Another Age: Final Project Reflection

The final project for this course was a long time coming. I conducted interviews, read numerous texts on both filmmaking and old age, and watched (what felt like) hundreds of Youtube videos. I wrestled with the decision of whether to use live interviews with elderly subjects or to do something different-somethings making use of both editing techniques of activism and a talking head. I chose the latter for reasons that will follow.

The two sketches that I did were takes on the former idea. The first was a heavily edited interview with a 94 year old man. It did not include me as the filmmaker. This was a deliberate comparative/research oriented experiment. I wanted to see what something like this did to the subject first hand. I wanted to see the impersonal nature. I wanted to compare it with my second sketch, which would intentionally be completely different.

My second sketch was an interview with a 79 year old woman. It was one long, unedited, take that included me and the interviewee talking about the subjects of aging, ageism, retirement, and my project at large. The format of this sketch came more from ideas of cinema verite and raw mores of third cinema.

It was an idea of combination regarding the two sketches that helped to form my final project: "Another Age".

This project it a combo. It is an Eisensteinian montage of black and white clips of elderly people butted up against a color talking head of myself. I wanted to use the clash of the two types of film to illustrate my point about taking the featured clips' taking of humanity away from the elderly. The clips show their subjects as black and white, ephemeral, byte size, antiqued objects. They all present a facade of caring and authenticity, when in actuality they are directly degrading the people they seek to build up. My talking head is the opposite: it is me/very personal, in is a long unedited/unscripted take, it is raw, it is colored.

I chose to focus on this idea of clipped black and white PSAs/commercials (etc.) vs. my long colored talking head for a big reason. I thought it summed up what I had seen throughout the whole project. There is no lack of people who want to care and respect and help the elderly in our Western society. The problem is that even the people who do want to help put their charges in a box of fragility and senility. My video makes the suggestion that the elderly be treated as simply what they are--people. Give them back their humanity.