Reflection on the Movie

Reflection on the Movie

            When I was told that we had to remake one of our papers into a movie, I immediately knew which paper I was going to choose.  My first essay was about my relationship with Hebrew, and I decided to focus my movie on Eliezer Ben Yehuda’s arguments in favor of Hebrew becoming Israel’s official language.  Eliezer Ben Yehuda revived Hebrew and made it a spoken language again.  I loved making movies when I was little with my friends, but we would usually just come up with an idea, like a spy movie or an SNL type skit show, and hit record and wing it.  For this project I had to carefully write out a script, come up with characters, and find people to provide the voices.  After doing all that, I had to review what I had and make sure that I incorporated MAPS and CRAP principles into the film.  After making sure that I had those in the movie, I began what I thought was going to be the fun part- editing in iMovie.  I soon realized how finicky and temperamental iMovie is and that it never actually does exactly what you want it to do.  After hours of moving sliders up and down and making sure that subtitles were timed properly and that music played and ended when I wanted it to, I was finished.  Or so I thought.  After burning my DVD, I realized that I still had to decorate the disc and the case.  After finding common Hebrew words and phrases for the front cover and making a phonetic Hebrew-English chart on the back, I was actually finished.  Seeing my finished movie on the projector in class gave me a sense of satisfaction, and made me feel like I actually created something real.  Even though it wasn’t the best in the class, I am very proud of my movie because of the time and effort that I put in to it.

Jennifer Lawler Questions

Jennifer Lawler is trying to tell the reader about herself.  She is telling us that she may be a scholar, she can also be a writer.  She thinks that Susan is wrong and that there is nothing shameful about a scholar or teacher being an author and working for Hollywood.  She loves the Hollywood side of writing.
She defines the literacy of reading, writing, and working.  She absolutely loves reading and writing.  She is very specific about what she likes to read, though.  She states that she only ever reads medieval literature.  And when she writes, it is generally creative writing, but she would never tell her colleagues about that because they don't think that it is a serious enough form of writing.  At one point, she worked at a lumber mill unloading trucks, but she never cared for that job and decided to go back to school.
Jennifer tells us about how she always thinks about what might sound good in a  screenplay, and which actors would be good at playing her characters.  This is all about her love of writing- it is a constant factor in her life.  When discussing reading, she spends a good amount of time talking about one of her favorite pieces of literature- The Wanderer.  It is a poem translated from Old English about a man who is not protected by a lord anymore, so he is very vulnerable and in a dangerous position.  The poem states that fate is inevitable, which Jennifer find to be redundant.  It can definitely be seen as redundant because if it is fate, then it is going to happen regardless of anything else, and then of course it is inevitable!
What I thought to be a main point of this article was the importance of writing.  The fact that she says that other scholars and academics look down upon writing creatively and that they think it is not really what literature is about, is shocking to me and at the same time makes me a bit sad (if that statement is actually true).  Writing is really important to me, and if our professors and intellectuals are not encouraging it, then they are, in essence, discouraging us from expressing ourselves.  I don't know if Jennifer Lawler had anything like that in mind when she wrote it, but that was what struck me the most and where I saw a connection to the larger issue of literacy.