Parallels between my work and Melitopoulos'
After Angela Melitopoulos' work was recommended to me by my tutor, I decided to watch the snippest of her film Passing Drama which I could access online. Melitopoulos' work has a similar interest in identity as my own does, as she focuses on her family's stories of war, migration, and manual labour. As seen above, her film closely captures the manual arts of textile making and gardening, both of which involve physical exertion through your hands in order to carry out repetitive movements.
The ways in which Melitopoulos' compiles the footage of characters in her film create a cinematic rhythm, which is also achieved through audio manipulation of her chracter's interviews. Words and phrase are repeated, sometimes increased or decreased in volume, and overlaid on top of one another to create an experimental portayal of the tight knittedness of identity and work. In this way, Melitopoulos' treats the film format as her characters would a piece of clothing; the editing process is not concealed but made noticeable, demanding the audience's attention, as she stitches and unstitches the elements of the film before our eyes and ears.
This is what I attempted in my test video of my grandmother sewing a bag together. I overlaid audio of a conversation we had about her time living in London, where she worked as a seamstress in a factory for around thirty years. I thought it was significant how she had her own dreams of what she wanted to do (i.e., become a hairdresser) but her mother thought tailoring to be a more respectable and worthwhile job, when it came to providing for her own family in the future. These expectations carry through intergenerationally, since myself and my sibling and cousins were encouraged to study abroad so that we could secure a better future for ourselves, and thus be able to enjoy living comfortably in our motherland in the distant future.
In the edit, I used close-up shots of her hands picking stitches a part, to demonstrate the tension and deconstruction required for performing this work. I intercut between different parts of her process in order to emphasise the manual extent of this work, as nothing in this process is automated and every part of her process is co-dependent with the other. I'm unsure if this is the exact style I want my film to adopt, but it's something I will continue experimenting with, in order to find out where my tone as a filmmaker belongs.
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