a unique
formula for looking at history and recreating a history in
a honorary manner by utilizing and experimental
storytelling/film technique.
I think this method still
applies to my film in that, to recreate or reconstruction
an understanding of identity for my character can only
constitute experiences, memories, stories and daydreams.
The ‘true’ manner or ‘real’ way the character embodies
American-ness is subjective.
Hence a experimental form for
understanding the bridging of culture and identities into a
national identity will prove beneficial as the form and
objective is an attempt altogether.
Julien’s main subject
in the film Langston Hughes (author and poet of Harlem
Renaissance), which the filmmaker attempts to recreate what
the author’s experience could have been and connects that
to the experiences of gay men today.
For my film I am
attempting a similar structure in which my main character
is attempting to connect to a writer, her mentor James
Baldwin.
Although for this script he is never mentioned by
name the writer in always referred to and his experiences1
are transformed into my characters understanding of what it
means to be American, young and questioning identity.
Helke Sander
Experiences as understood through Baldwin’s personal essays, short stories, interviews,
and biographies on the author.
1
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
“Fassbinder films suggest that is it no more possible
to die without a confirming gaze than it is to assume and
identity” Kaja Silverman
Goals