Still on the topic of 1) Women and 2) History, I chose Jo March’s Monologue in the 2019 movie Little Women (directed by Great Gerwig). At this point in the course, I think there is a recurring theme of history and feminism in my works, although I never intended it to be that way. Strangely, I always thought that whatever I end up doing in life, I will always be closely intertwined with activism, especially for women’s rights.

Anyways, moving on.

Jo March’s monologue is special to me. Saoirse Ronan performs it in the set that depicts a dark attic, and she was initially conversing with her mother about Laurie, a boy she used to be friends with whom she turned down. None of them thought Jo would end up monologing about women, but I think her mother responded gracefully by letting Jo take center stage and talk out her feelings that overwhelmed her.

What I like most about this performance is how Saoirse delivered the escalation of emotions without necessarily escalating her voice. She sounded tired, exasperated even. Sometimes her voice and presence don’t fill up the entire space, and she shrunk into herself in one way. Some other times her words overtake her presence and just overwhelm the viewers as much as her emotions overwhelm her.

I translated this into typography. Initially, I made a layout of all the stills and then defaced it with digital illustrative typography in my own handwriting.

In this iteration, I leaned a little too much into the stereotypical feminine colors. On the other hand, I would like to explore the materiality of the project more. I always imagined this to be printed, to be some sort of collectible thing that fans of the book or movie could own as sort of a novelty thing. Making it into a booklet would make sense, as books are linear not unlike movies. So, the next iteration is booklet-shaped.

I wanted to experiment more with it. I felt like movies don’t really wait for you to be ready before moving towards the next scene, something that you could do when you are reading a book; when you are still digesting the previous paragraph, you have the agency to control the pacing and just not flip the page before you fully understand what you just read. It isn’t like that with movies, and I wanted to convey that.

Enter: the concertina!

I feel like having a long concertina of Jo’s monologue emulates the feeling of watching the scene play out and feeling like having Jo slipping through your grip as you try to understand her while she already jumps into the next point she’s making. I also want to show the escalation of the emotion of the scene, so I came up with a concertina that grows in size in every fold.

But then I wanted to see how it would go if I just removed the stills completely, how would it play out without anything tethering it to the film medium it was translated from.

I think that turned out great!

But the concertina raised a new problem, you’re now able to see the entire thing at once instead of seeing it scene by scene like a movie. So, I must find a balance between having the linear and size-growing nature of the concertina but not really showing everything all at once.