I decided to take the task of producing my own self portrait as a challenge to work through and convert old baby footage. As an only child and the daughter of an artist, my childhood, or at least the earlier stages of my childhood were fairly idealistic, as is documented very well in my home-baby-videos and photos. The footage ends around the age of 6 or 7 as the life of the woman who captured the 72 plus hours of footage began to deal with her own battles and our life became a little less charming to record. In this way, the project of working through this footage became a bit of an obsession. It has given me an opportunity to see the person that is my younger self as a third person. I look at her and I think: she is nothing like me. That …show more content…
In That Screen Magnetism, Brigitte Weingart uses the lens of Andy Warhol’s work in the Screen Tests to explore the “grammar of glamour” in cinematic art. Weingart’s ability to produce an explanation for the nuances associated with the loaded term that is “glamour” provided me with a better understanding of my own association with glamor and the personal process I take to appear glamorous. The instructions Andy Warhol gave to his muses was to “pose or perform as oneself,” but really what Weingart is able to hone in on is the duplicity of what Warhol actually wanted (10). He wanted the performance of the self to be innately glamorous. To this effect, one of Warhol’s favorite portraits in the Screen Tests is that of Ann Buchanan. Weingart refers to an interview of Warhol in which he shows signs of favoritism towards Buchanan’s screen test stating: ““She did something wonderful mar-velous . . . . She cried”” (66). It is unclear whether Buchanan sheds tears as a form of emotional response or if she is her eyes are merely watering as a response to their sensitivity from posing. Warhol’s art is tricky in the way that it is working with an arbitrary idea or conception, but it still holds on to a very societally charged framework in which people can achieve glamourous-ness “by following a certain script (or fashion or diet or make-up method) which they claim will make us “similar” to the stars we admire” (45). Interpreting Buchanan’s screen test, particularly trying to do so through the lens of Warhol and with the insight of Weingart, the tear(s) can signify the pain and hardship of “pos(ing) or perform(ing) as oneself under the constraints of a cultural gaze. Though, make up is such a surface level component in the production of our identity performance, as a young woman in