(Total Streams over Senior Project)

 

Looking back at my essential question, did I answer it? No. But that’s not for lack of trying. It’s just a question that is unanswerable, or if there is an answer, it changes for every person. It’s a very subjective thing, trying to figure out how we can understand and talk about movies. That’ll change for every person. It depends on the movie too, and the memories or relationship we have with the content of the film. For example, the way that I relate to Lost In Translation, and the way I understand that incredible film, will be incredibly different than Kamara would understand it; that’s just how it works. I have memories of that film, and memories of wanting to be in that film, and so watching it is an incredibly personal and emotional experience for me. For someone else, it could be just a boring quiet talky slow movie, and that’s totally fine, because every movie is someone’s favorite and every movie is someone’s least favorite and that’s just the way it works. But, I don’t feel like my project was really about that. That’s where we started, sure, and that’s what our podcasts were about, but I feel like the project really, when you get down to it, was less about understanding and more about talking (both parts of the essential question but I have to fill up space somehow).

Throughout our Senior Project Experience, we learned how to articulate what we felt about a movie and why, and we learned how to do so with actual sentences, not just us saying “this is cool and that’s cool so it’s cool” (although that happened a lot.) It was more about actually getting to the core of a movie and figuring out what makes it tick and why that is, and then how we felt and related to it/how it relates to the world in a larger sense (which I guess actually is understanding but, again, gotta’ fill up those pages somehow). And, over the course of this senior project, I really do think that my skills in that field have improved. I’ve thought critically about films in the past and talked about them with friends, but putting out a 30-minute episode about the movie for people to listen to means that I have to articulate my thoughts more clearly, which really pushed me to try and speak concisely (while still remaining the vibe of our podcast which was casual and laid back.)

I think, looking back, the thing I’m most proud of is the episode we made about Scarface (1933) or the one we did about A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014). The reason why is I think that Kamara and I really thought deeply and really spoke well and articulated our points well when talking about these two movies. In Scarface, we were able to talk about the greater context of the world at the time that the movie was released and how the film related to it at that time, and for A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, I just feel like I spoke well about the film and why I liked it.

 

I reached the page limit (roughly) so that’s it.