The film that we are going to produce is about 2 minutes
long and the story will be an office lady sitting on a rocking chair while
having flashback on how her husband has abused her. The directing team has already written the script
and had idea on how to shot those scenes before I join the team. We discussed
the sequence of scenes and which arrangement will leave a bigger impact to the
audience. The interpretation of the scenes which will be used in the film
differs among group members. This is the best part for a group work, by
combining brains from different people, ideas can be generated and concept can
be made clearer through brainstorming.
In movies and
literatures, object often carries symbolic meanings and the meanings are left
for the audience or readers to interpret according to the perceptions they
have. In most of the films, objects play an important role and will help the
audience to understand the story more.
In the film we are going to produce, the props we most
probably will be using are rocking chair, vase, flowers, belt, and alcoholic
drink’s bottle.Dropping of the vase onto the ground and breaks into many
pieces, this is used often in film to symbolize shocked feeling, sad and other emotions.
Flower like rose symbolizes woman, beauty, romantic and sometimes blood. The
characteristic of a man can be shown using belt. Choice of colour, material and
buckle reflects the social status and sense of fashion of the user.
The object that I want
to focus here is the rocking chair, which the object carries significant
symbolic meaning in the novel “Sister Carrie” by Theodore Dreiser. Sister Carrie (1900) is a novel about a young country girl
who moves to the big city where she starts realizing her own American Dream,
first as a mistress to men that she perceives as superior, and later becoming a
famous actress. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sister_Carrie)
Aunt Karen in the Rocking Chair - Edvard Munch
The rocking chair as a symbol of
dream for Carrie in Chicago and of escape for Hurstwood in New York, and it is
an obvious example of a rhythmical symbol (qtd. in Pizer, 1976: 91). Throughout
Sister Carrie, the symbol of the rocking chair is employed by Dreiser to
reflect “the restlessness, the feverish activity, which leads Carrie to no
satisfying destination”( Gerber,1964: 62). Early in the novel Carrie is seen
rocking in her sister’s flat on Van Buren Street , dreaming of escaping with
Drouet. As Drouet’s mistress in Ogden Place she desires a luxurious life, fame,
applause, refinement.
The rocking chair is a symbol
of Carrie’s continued frustration and her inability to make a choice, wavering
instead from one possibility to the other. Just before Hurstwood’s two
visits which occur along chapters eleven and twelve Carrie sits rocking in her
chair. Dreiser takes the opportunity to foreshadow the future outcome of her
desire: “She hummed and hummed as the moments went by …and was therein as happy
though she did not perceive it, as she ever should be”(87). In New York when
living with Hurstwood, she sits rocking to and fro, thinking how “common
place”( 229) her pretty flat is compared with “what the rest of the world was
enjoying”(229)- the rest of the world made of those who had money and had a
better life than hers.( Gerber, 1964: 62)
In contrast to Carrie, after losing his business, Hurstwood uses the rocking chair to meditate over the
lost days, the exhausted funds and his lack of strength. In the chair’s slow
and repeated motion he finds a narcotic dream of security.
The final view of Carrie is moving. She
now finds herself rocking in her chair, “successful but unhappy, accomplished but
unfulfilled” (Gerber, 1964: 63), she dreams of new conquests which undoubtedly
will or must bring her joy. Yet she accepts for the first time that
happiness may not be for her, that perhaps her fate is “forever to be the
pursuit of that radiance of delight which tints the distant hilltops of the
world” (369). Dreiser creates a universe where life takes on the aspect of “ a
fierce, grim struggle in which no quarter was either given or taken, and in
which are laid traps, lied, squandered, erred, through illusion”. (Dreiser,
1991: 82) And even the survivors of the struggle to become a king, are left
without a trophy.
…..
If you are interested to read the complete essay, you click
into the website link below.
Other than that, in some films (I can’t remember which),
rocking chair symbolizes death as people especially old folks die on it. When
they are retired, the old folks have plenty of time to be spent but don’t have
much energy to carry out their hobbies. They won’t figure the meaning of life
anymore and relax on the chair. They rock the chair as time elapses, energy
elapses and life elapses.
