Happy (Week After) Mother's Day!

But who's counting?

So for mother's day I was at a standstill for what to make - because I have the kind of parents that actually seek creative involvement in presents - cause they are under this impression that we're talented, for some reason - when it occurred to me to make a clip collage solely dedicated to mothers.

I specifically included all types of ways that mothers are presented on film/ in films - positive, negative, alive, dead, onscreen, offscreen, fantasy, reality, animated, live-action, old, young, - you get the idea. I called it "Happy Feminist Mother's Day" to make sure viewers realize that I have set this up from a feminist perspective. And by THAT I mean that this is what I call a "clip collage" - a succession of clips specifically arranged and designed for examination - to study and/ or enjoy the WIDE PALLETTE that is "mother" for screenwriters.

Note: This is an hour and forty-two minutes long, but it goes by fast. My mom liked it. But then again... that's kind of her job isn't it.

The visual and especially audio is lower quality so I won't get sued/ sentenced for 5 years in federal prison and the collage still qualifies under "fair use" in the Copyright Act of 1976. I included on Vimeo b/c the collage picking, choosing, and placing was done all on my own.

Here is the description I supplied for vimeo:

"A Collection of clips I made for my mother from a random list of movies, including moments I knew she liked, as well as movies I knew she hadn't seen. List: Adasen Dowa Little Mermaid, All of Me, Disney's Atlantis, Disney's Cinderella, the 1985 Clue, the 1975 Reader's Digest Little Mermaid, Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, How to Marry a Millionaire, It's a Wonderful Life, Julie and Julia, Knocked Up, Lilo and Stitch, a clip of Malayan Tapirs, Mary Poppins, Mulan, Overboard, Ponyo, Princess and the Frog, The Simpsons, and Hey Arnold

I have a feminist blog whose express purpose is to find out what feminism in general is as well as my idiosyncratic feminism. This video AND my blog are for the EXPRESS purposes of critical and creative analysis with a twist towards feminism. I ooze respect!

The focus on this of course is the subject of mothers in our culture. I made the opening & closing collage myself, all images well thought through."

It took two full days to make, and THREE days to get on the internet (it is also lower quality b/c 2.3 GB was way to big to haul online). (I probably shouldn't have spent three whole days but I got obsessed with sharing it - probably transferred agression from something else in my life, as Freud would probably say.) (I was at the edge of madness, probably induced by an entire day without coffee somewhere in there. That hasn't happened since I was 14.)

Here is the mother-centric collage I made for the title sequences of the video:

Images are from:

• An early Da Vinci Madonna
• Disney's 1937 Animated Snow White
• Trina Schart-Hyman's Snow White
• photos from my collection of Malayan Tapir Images
• a photo from my collection of roald dahl images (that's the one with the woman wearing the eye patch)
• "The Girl, the Fish, and the Crown" by Marilee Heyer
• Tim Burton's "Corpse Bride"
• Disney's 1950 Animated Sleeping Beauty
• Jimmy Stewart's "It's a Wonderful Life"
• ... And the BEAUTIFUL mother mermaid image from my collection of 1,357 mermaid images folder see the first image in this entry, above (there are other mermaid folders but who has the time to add them all up... other then the person who has the time to compile them all I mean... cough cough.)

anyhow, Happy Mother's Day! And I hope this video helps to bring out the motherness of it all!

- oh yeah, and I opened and closed with clips from "The Little Mermaid" even though she WASN'T a mother to indicate that mothers have more to them than motherhood - behind every mother there is a maiden - obviously. It's not really the theme of my clip collage, considering I am passively analyzing the portrayal of mothers on the screen vs. mothers themselves and the concept of "motherness" - but I'd thought I'd include that little reminder as a cute little touch of the POTENTIAL motherness of us all (us ladies that is. Though science is getting closer and closer to... well, that's the subject of another entry).

Signing off,

-Just call me Jo