formative flannelgraph

crosspost from my media class blog:

I grew up the son of a Baptist Preacher, and possibly, more importantly a Baptist Preacher's Wife par excellance. My mom not only played the piano, managed the women's ministries at our church and controlled three boys and a girl sitting motionlessly and perfectly in the front row with but a snap of her finger -- she also was in charge of teaching the three year old class.

And one of my favorite things in those classes was --

Flannelgraph. Do you know about flannelgraph? It's kind of a pre-cursor to velcro. Soft-core velcro. Little Bible-time paper figures monochromed in technicolor who were permanently frozen in their character's most meaningful gesture. So, for instance, Mary (the mother of Jesus) held her hands raised in a receptive openness and sat on her knees in an Oh-So-Feminine Way.

Even when she was riding the back of a donkey all the way to Bethlehem, and she and Joseph would move across the bright blue background of the flannelgraph board as they walked from Inn to Inn and finally into the stable. Or she would appear behind the disciples. And the whole time she was on her knees.

And these two qualities stand out to me as being some of the most attractive and enjoyable qualities of flannelgraph as a medium. (1.) The frozenness -- iconicity even -- of the characters. What would it be like to move through ones entire life frozen in one gesture that was reminiscent of a particular moment that some artist, drawing white Bible characters in the fifties, thought was the most important? Frozenness and (2.) the contextless-ness of the stories. The wide blue emptyness on that board could serve as any number of backgrounds, like a wide black stage, like the simple line drawings in some comics.

I haven't thought hard through all the reasons why I love these two things. What about those qualities evokes nostalgia and happiness in me, but I sure remember thinking they were magical back in the day.



It may have had to do with the fact that this particular FORM of mass media was one of the most unique forms I had encountered thus far. I had seen a (very little bit of) television and a few ("Christian") movies and read tons of books -- so I knew about what mass media was -- many copies of exactly the same story told by a few distant and talented storytellers in a way that made them money.

But these stories were engaged and interactive to a degree that very few other mass mediums have been able to replicate. Some forms of internet storytelling are similiar -- and the internet allows audience members to become "co-storytellers" on fan-boards and with fan web-sites, but that's as close as we've come as a culture to the unique voice of Gloria Rudd -- my mom mingling her unique dramatic storytelling prowess with these mediated forms. These mediated forms that were fashioned by an artist-for-hire, based on formulatic standards, made to appear to a vast "mainstream" audience, mass-produced in factories, marketed to media distribution outlets and consumed by relatively nameless/faceless large audiences.

(Craig Barnes' flannelgraph memory offers a great example of how he became a "co-storyteller" in a bit more destructive way)

And I think that I fell in love not just with the performative way that these forms included LOCAL & FAMILIAR voices in the storytelling process, but also because these forms (to me, in that time and place) empowered storytellers and demanded the imagination of the audience. (It was a very cool medium.)