"utopia in four movements"

So yes, I've been neglecting writing and reflecting on this project...and this post isn't explicitly about it either. Mostly I'm just terrible at blogging, but I hope to craft a better narrative eventually...

Utopia is a concept that I've always been fascinated with, because it captures a perpetual idealist spirit, an insatiable yearning for something beyond the flawed present. So when I heard about the film "Utopia in Four Movements", I was captivated by the promise of the title - An idealist paradise combined with four movements of...poetry/art/music? Beautiful!

From the film's website, it's difficult to get a good sense of what it's actually about. But the unconventional format of a "live documentary" was intriguing. Basically, the film is a slideshow of a series of photos and videos, narrated by film maker Sam Green on stage. Dave Cerf facilitates the background music, also live in accordance with the narration (unfortunately they did not bring the band to Scripps!).

The content of the film is interesting, spanning from the beginning of the Twentieth century and the invention of an universal language of hope called "Esperanto" (it's real, I looked it up on wikipedia), to the modern reality of Capitalism sweeping across practically all corners of the globe except for Cuba.
The stories portrayed provoke many thoughts, and explored questions that I've wondered about for a long time (particularly after doing research on 20th century China, more on that later perhaps). How did a century that began with such optimism descend into the global capitalist society that exist today? What happened to the Utopian socialist movements? Did they come upon the indestructible barriers of human nature?

But beyond the immediate content, it was truly astonishing how the format of the film interacted with the concept of utopia, dialogue, and the limitations of humanity. Utopia exemplifies subjective experience as a film that interacts with the audience and has the potential to shift forms with each new performance. During the Q&A, Sam and Dave touched upon the concept of belief in human kindness and love as a form of social change. Utopia as a live performance has the potential to inspire the subjective experience of people in the theatre, and each experience is unique. The film pushes the boundaries of documentary and in some ways, transcends the limitations of media in our technology-obsessed age. However, the format of the film is also limiting. It cannot, as a conventional documentary, be mass-produced in theatres and video. It cannot really be transmitted through the web. Its reach is limited.

In some ways this dilemma seems to embody some of the contradictions of idealism and human limitations in ways that I've never thought about before. What is the relationship between subjective experiences of utopian ideals and the limits of human nature? During the Q&A, I brought up this question and people sort of looked around and laughed, because it encompasses so much philosophy and speculation that it's kind of like asking, what is the meaning of life? But I thought the filmmakers gave a pretty satisfactory answer that just raises more questions...as all good answers tend to do.

So this film inspires me to think about the presentation that I will have to do in a couple months about my summer research. Presenting the topics my grandmother discussed will be a difficult task. The methodology of oral history is subjective experience, and there are certain merits and potential problems associated with that. Oral history can be an empowering tool for marginalized women (in this case, my grandmother) to tell stories in their own words. On the other hand, when I present her story to a mixed audience, one individual's experience may be essentialized to represent the extremely diverse experiences of women in 20th century China. How do I recognize and avoid this possibility in my presentation? Perhaps as in Utopia, I could alert the audience to the significance of selective experience through the format of my presentation. Maybe instead of having a stereotypical lecture style powerpoint, I can have a few pictures and audio from the project. The rest...will be a narrative that I will have to construct. More on this later...