B&W Bananas

While filming we learned that St. Lucian violence can be traced to its history as a colony of plantation systems. In order to illustrate this aspect of Caribbean history, we're looking into archive video footage to supplement our doc. I've had luck with the Prelinger Archives, the Kino Library, and Travel Film Archive thus far. What makes the search process difficult is the lack of tags attached to some videos, which renders them impossible to find without looking through droves and droves. What makes it cool is how eccentric and obscure the found footage involved can be.

One of my favorites is this video, "About Bananas," which is a silent black&white film about, well, bananas. See here: https://archive.org/details/AboutBan1935

Banana export was St. Lucia's largest source of income until recently, when shifts away from St. Lucia in the international trade put local banana growers out of work. Instead of being able to make a living on their land with their family, many Lucians now have to commute to work at the island's many tourist resorts, resulting in time away from home, money spent on transportation, children being left unsupervised, etc. This is one example of a riff that history has torn through St. Lucia and something we're going to work very carefully--with the help of archive footage--to visually explain.

Dear Photograph

     Right now I want to share a website with anyone who reads this post. The website is http://dearphotograph.com and what they do is creative and meaningful. What they do is have a picture in the foreground and take a picture of it. They take the picture in the same place and have the same orientation so they are lined up. One of the things this does is show how things change due to the passage of time. The way I stumbled across this is through this 9-11 picture a year ago.

     A lot of the pictures tend to be of family members, old houses, things along that line and as stated before it shows the passage of time. There is then a caption added to each picture, addressed like a letter often giving a back-story that you would not be able to tell just by looking at the picture. This project could be a cool concept if transposed to film. This is similar to the one shot project we are doing though. The point of the photographs is to tell a powerful story in a very brief amount of time and use generic or relatable moments, but with a slight twist.

     I find this project pretty amazing because it shows the meaning in objects or places where you wouldn’t see it at first by telling a story. While some people say that not everything needs a story, I am a firm believer that everything has a story.