the groundhog day project

I'm reminded of a line I said way back on Day 69 - i don't even have to floss --back in the Groundhog Day phase of this blog-- He isn't just an everyman because he represents each of us. He's an everyman because he represents all of us. But, I get ahead of myself by getting behind myself. What is absent from a great deal of Stories We Tell is Sarah Polley herself. She is present in the majority of scenes in the film (only absent from the past footage that is genuine) but here story is not a part of Diane's story. Now, Acts Two and Three of the this documentary turn this into a story that is very much about Sarah instead, about her parentage and what that means for the bigger story of Diane. It was the weekend of Sarah's 11th birthday that her mother died. Eleven years old, her mother dying from cancer--there is no way that Sarah cannot remember it. It is acknowledged within the film that Sarah did not know that her mother was dying when her older siblin...

(650) I was going to make a point today about performativity and performance... but then I thought maybe I'd already made it. Some scribbled notes on my copy of Brickell's (2005) "Masculinities, Performativity, and Subversion" that I wanted to share, and a quick Google search and I found the blog entry-- Day 557 - i think i hear a footstep --in which I typed up my scribbles word-for-word... I suppose you can go read that entry (which, ostensibly, was about Singin' in the Rain , by the way) but the basic gist was that all performance is performativity. That is, everything we do, even our subversions, our revolutions, are defined and con fined by what the world tells us we can get away with. I just recently started reading José Esteban Muñoz' (1999) book, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics . The gist I'm getting so far to his idea of disidentification is effectively finding your identity in the differences, the opposite ...

A couple things... First, back in my Day 52 - if you only had one day to live entry, I explained how this blog is about me as much as it is about... then, I was talking about Groundhog Day , but I suppose whatever movie I’m watching this particular week fits. So, today, this blog is as much about me as (if not more so than) it is about Singin’ in the Rain . I’m of two minds about blogs at the moment (and only at the moment, future me, looking for something to quote in your master’s thesis): 1) blogging is an entirely selfish enterprise. Clearly, I don’t do this for the audience, though I know there is a small group of dedicated folks who check in regularly or semiregularly. If I wanted a bigger audience, I’m sure there would be some way to promote this blog much more than I do now. Just last week, my numbers jumped for a couple days; between Schulman’s “ The Accidental Swami “ and it being Groundhog Day, people were looking up my blog. And, maybe they were intrigued, but that doesn’...

I'm trying to think if the quest to make The Dancing Cavalier counts as an external quest or an internal quest. In Doughton's (1996) terms, that is (or really, wherever she got those terms; she didn't invent them). Is starring in a musical--for Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor, Don Lockwood or Cosmo Brown-- masculine ? Singin' in the Rain certainly upholds binary gender roles, pairing off men and women... well, man and woman . If we ignore Cosmo for a moment, at least. Cohan (2000) suggets that several "binarized terms... dominate the entire narrative: body/voice, image/sound, naturalness/engineering, innovation/obsolescence" (p. 56). Cohan hints at some of the issues with gender later but doesn't list male/female among the binarized terms. But, clearly, the genders are distinct and unequal in the film. Nevermind the stereotypical gender roles in the films-within-the-film, The Royal Rascal , The Duelling [sic] Cavalier , and possibly even more so,...