Because this week we will be working on a split screen exercise, I thought that I should look for video essays that deal with this formal criterion.

I watched “Gestos do Realismo” by Margarida Leitao, which is an essay that parallels two movies from the realist movement in exactly matching shots and sequences. The result is quite incredible and, I can imagine, quite laborious. This video essay does not tell us much about the movies themselves, does not necessarily or at least not outwardly want to make a point, but definitely, wants to bring our attention to the commonalities of representation within the realist. From this video essay, I am learning that sometimes video essays are better without voice-over or text, especially given the use of multiscreen where the juxtaposition speaks for itself. The movie that I chose as my source material is one that deals with the post-independence idealism and the rejection of the African in favor of the European and colonizer’s lifestyle. It is my belief that this movie is highly political and that it denounces a post-colonial reality but I am so scared of that being lost in my video essays that I believe that it has prevented me from being truly creative with my material and treat it like the piece of art that it is.

Gestos do Realismo exploited commonalities between movies that I will never find between my movie and that of other folks in the class, but it also shows that simplicity can be one of the best ways of communicating meaning, especially if meaning is conveyed in the form of movement, pace, camera angles.

After looking up what realism means in the sphere of film I learned that it is not a movement, it is not a genre but it describes a type of film that tries to, as much as possible, portray the real, as is. That makes the video all the more meaningful to me as both shots were extremely slow paced, with little abbreviating cuts. Interestingly enough it did not seems to me that the acting was very realistic but perceptions on acting change over time and those movies are clearly old, they are black and white classical movies.