Trip to MoMA: Private Lives, Public Spaces Response
Last Friday, my Arts, Imagery, and Culture class took a trip to the Museum of Modern Arts. There we saw an art show called Private Lives, Public Spaces. The exhibit showed old home movies that people made from the last century using only film cameras. The presentation was interesting to see because it was nice to see old films that people made back then before the age of social media became mainstream, which impacts our daily lives. Back then, there was no such thing as Social media nor the internet – it was just people making home movies with film cameras that used film only. The overall purpose of the show was to watch these home movies to get a sense of these people's private lives back and determine who they were and what they were doing to construct their identities. What it means to "construct an identity" is by comparing yourself to others and figure out what makes you different than this person or this specific group of individuals.
The first home movie I came across was a film called Wise Family. While watching the film, I saw six men hanging out while looking at the camera, smiling. I don't know what these men were doing, but from looking at how they dressed, they looked like farmworkers. I saw the information label that the film filmed in 1927, so around that time, two years before the stock market crash in 1929 that sent America into a prolonged recession in the thirties, also known as the great depression, men mostly worked in factories and farms. The subjects in the film appeared to be happy while laughing and smoking cigarettes. How does Wise Family have to do with identity? According to Judith Howard’s article on the Social Psychology of Identities, she talks about Class Identities – identities referring to what class you’re in America: Upper, Middle, and Lower. So, for the home film Wise Family, we can identify that the men in the film are low class (poor). I think why the film is titled Wise Family is because these men are poor but their wise with each other given the set of circumstances they're in back then. They're not happy about being poor, so the best they can do is always look at the bright side of things in life. With their act of "wiseness” towards each other in the film, we can get a sense that these men will be fine, despite them being poor.
The second film I observed in the art show was called Jarret family. In this home film, I saw what it appears to be the family of Jarret's, although I never found out who Jarret was in the movie or is Jarret used as the last name of someone. The film showed what appeared to be a family get together inside Jarret's house. From Howard's article, we can quickly identify Jarret’s family as either middle or upper-class African American families. The African American part is coming from Ethnic Identities – identifying people that are in the minority. As for the middle- or upper-class part, in the film, African American women were wearing necklaces and dresses that middle class or upper-class women would wear. So that made me think that this family might be wealthy or in between, but I couldn't tell. The film showed clips of activities from the Jarret family between 1958-1967, and around that time, Segregation and the Civil Rights Movement were going on in America. The primary purpose of the Jarret family was to show that African Americans are equally the same as white people in the sense they're capable of having families and doing the same fun activities that white families were doing back then.
The last film I wanted to discuss in the art show is the Martin family. The same as Jarret's family, this film shows the Martin family's only difference is that the family is white. There's a scene in the movie where the mother undresses her infant child, leaving the baby naked. Then the father picks up the baby and plays with him by throwing him up and down while holding the baby's legs. At first, I felt uncomfortable watching this film because I wouldn't say I like to watch babies when they're naked – I don't find that adorable. For identity wise, the Martin family is white, and they're either middle-or upper class judging from the way the parents dressed in the film. The year of the film was 1927, and this family back then had nothing to worry about because we can identify this family is wealthy.
In conclusion, these movies do help us identify people in a way; by comparing your characteristics that make up your identity to the other personal features that make up their identity as well. These films listed do, in a way, foreshadow social media imagery because, for example, Facebook and Instagram, users like to post pictures and videos of themselves doing fun activities. These old home movies showed case the same thing with people doing activities, whether it's hanging out with friends, being at parties, or playing with your infant child – the movies do foreshadow the world of social media. The only difference is that these films were mostly family-related, and social media users today don't use social media platforms to confide their private lives. The majority use social media for marketing, networking, and, unfortunately, cyberbullying. Nowadays, younger people are always thinking about what's going on in their lives on social media. In contrast, back in the old days, that level of pressure and stress didn't exist, which I can identify us millennials as "hungry social media junkies." It's an addiction that's hard to stop.
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