Film as Poetry: When Art Intersects
Written by Kennedy McCutchen
The intersection of two art forms into one creative entity has the potential to breed a magical and idiosyncratic experience; all the more so when those two art forms prioritize a kind of rhythmic sensory aesthetic that makes one treasure the budding trees of springtime or reexamine a kiss from a loved one. Over the years, several independent filmmakers have taken advantage of such artistic marriages in powerful and innovative ways. Poetry and its typologies have emerged as one medium on-screen as a subject, as an identity, and as an idea. The list of short films below consists of filmmakers whose poetic identities and interests reveal themselves as intricate and palpable stories.
Film as Haiku: Nettles (2018)
Photo Credits: Aaron Jaker, via Nettles - Chapters
A Bushwick Film Festival competitor and prize-winner, this short film written and directed by Raven Jackson exudes a haunting elegance characteristic of many women’s most subtle and traumatic moments in life. Composed of six nearly silent chapters, viewers are taken from body part to body part, both literally and figuratively. A little girl’s eye watches a father figure let his wet towel fall to the floor in what feels like a vacant home. An older woman’s back is quietly swept away in the currents of a muddied river. These little instances of difference and the liminal reminded me—and I’m sure many others—of my own intimate moments with fear, grief, healing, and sexuality.
Jackson is a published poet (her most recent work is a chapbook titled little violences), but her film does not prioritize nor celebrate poetry directly. Rather, it is the delicate haiku-like audiovisual experience that resembles something of an atmospheric slam session. The film’s short stories mimic the length and precision with which Jackson writes her poems. An excerpt from her poem “i watch papa bury our dog in a grave the size of a pond” strikes the same tone as her bodily Nettles chapters: “my jaws lock in mid-sentence and hands cover your last white leg with dirt.” Just as a haiku emphasizes the beauty of nature or the simple moments of life in only three lines, Jackson needs only the skip of a small girl’s jump rope over crunching leaves to foreground links between innocence, femininity, and the earth.
The fourth chapter, Throat, further displays the ephemeral and complex moments of a woman’s life. The audience watches the protagonist unflinchingly gut a chicken as the camera closes in on the innards of the bird, refusing to cut away. Confronting the uncomfortable while nevertheless carving a familiar ambience, the chapter continues to explore necessity and desire as we begin to watch the same woman masturbate. The director’s choice to juxtapose the scenes embodies the direct and often provocative nature of the well-known three-line poetic structure. Singularly evocative and desperately poignant, Jackson’s knack for stinging the viewer with an efficient, transient aesthetic keeps the tension high. Shot with 16 mm film and with little to no dialogue, Jackson’s work indeed reminds one of a rich haiku: short, intentional, and surprising.
Stream on The Criterion Channel
Film as Freeverse: How to Be at Home (2020)
Photo Credits: Andrea Dorfman’s YouTube Thumbnail
Directed by Andrea Dorfman in collaboration with songwriter and poet Tanya Davis, How to Be at Home is an endearing and timely short film made via still-shot animation. A narrator’s melodic voice recites a poem, a sequel to the pair’s first film How to Be Alone (2010), as Dorfman turns the pages of an illustrated book, each new leaf revealing a depiction of the words spoken. Made in the throes of the recent pandemic, How to Be at Home both comforts and mourns alongside our isolated bodies that are still coping after more than a year of living in the era of coronavirus. Kind suggestions of healing greet you at every corner. “Appreciate the kindness in the distance of strangers,” we’re told; “lean into loneliness and know you’re not alone,” our invisible friend says as hands hold along the bind.
“Feed your heart - if people are your nourishment, I get you. Feel the feelings that undo you while you have to keep apart.”
The film serves as a stylistically rhythmic lullaby, not abashing our self-pity nor ignoring the triggers that grind themselves against our identities and loved ones at every fresh news notification. It’s a short film about the familiar. It’s a two-dimensional pot clanging against a two-dimensional spoon. It’s a seagull beating above waves that can resemble our calmest spaces. It’s a poem, spoken and seen, reminding us that spaciousness in solitude can create a more holistic individual, one that can find connectivity and “truth” in the murk of death and isolation.
Stream on YouTube
Film as Elegy: The Poet and Singer (2012)
Photo Credits: Cinema on the Edge
“Hell subverting hell becomes heaven,” recites the poet of The Poet and Singer, a 21-minute short film directed by Bi Gan. The film follows an artistic pair along their casually murderous trek. Two men contemplate ambition, the Diamond Sutra, and toothaches in transitory non-places, all points from A to B: a river, a cave, a path along a field. Lightning bolts flash sporadically, cloaking the film with a sense of unexpected danger while maintaining voyeuristic awe regarding the extraordinary capabilities of nature. The poetry reveals itself out of the aforementioned toothache, out of meeting the father of a man they were paid to kill. A knife lingers from scene to scene; it doesn’t seem to surprise.
“Hell subverting hell becomes heaven.”
The lack of shock value is precisely why the melodrama of the film feels relatively unimportant. What does hold import is the contemplative and serene nature of Bi Gan’s artistic vision. For this reason, even given the abstract nature of the piece, The Poet and Singer best embodies that of an elegy, a reflection on a serious subject matter. A murder occurs along the river, but the philosophizing and ambition of the main characters’ are not limited to their callous act; in fact, they seem hardly troubled by it at all. Just as “the old man” claims the singer’s toothache “doesn’t matter,” neither does their crime. Instead, the political and spiritual realizations, as disguised as they may be in the film, are lamented with the poignancy of a silent paddle upstream.
Stream on The Criterion Channel
