Short Excerpt Progress 3

 I decided to give myself a break from the initial sequence, so I could start the next half of the video. I figured this would also be productive, since it would allow me to watch the first half with fresh eyes. I started watching back footage of the artist again and trying to decide which of it would be interesting to juxtaposed with the footage of my grandmother. I did the same with the audio, since I already knew voiceover had become an important aspect of my film. Not just voiceover, but layering my own voice repeating the "subject's" words over theirs. 

I experimented with different footage. First, I began with a close-up shot of the artist's hands, marking and cutting the fabrics they worked with. I used this initially since it directly paralleled the footage of my grandmother's hands at the beginning of the video. But, in the end, I decided this wasn't impactful enough: 1) because I didn't like the composition of the shot in general, and 2) I didn't like how 'on-the-nose' it looked to use close-up hand shots, from the same angle as my grandmother's, and wanted a different style of footage to emphasise the differences I primarily intended to explore between generations of Cypriot women. I decided on some footage of the artist setting up their work-space wall, by pinning up their textile designs. This highlighted the different contexts of their situations: the Cypriot artist chose to study art in a university outside of Cyprus, where she was given the resources to do so; my grandmother was steered into the garment industry at a very young age, due to limited opportunities and poverty.

The sequence begins with the purple textile consisting of the ancient, Eteo-Cyprian, syllabary. This was an extinct language spoken by the indigenous, non-Hellenic population of the country. I superimposed these inscriptions against the shots of my grandmother's hands in the beginning of the video, and wanted to bring it back to create an interesting motif, since it was featured in one of the artist's designs. The textile fades in to the shot of the artist setting up their wall, and as it fades away, it briefly superimposes against the artist's other designs. Part of the impact is the lack of remembrance of there ever being an indigenous, non-Hellenic population in Cyprus, before the arrival of so many colonisers and occupiers. The south of the islands, instead aligns itself heavily with Hellenism, since it represents every arrival on the country as an occupation, except for that of the Greeks. To cut this short, I was exploring the many differences between generations in such a short amount of time, and how Cypriot Cypriotness, one that aligns with Cyprus and not any "foreign" nationalism attached to Turkey or Greece, is being celebrated by the Cypriot youth today.

To briefly speak about the audio, I used sound of my writing with a pen and paper on the clip of the Cypriot inscriptions slowly coming into view, to create a tactile effect. This was more of an experiment, as I wasn't exactly sure if I liked how this looked or sounded. Furthermore, in the video, the artist speaks in Cypriot about how she argues with her dad, as he often says to her that the Cypriot youth cannot speak "proper greek", that they cannot write properly, and always make mistakes. I thought this was interesting, and perhaps unsurpising, since 1) many Cypriots go through private school education, where the Greek language is given very little priority, in comparison to Cypriot public schools; 2) the Greek language is not spoken by Cypriots on a daily basis. Instead we communicate in the Cypriot dialect, which is vastly different, and something we learn through speaking to each other (our families, friends, etc.) everyday. Cypriot is not taught in Cypriot schools, as it is noot seen as a "language", but a dialect, despite it being the primary form of expression of people on the island. She also goes on to talk about how her family never discouraged her from following art as a career, but she still experiences this "trope" from others in Cypriot society.