Creative Task: The Day My School Bus Rolled Down a Hill

Sometimes I like to browse the national news on the internet. I usually just scroll through the headlines in the hopes that something will capture my interest. The other day I stopped scrolling when I read the headline '35 children hurt in schoolbus crash'. When I saw the image of a smashed bus sitting in a field I traced my mind back to the strange day when everything turned upside-down.

Sept. 6 bus crash (NZ Herald)

It happened so fast, with no time to react. I remember seeing grass and daisies squashed under the glass of the windows before the bus came to a halt upside-down. The screaming subsided and everything was still. A silent surreality filled the bus as boys and girls began to clamber out from under the detached seats and scattered schoolbags. Some young children were sitting on what was once the ceiling crying, while others dizzily crawled their feet. With my shoes nowhere to be seen I calmly stood up and walked towards the emergency exit. Maybe I crawled. I can't remember.

Like any other sleepy school morning I climbed on the bus and scanned the faces for Meaghan, who usually saved me a seat. I found her in our usual spot by the window on the left and I sat down next to her and began preparing to have a snooze.

The bus driver was playing that terrible mixed CD again and I couldn't help but laugh.

Playlist
1) Dr.Hook - A Little Bit More
2) Boys II Men - To the End of the Road
3) James Morrison - You Give Me Something

The CD had just reached 'A Little Bit More', my least favourite track, when the bus jolted suddenly to the left. I watched as all the people in front of me were thrown sideways, and I soon followed...

(NZ Herald Oct 2006)

BREAKING NEWS: A school bus carrying around 40 students on their way to school has rolled off the road into a paddock off the Coatesville-Riverhead highway.


When I got off the bus I saw children with dirty faces wandering around looking for their shoes and friends. Cows grazed in the long wet grass, seemingly oblivious to the big red thing that had rolled into their paddock. I found Robert with a bleeding head and he calmly asked me if I was ok. Emergency services and worried parents had already arrived and they began to usher us into ambulances and cars to be checked for injuries at the nearby town hall.

I finished reading the article and thought about how lucky we were that nobody was seriously hurt, and with that I returned to the national headlines.

Critical Reflection

Critical Reflection

Memory and narrative form: The flashback as a narrative tool

In literature and film alike, flashbacks are used as a tool with which to present memories usually exclusive to a single character within the story. Memory, in relation to contemporary cinema, can be divided into two categories; public and private.

Cameron says that 'flashbacks are conventionally used as a representation of human pyschological processes' within the medium of the film (81). In the Creative Task the images and text that compose the flashback are juxtaposed with the narrative of the present day, and with the news story images. The flashback consists of a recollection of events and drawings to illustrate it. The images that accompany the flashback are hand drawn to indicate that they are personal and emotive ways of recalling the memory, as opposed to the photos that factually document the events in history. The narrative of the flashback is not totally chronological, but skips to different images and moments in time just like the human mind does when a person remembers an event. The brain does not remember everything perfectly, but jumps from moment to moment. The focus is not on the chronological, but rather key personal memories. Among these memories are the unseen forgotten moments , represented by the missing images that would other wise complete the recollection.


Turim writes that in a classic film flashback the 'image in present form dissolves to an image of the past.' (1) This acts as a way of connecting the present narrative with that of the past. The Creative Task begins with the narrator reading a newspaper article that makes them think of a similar event that happened to them. The focus of the story goes from a present day event to the personal recollection of an event that happened years earlier.





References:
Cameron, Allan. "Navigating Memory: Temporal Anchoring and the Modular Subject." Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 79-112.

Turim, Maureen. "Definition and Theory of the Flashback." Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History. London: Routledge, 1989.




Bibliography:
Cameron, Allan. "Navigating Memory: Temporal Anchoring and the Modular Subject." Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 79-112.

Turim, Maureen. "Definition and Theory of the Flashback." Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History. London: Routledge, 1989.

Turim, Maureen. "Flashbacks and the Psyche in Melodrama and Film Noir." Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History. New York: Routledge, 1989.