To Be a Transcendentalist Today -- Stew Boss

My working title right now is To Be a Transcendentalist Today. I am basically trying to explore and take a position on the ideas of classic transcendentalism and the views of writers like Emerson and Thoreau who instigated the original movement, and discuss how they apply to have applied to modern society and how they can exist today for us. I went back to Charlotte the other weekend and met up with my old English teacher and Transcendental Club reader who for a long time taught a British Romantics course and is somewhat of an expert on the subject. I interviewed him and got a lot of audio and some video of him talking in the woods behind his house. I've used his thoughts and views to kind of direct the movie. In putting my movie together I've sort of bookended the film with video of him. Then I have continued with some natural scenery footage paired with audio; after that I've combined alot of found footage and photography of more well-known modern figures and art that have brought transcendentalism into the modern day,including sources such as "Into the Wild", Maclolm X, guerilla gardening, Emma Goldman, MLK, Angela Davis, Really Really Free Markets, and Akira Kurosawa's film "Dreams." Very different sources all made to relate. More natural scenery and flipping through transcendental literature, where the movement really began, and discussion/vizualization of Emerson's "transparent eyeball" philosophy. Then more video of my teacher, then passing trees with audio that wraps up all the ideas discussed in what it means to achieve a sense of transcendence in our own lives. I've edited some of my footage to give it a more luminous, transcendent vibe with some of the iMovie video settings like "Glow" and "Heat Wave" and I've tried to combine the audio and video elements so that while they may not be exactly related they are at least roughly close together so that the people watching the movie might see how transcendentalism can be interpreted in different ways than they may have previously thought.