Reflective Essay — Zarina Bhat
Girona, was once a city that was invisible to me and over the last few weeks it has come into focus and is now somewhat familiar, thanks to working collaboratively with students from the University of Girona.
My original perception of the Spanish city was highly romanticised, and touristic in image. This has remained in part true, there are small winding laneways, and grand cathedrals. But through communicating and sharing media with our group in Girona, I now realise how our day-to-day life seems to parallel each other, lifting the rose coloured glasses off and showing the reality of the city. Speaking with our group, we found that they don’t in fact visit their grand cathedrals often or sometimes at all, debunking my imagining of elaborate church services that the whole city attends weekly. Our group also seemed to not live in the city itself, only coming in for class, which closely resembled my relationship to Melbourne city center. My perceptions of Girona were built on mass media and Western film that always tend to dramatise life in Spain. It was an exciting experience to connect directly with students and gain a deeper understanding of their lives.
Our film captures the unique connections that both Amy I have with Melbourne. It also shows our counterparts connections well but I feel that the story of becoming familiar with a place is told in a factual but somewhat disjointed way. Amy and I have very different experiences of the city and our lifestyles are sometimes completely opposite, I live in the bush, her world is in the city. This gave us a huge array of footage to put together to give a varied perspective of life in Melbourne. This has expanded my connection and understanding of an international students’ way of life that is sometimes missed by the locals. I feel that as much as I have become familiar with Girona and Melbourne through this film, my connection to a city comes through people. In our film we compare journeys and destinations, but not the habits that would connect us to the variances or comparisons of our cities, further promoting familiarity. There are a few people shown within our Melbourne footage with people sitting on the grass, talking for example, but in the footage from Girona, we don’t get that close connection with the people, apart from some passers-by. This could be a personal preference of mine but the routines and relationships of people are what make a city important and in the future I’d like this narrative to have more of a focus.
Throughout this semester we have gained awareness of how media can depict cities that make us form perceptions of a time and place. From the get go, my work has been inspired by two distinct films and I tired my best to incorporate these into the final film. With our first initial idea of using social media vertical like video with voice-overs to a friend, News from home helped us imagine how well this could work with a voiceover laid over footage. As that idea didn’t work we kept the idea in parts, which you can see with the added Skype call, and also the voice-over, which is also a huge part in many essay films. Our footage has somewhat tried to emulate the steady shots of city as well. Taxi Driver (1976) and An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Sussex (2018) showed just how relevant sound was to creating worlds, and so I dived deep into just how much we could play with this. Even though we had technical issues, we used multiple sounds with in the film, such as the added sound of the dog barking, sounds of Spanish crowds and extra bells and train horns, to try and harness our senses and help create our cities and their likeness.
There are a myriad of shortcomings that limit how we represent our cities through the lenses of media. Any shot especially when deliberately taken, is carefully crafted and framed. What falls outside of the frame that could change the meaning of the shot? What is in the shot that is important, and why? These limitations may be overcome in the future, maybe by creating multi-sensory media, or having media that transmits patterns to create empathy or emotion to truly gain another’s perspective.
Our film falls short in meeting the filmic editing that we were going for and this may lead to cultural misinterpretations, especially without context. The clips are cut short, due to trying to cut out unstable camera work (with our clips as well as Girona’s). The layering of sound could be cleaner especially since we discuss sound as the next step in expanding perception. The film is also confusing at times, as there is an overload of information coming from the visual and the voice over all at once. I think in the future, planning footage and the script in a collaborative approach rather than separately may help the editing process feel smooth and more deliberate. These personal limitations are often overcome with trail, error and practice.
Other than that, I think our film succinctly creates a wonderful mash of the two cities. There are some pleasing aspects to our film, and despite the glaring issues, it works well in connecting the two cities of Girona and Melbourne. I feel more familiar with both cities, but there will always be an element of the unfamiliar lurking around every corner, which is what makes the adventure of life all the more exciting.
An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Sussex, 2018, Vimeo. Nowness, United Kingdom. Directed by Jessica Bishopp.
News From Home, 1977, DVD. Carlotta Films, France. Directed by Chantal Akerman.
Taxi Driver, 1976, DVD. Columbia Pictures, United States. Directed by Martin Scorcese.
Toscano, Patrizia. “Instagram-City: New Media, and the Social Perception of Public Spaces.” Visual Anthropology, vol. 30, no. 3, 2017, pp. 275–286.
