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As a final project for its concordance workshop, a St. Elizabeth Academy film class produced this video, “Juxtaposition.” Their teacher John Adams describes the ideas behind it in the following.
After returning to the classroom from seeing stylus in the fall, the class had a spirited discussion around the word “perception,” particularly with regards to the connection between perception and reality, and how the media shapes and forms perception through the juxtaposition of words and images. My students repeatedly stated that when they mentioned the city of St. Louis to friends and family who lived outside of the city or who had never ventured into the city, too often the words that were associated with St. Louis were dangerous, crime-ridden, and poor. As the students examined their concordance they made from their research, they developed a series of questions to guide their analysis:
1. What descriptive words or phrases are associated or juxtaposed with our spine words?
2. Are the descriptive words or phrases positive or negative?
3. What perceptions might readers/listeners/viewer form from these juxtapositions?
4. How does the media reporting shape the perception of the community, both by the people who live within and those who live outside of it?
Ironically in the midst of their analysis, local and even national media became fixated on a report that claims St. Louis is now the most dangerous city in America. My students, angered by the report, wrestled with a way to respond to it in light of their research and their personal experience of living in the city and attending a school that has been in same neighborhood since 1882. Taking their cue from stylus, they decided to respond by creating a concordance–in the form of a video–that uses juxtaposition “to create new possibilities and contexts for meaning.”
In the students’ video concordance, they themselves and their “I-am” statements become the principal words within the “walls” of the video. In Hamilton’s concordances, the “exterior register of the world’s events [. . .] culled from six world newspapers [are] pulled from their context in the newspaper to create this new field of text.” In the students’ video, the exterior register is culled from the broadcast videos juxtaposed against one another, the manipulated still images from F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, and the serenely idyllic video footage of St. Louis. The juxtaposition of the first part of the video with the second part with the students results in an ironic contrast and new possibilities of meaning and perception.–John Adams