“held, still” is a multimedia project created in conversation with Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.
It was made for ENGL 381, “A Century of Black Women Writers,” and is composed of a video, statement, and essay.
“held, still” Statement
In creating this piece, I felt it was crucial to complete the audio portion before anything else. I decided against using large gaps of silence; I wanted to portray quiet discomfort by burying the Morrison excerpt within itself. To do so, I took different takes of my reading of the passage and placed them at different audio levels before overlapping them as the video continued. It was important to me that it was not the same clip of me reading used over and over — I wanted to make the clips so that they could never actually align because they are not identical. Additionally, because the passage of time is so central to remaining still, I thought it was fitting to read the same passage over different periods of time. Editing the clips of me reading, I also isolated moments in which I breathed in before speaking and increased their volume, sometimes taking these moments out of context and placing them within pauses. Even though it is largely unnoticeable, I aimed to recreate the feeling of always breathing in and never breathing out. In this way, I wanted to represent Pecola’s “holding in” through breaths.
From here, I added two additional layers of audio: Two sound bytes from the 1941 educational video “How the Eye Works” and a layer of electric buzzing underneath the entirety of the video. In watching “How the Eye Works,” one. may find the beginning jarring because the music suddenly starts with so much force, and I wanted to replicate this effect in my own video. Although there is audio before the music starts, I wanted it to suddenly seem “silent” in comparison. I also thought the video’s description of the eyes as protected was relevant to both this excerpt and the novel as a whole. Including that sound clip, I wanted to juxtapose the moment in which Pecola’s eyes betray her with the banal, confident assertion about the workings of eyes. Finally, I used the buzzing in hopes of creating an aggravating version of “silence” so that listeners never get a true break from the audio. It was important to me that the video ends on the quietest reading of the text to mirror Pecola’s “small” voice. After the voiceover finished, I wanted to bring attention to the quiet buzzing that had been there all along, so I increased the buzzing volume as the reading clips faded away. In this way, I wanted to impress that the voice reading was fading into a larger “silence” that is nonetheless still discomforting. The voice’s fade-out mirrors Pecola’s foregoing of active pain (expression) for passive pain (silence).
I created the visual portion of the piece using a mesh of abstract and tactical archival videos. I started the project with the intent of working only with abstract shapes because silence, stillness, and nothingness are such broadly abstract themes. But, after finding several clips of oddly-moving clocks, I decided that a mix of the two types of videos would allow for more direct connections between such broad ideas and The Bluest Eye excerpt. I included the most abstract clips at the beginning of the video, where the narrator talks the most about disappearance. For videos with color, I drifted towards reds and oranges that oppose The Bluest Eye’s emphasis on green and blue. I was also drawn to the videos of outer space; I liked how, as soon as one spacecraft would almost completely disappear from the frame, another would take its place. To me, these transitions mirrored Pecola’s inability to completely disappear. I attempted to recreate this effect in other clips by occasionally slowing them down so that they almost stopped. However, the images are never actually completely still.
I also repeated symbols of vision, time, and performance. Although stillness can be conceptualized as the stopping of time, I wanted to include moving clocks that repeated the same times to give the impression of being stuck in one memory, one passage of time. When the narrator describes Pecola’s eyes as a site of her memory, I wanted to represent it literally by showing a broken clock within an eye. I also included the Motorama introduction as a reference to Pecola’s attempt at escapism through television, which ultimately fails as she begins to re-see painful memories. Lastly, I included clips of children from the 1957 home video “Palmour Street” to represent Claudia and Frieda (and Pecola’s peers at large). I intercut these clips with additional footage of darkness, hoping to portray Pecola’s isolation from the two characters. Because Claudia and Frieda have familial support that Pecola does not, they play happily with one another like the children in “Palmour Street.” Meanwhile, Pecola (the viewer) watches, both remembering her own familial neglect and internalizing her supposed ugliness. Pecola’s memory and vision lead back to the still, disembodied eye, which was once connected to whiteness. By including the white woman smiling almost menacingly at the camera, I aimed to portray the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness that Sharpe describes in “The Weather” while still centering Pecola’s vision. Consequently, in the video, Pecola both watches and is held still by the oppressive gaze of others.
Video Credits
“How the Eye Works.” Prelinger Archives, 1941.
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. First Vintage International Edition, 1970. “Out of this World.” Prelinger Archives.
“Palmour Street.” Prelinger Archives, 1957.
“Touch of Magic.” Prelinger Archives, 1967.
“This is Coffee.” Prelinger Archives, 1961.
Read Lily’s accompanying essay: Still and Silent Pain in The Bluest Eye.
Lily Weeks is a junior double majoring in English and Visual and Dramatic Arts. They work mostly with experimental video and digital art with a primary focus on audio mixing and editing. They are interested in exploring themes of gender, sexuality, and gaze in both written and audiovisual mediums. In their free time, Lily enjoys roller skating, listening to podcasts, and anxiously watching the final season of Killing Eve.