Fulbright Personal Statement

PERSONAL STATEMENT
Elizabeth Skadden, Poland, Filmmaking

Growing up, I was extremely interested in music but lacked money to buy records. The dubbed cassette tape became the most important vehicle to my education and experience with music. I was a fan of the 90 and 120-minute tapes, putting as much music as I could on each side. My experience of this music was not related to any of the promotional materials for the bands, as I had no money for music magazines, albums with their cover art, posters, or band T-shirts. These tapes allowed me to access music cheaply, quickly, and with maximum contact with other people. This is a unique and rare way for someone growing up in the United States to encounter music, as there is no media influence as to how the music should be experienced. This experience helped launch my career working as a musician and creating visuals for and about musicians, as I was not influenced by media hype, preferring to trust my own taste.

While at the University of Texas, I worked as Program Manager and DJ at KVRX, the student radio station, and became interested in music subcultures. My friends were record collectors and our language was a mix of album titles and promises for future mix tapes. Plain or decorated, I remember distinctly the cassette tape boxes: magazine images cut out and used as inserts, personal notes, and explanations for why certain songs were chosen (“this is our cover of Sonic Youth’s cover of Sister Ray”). The images created by the hands of people that I knew became my visual image for the music, personalizing my experience. Each cassette tape represented the end of a search for an album, time someone spent putting the tape together for me, and my love for the music.

Being in my own band, “Finally Punk,” gave me a deep view into the network of underground music across the United States and Europe. We toured every year from 2006 to 2009, always meeting more bands and becoming a part of the subculture. I had many jobs making documentaries about the bands I was now friends with, and worked closely with the Flaming Lips, a band from Oklahoma. Enrolling at the Rhode Island School of Design while still playing in Finally Punk allowed me a double life: a tour life where I slept on floors, screamed into a microphone every night, and drove 18 hours between shows; and my RISD life, where I participated in an elite art school and created art about obsolescent media and abandoned spaces. I always actively kept both worlds separate and only in the last two years, with the dissolution of the band, my graduation from RISD, and my work creating visuals for other musicians have I started to connect my interest in music subcultures with my artistic practice. A documentary about the cassette tape culture of a bygone country is a marriage of my interests in music subcultures, obsolescence, and video making.

In this Fulbright application, I am applying to create a documentary about the cassette tape subculture of the former communist Poland. Listening to Western music was forbidden and teenagers experienced the Doors and the Dead Kennedys through dubbed cassette tapes from a black market supported by secret music fanatics. Poland’s development of their own music scene and relation to Western music was unique, as a network of people developed it without outside influence. By creating a documentary of this self-created system, I hope to bring the story of their ingenuity in listening to music from the West by circumventing normal routes to the attention of the Western world.