Compare and Contrast: Montgomery vs. Porterfield

Matthew Porterfield's film "Hamilton" is about an interracial family and a young single mother's quest to find her daughter's delinquent father and let him know that she is leaving for the summer. Jennifer Montgomery's "Notes on the Death of Kodachrome" , according to Montgomery, "...purports to be about the discontinuation of the much-loved format, Kodachrome, and with it the further endangerment of super-8 film. It begins with a short, experimental s-8 film made in 1986, which makes prophetic assertions about the future of artistic expression and the dangers of bodily intimacy. From there, the film jumps to 2005, and to digital video. The filmmaker tracks down three old friends who borrowed, and never returned, pieces of super-8 equipment."


After watching "Hamilton", the most obvious contrast between his film and "Notes on the Death of Kodachrome" is dialogue. "Hamilton" relies on very little of it, and therefore it hard to fully establish ties between the family members and their true roles in film. However on "Notes" dialouge is abundant, in which most cases Montgomery has her subjects speaking directly in the camera as they tell their stories about her equipment and their personal life. Because of this, the audience isn't given the conventional means of characterization with "Hamilton", but "Notes" shows and tells the personal and professional struggles and conflicts each subject has (such as speaking about a battle of AIDS).


The second contrast between the two films is emotion. "Notes" offers up extreme facial and body expressions, lively characters, laughter, ect. "Hamilton", on the other hand, has no drama of any sorts--there is subtle facial expressions, a sort of robotic boredom to the verbal interaction amongst the characters and very little dramatic body movement. While in "Notes" it is clear that life is an adventure worth living, "Hamilton" proves that for some life is merely routine. A trademark theme amongst Montgomery's films is her provocative, in-your-face, very political scenes that tell tons of the feminist movement and her personal beliefs and quests. And the only controversial thing in "Hamilton" is the older mother isn't married and she has both white and biracial children.

In the end, "Notes" is a work of closure. Montgomery finds her equipment, reunites with old friends, revisits footage from the 70s and gets ready to enter a new field of work. Ironically, "Hamilton" is almost the complete opposite. Although the delinquent young father is found and given the message, we're left with the scene of the father and a random neighborhood boy riding off in the distance, leaving us with new questions and confusion. Both films, however, each explore unconventional ways to tell us a story.

Jennifer Montgomery's Little L Breaks Territorial Ground

Jennifer Montgomery provides an inside look of the territorial minds of young girls in her provocative film "Age 12: Love with a Little L". Montgomery's description of the film is "...depicts early lesbian sexuality, using reenacted scenes from the experience of a 12-year old girl as the platform for a meditation on forbidden desire,transgression, and Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts of identity formation. Raw adolescent memories counterpoint staged scenes, exploring mechanisms of power and submission".


Throughout the film, the audience is exposed to young women "marking" their territory, whether it is the ground or a human being by urination. In one scene, a young girl pulls down her underwear and urinates in front of the camera, and then calmly pulls her underwear back up and walks away. On top of this being a provocative scene, it shows how young women are territorial (sort of like animals marking their territory) and also explores the unspoken question of why it is acceptable in our society for men to make such gestures but for women it is considered disturbing.


Montgomery continually forces her audience to examine how they have been molded by society's way of viewing women with scenes such as a young women acting out animalistic expressions (growling, pointing ears forward, ect.) as they mimic territorial acts. "Age 12: Love with a Little L" will definitely challenge your perspective on sexual roles in modern society.

Scott Stark in "More That Meets The Eye: Remaking of Jane Fonda"

In class we watched "More That Meets The Eye: Remaking of Jane Fonda" by Scott Stark. The purpose of his video is to make fun of Jane Fonda's change from a political activist to a fitness guru. "More That Meets The Eye" is a twenty minute comedy, where Stark workout to Jane Fonda's best-selling Jane Fonda's Workout, made in the 80s. Stark is seen wearing unreasonably tight sweat pants, a baggy red sweatshirt, and a little t.v. In each scene, Stark is in a different place, rather it's a grocery store parking lot, on the balcony in the rain, a patio over-looking a baseball game or his living room. Besides two stills (one at the beginning and one at the end), we never see Fonda and her workout class. Instead, we hear her as we watch Stark, and various images of influential political activists such as Malcolm X. Running vertical is text, quotes from various political statements Jane Fonda has made. On the bottom, running horizontally, are snippets from her book, My Life So Far talking about her personal battle with sexuality, image, and health.

The point is to contrast the two Fondas: the one that was very controversial and outspoken about the Vietnam war and the one that was a leader in the workout business. In a letter to Jane Fonda, Stark wrote:

"The original idea for the video, which I began shooting in the early 1990s, was that your exercise video series, coming as it did at the cusp of the 1980s, was emblematic of a cultural shift from the politicized, activist climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s into the me-decade of the 80s. You, as Jane-Fonda-the-activist morphing into Jane-Fonda-the-exercise-queen, were certainly a symbol of this cultural shift, and even in many ways one of its driving forces. Some have seen this shift as a betrayal of a certain kind of selfless idealism, replacing it with a more self-centered view of changing the world through self-improvement."

After watching the video, I was curious to know what was the real story behind Fonda, and sought out the book (I haven't read it yet). In my opinion, this spark of interest on my part makes Stark successful. He seemed to have both awe and disgust for Fonda's different personalities, and through each and every scene we saw that. My favorite scene is him working out in the grocery store parking lot with a picture of Fonda on a car nearby. I would highly recommend this for those who are interested in finding a different perspective of Jane Fonda.