Making an Idea Out of an Idea (Academic Essay/Experimental Film Sample)
This was the cumulative project for an experimental film class I took. The assignment was to make an experimental film paired with an essay explaining the ideas behind it and the process of creating it. There’s a lot going on in this video. It gets uncomfortable at a few points but, as I explain in my essay, that was necessary for the goal of the video. Both pieces work on their own but they work better as a unified piece because each provides context for the other to prevent misunderstandings and misinterpretations.
I decided to include this video and essay as a way to highlight my ability to successfully create something that evokes emotion from the reader/viewer. I had a very specific goal for this project and, thankfully, I accomplished it. The video is fun, then uncomfortable, then hopeful. The reaction the class had to it when I presented it was exactly what I had in mind and I couldn’t have been happier.
Making an Idea Out of an Idea
I started to look at memes more seriously when I entered college. Previously, I hadn’t paid much attention to memes. They were often stupid, unoriginal, and kind of bland. They stuck to simple formulas: 1. an image of something popular/recognizable (i.e. the Sean Bean Lord of The Rings image) 2. reference the original source material (i.e. “one does not simply”) and 3. the input from the meme’s creator (“write an essay on memes”). This was the standard formula for a lot of older memes. But I noticed that memes started to change when I entered college. Memes became more esoteric, more avant garde, so I no longer thought of them as being simple any more.
At one point my in my junior year, I read a graphic novel called Memetic by Eryk Donovan and James Tynion IV. The graphic novel’s premise was simple: an outrageously popular sloth meme destroys the world. This sparked my initial curiosity with memes and what the word meme actually meant. As it turned out, the word is derived from memetic, which was a term coined by Richard Dawkins in the 1970s. He originally used it as a rhetorical device while talking primarily about genetics. It wasn’t until the late 80s that the terms memetic/meme stood on their own. Dawkins described genes as replicators, something/anything that can either, “make copies of itself or... is easily and automatically copied by virtue of its relationship to the medium in which it is found,” (Burnam 80). However, Dawkins took it a step further and applied the same concept to the cultural equivalent of the gene: the meme. The meme easily falls into the category of a replicator, which is why I think the idea that it could be weaponized (like in Memetic) is not something to be taken lightly. Memes can act as a social virus that spreads faster than some physical viruses. That idea was part of the inspiration for this project: memes hold power over us.
From here I started to wonder what fueled memes and the answer was, frustratingly, both complex and simple: us. We create memes and share them so fast that meme fads die out at the same rate as a twice-as-bright burning candle metaphor. So to further understand why memes spread so quickly, I needed to understand the thinking behind sharing a meme. According to Razvan Nicolescu’s contribution to Social Media in Southeast Itally: Crafting Ideals, memes take on a life of their own once shared because they represent things that people believe in rather than what they enjoy. Nicolescu also goes on to say that memes then, “stand for absolute personal truths,” which explains why they are so often shared (Nicolescu 62). I found this concept particularly distressing seeing that the meme template Pepe The Frog was declared a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League. This meant that many people were using a replicator to easily spread a hateful personal truth.
In regards to the class’s contribution to my idea, I wanted to talk about what inspired the form of the final video. My favorite film that we’ve seen in class is Stan Brakhage’s The Dante Quartet. I found it to be a visual masterpiece that forced viewers to understand the volume of images that go into a film as a way to untrain or ‘untutor’ the eye of the viewer. The fact that Brakhage was so fascinated with the concept of an, “untutored eye,” is what really drew me to this concept in the first place (O’Pray 60). Not giving viewers enough time to fully view a frame on screen is a great way to make them separate themselves from what they have been taught: watch and think about what you’re watching. I wanted to take that formula and flip it. By not giving enough time to read the text on the image, it strips it of any abstract meaning and leaves it with a concrete object, or in this case, the image (as highlighted by the Sean Bean meme section). By doing this with hundreds of memes that are moving rapidly, the viewer can see the sheer volume of memes that are out in the world. This contrasts the segment of the film where hateful memes are seen. Here, the viewer is forced to sit and fully grasp the power of what a meme can do. This is why I decided to include a song with the film because, unlike The Dante Quartet, I wanted my film to have a clear tone to it. This is why I chose Clair De Lune. The song carries a lot of emotion with it. The opening is quiet and light-hearted, then it leads into a strong and smooth-flowing volly of notes that speeds and slows, then it comes to a very quiet section with long and heavy gaps of silence, then back to a smooth-flowing volly, and finally it ends the way it began. I felt that this structure, specifically the quiet section, would be perfect for exemplifying both the volume of memes and their larger meaning to us.
The physical editing process, as I’m sure one can imagine, wasn’t a light task. I spent several hours archiving dozens upon dozens of memes on a USB. However once I started editing, I quickly ran out of memes and needed to ‘restock’ as it were. In the end I made four seperate folders in order to keep track of which memes I had already used. This wasn’t a perfect system, though. I know of at least two repeats in the final cut that I decided to leave in as a way to represent the fact that we see ‘reruns’ of memes from time to time. This kind of that-will-have-to-do attitude was something I was ready for when I first started drafting up my initial idea. I knew I didn’t have the organization or editing skills necessary to do the one-meme-per-note plan I originally drafted, so I decided to compromise by cutting back the number of memes and synced the rest to the most recognizable beats. The opening breaks away from this formula because, similar to The Dante Quartet, I wanted my film to also start slowly and then speed up. This would help untutor the eye of the viewer like Brakhage’s film did. However, I faced a dilemma when I got to the section intended for offensive memes. Up to this point, I had tried to make the film rather humorous because of the nature of most memes. I was worried that, if the offensive memes synced up to the music the way it had previously, the audience would think it was intended to be humorous as well. The end result was that images would sync up to notes that were lower in octave. I did this because it wasn’t the melody and it allowed more time for the images to stay on screen; as a result, the audience had more time to absorb the memes’ meaning/purpose in the film.
Ultimately, I feel that the final cut conveys my intended message about memes, but once I share it, it will be out of my hands. The audience will have to decide for themselves what they think it means. Or rather, memes.
Works Cited
Burman, Jeremy Trevelyan. “The Misunderstanding of Memes: Biography of an Unscientific Object, 1976â1999.” Perspectives on Science, vol. 20, no. 1, 2012, pp. 75–104., doi:10.1162/posc_a_00057.
Nicolescu, Razvan. “Visual Postings: Looking For 'The Good'.” Social Media in Southeast Itally: Crafting Ideals , 2016, p. 62., doi:10.14324/111.9781910634745.
“The 1950s: The Aesthetics of The Frame.” Avant-Garde Film: Forms, Themes, and Passions, by Michael O'Pray, Wallflower, 2007.