internship report
The Internship opportunity with LAGFF has been a truly eye-opening experience for me. The internship, integrated with an LMU course taught by Professor Katerina Zacharia, trained its focus on media and the messages that it can intentionally and unintentionally send given the context in which media is created or distributed. Primarily referencing two texts, Representations by Stuart Hall, and a collection of essays edited by Dr. Zacharia, my internship with LAGFF has opened me up to the different ways in which media messages are constructed (encoded) and received (decoded).
The wide breadth of films at the LAGFF allowed me to come in contact with different corners of Greek cinema that I would have never been exposed to on my own. These films included a short that satirizes the way American masculinity is projected onto the world, shorts detailing how the refugee crisis has come to redefine modern Europe, and, my personal favorite, a documentary that followed a group of right-wing Neo-Nazis who were able to find and achieve dramatic success in recent Parliamentary elections. As a screenwriting major, while in this class I was completing the second draft of a screenplay entitled, Bacha posh. Bacha posh follows a female Afghan warlord and her quest to save her sister amidst the United States’ occupation of Afghanistan. Mr. Hall’s work in Representations provided me with a reference that I kept coming back to. His work on “othering,” and how human beings largely perceive the world and create interpretations of it along binary lines informed my approach to what I was writing. Hall encourages creators and media commentators to reach for similarities when discussing the differences between different cultures and different races, rather than reach for the “peculiarities” that you have no context or frame of reference for. When viewed this way, Hall’s notions began to find concrete application to my own personal field of study. Hall’s essays also informed the way I began to see the world. I’m now far more eager to resist rushes-to-judgment or other abstractions that I’ve rushed to because of media portrayals. Surprisingly, or perhaps not surprisingly given my field of choice, media representations have long been a subject on my mind. Growing up, my father would often recant how he wrote one his final dissertations about The Cosby Show and the impact the Huxtable family had on the perception of African Americans. Leaving recent controversies aside, Hall’s notions allowed me to place a critical lens upon the material. As a black man, questions of what’s appropriate and inappropriate to a story vex me at every turn. Sometimes it can feel that there are dueling priorities: the truth or what I’d like to see presented in the world. Can one write about the plight of the black experience and avoid all familiar iconography? It’s hard to imagine it being a possibility. Moreover, to write about the black experience and avoid familiar stereotypical imagery altogether is to fail to strip the stereotype of its weight. Mr. Hall provides us with a route that I have since embraced: you have to engage with the world. You can only subvert the things that oppress you if you study the root of an idea. Only then can you offer an image that proactively acknowledges its legacy while also taking the time to undermine the baggage we bring to it. For these ideas, things that I think about constantly when I’m writing, I will be forever grateful and blessed to have been a part of the Los Angeles Greek Film Festival of 2018. I look forward, when the semester is over, to lending a hand to the operation of the festival. The Los Angeles Greek festival exists as an important nexus between artists who trying to document and give voice to those going through unimaginable horrors, and the cultural capital of the world. It is an amazing opportunity that I highly encourage others to be a part of.
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Daniel de BoulayJunior screenwriting student |