A process and final result for interpreting a vignette of Gertrude Stein’s ‘Tender Buttons’
Introduction & Project Brief
The second project for James Grady’s Spring 2020 Motion Graphics elective is ‘Tender Buttons’.
From the project brief:
Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein is considered one of the most innovative pieces of Modernist writing. Published in 1914, this collection of experimental verses is celebrated for its abstract qualities — the sounds and rhythms of the words. Most of her descriptions of objects, food, and rooms have no relationship to the meanings of the words themselves. This makes her work a rich source for studying vignettes because it captures moments of consciousness, breathing life into inanimate everyday things.
The requirements for the project:
- The chosen passage should be 30–40 words long.
- Your vignette should be 60–90 seconds long.
- All words from the chosen passage must appear typographically in the vignette, but the whole passage needn’t be written out, nor should all the words be granted the same weight or attention.
- Your vignette must simplify the passage to a singular idea. Whether or not it relates to the meaning of the original passage is up to you.
Ideation/Research
The first step was to open the text and start selecting excerpts that felt visually compelling.
From Project Gutenberg: http://gutenberg.org/files/15396/15396-h/15396-h
During my first reads over the text, I felt intrigued by its boundless yet casually prosaic form. The body of work was robust, but each word felt in place. Reading this involved experimenting with rhythm and pace for the words, but also which excerpt for 20–40 words felt the most compelling.
Some of the notable excerpts for me were ‘ROAST BEEF’, ‘A CLOTH’, ‘A DRAWING’, ‘A PAPER’, ‘A FIRE’, ‘VEGETABLE’ and ‘CARELESS WATER’.
The categories we were able to choose from Tender Buttons were separated into Objects and Food, but I knew from the start I didn’t want to start with the literal object described in the titles.
So my initial goal for the project wanted to express the idea for what it means to translate the repetition, deliberate movement, and texture of the words into visual language. I was inspired by heavy analog gestures, like brushstrokes, and felt a connection to calligraphy for expressing textures. Being stuck in choosing only one excerpt I liked, my initial associations from the words drew me into these material/production themes:
- Stopmotion
- Macro-shots
- Analog/paper/ink
And then depending on how compelling the shots were, I would be able to finalize the excerpt I wanted to use.
Conceptually, what inspired me was translation into different poetic forms. I read a New Yorker piece about Gertrude Stein that talks about her approach to writing, and certain ideas and qualities about her work jumped out to me: “Steinese”, “commaless undivided form”; monosyllabic vocabulary, “a continuous present”, a “purely spatial art”, to use words for their sake alone…and most importantly that every word matters in Stein.
I was also attracted to translation as an non-smooth physical and linguistic practice, particularly in Chinese poetry from the Tang Dynasty. 李白 (Li Bai) was a poet we had to read for Chinese school, but I was actually reminded of his important work through a beautiful zine I bought in New York Chinatown that illustrated a side-by-side translation of Li Bai’s Drinking Alone in the Moonlight. With few characters, there was a fullness of expression that was gripping when brought into English.
As I researched more, the relationship between Chinese poetry, particularly Tang dynasty truncated verse (jueju) form, and ‘Steinese’ was fascinating to me. Stein evokes the Chinese poetic concept of 小中见大, or “seeing the big within the small”. The parallels for using the exactness of words, with the intentional shortness, and commaless form were fun to see.
But it was hard for me to resolve how to boil it down into a single idea and I was feeling overwhelmed with good, workable ideas, so I knew I needed to move into filming the visual experiments first before making a decision.
Filming/Editing
Filming
For the first video, I had recorded it with an iPhone. For this, I wanted it to have a cinematic quality, so I wanted to record it with my DSLR on a tripod for the best video and mitigating concerns about shakiness.
With regards to macro, I played with the manual focus to evoke the motion of flitting and fleeting the words were expressing. There was a visceral element about Stein’s word choices that attracted me to thinking about flimsy paper materials that could be subject to different treatments.
Luckily, I had packing materials and papers from an IKEA delivery, so I was compelled to film and experiment with those.
Inspired by ‘FIRE’, I wanted to try seeing what interesting visual results burning paper could produce for the other excerpts, as I still didn’t want to be as literal with my interpretation of each excerpt.
Based on the shots, I determined that I wanted to use this excerpt:
My concept for VEGETABLE was how to observe the parallels for the manipulation potential in food and paper, particularly with burning(“radiant”, “upslanting”, “red”) and cutting.
Audio Considerations
When filming, I also recorded my audio to see if any interesting textures could be used.
Sound Recordings from my iPhone (I felt like a Foley artist lol)
Honestly I was having trouble finding the proper soundtrack for the video. I knew I wanted an ambient sound but one that felt more intentional than just nature recordings or whatever it might be.
I’m really lucky that I was searching and encountering retro Japanese jazz and city pop samples…because the Youtube algorithm put this Japanese ambient sound designer from the 80s into my recommended. One of the pioneers of this field, Takashi Kokubo, is famous for designing ambient electronic sound scapes in the 80s and 90s.
From The Vinyl Factory, a website for an online audio magazine about Takashi Kokubo:
The Japanese approach to sound is all encompassing — fictional characters, brands, ideas, even inanimate objects like printers and whiskey have their own theme tunes and original music created specifically for them.
This is referred to as an “image album”, an audio impression designed to give a multi-sensory experience.
The timeliness of discovering Kokubo led me into the extremes of this genre, from interpretations of oceans and colors, to the sounds of air conditioners. Eventually, I stumbled on this unique piece on Youtube titled ‘Aloe Extract Sound’ by Momoe Soeda.
The video description:
The CD spine and obi have the artist listed as being “Aloe”, presumably referring to the plant, which alludes to the method by which the music was produced. The insert suggests, without explicitly stating, that one of the humans involved in its production was Momoe Soeda, an expert in medical research relating to aloe. Soeda is quoted as describing how the music was produced: “This CD was produced by attaching a surface potential measurement device to the aloe leaves and converting the measured values into music information to play a synthesizer. The music played by this aloe releases you from everyday stress and leads to deep relaxation. Please enjoy it as a new type of relaxation sound.” — Momoe Soeda. Other artists likely involved in the album’s production are unknown.
The surreal production method and dream-like, singer quality of the supposed plant was amazing, and I knew I had to use it for a project about Modernist writing.
Visual System
Thinking about grids was something I’ve never really done for videos, but the grids really helped me develop my approach to match cuts in the editing process.
Conclusion
I had a lot of fun experimenting with filming and editing techniques, and gaining familiarity with the software. Layering in video became prominent in my process, and there were moments to judge how saturated the piece became depending on how many layers were there. I learned more about using effects in AfterEffects and manipulating video clips.
The narrative structure was loose, but I wanted to pay special attention to the flow of the vignette. Overall I’m pretty happy with the result and excited to see where else I can improve on with video.
