[Frameworks] video translation of poetry/prose

[FrameWorks Admin]

Hi Jimmy,

There are some early examples such as Manhatta (1921) by Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler, a film portrait of New York structured around a Walt Whitman poem.

P. Adams Sitney in his 2008 book "Eyes Upside Down" draws parallels between the poetry of Ralph Waldo Emerson and traditions of American experimental film. Emerson marks the transition from a puritan America of religious severity towards a sensitivity of personal perception, nature, expansion and beauty. Emerson’s disciples - Whitman, Thoreau, Gertrude Stein - broadened these traditions towards sensuality, sexuality and perception and introspection. Musicians like Charles Olson and John Cage and filmmakers like Mekas and Brakhage took direct inspiration from these poets.
Emerson’s poem “Nature" contains the famous phrase “I am a transparent eyeball - I am nothing, I see all.” Sitney describes this as an appreciation of the wonder and beauty of nature, and links it directly to the cinema of pure visual experience and the ecstasy of natural phenomena he sees in films such as Menken’s Notebook, Mekas’ Rabbit Shit Haikus (Lost Lost Lost reel 5) and Brakhage’s Mothlight. 

Jonas’ Walden freely cites Thoreau of course and there are parallels in his observations of nature, solitude, society and economy. If you compare some of Jonas’ poems from Idylls of Seminiskiai you can identify the same logic of glimpses and invented vocabulary to describe textures, colors and visual impressions as can be found in the filming style he developed at the time of shooting Walden. The title cards “Walden” and “I thought of home” connect with the theme of exile and memory of childhood in the same way as those poems about Lithuania written in the camps in Germany. Jonas’ later short film Imperfect Three Image Films attempts to directly impose the Haiku form onto filmmaking by using only three shots with at least one of them indicating the season (the title includes the word “imperfect” because he deviated from this form as well).

More directly, Stan Brakhage quotes nearly literally from Gertrude Stein’s "Stanzas in Meditation" in his film Visions in Meditation #1. Brakhage writes extensively on Stein on page 196 of “Essential Brakhage.” On page 330 of "Eyes Upside Down” Sitney quotes Brakhage’s full description of Visions in Meditation #1 and his attempt to recreate in film Stein’s demonstration of the slippage of language (for example in “A rose is a rose is a rose”) to detach the image from its content to allow subjective and multiple meanings for the viewer. Comparing Stein’s poem with this Brakhage film can be useful for your students.

You can also look at poets who became filmmakers, such as the Lettrists Isidore Isou, Maurice Lemaitre and their followers. Their poetry was an abstract sound performance linked to a polemic manifesto on the destruction of poetry and you can see their attempts to destroy film, painting and other forms as evolving from their poetry. More usefully for your students, you could show Isou’s On Venom and Eternity chapter 3 when the protagonists visit a Lettrist poetry recital, the film being scratched accordingly.

Hope this helps,
Pip Chodorov


> On Jan 10, 2021, at 3:44 AM, jimmyschaus1 <jimmyschaus at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I'm working on a class assignment where students write a short piece of poetry or prose and then make a video where each shot corresponds to one sentence or line in the text. 
> 
> Can anyone point me towards a prior example of this, or something else that engages translation in a similar way?  
> 

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