The Abstract:

According to Philadelphia’s Office of Sustainability, 35,000 tons of clothing and textiles are thrown away in the city each year. I created Drop and Shop to lower that number. By providing a place for students to drop off clothes they don’t want anymore and others to shop for free, new-to-them items, fewer clothes go to landfills. Students can stop by anytime, and anyone is allowed to shop, regardless of whether they’ve dropped clothes.

I officially started in March by putting a poster and collection box out on the first floor. I also launched an Instagram account to promote the project. The racks and hangers are borrowed from Ben Franklin Community Closet, and SLA’s vocational training program helped me organize everything. In the past five weeks, over 200 items have been dropped and 85+ shopped.

I created a spreadsheet for inventory of the clothes and updated it at least once a week. I then made graphs showing how the number of items each week varied, as well as the frequency of items and sizes. I’ll provide an analysis during my presentation.

I’ve heard lots of positive feedback so I decided to keep the Drop and Shop running until the end of the year. My goal is to find a purpose for each item, meaning that none will go to landfills. There is also a 10th-grader who is going to continue it after I graduate.

As clothing production and processing exacerbate the climate crisis, programs like these are the future.

The Product:

A google drive folder including the guidelines, some people shopping, posters I made, and pictures of the setup throughout the weeks.

The Instagram account: @sla.drop.and.shop

Annotated bibliography

After watching some film analyses, I was intrigued by the idea that Deckard is a replicant. I wanted my poster to hint at the fact that he is one. When the idea was first floated, I was pretty doubtful but after watching the videos, I began to believe it. I still don’t completely believe that he was written to be a replicant but it’s fun to think about the hints that the people who made the film put in. I wanted people who believe in the theory to see the poster and think that since Deckard is on a poster with so many other replicants, he is one too. The new title could also be ironic; “retire all replicants” could mean that Deckard eventually would have to be retired, too.

I found pictures of Deckard and the replicants he is tasked to retire. I like the shot of Deckard a lot because it shows that this is not a movie about retiring, it’s about murder. There’s stress and suspense, and it’s almost always dark and raining. All this can be inferred from that one shot. It seemed like an obvious choice to make Racheal’s picture bigger since her involvement in the story is bigger. I also like that by looking at her outfit and the way she holds herself, someone could guess that she’s the femme fatale even from just one shot.

The unicorns at the bottom represent the added symbolism of unicorns in the director’s cut. While watching the video about the differences between the cuts, I learned that the original cut focuses more on the whimsical aspect of unicorns whereas the director’s cut focuses more subtly on them. Either way, unicorns represent something special and magical, similar to the replicants. Adding them to the poster makes it fun to look at after watching the movie because viewers aren’t going to know how they connect to the story until after watching.

I added the question to intrigue viewers and give a very basic summary of the plot. I like the question format because it can be answered with “find out this June” which is when the film did come out. People don’t want to read a lot of text, but they want enough to know what the film is about.

In my opinion, this movie is much more about the replicants than the blade runners. By focusing the poster on replicants, one could tell what the film is really about and theorize that Deckard is also a replicant. Both are things I wish I knew before watching.

I adored Rear Window. I loved the way it was never too much in one genre: sometimes it was thriller and mystery, other times it was romance, and for a few scenes it almost felt like a mockumentary. I read several reviews in preparation for this project and landed on My favourite Hitchcock: Rear Window, written by Killian Fox and published in 2012 by the Guardian. Unlike many reviews I’ve read that are more formulaic, this review intersperses summary with analysis. By including random scenes Fox remembers from his first viewing many years ago, his review reads like a friend explaining their thoughts on a movie you saw a while back.

Fox starts with: “The first time I watched Rear Window, I was 14 or 15 and living in a remote part of Ireland. There was a mile and several hills between us and our nearest neighbours, so the concept of looking out the window and being able to closely survey the lives of an entire community was alien to me, and totally fascinating.” One of the main reasons I became invested in this film was because I live in a city and could understand its portrayal of city life. I know what city heat feels like and can sometimes see what my neighbors are watching on TV, so even though it was set seventy years ago, many aspects still felt relatable. I wonder if the same would be true for viewers from a city watching a film set in a rural area. Nevertheless, this quote shows Hitchcock’s ability to engage viewers from anywhere. He makes the setting central to the storytelling in this film, yet you don’t need to know anything about city life before watching.

Later on in the article, Fox writes, “When I watched Rear Window again at university, I was able to appreciate what the film was saying about the cinema-going experience – of sitting in a dark room and gazing into other people’s private lives.” I like that he brings up that he watched it at university, a place where you are often in a living situation closer to what Jeff has. Although I’ve never lived in a dorm, I can imagine that due to the typical high-density housing, it can be easier to look at your neighbors. I wish Fox wrote more about the similarities he found between the setting of Rear Window and his university life. I understand reviews typically are supposed to be more about the film and less about the writer but this would’ve been a great way to continue the theme started in the first paragraph.

He concludes, “If the film was critical of voyeuristic behaviour, Stewart and his co-conspirators would be proved wrong…this is Hitchcock, connoisseur of the perverse, and the film ended up saying the opposite of what I thought it should.” This is the only line I disagree with. I would not have liked the movie as much if they had been wrong, all the suspense would have been a letdown. In class, we’ve talked about Hitchcock’s “the bomb must never go off” ideology. That seems like it could be applied here, but instead of just the audience knowing about the bomb under the table, the characters know, too. In Rear Window, the characters feel the same type of suspense the viewers do so Hitchcock uses a completely different kind of suspense that only is worth it if what we think is going to happen, happens. I’m not super into thrillers or mysteries, because I’m often pretty gullible when it comes to movies. I tend to believe what the main character believes and I’ve never guessed a plot twist before it occurred unless it’s super cliché. Rear Window is a movie for people like me, I didn’t have to do my own detective work to guess what was going to happen, I just listened to the characters.

Fox ends his article with: “Voyeurism has its rewards; keep a close eye on your neighbours and you might just root out a murderer.” This line seems a bit sarcastic and hyperbolic. You probably won’t solve a murder, but you could tell if a neighbor is sick, or find they have a new lover. Above all, voyeurism (to a respectful extent) creates community. You may not know your neighbor’s name or anything about them, but you know they exist, thus you know you’re not alone.

Fox, Killian. “My favourite Hitchcock: Rear Window | Alfred Hitchcock.” The Guardian, 25 July 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2012/jul/25/my-favourite-hitchcock-rear-window.