Looking Back on the Italian-American Experience

For our project, we decided to turn Daniel’s autoethnography into a video. The purpose of this paper was to add to the larger conversation about immigrating and assimilating cultures within the United States and how connections can be made between members of these cultural groups as they go through and reflect on the forever challenging process of immigration. In his paper he adds to this on-going conversation by talking about the stereotypes faced by Italian-Americans as well as the process of assimilation. The process of creating a video based on this paper includes making rhetorical decisions during the filming and editing process in order to convey the messages found within the paper as well as possible. In order to properly convey these messages, whatever is presented on the screen needs to best reflect the main arguments from the paper, and in order to do so we decided to use a couple of different techniques. In the autoethnography Daniel uses personal evidence as a form of support in order to make his arguments stronger and content more meaningful. You can see how we incorporated this personal evidence within the video in many differing ways. Next, another major section of our video was outside support drawn from differing forms of popular American media to establish a sense of outside awareness of this topic. These forms of popular media all presented Italian-Americans in what many would consider a stereotypical way. Then we included some personally filmed videos and photographs in our project to build on a metaphor developed in our script. The rhetorical choices made and how these choices came together to portray our groups desired messages and ideas are interesting to talk about further.

The video opens with the sound of soft Italian music playing. As images begin to pop up on the screen and the audio recording of the script begins to blare the viewer must focus on the content of the audio to understand the meaning of the maps and images that are phasing through the screen. The maps are used to allow the viewers to orient themselves geographically allowing the audience to get a sense of how large a distance Daniel’s family traveled to come to the United States. The images of the differing towns both in the states and in Italy provided a sense of scenery for the viewer to help them visualize the drastic change in environment that Daniel’s grandparents underwent as they moved to the States. Next we used images and videos of Daniel’s current and past family members to shine a positive light on Italians and Italian-American culture as we headed into the bulk of the content the video needed to cover. This section of the video can be viewed as the introduction to our topic. It set up the viewer with the necessary personal information of Daniel’s background and family history as well as the necessary background of Italian-Americans to proceed with enough depth of knowledge into the rest of the video.

The next section of the video is centered on the assimilation process of Italian-Americans, a large part of Daniel’s paper. As the viewer heads into this visually different section of the video the comfort of the soft and pleasing Italian music is taken away as the music stops and a series of sped up black and white videos of dirty and clean feet and hands runs across the screen. By stopping the music the viewers are forced to focus solely on the content of the scripted audio that sets up a metaphor to go along with these black and white videos and images. The viewer then finds out that the dirt is symbolic for the Italian culture that assimilating immigrants were washed away of, and that the repetition of these videos of the feet walking and the hands washing is representative of the constant cultural push and pull away from Italian culture towards American culture and back. These videos are followed by a series of impactful images that show the hands and feet going from being completely dirty to becoming half cleaned. The music begins again and the viewer is lead through a selection of images that finish off this section of the video that shows Daniel’s family participating in very Americanized activities.

Finally the last section of the video deals with the topic of Italian-American stereotypes present within differing forms of American media. The background music stops completely and the transition slides introducing the two stereotypes of mafia and guidos goes by and the audio begins. The viewer is subjected to a doubling repeating start to a promo for the Jersey Shore show with text over it. The text is a quote directly from MTV that states the type of people they tried to cast for the show which includes the use of the derogatory word guido, and guido is in red in the text for emphasis. Then the scripted audio ceases as the audio of the promo begins and we hear Mike, “the situation”, describing what he calls the “guido handbook”. Next, Mike saying the phrase “gotta do the guido handbook” was cut from the clip of the promo and repeated three times, and then followed by a short clip of guidos yelling at each other from a Family Guy joke. There are some other aspects about these short repeated clips that were important to note. With each succession the clips lost some color until they were completely in black and white. This was to display the draining effects this stereotype has on the Italian-American culture. Next a quote was displayed over these clips that shows the president of Unico National, a large Italian-American social group, derogatory definition of the word guido. This was to emphasize how the use and display of this word is not one that is tolerated or accepted by most of the Italian-American society. The other images and guidos follow and serve as the background to the continued audio about these stereotypes. The final stereotype presented is the organized crime stereotype. This is the stereotype that has been present within the American media for many decades, and in turn giving us much to pull from. We pulled clips from the most well known Italian mobster movies to portray our message. Most of the videos are extremely violent and this was on purpose, because nobody ever suspect a mobster of being nice guy. These extremely violent clips set the scene for what we today do not fear. These clips are intimidating, repulsive, and downright scary. They certainly embody the images that natural Americans were afraid of as they encountered ordinary Italian-American back in the day. But alas it was necessary to end this video on a positive note to redeem the viewer’s sense of sympathy and understanding for the Italian-American community by including some final videos and pictures of Daniel’s family.

Although we learned several skills about filming, editing, and composing a video using an essay as our backbone and an ongoing conversation as our guide, we still have plenty of room for improvement. First of all, time management is always an area ready for adjustment, but rather than simply splitting the work into chunks and completing it on time, I believe we could have taken it to a deeper level. Although we succeeded in subdividing the work into manageable mini-tasks, we could have allotted space in between steps for that intermediate reflection time that would allow us to see the errors in our work so far and better organize the ideas we had for the steps to come. Furthermore, while our final product did not stray too far from our original ideas when we brainstormed, I believe that more time spent on brainstorming would not only have shortened the time needed to execute all the steps in the production process, but also would have allowed us to conjure up richer ideas and stronger positions regarding the issue of Italian-American culture assimilation. Both of those consequences combined would also extra time for general revision at the end of the process, which is one area we could have done more thoroughly.

In terms of conceptual areas that needed improvement, we could have adjusted our speaking tones in ways that would have pulled the viewers through the sensations described in the video rather than simply dictating to them the information, which is how our narration could be characterized. Had we had extra time, we could have also placed more emphasis on polishing up the finishing touches such as extra details and including more cinematographic aspects. Both the speaking tones and the details are areas that are not so much focused on our completing of the project but rather developing it in a manner that portrayed the message as empathetic and understandable to our audience, which is one of the more established advantages of the video medium and is therefore a skill in which we certainly have room to grow.

However, despite our weaknesses and areas needing improvement, we did come to catch a grasp of some of the major lessons within filming a video project. We developed what many call “soft skills”, or the ability for people to interact efficiently and cooperatively with other people, and we acknowledged the fact that we grew in that aspect. Because we were aware of this development, we were able to “get meta” and observe how we grew as writers, students, adults, and humans throughout the course and semester as well as maybe catching an idea of where we could be headed next. With the project and its specific purpose aside, we also learned how to effectively juggle responsibility between members, play to our strengths in order to cover each other’s’ weaknesses, and reach out of our comfort zone and set aside some of our personal motives in order to accomplish the task before us, just as we will inevitably need to do in the future. We came to further understand ourselves and advance our skills as writers, but we ultimately learned that while we may each have a plethora of conversations we add and take away from individually, it is what we take from ourselves and how we add it to those conversations around us that will determine the impact we will leave on those around us.

— Rupert Congman, Daniel Oberti, and Will Berczuk