Multimedia Photo Book

Click to View: "Wildflower" by Caroline Garrow

 

Experimental Video

 “Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness. “Time” has ceased, “Space” has vanished. We now live in a global village...a simultaneous happening...we have had to shift our stress of attention from action to reaction.” (McLuhan 63)

"'Only the hand that erases can write the true thing' -Meister Eckhardt" (McLuhan 156)

This film, titled “Hey Caroline! What is Truth?,” exemplifies the innate trueness of family. The footage, filmed by my ten year old self on my pink 2009 ipod nano that I had just received as a Christmas present, engages with theme of childhood innocence, a pure outlook on life with no ulterior motives. The film opens with a title-card from my modern-day self asking my younger self “Hey Caroline! What is truth?” and my younger self responds “...well I can tell you about it.” This choice makes all the truths in the film the truths of my younger self, the documentarian. The film re-enters an old, nostalgic world as I say that I am going to America, a place I had expatriated from three years prior. The raw footage amounts to about 45 minutes of narrated train-of-thought style documentation. I liked the grit of the footage, as it evidences a sort of truthful old-world style. The film was also shot around Christmas-time, which was a time I traditionally spent with her grandparents. While making the film, I engaged with two types of truth--implicit and explicit--which drove the piece’s intent. The explicit truth of the film is what can be seen. In the film, I say that “it snowed last night, as you can see,” and shows photographs of my grandfather on the wall as another form of explicit evidence. The implicit truths of the film require extraneous information that I sees retrospectively. My grandmother cannot remember the name of the burger place because she has dementia. At the end of this clip, I leaves a couple seconds of silence to let my grandma’s words “I can’t even think of the name of the place” resonate with the viewer. My grandfather, on the other hand, is seated because his muscles are beginning to atrophy due to Parkinson's Disease. This shot ends with my younger self absentmindedly saying “stay away from the light,” an allusion to the light one sees as they die. I was not aware of these conditions at the time of shooting. These were truths that I captured on film, but could not see at the time. What makes the statement that I make about going into the light extra resounding is that my grandparents both died around Christmas time, the time they had always spent together. My grandmother died exactly one year after this footage was taken. The only new footage in the piece is of the American flag, which was hanging in my dorm room. This establishing shot was intended to bring the viewer to America with my ten year old self, and into the old, nostalgic, family-oriented, Christmas time world. The narration over this clip is my voice from 2009, from the original footage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIKKUzstD8s&t=10s

Marilyn Monroe

To start...before my thesis...I would like to look at McLuhan’s use of Monroe in The Medium is the Massage.

McLuhan is highlighting the use of media as a manipulative tool, to propagate information and misinformation. I will explore this more in my thesis. As some background of the language used on this page, Premier Khrushchev was the leader of the Soviet Union from 1958 to 1964. This image was taken from his visit to the United States in 1959 during a luncheon that was attended by Marilyn. The bolded text is a play on words, as it refers both to the Cold War, which lasted from 1947 to 1991, and the film Some Like it Hot, which starred Monroe and was released in the same year as this photograph was taken, 1959.

 

For McLuhan, Monroe is the icon--a sign whose form directly reflects the thing it signifies--for Hollywood. I would argue that Monroe, while iconic, is better analyzed as an agent subject capable of critique and influence than a passive object of propaganda.