I began this videographic essay with a measure of discomfort. While I attended the “Embodying the Video Essay Workshop” at Bowdoin College in the summer of 2023 with much enthusiasm, the act of making a video essay with an embodied approach to the material was daunting. In my case, I had chosen to work with a film that has personal resonance, Vincente Minnelli’s musical, Meet Me in St. Louis (1944).
While I have written about this film in scholarly publications and taught it to undergraduate students on many different campuses, I have never grappled with what the film means to me personally. It is one of the first films I remember seeing as a child and I have returned to it countless times, as changing forms of technology allowed, throughout the various stages of my life: as a teenager, a college student, a graduate student, an actress, a professor, and a mother. In July of 2023, I sat before an empty timeline in Premiere Pro and asked myself: “How can I possibly capture what this film means?” And, perhaps even more skeptically, I asked myself a second question: “How do I feel about sharing what this film means?”
In starting the essay, I moved from “individual memory to collective memory,” as Kathleen Loock has described this sort of “videographic memory work,” and back again.1 I sought to understand what the film has meant to others and collected clips from films that reference, quote, or otherwise use Meet Me in St. Louis in some way. This search included Terence Davies’s The Long Day Closes (1992), a film that conveys a somber nostalgia for the past, and the Australian indie film, Love and Other Catastrophes (1996), which captures how even care-free twenty-somethings long for a stable family.
Doing cultural memory work, however, also required me to engage with a film in which I starred as an actress (the first and last time), Damien Chazelle’s feature-length musical made while he was a student at Harvard, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (2009). My big song number in that film includes lyrics that say, “when Esther sings,” a reference to Garland’s character.
But it was through the use of voiceover and personal home movie images, along with Premiere’s “opacity” effect, that I could return to my first moment of encounter with the film. In this respect, I found Laura Mulvey’s profound ruminations on the power of technology to take cinephilia and film scholarship to new heights and convergences resonant.2 With videographic tools and a willingness to insert myself into the narrative, I could effectively postpone, as Mulvey writes, the fading of the now into the then. And it was in this process that I realized how effectively Meet Me in St. Louis already does this, with its tableaus of a family that seems to hover out of time, much like one of Minnelli’s richly-detailed postcards.
True, much of my reticence to delve into the personal with Meet Me in St. Louis stems from my background and conflicted memories. What did I, a half Mexican American girl from Oregon, have to do with the Smith family of turn-of-the-century St. Louis, a place without any evidence of working class struggle, racial discrimination, or material problems? But like Lawrence Levine and Richard Dyer have written about the function of popular entertainment, such works replace that which is lacking in our lives.3 In other words, I repeatedly returned to Meet Me in St. Louis, not to escape, but rather to gather from its sounds and images the tools with which to face reality, as Levine says, “day after day after day.”
In “The Bijou Room,” I’m not sure where film critique ends and the personal narrative begins. But I do know that I reside, as a spectator, a performer, and a scholar, somewhere in between.
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Endnotes
- Kathleen Loock, “Memories of It,” Tecmerin. Revista de Ensayos Audiovisuales 11, no. 1 (2023).
- Laura Mulvey, Death at 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006).
- Lawrence Levine, “The Folklore of Industrial Society: Popular Culture and Its Audiences,” The American Historical Review 97, no. 5 (December 1992); Richard Dyer, Only Entertainment (London: Routledge, 2002).
Desirée J. Garcia