Walking, Working

Ryan Larkin' short film Walking is a form of art because it incorporates dramatics, animation, and music into one piece and even without including any dialogue, a statement is made. As the person who was not clearly a man or a woman in the beginning walks along, diverse peoples are shown. Walking is used as a metaphor for the walks of life.

The short film does not defamiliarize the people within the artwork. The images used depict simple everday life of common people. It should not take the viewer any effort to see what is portrayed. The effort comes through associating what the images mean as a whole. This is not a difficult objective either, which is why the idea of combining artwork and film to show differences among the human race is moving--it's something we can all relate to and it easily makes a broad statement out of the piece.

I did not notice any images that I have seen before from famous works of art, so I do not detect any decontextualization in Larkin's film. The humans shown are in their natural conditions, which makes the film apealing in the first place. They're people we can relate to; these people from the outside perspective aren't out of place.

Walking away from viewing Walking, the viewer is supposed to relect on the humans of the American scene. The viewer realizes how much of society we really encounter as each of us goes about our daily lives.

I'm sitting here at work in the computer center at the Oak Lawn Public Library and the group of people in here reminds me of Walking. There are the regulars, the young, the old, the males, the females, an African-American woman, a Middle-Eastern teenager, the patrons I've never seen before... Even when I'm doing my usual job here at the library in the reference/non-fiction department, working at the library is a place where diversity comes together because from time to time all kinds of differnt people head to the library in search of informational materials.