D A W N

D A W N - A cinematic masterpiece coming soon to a theater near no one 

         I imagined this project as the opening sequence of a non-existent movie about the unraveling of social order told through a woman, Dawn (played by Annie Connolly) , drawn to kill and an altar boy drawn into sin. The altar boy doesn't appear in this version of the opening but he's off screen praying for Dawn's soul because he sense that she has transgressed all boundaries and killed. While I had these elaborate plans for what this fake movie would look like, I wanted the title sequence not to reveal them. I focused instead on the interaction of Annie's character with her things - her clothes and especially her cigarette. I was really inspired by the work of Kenneth Anger and wanted to recreate the charged relationship he crafts between his subjects and their things. So I imagined the cigarette, the blue fuzz of her coat, her pink shoes against the snow holding the tension, passion, and tragedy of the murder she was going to commit. Visually and aurally I waned to evoke the melodrama of old Hollywood Cinema. Marshall McLuhan wrote, "We approach the new with the psychological conditions and sensory responses to the old" (94). Looking at the modes of classical cinema as patterns we have been psychologically conditioned to consume, I see them working similarly to McLuhan's theory of the alphabet - as a construction of fragmented parts into an imagined whole that as a result shape our ways of seeing and thinking. I wanted to call upon these expectations to consider how my view of a female subject is negotiated through them.