I am (queering culture) from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.
password: queering
1. what is the tone of this piece for you? does it change over time?
2. what do you experience watching it?
3. would you like there to be more in the sound score? if so, what?
4. how do you feel about the length and pacing? Does it include everything you would like or do you feel it is too repetitive?
5. Any other feedback?
password: queering
1. what is the tone of this piece for you? does it change over time?
2. what do you experience watching it?
3. would you like there to be more in the sound score? if so, what?
4. how do you feel about the length and pacing? Does it include everything you would like or do you feel it is too repetitive?
5. Any other feedback?
ReplyDelete1. Generally it moves from serious to playful.
2. I find your initial expression, with your round staring eyes, compelling and a bit disturbing. The consistency in your expression and the placement of your gaze between the different cuts/outfits is striking. There’s a marked shift when you first lower your eyes in the hat in a flirtatious, coy manner. It’s fun when the costumes start getting mixed up and when you start getting more playful and silly: staring cross-eyed at the bindi, etc. Doing the abhinaya in the burqa is striking and surprisingly expressive.
3. I quite like the spareness of the soundscore, how meanings multiply through repetition and phrasing, and how it layers and enforces the edits – particularly in the very beginning there’s a nice rhythm that is set up. Rather than adding more sounds, I might play with volume or panning. I do notice the difference between when you say a word live and when it’s dubbed over. If you’re happy with this study and would like to make it a bit more finished, it might be nice to do a little more post production on the soundtrack so that the changes in background noise between cuts are not so obvious – I found them a bit distracting.
4. I think the length and pacing is great! I liked that you spent quite awhile in the serious/staring mode before letting it unravel into subversive playfulness. I did wonder whether the first coy look (around 0:17) came a bit soon, but I’m not sure.
5. I love it! It’s awesome!
1. I feel like the the piece morphs from serious and almost disturbing, to funny and playful.
ReplyDelete2. Your eyes. At first they are extremely wide open, seemingly unblinking, focused on something or someone so specific on your bottom right corner. I feel slightly disturbed. I feel compelled to ask: why this bottom right corner? I experience an accumulation of images and characters. Because the position of you remains the same, the jump-cuts in between characters reveals to me that the same person is expressing and then mixing up and intermingling multiple sides of self. I also noticed that the abhinaya moved from a fixed stare kind of 'neutral,' to a flirtatious sringara, to expressions that I wouldn't include in the classical BN abhinaya repertoire (cross-eyed for example). This added to the mixing and re-matching quality that I experienced. This subject has agency and takes agency to change selves, and haves fun while doing it.
3. I don't feel like I need more in the soundtrack. The rhythm of the editing and the words are connected, especially because in the beginning edits occur simultaneously to a change in a spoken word. The accumulation and pacing (slow to fast) both in visual images (characters) and words feels cohesive. It goes from sparse, to fast paced and multi-layered, to sparse again. The laughter at the end breaks up this cycle in a nice way as I wasn't expecting it.
4. It works! I had the same thought as Cynthia about the first teasing look around 0:17. Does it come in too soon? Or do you want set up a premonition of what is to come? I also think that the different tones in the "I am not/what" keeps me engaged as a viewer. Plus the addition of mudras in the second part (alapadma in different ways, mushti, suchi) kept me guessing too. I wasn't sure if there was an inner logic behind the mudras - were you trying to say something specific? Sometimes the alapadma read as "look at my face in different ways" and the face kept on changing (sometimes we don't see the face too). Sometimes it read like the number 5, or like you were shooting the face outwards (or the something/someone that the gaze is directed at your bottom right corner). Either way, I didn't need the mudras to be telling a linear narrative. I liked that they didn't and it was a major component in the pacing moving forward.
5. It's fun! It's great! The main question that remains with me is about the gaze Why the bottom right corner? Curious about what might happen if different facings were to be explored to explore another question I have: "who is the switching and mixing of selves intended for?"