Student video explores the city through its contrasts Dr. June Ellis (English) wanted The Great Gatsby to come alive for her students. Toward that end, she devised an assignment that asked students to connect themes and elements of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s contemporary classic to Loyola’s “Year of the City” initiative. One student, Jon Barnes, responded by creating a short film that uses themes in Gatsby to enliven the viewer’s vision of the city by highlighting its ironic and contrasting elements. Barnes, who serves as Youth and Young Adult Ministry Coordinator at a local church, offers the following account of his film: The immediate themes I thought of from the book as it relates to the city were messages of irony and contrast; rich/poor, blue collar/white collar, hope/hopeless, fear/faith, etc. I’ve always had a fascination with images of the city so I went through my footage and photos, created a soundtrack and added text cues throughout the film that would translate the ironic and contrasting elements of the city into visual form. The text is simple and playful and constantly transforms itself into new words of contrast; words of opposites. My goal was to take the ironic elements from The Great Gatsby and challenge us visually to embrace the city; its irony, humanity, restlessness, beauty and inseparability to our own lives.
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