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matildainmotion · 3 years

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What if Self-Love is Not About the Self? By Natasha Fowler and Matilda Leyser

This blog is a collage.

A collaboration

A conversation between my words -Matilda’s- and….

….Mine, Natasha’s

It’s a blog about looking after yourself, ourselves, and how I, you, we go about doing that.

It is in two parts. You can also listen to the blog if you go HERE:

PART ONE:

First, to introduce ourselves:

Matilda: I am a mother, writer, theatre-maker, co-director of Mothers Who Make, wife, daughter, insomniac.

Natasha: I am a friend, a lover, a guardian, a wounded human. I am a White woman, descendant from my ancestors. I make art, share what I know and raise children.

We met at an international MWM meeting.

I’m trying to finish a draft of my novel by Christmas, so I am not writing any blogs. Instead, I send an email to Natasha, in Amsterdam….

Hi Natasha, Please let me know if you wish to write a MWM blog for the month of November. The only requirement is that it ends with a question, relevant to the theme of mothering and making, that can become the focus for the month’s meetings should people wish to take it up. Let me know….. Matilda

Thank you, Matilda, yes. I started work on the self-care article yesterday. I’m going to edit today and share with a few friends. I can commit to having it to you by Wednesday. I hope you have a good steady day of eating, working, caring and resting. I have stretched, washed and consciously dressed but my teeth are not cleaned yet (3/4 of my morning routine). Time to get off emails! Natasha

Late Wednesday, I receive Natasha’s first draft. I see it come into my inbox at nine pm, as I am about to read bedtime stories to my daughter – I think, ‘I won’t read that now, or I won’t sleep.’ I close down my laptop.

I don’t sleep anyway. One of the worst things about insomnia is the radical loneliness – an irrational sense that no one else in the world is still awake.

The next day, tired, wired, I read Natasha’s blog. I know I am a word control freak -I have been known to edit, and re-edit, a text message - but I feel uncertain about publishing Natasha’s draft in the MWM blog spot. I want more mothering and making in it. This also seems a very dubious response- to invite new, diverse people to write a blog and, when they don’t sound like me, to want to edit them to make them sound more so…..and yet, at the same time, I think there is something valid in wanting to look after the particular space that MWM holds, in meetings, online, in writings. After dithering for a few days, I email Natasha –

Hi Natasha, first a disclaimer: I am not in a great place right now. My chronic insomnia has become acute and I am not functioning well, so my critical faculties are pretty ropey! …But would you be willing, to include a little more about your mothering and making in the writing….?

Hi Matilda, It makes sense to me that my approaches and the boundaries of the blog are having a conversation. I am curious about why I don’t talk about mothering and making in a way that meets the criteria. I have an imaginative block for what that’d look like - which tells me I’m categorising the requirement differently to you. It’s a familiar thought cul-de-sac that comes with this Neurodiverse mind I operate in.

Neurodiverse. It’s a term that is relatively new to me and suddenly tremendously potent: at the end of September my son at last received an autism diagnosis. “I get it,” he said when my husband and I told him, “My brain does this” – he drew a detailed picture in the air of different, curved and diagonal connections between invisible points of meaning– “And other peoples’ do this,” he said, drawing a series of straight, right-angled lines.

Hi Natasha, as part of my learning in this area I would be very interested to hear a little more about how you name and describe your neurodiversity. Please send me a few lines articulating your sense of it - why does our exchange feel like ‘a familiar cul-de-sac’ to you? Tell me more about the cul-de-sac and the other streets and highways of your mind :-) Thank you again for your openness, integrity, and all your work on this. Matilda xxx

The cul-de-sac I talk about is a place I get stuck when I've been given a task and I have no imaginable concept of what that would look like. With a long conversation and lots of back and forth clarification, I would probably discover that I do know what you're talking about but I learned a long time ago not to try and clarify everything so precisely, it was not practical/ possible and probably led to people being annoyed by my questions.

Part of my response to the task is to think "but I made the writing - that's the making" and "I am a mother, so if I speak, I'm speaking from the experience of mothering".

In the end I understand the labels autism/ADHD/dyslexia/neurodiversity to be bureaucratic necessities in a world obsessed with 'normal'. The necessary diversity of human experience is medicalised, categorised in order for us to get the money from the system that is needed to exist in the system. I am disabled by what I live in and my race/class/gender identity have protected me from that disabling being far more consequential.

I can’t and don’t want to argue with any of this. I feel dismayed at the idea that my requirements for the MWM blog might actually in themselves be exclusive. I don’t feel good about wading in and making Natasha’s voice more acceptable within my idea of what the text should sound like. So, I think instead I will be transparent – I will leave her words as they are and add some of mine – put in the mothering and the making that I feel the need to include. As it happens, Natasha’s chosen theme, of the need for self-care to be a process that takes place as a collective, community act, could not be more relevant to my experience of mothering and making this month.

Here we go then….

PART TWO:

Natasha: I ran out of self-love this summer, overwhelmed by stories of all my faults, what I’d lost and not done. I spent too much time subject to a cruel inner tyranny. I held onto the idea that I could take care of the situation alone. That I could create the self-love I needed. I could not. I needed to depend on something beyond my self. Although I had vowed to love myself first only two years ago, I was now raising questions about this individualised ideal of self-love.

Matilda: Take care, people say. I still struggle to do this. I sit on the stairs at 3am. My husband is asleep. My son and daughter are asleep. They are 8 and 4. I am 46. I ought to be able to rest too - how can I possibly take care of them, if I cannot take care of myself in this fundamental way? Self-soothing is a skill that babies, some say, are meant to have learnt after only a few months. I tell myself this when I get to the sobbing stage at 4am. I fantasize about a mother figure– not my real mother who is 79 now, also in my care, also asleep – but some great giant of a mother coming walking through the woods outside. She is coming to take me up in her arms, hold me against her, above the trees, hold me, grown as I am, until I fall asleep. Because tomorrow I have other people to take care of– the children, my mother. And I have another chapter of my novel to write. I know I cannot write when I haven’t slept.

Natasha: I finally gave up the idea that self-love is my sole responsibility. I began to accept the dependence that exists, the vulnerability of my well being. My self-love became communal. Just like the child raising that I do along with my partner, our friends and family; just like the neighbourhood garden my wee boy and I joined in preparing for winter last week.

But how did I end up believing self-love is something I have to do by myself? Born in 1978, independence and individuality were highly prized values when I was growing up. To be able to do things yourself without help was a given. To be free of the demands of a group was important. The myth of singular heroes was all over the culture, from lonesome superheroes to introvert inventors and brave explorers. The heroes saved the vulnerable, and the vulnerable were symbolised as young, straight, thin, white women. The stories of everyone around the inventor and all that they did were edited out. The people who were there before the explorer even set his foot down were erased. The values of independence of individuality, invulnerability are seeped into my bones.

Matilda: Did you sleep? My husband asks me in the morning. I shake my head. He is worried. I am worried. I don’t know what to do. I have tried so many things. I tell him I might put a post about it on the Mothers Who Make Facebook group– “You should,” he says. “That’s what it’s for.” True. I started it, but I find it hard to reach out for support. I have a kind of pride, almost a snobbery, that has often stopped me sharing. ‘What’s on your mind?’ FB asks me – so many things, but I don’t want to place them in that white public space. It feels immodest to do so, to turn my life into a headline. But the truth is, I am afraid.

I recognise this. It is also why I find it hard to share my work. I hold onto it. I have been working on this novel for ten years, and hardly anyone has read it. It is the same reason I edit, re-edit text messages. I do not let people see the mess. The missed comas. The words out of place. I feel safest when sealed off, private, when only carefully crafted images of vulnerability are revealed. And yet, when I am sobbing at 4am, all I want is company. A giant mother. Someone, anyone, to see me, to see the mess of me.

Natasha: I am communally made. My ideas of who I am, what I do, what is the value in me are made during my relationships. Maybe I always knew that like the self-hate I was carrying, my self-love was a communal responsibility. I suspect there is something about the experience of being a mother in my culture that helped me forget. It seems to be an experience that isolates and calcifies our individual sense of responsibility. The International mothers who make calls were part of my communal self-love recovery. Getting to turn up to a new group and hear me tell my story and listen to so much good company. I hope we might all give and receive the love that we need to maintain a sense of our self being loved. I hope we are all learning what we need to learn to be able to do that.

Matilda: So I did it – I put the post on Facebook. I need some help, I wrote, I don’t sleep and I can no longer blame my children for this. My children are sleeping – I am not. Many of you reading this, may have seen it and responded. It was extraordinary for me to see such a huge number of compassionate, wise, responses so fast. Humbling. Profoundly helpful – not just the resources, but the act itself of reaching out and finding so many hands writing back. After only an hour, I went online to look and I could see the wavy line that appears when someone, somewhere is in the process of typing something. A real person out there, taking care. Not just one. Over a hundred. A giant number of mothers.

I wrote back to Natasha:

P.s. The amazing response I received to my insomnia post rather wonderfully proves your point - we don’t have to do this self-care thing on our own. Xxxxx

Don’t have to – can’t even – whoever you are, how ever your mind works, however brilliant you are, however vulnerable, however divergent, however alone you feel.

It sounds so simple. So obvious. We are interconnected. All the streets link up, even the cul-de-sacs have passages leading onto one another. There is no such thing as social distancing. Physical distancing, yes, but social – two metres apart between your thoughts and mine, your experience and mine, your words and mine – is just not possible.

Here then is Natasha’s, my, your, our question for the month:

How do you understand self-love, is it clearly something you must do for yourself? Or something you share? or maybe you practise other ideals of compassion? Maybe you carry some communally made self-hate too? How do you sustain yourself when overwhelmed?

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s0022548asfilm-blog · 7 years

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Post P. Evaluation

What were the aims of your artefact?

In Post A, The Brief i discussed briefly what the aims of my short film where and how i intended to meet the aims/criteria i had set out for my self.

One aim was to create a short film that was 2 minutes or very close too, and i planned to ensure this aim was met by completing planning in the pre-production process and editing in the post-production process to the best of my abilities. In my brief i also stated that i wanted my short film to be strongly influenced by my two textual analysis films, Ayoade’s, The Double and Lanthimos’s, The Lobster, especially in term of cinematography and theme, as i talked about how these films where “dark, dystopian and strange.”

The influence of my two focal films was perhaps my most important and prominent aim, therefore conducting the textual analysis into these films needed to be successful to give me insight and information to film my short film.

In my textual analysis i had hoped to clearly identify the prominent micro technical features of both films. I hoped that looking into the use of cinematography, editing, sound and mise en scene in great detail would help with the planning and production of my own short film.

I also hoped to study how The Double and The Lobster conveyed the theme man vs himself, positioning this question (how The Double and The Lobster convey the theme Man vs Himself and Man vs Society) as the title of my essay so i could focus on this. In my textual analysis i also hoped to draw more information about this theme from film theories, so in my essay, looked into Foucalt’s idea of fixed identity and Freud’s, ‘The Uncanny.’ From this i hoped to get a deeper insight into the psychological aspects of man vs himself and perhaps reflect this understanding into my own short film.

What codes and conventions identified in the Textual Analysis were used in your film?

Mise En Scene

A large part of mise en scene i identified in my chosen clip from The Double was costume as i talked about how the costumes of James and Simon helped symbolise and reflect their different personalities, as well as help the viewer differentiate between the two. In the screen shot from The Double, above, James is shown wearing a relatively bright, floral shirt, which reflects his more interesting, perhaps happier personality. Although i did not replicate this symbolism exactly in my film , the costume choices were strongly inspired by The Double.

This (above) is the costume choice for my protagonist Toby, it is a bright blue shirt and also features denim jeans. This costume choice reflects how the protagonist looks to the world, his outer emotions, and in comparison to my focal film The Double, takes influence from James’s costume, which symbolises a more favourable personality.

To explore the theme of man vs himself in my textual analysis, i compared James’ costumes with Simon’s and came to the conclusion the costume choices were symbolic of the characters personality and to reflect the conflict between the two doppelgangers. Above, it can be seen that Simon, the passive, less interesting of the pair, dresses in clothing that reflect these mannerisms.

Taking influence from Simon’s costume in The Double, i dressed my protagonist, Toby’s reflections/inner emotions in dark, dull colours, objectifying the negativity he keeps hidden inside him

Cinematography

In my textual analysis, focusing on my second focal film, The Lobster, i noted that “for long periods of time throughout the scene a medium shot is used, so the focal point is Robert.” These mediums shots were of Robert’s side, i decided to reflect this in part of my own film as i thought it created intimacy but also made the character look vulnerable, which is wanted to achieve,especially at the start of my short film. I also felt this angle in The Lobster reflected man vs society well as Robert was surrounded by people and managed to achieve intimation through the shot type, i wanted to reflect this to portray man vs himself in my film. However because this scene from The Lobster didn't vary in cinematography a great deal, i felt that i took most of the inspiration from The Double.

The chosen clip from The Double opens with a tilt and framing of Simon’s face using a close up, i really like how this conveyed Simon coming to reality, especially as he seems to look up into the camera and at the viewer. I replicated this in my film as the protagonist is shown via a close up, putting on his headphones and then looking into the camera.

Although i did not replicate the cinematography and the mise en scene exactly in this shot from The Double, I definitely took inspiration as i liked the message it conveyed. I wanted to reflect the framing of the character’s expression in my film as, because the character is struggling to fit into frame it helps convey man vs himself. The close up also helps show the expression of shock and surprise of on both Simon’s and my protagonist face.

Editing

As talked about in my textual analysis, shot reverse shot is often used throughout The Double as well as in the chosen clip. This editing technique is key when filming with the same actor playing different characters, which is the case with The Double and in my film to an extent. The shot reverse shot is used in The Double, firstly when Simon is talking to Hannah and director, Ayoade, wants to create tensions and awkwardness and then when doppelgangers, Simon and James are talking. I used this editing technique in my film to show the exchanges with the protagonist and his reflection/inner emotions in the mirror.

In my chosen clip from The Lobster, atmosphere is created by have little too no cuts during the intense toaster scene. Having no cuts deprives the viewer of relief from the disturbing, intense scene which creates an uncomfortable tense atmosphere just by using or in this case not using the simple editing technique of cutting. Although, i wouldn't be showing such an intense sequence in my film, i did want to replicate this, by having long periods of footage without cuts, which, like in The Lobster, would create an uncomfortable atmosphere. In my short film, i decided to use this technique on the bridge scene, the shot lasts for just over 20 seconds.

Sound

In my short film, right from the initial planning, i knew that my film would feature no diegetic dialogue, although this did not reflect either of my textual analysis films, i felt that it was necessary not to include it, as it would have decreased quality and not fitted with the lonely narrative of my film.I also recognise that neither of the chosen scenes from The Double or The Lobster feature a voice over, however i deemed it necessary to feature one in my short film, as it was needed to carry the narrative.

The Lobster did feature a non diegetic score, which i reflected in my film as i had non diegetic music, the music from The lobster scene helped add to to the atmosphere as i noted in my textual analysis “sharp, jolts of piano keys accompanied by screeches of violin strings creates a highly uncomfortable atmosphere for the audience.” I intended to replicate this, however by creating an emotional atmosphere instead of an uncomfortable one.

This is the link to the song i used for my short film:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZVVJktWHPM

Genre and Film Theory

Even though genre was not a main focus in my textual analysis as the macro feature i was focusing on was theme, i still took into consideration the types of genre my focal films would fall into and eventually what genre conventions would help influence my own film. Following on from my genre research into psychological drama, i identified conventions throughout my two textual analysis films of this genre, and tried to apply these to my own film. i identified the common theme of self doubt or depression, which is prominent in The Double and could be argued is the main theme in my short. In terms of genre iconography, i identified dull or colourless costumes, which i talk about in my textual analysis within the mise en scene of both The Double and The Lobster. This convention is easily reflected in my film through costume.

In my textual analysis i also explored film theories that could be applied to aid my understanding of man vs himself throughout the two texts. One of these theories, Sigmund Freud’s- ‘The Uncanny’ is reflected in my own work, as the exploration of something familiar becoming foreign and frightening is addressed through my protagonists familiar reflection/emotion becoming something that is scary.

How were the planning materials used in the construction of the artefact?

Before writing my textual analysis essay i had too initially decide on what type or what genre of film i wanted to study in more detail, this quickly eliminated romance and comedy, as although my films may have elements of this they do not solely rely on these genres to carry the narrative. Previous to this, i had enjoyed Ayoade’s work before (director of The Double) and admired his quirky directors style. Both The Double and The Lobster focuses on ‘outsiders’ in society and along with other narrative aspects really interested me.

In preparation for writing the comparative essay i re-watched the texts and noted the micro technical features i would consider writing about in more depth. In Post B Textual analysis details, i began to structure my essay.

In terms of planning for my actual film, i am happy with the amount and the quality of pre-production planning i have completed. The shot list would have to be the most important document to help with production as allowed shooting to be completed with ease as well as making any additional ideas pre filming simple to add. The shot list helped with organisation of shooting and technically from a directors point of view.

Above is an example of how my detailed shot list helped in shooting, especially when filming shots with relatively long duration like the one demonstrated above. It helped with direction of my actor as i could consult my shot list and instruct him on facial expression and movement. The shot list was also important in post-production as i had a good understanding of were my voice over was to be situated.

The shot list also helped me keep track of costumes, especially as my actor would be switching between two different costumes throughout, any continuity errors involving this would ruin the narrative of the film.

As well as my shot list, my initial ideas not only helped with costume but also helped establish all the planning involved with cinematography, editing, sound and mise en scene. Although not every aspect of the initial ideas were rigidly stuck to in production, without this piece of planning the creative elements of the film would have been lacking in quality.

As part of my initial planning i completed a location report to help structure my mise en scene ideas and create a clearer picture of the locations i intended to use. However from this planning there is examples of how my final artefact differs from my initial planning.

As can be see from the screenshot from my location report, i had initially intended to shoot a different sequence on the bridge compared to the final sequence i shot. Although i still used the bridge as a key location in the short, i decided against the idea of this sequence (detailed above) as it would cause timing problems in post production and i feel the sequence i did shoot was better fitting.

Examples of planning in comparison to final artefact:

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How successful was the artefact in achieving the aims?

Linking back to the consideration of aims and goals involved with the artefact i feel i was overall successful. Firstly, the aim of my textual analysis was to explore how The Double and The Lobster convey the themes man vs society and man vs himself. In my textual analysis i included exploration of how cinematography, editing, sound and mise en scene were used in both films to convey this theme and i am overall happy with the detail of my final draft. I also felt my textual analysis was successful in meeting the aims as it also explored film theories relative to the man vs himself theme, this is information and knowledge was incredibly useful when producing my own short so i would deem the textual analysis essay a success.

In relation to the success of my film, i feel it did achieve its aims but there is room for some improvement. Firstly my short film fits within the required duration time of 2 minutes, giving or taking 10 seconds, this means the artefact is brief but also means the narrative and messages of the film are delivered concisely but intentionally ambiguously.

Importantly, an aim was to reflect micro techniques from my textual analysis films, The Double (Richard Ayoade) and The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos)i felt this was mostly successful, especially after looking back and comparing how the films influenced my own in the evaluation. However, if i were to complete the artefact again, i would try and include more diegetic or non diegetic sound influenced by my focal films.

I had also aimed to convey the theme man vs himself in my short film, and feel this was my most successful element. As, along side peer assessment and audience feedback, i, myself feel the portrayal of the protagonist battling himself was a clear and prominent theme, developed through cinematography and mise en scene.

To improve or if i had a chance to complete another edit or start entirely again i think i would make the film simpler and focus a lot more time on beautiful and perhaps more unusual cinematography techniques as i sometimes felt this was rushed in the footage to keep up with the narrative.

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