An Introduction

Hello friends, family, fellow travelers and random cyber-nomads!

My name is Sarah Burt and this summer Alex Fisher and I will be making a travel documentary. We are taking a road trip across the United States and conducting a sort of cultural research project. The point of the project is to explore the American identity, or see if there is indeed any such thing as a collective American identity. We are hitting the streets of various cities and asking people three questions:

1) What does it mean to be an American?

2) Of all of the Americans you have met, what is one thing they all have in common?

3) What is the American dream?

There are two disclaimers that come along with this project -

The first being that the scope of our research is limited. Due to time and financial constraints, we only have seven weeks. Seven weeks is not enough time to visit every state, let alone enough cities to constitute a good sample of the American population. Even if we did have the ability to take a somewhat more accurate sample of the population, this would still not entirely be able to capture the essence of "Americanness" for all of time. It is always changing, being redefined, and constantly being expressed in new ways. Rather than suggesting that the results of our ‘research’ will somehow define the concept completely, our goal is to create a portrait of Americanness in this moment based on our findings from the interviews.

The second issue that arises is that of objectivity. Alex and I have created questions that can be answered by anyone we ask. The questions are not necessarily political or controversial in nature. Our goal is not to lead the interviewee in any way or steer them toward a preferred answer, but instead to provide an open question to which the person can answer in any way s/he chooses. That being said, in the very act of creating a film we are constructing an image. The portrait that we paint of American identity is ultimately going to be through the lense of Sarah and Alex. As we edit we will be choosing which footage to include and which to exclude. We will be choosing the order, pace and flow of the footage and in the end will create a picture of American identity that is ours. That being said, this image will hopefully be shaped by the many people we meet on this trip and not stifled by any current conceptions we have of America.

Our reason for making this documentary is just that, we don't know what this portrait of American identity should look like. If we asked ourselves the same questions we were asking participants in our project, we would have a very vague idea of what our answers might be. Both Alex and I have certain preconceived notions of America and its citizens. The goal of this trip is to form our own ideas about the country we live in by simultaneously exploring its landscape and conversing with its people.

This blog will serve as our space to reflect on our travels and work out our own ideas on American identity and even the act of attempting to “capture the essence” of America. Besides the written blog, we hope to also post “video diaries,” as I like to call them, which will be our personal reflections and also pieces of discussions that Alex and I have as we trek across the U.S. (We've only been on the road a week and have already encountered many issues with attempting to define the vague notion of a country). We will also post some rather raw footage as we collect it – whatever we deem most interesting from our day's journey. This will give you all a better idea of what we're doing and also give you a sneak peak at the types of interviews we will be including in the documentary. And of course, we will post pictures!

Whether you are interested in this idea of Americanness, or you just want to live vicariously through us on our trip, please follow us and leave comments!

Enjoy,

Sarah