Thursday, November 26, 2009

Summer Palace Group Presentation
For my group’s Primary Text Class Presentation, we focused on the film Summer Palace directed by Lou Ye. We wanted to focus on the characters in particular and how their lives and the situations they go through lend meaning to the story in its historical context. Also, we wanted to encourage the class during the discussion to consider the differences and similarities between the young main characters of this film, which takes place in China during the 1980s, and youth represented in our Western culture. I thought it would encourage more discussion to show something which would jog everybody’s memory of the ways we in America are shown representations of youth. I wanted to compile a kind of video montage but I’m not particularly skilled at the overly technical aspects of working with a PC. Thus, I searched the internet for a large amount of images which showed youth in various ways. I then whittled the number down to about forty-five images to make a slide show on PowerPoint. The song “Teenagers” by My Chemical Romance was the one I wanted to play during the show, which was difficult to do on PowerPoint at first. Thanks to advice from my group mate Loretta, we accessed the music video for the song on YouTube so that it could play concurrently with the slides. With the timing of animation in place, this ended up working out fairly well. That way, I was able to show the familiar representations of youth in American popular culture and play the song, which has some of the best lyrics about teenage isolation and resistance against the society we all as teens dread to join and love to scoff at.

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