Lecture: Expanded Genealogy

Following on from our first lecture on Genealogy, we wanted to expand upon this and start applying this to our work and looking at the meaning more.
Although confusing at first, I found the lecture helpful with the visual aid that was given to us, mainly using the comparison of the Simpsons introduction and the Gotham evolution video to make some sense as to why we were looking at this in the first place.

The methodology of genealogy was looked at in the lecture, defined as "the way of doing genealogy" - although I didn't understand this to a massive extent, it related back to our work because of the way we look at things that isn't entirely black and white - there's a big grey area in between; which, when looking at our work and researching into it, this is what happens, as we don't know the entire picture, especially when using genealogy to this, as we are filling in the blanks.

The guardian commercial we focused on in the lecture also looked back at this. The idea was that historians don't have actual access to what happened in different periods of time when researching, they weren't actually there to witness the event - this may not be the truth, so, when researching, we have to fill in the blanks of research that we can't necessarily find out for ourselves and make an assumption. (This was backed up by philosopher Zizek, in his "from a bed" video clip)

American Beauty was shown as a visual example of how we can apply this method to our own work and the essay we're given at the end of the term. The five minute introduction to the film is establishing the narrative for the entire film, it makes you interested in the plot and introduces the characters without giving too much of the plot away, as Lester, the main character, is quickly shown as someone who despises his current life. This is what we should be applying to our essay - in the introduction, we should be creating a narrative from the start and enticing the person reading our work to want to continue reading it, plus giving a summary. I found this lecture very interesting in terms of the approach and the way the examples were referenced back to how to apply this to my work, and like the idea of using the films as ways of creating our own essay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Beauty_(1999_film)