(I’m completing this task now because I was away in week four and didn’t have time to do the set exercise).
I chose the Ashbery poem The Black Prince to adapt for this task. I’ve read very little of his work but the few poems that I’ve read and the interviews that I’ve listened to have definitely intrigued me. The freedom in his work and the strangeness of the associations that he makes really stood out to me. Out of the four provided poems The Black Prince stood out to me almost entirely because of the strength of its last line: ‘It was only when the wind blew them apart that they didn’t matter, mattered only to some’. I thought that was such a beautiful, evocative image and I thought that I could do something interesting with it.
Because I really wanted to hone in on that final line, I only included the line directly preceding it which sets it up and gives it some context. The rest of the poem didn’t speak to me in the same way as that final line did, the humour in the opening seemed almost at odds with the solemnity I saw in those final lines.
If I’m being completely honest, this is definitely the exercise that I’m the least pleased with. I didn’t give myself anywhere near enough time to think deeply about the text, the associations that it brought up for me, and ways to approach translating it to screen. The finished product was mostly assembled improvisationally, from either footage I’d filmed before or footage that I’d filmed without much thought going into them.
The two nature shots were ones that I’d taken quite some time ago and had sitting on my SD card. I wanted to include them to have the natural world (and in particular the wind, which is obviously a part of the lines that I included) be a part of the film. I wanted its presence to bookend the film, the sound of the wind moving through leaves to be its only soundtrack (as opposed to letting music drive the film, which is something I’ve done in all the other films I’ve made for this class) and to provide a contrast with the interior footage of myself which is in the middle.
The shot of me playing the piano was something that I’d just shot with the thought that I could potentially use it in one of these films at some point. I included it because I wanted that to represent the ‘gestures’ that are spoken about in the poem.
The shot of me speaking into a microphone was shot when I had a slightly different idea of how I wanted to tackle the text. I thought that originally I could include a shot of me speaking the poem’s lines on camera, and upon speaking that final line and evoking the image of speech and gesture being blown apart by the wind that I could tamper with the audio somehow to make it abstract and impossible to understand. I toyed around with ways to do this like reversing an audio clip and putting it through a granular synthesiser, but the results weren’t completely pleasing and I thought that it could sound a bit too sudden against a relatively calm video.
So yes, here’s the finished film. I really think that it’s probably the weakest thing I’ve posted on here. I think it relates to the original poem in very minor and uninteresting ways and lacks a deep engagement with the text. I’m going to immerse myself more deeply in the examples of the poem film that we’ve been provided with and grow a greater understanding of the directions that I can take a poem.