# 24

museum of childhood, lyric hammersmith theatre

this is a crazy week! fmp has just officially began. and i have decided to change my reflective journal from an actual hand written journal to a BLOG (on tumblr) so i have to balance out my work between these 2 blogs. tumblr is so much easier (and prettier!) than blogspot. i am kicking myself.

ive started my project by reading the whole of hilaire belloc’s “cautionary verses” and i went to the v&a’s museum of childhood. luckily for me i found 2 pieces which focused specifically on cautionary tales! the first was an illustrated concertina book entitled “a guide for well brought up children” (1856) and the second was “good charlotte”, a response to the lokesh’s warm charlotte collection. i need to research more into this. the piece was made by teresa hare duke and caroline smith, (and also help from year 2 and year 6 school children). it was a dress covered with little reminders written on handkerchiefs telling children how to behave. i thought it was charming. some of the things the kids wrote down was hilarious. “always wash your clothes or the fox will come”, “don’t use too much make up or your boy friend will run aways from you!”, “don’t bully people or you will be next”, “always eat your breakfast or you will lose your belly button”. it made me really excited to plan my questionnaires. i was then questioning how i would go about this. teresa hare duke used colours on her hankerchiefs which must have exciting the children, and want them to participate. i then went upstairs to the new exhibition “food, glorious food” and happened to see something similar done by the museum. they were asking children to draw/write down what their favourite meals: “draw the best meal you have eaten” and “what are your strongest food memories: tell us about one here”. soo many kids had participated! the layout of the paper was simple with minimal use of colour. just clean, olive on white. i took a few away to potentially plan my questionnaires in a similar way.

today i read “struwwelpeter (in english translation)” by heinrich hoffmann (1845), “pierre: a cautionary tale in five chapters and a prologue” by maurice sendak (1962) and “the gashlycrumb tinies” by edward gorey (1963). these were all quite short! i need to figure out a good way of documenting all of this information in my sketchbooks.

i also decided to watch two social guidance films. the first was a 10 minute movie called “boys beware” (1961) and was shown to young boys in american schools, to warn them of the “dangers” of homosexuals. i was really shocked of the views that were shown in this movie. i realise that there can be a lot of hatred towards gay people but i never imagined that it would be so bluntly stated. they were labelled as having “a sickness in the mind”, “demanding an intimate relationship with members of their own sex”. another quote: “one never knows when a homosexual is about. he may appear normal and it may be too late when you discover he is mentally ill”. the second movie was entitled “reefer madness” originally released as “tell your children” (1936) and it was teaching high school students about the dangers of marijuana. it was extremely melodramatic. whilst under the influence, it made you descend into madness and can lead to manslaugter, attempted rate, and murder!

i then also went to see an evening performance of an adaptation of roald dahl’s “tales of the unexpected”. it was performed at the lyric hammersmith theatre and ran for a sweet 80 minutes. i am really glad i went. i thought it would be quite closely linked to cautionary tales-> by telling people what NOT to do, through unexpected twists in stories. it was full of great theatrical shocks and really left the audience satisfied. i recognized a few of the stories from having previously read them (“man from the south” and “the landlady”).

today was spent working in sketchbooks and doing A LOT more in depth research into what i have already learnt. from day 1 i discovered a piece at the v&a museum of childhood: “good charlotte” where young children had written on handkerchiefs, i researched more into the story behind it. it has also been called “fair charlotte” and “young charlotte” and is a cautionary tale about a young girl who refused to wrap up warmly to go on a sleigh ride to a new year’s ball, and froze to death on the journey… it was first published by seba smith in a maine newspaper (Dec, 28 1843) under the title “a corpse going to a ball”. there have been several attempts to link this story to an actual event. the closest thing that i could find was that the new york observer reported on feb 8, 1840 that a girl had frozen to her death on her way to a ball on Jan 1, 1840… who knows … this then made me think more about the newspapers that i’ve been collecting and whether i should just take scraps of them and stick them in their own sketchbook.

by monday i feel like i will be ready to show my tutor what i’ve been doing for the past week, and to ask what my next steps will be. it is key to get as much feedback, from her and then from my peers. i need to ask how i should display my gathered newspapers (or articles), and to find out what books i should get, to research rules and how they are given to us in society. this should then help me plan by questionnaires and such… exciting!
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for contextual studies we also needed to do a film review based on the movies we saw and relate it to another culture artefact. here is what i wrote :

“Enter The Void” and “Festen (The Celebration)” were two movies that were unlike anything I have ever seen before. Through extreme-film making techniques, both movies invited the audience along for one very, bumpy ride.

“Enter The Void” (2009) is a French film directed by the controversial Gaspar Noé. It tells the tale of American drug dealer living in the red light district of Tokyo who gets shot and killed by the police. Through an after-life experience (and from the view point of his spirit), he continues to watch over his younger sister, floating above the streets and looking down on her. Using multiples points of view, the whole film is shot entirely from first-person perspectives. Whether it’s through the eyes of the protagonist, from his spirit floating from a birds-eye angle, or looking over the shoulder of the younger sister, this smooth, gliding technique is what makes the film so absorbing. Karina Longworth, a writer for The Village Voice (free New York paper) stated “I could stare at this movie for days and not get tired of the sensation.” The cast were asked to improvise all of their lines, and the honesty of the casts reactions to their surroundings made it extremely difficult to watch.

Similar to “Enter The Void”, the audience’s experience of the film “Festen” is the main focus of the film. “Festen” (1998) is a Danish film directed by Thomas Vinterberg and is the first movie to have been created by the avant-garde filmmaking collective, Dogme 95. The movie tells the story of a family celebration for their father’s 60^th birthday. At the dinner reception, the eldest son forks out some family secrets. He accuses his father of sexually abusing both him and his younger sister who had recently killed herself. This turning point in the movie is emphasized through the ‘difficult to watch’ cinematography and semi-improvised acting. Dogme 95 created a Manifesto in which they would follow certain guidelines to create their movies. These included: “The camera must be a hand-held camera. The filming must take place where the action takes place”. The audience is confronted with such real, “in your face” action and is left with a feeling of overwhelment that it is impossible to escape.

“Enter The Void” unintentionally plays with a similar aspect of the Dogme Manifesto: “The film must be in colour. Special lighting is not acceptable.” Noé was reluctant to use artificial lighting whilst filming, as it would destroy the mind-numbing illusion if the camera was turned around. Due to it being filmed in Tokyo and mostly at night, it’s impressive neon signs meant that a very small amount of additional lighting was necessary. The colour blue was avoided throughout the entire film since Noé did not associate this colour with dreams.

Both films engage the audience to become a key observer of all of their actions. It could be said that it is primarily due to the raw, improvised acting and cinematography that allow the characters to become real to us, resulting in an unnerving, emotional experience once the movies are over.