As I work to weave a poem into one of my own visual projects, I went in search of inspiration from short films that are deliberate in their use of poetry. I came across Motion Poems, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit that matches poets with filmmakers to produce work that interprets poetry.
Be forewarned: The motion poems are addictive and inspiring. Each one I watched led to another. And I wanted to know more about the poets and the filmmakers who created the work. How did the filmmakers chose the imagery, and what else had they produced? How much did they collaborate with the poets? Even without words, many of the films could be considered visual poetry. But with skillful use of sound and music and words, they transcend both film and poetry to become something new.
Some of the motion poems were explicitly linear, using reenactment to tell the narrative of the poem. Others were much less overt, and I was surprised by how much I was drawn to the nonlinear visual storytelling. With these types of motion poems, images are as carefully chosen as words to evoke emotion. There is much we can take from this approach, even when we are putting together journalism-based work: images have emotional power that we can use to convey a tone and even the intent of our pieces.
In “How to Make the Girl” by filmmaker and musician Ann Prim, we see the power of a nonlinear interpretation of a poem by a fellow multi-hyphenate: musician and artist Dessa Wander. Prim often has a nonlinear approach to her work, which is deliberately designed to provoke feelings, she said in an interview with Minnesota Public Television about one of her other films, Filmetto – Porta 241.
“I really like the person viewing it to create their own narrative,” Prim said. “The human mind always wants to make a narrative. It wants to make sense of our surroundings.”
Of her films, Prim says she is drawn to telling stories of women’s lives, “especially stories that reveal the strength needed to survive and thrive.” A common thread running through her work is a focus on characters who tend to dwell outside social norms. They also often exist in what Prim describes as “the space between and in the process of becoming.”
That’s exactly what we have in “How to Make the Girl.” The four-minute film opens with the title appearing word by word over an abstract image (and sound) of a lathe. The words disappear one by one, as though they are being deleted on a keyboard from the end of a sentence. It’s an act of visual wordplay that suggests the girl can be unmade by external forces (or creators) as easily as she can be made. Viewers may create their own narrative, but they are given a visual clue at the film’s beginning that this film is about the forces that shape women’s lives.
From the start, music and sound are powerful forces in this film, as is befitting in a piece of art made by a filmmaker and poet with musical backgrounds. The film opens with a curtain drawing from left to right and music that evokes the rhythmic sound of industrial clicking. It was only on second viewing that I realized there was a hand – unknown who it was attached to! – pulling the curtain. A bare lightbulb swings in the opposite direction, creating an artful juxtaposition of imagery.
In the background are a girl’s dress behind plastic, dirty shears, blue rubber gloves and a hose. The hypnotic lightbulb continues to swing back and forth as the camera pulls away in an unmotivated negative action shot. We are 30 seconds in, and visually, we know that a stage has been set. The emotion evoked here is that of unease, that something natural is awry.
Next, we see shadows on the floor that represent the moving light bulb. We see a sequence of the items on the wall: the dress, the shears, the hose. The camera moves closer to pan over these items. Unlike the crisp medium opening shot, these are fuzzier, their focus deliberately muddy. The light from the shining bulb continues to swing across the items. And then, at 45 seconds, Prim focuses on the moving bulb, in an extreme close up that crescendos with the sound of the sizzle and crackle of the filaments within. It is so close we see the dust on the bulb.
This shot is followed by a conceptual match cut to the smooth legs of a girl, also swinging from side to side from some fixed point above. Her pale legs are the only bright spot in this otherwise ominous room. They being to spin, and we hear once again the sound of something turning. The next shot (at 1:12) is of an analog counter.
It is here that the poem begins, with words that correspond to the counter: “One hundred turns on the lathe…”
Fear is evoked next. A raw rib scuttles from left to right across the screen, using stop motion to animate its movement. “We don’t use the rib in this new method.” Feed it to the dog, the voice of the creator says, as a growling maw lunges at the rib at 1:40.
Again, the hand of an unseen creator is at work, turning the figure of the girl wrapped in a opaque plastic tarp. Still unseen, the creator tosses the body into the trunk of an old green Buick. It contributes to the feeling that we are watching a horror film, a Frankenstein under construction. And the treatment of the girl’s body, tossed in a trunk, suggests her disposability. The garage door begins to close. In a matched action shot that takes us in a close-up to the door, it slams shut, with a powerful bang. This shot is so carefully constructed, with such an eye for detail, that we see spiders scuttling at the bottom of the frame, disturbed by the slam and the noise. (1:57) This is imagery used to evoke disgust and unease, accompanied by the sound of scuttling insects, as though a collection of cockroaches scattered, off-screen, somewhere behind us.
The camera as the car drives away is focused midway between the foreground and the background, so the taillights and the shape of it are out of focus until the car arrives at the point of focus. This is a beautiful, 20-second shot worth replicating. It is accompanied by emphatic techo music with a strong beat, and the muscular sound of a gas-guzzling sedan accelerating away. (From about 2 to 2:25.) This is a masculine, old-fashioned car, another clue that this film is about how women have mostly lived in a world created by men.
The screen fades to black, and then there is an abrupt shift of tone and color palate and music at 2:27. “La Camparsita” by the Brazilian guitar duo Los Indios Tabajaras, kicks in. (There are no other musical credits for this film, which suggests that Prim composed most of it. It’d be interesting to know whether she and Wander collaborated on the music.)
This next shot is also a lengthy one, lasting from 2:28 to 2:48. Once again, it begins with the girl’s feet, a callback to our first glimpse at the creature under construction. Prim uses a slider to pan slowly from the girl’s feet to her head. The girl is on a lawn chair in a pool, in a pink one-piece bathing suit, “baking” to her finish.
Next, we get an extreme closeup of the girl’s face, as it turns toward the camera and she removes tanning goggles. The next shot is so tight that we can see the veins in her eyelids and the wisps of blond, baby hair at her temples. The emotion evoked here is one of marvel: something real and youthful, yet artificially constructed, is awakening. The poem, which has been absent for more than one minute, does not start up again until we get closer to the girl’s face: “A day on the drying rack and the pupils should contract.”
I do not want to spoil the final minute for anyone who wants to watch the rest of this film, so I’ll end my discussion of film techniques here, other than to say that we return to the same shot we saw at the start.
The poem, except for its last few lines, is read by a separate voiceover actor, Mikel Clifford, suggesting once again, the hand of the unseen creator. Dessa Wander reads the final lines, though, leaving us with an existential mystery, but one certainty: It is the poet who created this world.
– Erika Bolstad