I love Mediastorm’s multimedia project, “Driftless: Stories from Iowa,” directed by Danny Wilcox Frazier. It tells the story of Iowa through a series of videos and photographs that tightly focus on small pieces of the state’s culture: a family farm, the town bar, a swimming hole, migrant labor, a butcher, an older couple. These videos are interrelated while at the same time telling part of a larger story of the the evolution of the Midwest. Mediastorm has been at the center of this kind of creative, multimedia work, and I think a project like “Driftless” can be done about any place or any community. Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) did something similar: telling about a place through the aggregation of disparate stories, voices, and perspectives. It’s an effective technique that works especially well in our fractured, fragmented, postmodern world.
October 4, 2009
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