#13 The Fragility of Female Identity

During a personal tutorial, I received a task to aid in the rapid and regular experimentation. I started by printing my proposal to highlight areas that I thought maybe useful and leave annotations in the margins of my ideas. I also chose to refer back to the previous notes taken containing potential visual responses to my research.

In these notes, I wrote how Anton-Sanchez (2019) discussed how directors represent the female identity as fragile. She gives an example of the opening of Pandora's Box in Mullholland Drive (2001). As a warmup task, I decided to use this as inspiration for a typographic response. I wanted to create a broken text effect, found a tutorial to aid in creating the image and then experimented with how I could manipulate the method to create different outcomes.

I created five designs in different ways and have selected three that I felt worked the best.

The first uses a broken concrete texture. I have pulled apart the letterforms and have lifted some letters from the baseline.

The second uses the same texture, but instead, I chose to layer the words on top of one another.

For the third, I used a broken glass texture instead as I felt glass was more fragile of a material.

I was unsure if I had achieved the goal of representing female identities in film as fragile, so I decided to ask one of my peers what they thought the images depicted. It should be noted that this peer does have previous knowledge of my project topic. The response was that I was trying to break/shatter female identities (the ones represented in films, I believe). I like that response to the work and think that it is much stronger than my initial intention.

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