As part of our reflections for this week, I’d love to hear about how you’re re-engaging Fun Home after our experience with Beyond the Page. What do you notice now that you didn’t notice before? How have your original interpretations — or modes for interpreting — shifted? How does time exist differently in different forms: illustrations of bodies on the page, stepping into the panels and taking their shape, expressing the emotional life of bodies, watching the scene with text on other people’s bodies, hearing voice as another kind of embodiment? What is the relationship between text, bodies, and voices? Where do behavioral and expressive modes exist in the musical interpretation? Which borders can you identify?…borders between behavioral/expressive, child/father? image/word?
Also: what provoked or moved you in class, and was it surprising? Did anything push your comfort level or require you to lean into the edges of the unfamiliar? How did our session with Beyond the Page open your thinking about bodies as static vs. moving, especially as bodies emerge from the details of Bechdel’s drawings? How have our activities in embodiment and our exploration of the performed “language” of bodies (through gestures) challenged your consideration of character and dimensionality? And beyond these questions, what questions were raised for you? What did you leave with? What did you appreciate about this experience?
I think that I gained a better appreciation for the blank panels in the end where Alison and her father are in the car en route to the movie. It made me understand why having pauses and a lack of dialogue is an important thing to include in a scene where she is trying to convey the weight of the subject of the conversation. Since the characters could be thinking of anything, it leaves us to fill in the gaps of what they might be thinking. It also kind of reminded me that Alison is writing from her own personal experiences, and that the pauses that she felt are things that she vividly remembers.
Given that this is a graphic novel, I also felt that although the acting exercises that we did we a bit weird, they gave me a better appreciation for some of the artistic elements of the novel. They also made me a little self conscious about the way that I conduct my body, which makes sense because I had never thought about in this way.
I realized how much detail and effort must go into each panel and how challenging it must be to communicate all of the feelings and thoughts and tension through a black and white photo. My original interpretations shifted to understand how much each panel can communicate. A lot of the physical movement we did pushed me out of my comfort zone but then helped me realize how difficult it is to cross the border between feeling a certain way and expressing it through art. I appreciated the class we spent with Beyond the Page because it helped me look at Fun Home from new perspectives I hadn’t considered previously.
I truly loved our class time with Beyond The Page because it allowed the text to come alive. The acting performance was incredible and totally made me look at movement in the car scene in a new light. Madison’s movements were so subtle yet so telling of Alison’s emotions during the scene. Before this class, I don’t think I analyzed the scene in the way that I would approach it now. I feel like you could go down a rabbit hole reading graphic novels because you could draw so much meaning out of each panel, how the panels function in comparison to one another, how the text contrasts or follows the images, or look into the style and construction of each panel. Beyond The Page certainly made the text feel real and tangible and I am so grateful for this experience.
I definitely have more trouble than most intuiting meaning from body language and drawings of people. Therefore, unfortunately, neither Bechdel’s drawings nor Beyond The Page added that much meaning for me. I will say, though, that Fun Home was one of my favorite works that I have ever read. That statement holds true for the poems and Borderlands as well but the minimalist way fun home is written–to make room for the drawings–makes it, in my mind, analogous to poetry. Despite my lack of synergy with the physical interpretations, the reenactment of the car scene was quite powerful for me. Even though I have trouble reading emotions from faces and bodies I think I perceive more emotion than most in spoken words. When I read the car scene I didn’t perceive nearly as much emotion and trepidation and longing as I did in the reenactment. This helped me see what others were able to see in the drawings and body language in that scene, and, by extension, how much I missed that can be conveyed in drawings and body language.
Something that astonished me about “Fun Home” was how intricate the expressions of each character in each panel were and how much information this conveyed about the characters. For example, there were always very specific small changes in the line of the mouth and direction of the gaze. This was a purposeful choice of Bechdel I believe because this family tended to be very closed off and not very emotionally expressive to each other (Bechdel hints at the family perhaps being mildly on the Autism spectrum). Due to this, she often could not have the stereotypical over the top emotional depictions that occur in your standard comic panels. She instead had to rely on readers picking up on the small changes of expression (likely unconscious to the character) to see how characters are feeling and the sort of dynamic that’s occurring between them. As such, the exercise was important to me because when reading there were times I wasn’t really able to decipher the small emotional ticks. But by recreating these expressions on my own face, I was able to sort of feel the emotions that create these expressions and thus better understand the characters. Overall, I really loved reading “Fun Home” and doing this exercise!
The most enlightening moments for me this past week were the various reenactments of “Fun Home”. While reading those pages I envisioned a very specific tone and flow to the conversation. Interestingly, my perspective of that scene shifted each time we revisited it in class. When Off The Page acted out the entire scene for the class I was a little taken aback because it felt simultaneously subtly changed, but radically different from how I had read and interpreted the pages. For example, while reading “Fun Home” I didn’t even think of the intentionality of the long and awkward silences created by panels with no text. I subconsciously skipped right over them and clearly didn’t take enough time to examine the attention to detail and intentional silences created by Bechdel. This was further expressed when we put ourselves into the panels of “Fun Home” and attempted to recreate the emotion present in the scene. Watching each member of the class show their own emotion in the context of the scene was impactful because it helped me to understand that it is not only the context of the story but also the context of the audience’s personal experiences that shape experiences with literature. I enjoyed working with Off The Page, their unique teaching style helped me to overcome subconscious barriers I didn’t know existed in regard to literature.
Fun Home definitely has a different meaning for me now. The subtleties of the illustrations and words are so much more evident and important. Another interesting element was what someone said in class (sorry I don’t know who!), but they spoke about how before this exercise, any blank panels would just get kind of skimmed over. Until I saw the reenactment of the scene, I did not understand just how important it was to take that pause there. I also had no idea how much value there was in using your body to connect to a scene. Normally, I hate that type of activity. I feel awkward and unsure of what I am doing (and definitely did in our first activity moving around the room), but this allowed me to understand the book in a way I hadn’t before and lose some of that awkwardness. In terms of borders, I obviously had recognized the border between Alison and her father, but until I saw the class and Beyond the Pages reenact the scene, hadn’t been aware of how literal that border was- especially in the car scene. This was a new really cool way to look at a book and I am excited to talk about it in class!
I was quite skeptical in the beginning of the class while I was flailing my arms around, trying to expressively demonstrate my feeling of “content”. I thought it was a little unnecessary and I felt a little foolish. But, by the end of class, I noticed a shift in my thoughts of how body language and demonstrations can change the way you think about a piece of work. It also was a really nice way to become more connected to my seminar peers. I am going to assume that for most of us, it was a little uncomfortable to act in front of everyone, but it was interesting to notice how each person in the class picked up on a different aspect of the scene like the facial expressions or internal emotions. During the part of class where we all started acting out the scene where Alison was in the car with her father, I realized that while reading the book, I was mainly focused on the text. While reading, I did pick up on those emotions of uncomfortableness and awkwardness, but it was very surface level. In addition, after listening to the song, I felt the anxiety that filled the car. I felt like the behavioral expressions of this scene were found in the panels, but the expressive part was in the song when I could hear the sound of her voice getting louder. Initially, I thought Alison was calm and quiet, but instead her head was spinning with hundreds of thoughts that added another layer that I did not pick up on while reading. In fact, I could feel this anxiety in my chest. In my reflection directly after the performances and musical addition, I wrote, “This feeling of being so close to sharing, so close to connecting, it’s right at the top of my chest, almost to my lips. But then, getting cut off, and that feeling of emptiness and incompleteness, almost rejection.”
The one word that comes to my mind that I feel really encapsulates how I feel about the whole class and the theme of the book is vulnerability. At least for me, I felt vulnerable moving in a way that I do not normally move in a class setting. I was nervous because I didn’t know if I was “doing it right”. But I also think this feeling can be found in “Fun Home”. Alison’s father shared a part of himself with his daughter, that he had suppressed and continued to suppress for his entire life. Vulnerability in of itself is a border. Is that too much to share? How can I truly connect if I do not try to embrace something that makes me nervous?
I think it was also very helpful to choose one scene and just observe all the details. I really appreciated how we were not necessarily analyzing all the different possible meanings of the panels, but actually acting out the literal body language and movement of Alison and her father. To me, that felt more realistic, rather than just guessing how Alison felt in that moment. I also felt this realism in the amount of time it took to act the scene. The actual scene in the book is only a page. But acting out each panel in “real” time allowed me to connect and be truly in the moment of the scene. Connecting back to the theme of vulnerability, all of these scenes are vulnerable and personal memories of Alison Bechdel. In slowing down one significant scene to be in “real” time, in a way, I felt a sense of trust that I really only feel with my close friends.
Someone (maybe professor Cassarino?) said something after the reenactment of the scene (which was incredible) that provoked me: “I’ve spent so much time with the images that I forgot about the words.” Hearing the dialogue after getting so much more connected to the scene by enacting it ourselves silently made the scene so powerful and dramatic, a feeling I didn’t get when I was just reading it. The silence of the pauses were so heavy and made me see the border that Allison was desperately trying to breech in a new and tense way. Reading the graphic memoir filled with Allison’s self-deprecating kind of humor made me read over this scene, but taken out of the context of that humor, I got a sense of her pain and sadness over her last night with her father.
Beyond the Page really made me think more deeply about the drawings in each panel. We spent almost the entire class going over one scene and I still felt like we had more to talk about. Also, I enjoyed listening to the song which was inspired by that one scene. The exercises we did made me truly appreciate how dense “Fun Home” actually is. The panels we examined were not even as rich in visual information as most. Getting into the heads and bodies of the characters made me see them in a very new light because we had to pretend to be them. One of my favorite parts of the class was watching the leaders perform that scene for us. The scene itself with dialogue felt extremely intimate and brought the book to life. By putting myself in the shoes of the father, although uncomfortable, I felt more empathy towards his character and more understanding of his motives. I found it was difficult for me to express his emotions but came to realize this was not due to him not having any but rather to the fact that it is also difficult for him to express his emotions. Going out of my comfort zone was really beneficial to my understanding and connection with the book. In the future I would like to do more acting out as a way on analyzing the text.
Truthfully, my experience with Beyond the Page was uncomfortable. I can feel emotions and express said emotions but imitating and emphasizing feelings via physical movement was outside of my comfort zone. I was shy so I escaped upstairs where there were fewer people to see me. However, I also recognize the power of acting, especially in conveying emotion. When I first read the book, the glances between Bechdel and her father seemed insignificant but when I saw those same glances recreated by Beyond the Page, the significance of the small eye-movements and facial expressions appeared obvious. I was able to recognize the intensity, uncomfortability, and distance between the two characters stood out like never before. This allowed me to appreciate Bechdel’s eye for detail in her illustrations. I’m currently in a Cartoon, Caricature and Animation class and I know how difficult it is to capture real life on a page. Not only can Bechdel create an intriguing story in writing, she is able to develop so many more layers such as body-language and symbolism through her art- it’s really amazing. From now on, I will be focusing more on the images instead of scanning over them briefly, only capturing the bigger, more obvious picture. I’m excited for Beyond the Page to return in four weeks because it forces me out of my comfort zone while simutaneusly teaching me a new way to analyze media.
Revisiting Fun Home was a really interesting activity, especially in the manner that we used. The way that we acted out the car ride scene towards the end of the book was particularly impactful, especially when the leaders acted it out. I didn’t quite appreciate before how much time each panel takes to not only make but act out as well. The way that our leaders acted out the scene with words and actions was quite effective in building the tension within the scene and conveying the discomfort that the characters had with one another. The border between words and actions was clear because once words were added to the scene, it was so much more impactful than just the actions, both as an audience member and actor. As an actor, I felt like I was simply doing the motions I was supposed to do because I couldn’t use words. However, once vocal elements were added to the scene I became much more invested and I could really relate to the characters. The beginning activity that we did with Beyond the Page was an interesting experience too. I realized just how unexpressive I usually am with my body. I found it difficult to outwards express and demonstrate emotions as they asked us to do. I think it was really interesting to see the difference between people who were much more expressive with their bodies and those who aren’t.