I have recently discovered poetry film which is a fusion of poetry, sound design and videography, some of my favorite elements all in one.
It’s an intriguing subgenre of film, mainly due to the kind of association it draws among words sounds, and visuals. To the creators of poetry film, the triggers for a poetry film could be any one of the three. I am always interested in how our senses are connected, influencing each other and creating a unique perception as a whole. It’s one of the reasons I have a stronger interest multi-media art than others. Maybe in a way, I am “greedy” and I want to capture the audience’s attention fully by taking captive of their senses all in one sitting.
We have in the semester done two projects using that kind of association, both the sound project and invisible project. There could be multiple inferences to a single piece of sound recording, and it’s also interesting to see how people view the same paragraph of text would come up with imaginary that are drastically different.
Many think that the film adaption of a novel could sometimes be too literal, as novel usually have very descriptive details of the character and environments. The film could be bounded by such. In comparison, poetry itself is an abstraction in words, which leaves much more blank spaces for visual expression, making the visual an artistic medium that could exert its great potential.
In addition, sound is also an important part for these films. Music video has been gained bigger role in the current music industry. Honestly, having a piece of music guiding the videography is also not something new, even in the full-length motion pictures. I have heard that for one of his film, Christopher Nolan had Hans Zimmer to compose scores for the film before he actually started filming, basing his film’s rhythm on the score.
Circling back to poetry film itself, it’s an interesting topic to look at and take on to be more artistic, exploring our flow of consciousness and the use of various medium to approximate the incomprehensive. To me, that’s the ultimate charm of this subgenre.
If interested, check out the amazing poetry films made by Harvard for a class called poetry of perception: https://vimeo.com/channels/972301
If more interested, check out this archive: https://movingpoems.com/about/
