The Video Store in the Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1996)
In my video essay on The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1996, USA), I examine the way the video store serves as both a cultural and a social space in the film, and the role that the urban space of Philadelphia plays in the narrative. My argument in this video essay is developed from the short paper I wrote earlier in the semester. I attempted to fit my whole line of argument from the paper into the video essay, but it turned out to be too much for a five-minute running time, so I shortened my argument about the video store as a social space by only presenting the mingling of classes aspect of the video store, which nevertheless still preserved the continuity of my argument.
Having an already established framework from the paper helped the creative process. I first skimmed through the paper and wrote down the major points as bullet points. After realizing that I could not fit the whole paper into my video essay, I re-evaluated the content and made necessary changes. Since The Watermelon Woman is a fast-paced, dialogue-heavy comedy, I found the voice-over format to be the better way of doing the video essay. The recording process was surprisingly the hard part of the project, as it was not easy for me to read out loud a long paragraph of words without twisting my tongue. Though it is possible to use the “Edit Recording” function on iPhone to replace the unsatisfactory parts, there was discontinuity in timbre between recordings from different times. I eventually obtained some usable voice-overs through simply practicing saying those words. As I had watched the film multiple times before writing the paper, finding accompanying images was not difficult. I also used the screen recording function of iMac for some of the visual materials.
-Rubing Zhang