golempoem

One of the basic questions attending any presentation of a poem concerns sound. Good poems are equipped with good sound effects. Those effects involve considerations beyond rhyme. Always, the effects involve artifice. For example, when Yeats refers to Innisfree, he has no real interest in letting us know there are bees on the island. Rather, he conveys the sense of there being the sound of bees, using the resonant artifice of a phrase like “bee-loud glade.” That phrase, unlike a million paraphrases of it, is the one that moves us.

I want to investigate carefully the role of sound in presenting poems in a cyber gallery. The venue permits other dimensions of the poem to be realized with sound. That’s come up in earlier posts, particularly with respect to the odd coherence of Billy Collins’ speaking voice, his poems, and the computer. But it seems that even a little sound may sometimes be too much.

Today’s clip–a 30-second Dolby trailer–is one of my favorite sound effects ever. If you haven’t already played it and don’t recognize it, try to be conscious of your perceptions as you assemble the sounds and the visual. If you recognize the clip, do you find it infinitely replayable? Maybe it’s a just a guy thing, but I am deeply moved by it and love to play it again and again. Why? I can talk about all the subjective connotations and allusions to film history and romance I associate with this clip…but I’d prefer to hear from you first.

How to assess the potential audience for an exciting recent development in cinema? The development is already here and is called Soft Cinema. The audience of interest to me, does not yet exist, or, at least, is not evident. That audience is typified by the Soft Cinephiliac.

Soft Cinema (SC) is a collection of three films created by Lev Manovich and Andreas Kratky, shown as loop installations and later released on DVD in 2005 for viewing on personal computers. The films exemplify concepts for cinema in the new media that Manovich had presented in his 2001 book The Language of New Media and in a variety of papers he’s written since. Each film constructs a fictional narrative out of modules (e.g. graphic images, animation, video streams, and scrolling text) collected from a database termed the Global User Interface (GUI). The modules are presented inside (and between) smaller frames that partition the screen in a way similar to Mondrian’s partitioning of the canvas. The selection and juxtaposition of those modules on the screen can be random, though Manovich and Kratky tend to synchronize sequences of randomly assembled montage in a nonrandom way, linking subsets of the GUI to synch points in a generally fixed narrative (voiceover or scrolling text).

What can we say about the audience for SC? Certainly, the kind of vertical/spatial (or within-frame) montage implemented in SC acknowledges the pervasive shifts in visual habits and norms as well as the changes in perceptual filtering and remixing of information that have occurred in recent decades. The visual norm for computer screens and the world news is decidedly compartmental and modular. Though we often think of technical innovation as reshaping our visual norms, excellent arguments have been made that the process may work the other way around—that changes in technology reflect prior changes in visual norms.

Cinema scholars and critics have been slow to weigh in on the merits of SC. Even the more enthusiastic reviewers are cautious, tending to treat SC as a curiosum and tempering their response with skepticism about the viability of SC’s relatively fixed narrative structure. In particular, Carlota Larrea, concludes her review: “There are some exciting and even impressive elements in this project…However, one wonders how many times one would want to watch the shorts … before getting bored, in view of the repeated storyline.”

What an interesting criterion for metering audience response to cinema—a film’s effects on repeat viewings. While I disagree with Dr. Larrea’s particular assessment of SC (I watched the films a number of times and, in each case, my urge to see the film again was undiminished by repeat viewing), I want to outline a segment of the potential audience for SC in particular, and, more generally, new media cinema that acknowledges changing visual norms.

How do we get to the Soft Cinephiliac? If we extrapolate the activity of repeat viewing to a kind of “fetishization” of cinema—repeat viewings, harvesting perceptions from repeated viewings, collecting and classifiying those subjective “moments”, and curating and exhibiting those “moments” to others in blogs, websites, and journals–we are nearing the province of the Soft Cinephiliac.

For the soft cinema, this province is uncharted territory. But the cinephiliac is already well documented in standard cinema histories, and contrasting soft cinema with traditional film may help identify overlaps between the traditional (hard) cinephiliac and the future soft cinephiliac. To the extent we can implicate shifts in visuality and mass culture with the historical appearance (and gradual disappearance) of the hard cinephiliac, we might extrapolate from those relations and imagine a soft cinephiliac associated with our new multi-channel and simultaneous visuality and our new remix urges and social norms.

I’ll close with a conceptual exercise built around a single widely-held distinction between traditional film and soft cinema and its possible implications for cinephilia. Traditional film is indexical (an imprint of physical presence) while the digital “live action” elements of soft cinema are not. Indexicality is central to an understanding of the hard cinephiliac: he/she collects apparently aleatory elements from the periphery of the frame, and identifies subjectively with the indexical traits of those elements. Those “collectibles” are extremely important to the cinephiliac because he/she has “seen something” that, as Paul Willemen put it, was not intended to be seen.

The distinctively indexical nature of traditional film underlies the criticism by traditional cinema theorists of “new” media like TV, the videocassette, the DVD, and certainly now soft cinema. Taken literally, for hard cinephiliacs and their theorists, the emergence of new media has meant the death of cinephilia.

The death of the hard cinephiliac may yet facilitate the birth of the soft cinephiliac. The vertical montage of the soft cinema, the multi-media face of TV news, websites and blogs as well as the arrangement of our personal tasks across the screens of our personal computers has implications for indexicality. It is not the imprint of presence of something past (photography) but perhaps the presence of something that is very much here and now. Repeat viewing of SC, for example, refreshes memories of previous viewings. There are no peripheral or unintended details to collect in the traditional sense. However, the aleatory perceptual effects of the randomly reassigned modules as well as adherence to (that is, respect for) the visual norm of vertical montage and all the “here and now”-ness is no less a discovery (and perhaps no less collectible) for the soft cinephiliac than her 20^th century predecessor.

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The Lake Isle of Innisfree

(William Butler Yeats)

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

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Yeats’ poem is about as intimate a meditation as any poem can be. We bring such works inside ourselves quickly and, because we do, reflecting on such works can yield interesting discoveries for us concerning the inner reader. Every time I read this poem off the page, I recognize the inner reader as having my own voice, though the particular version of my voice changes from reading to reading. For example, if I’m anxious, the inner voice is calm and even toned. If I’m a bit blue, somehow the meter becomes more pronounced in my inner reading. Though not with all poems, the inner voice is always unmistakably mine with this poem.

What does your inner reader sound like? If Yeats’ poem does not do the trick, what poems do? How does your inner reader resemble you? If you write poems, would you say that the inner reader you’ve identified is also your inner writer?

And, to hear an outer reader (no less than Yeats himself) go ahead to the reading at Poets.org and click on “play.” How does Yeats’ reading of his poem match up with your inner reader?

Once, I spent about 4 hours of an Irish morning, roaming the perimeter of Lough Gill (the lake of the poem) in County Sligo, searching for the precise spot on which Yeats must have been standing when the poem must have occurred to him. There was no stone or landmark to be sought, and I didn’t know what I was looking for. At some point, however, I found myself standing on a concrete boat landing. It was then that I noticed the lapping sounds of the waters upon the concrete precisely matched the tempo of my heartbeat. Turns out, my inner reader had been there quite a time before I arrived and was thrilled that I’d caught up.

This is a video produced by Baylor student Stephanie Pearson in late 2006. Ms. Pearson created her video around the reading of her favorite poem, “Death of a Naturalist” by Seamus Heaney. That’s an interesting favorite poem. And, as an added bonus, the video includes a bit of singing by Tom Lehrer.

The idea of filming an experience of reading one’s favorite poem is intriguing. Clearly, Ms. Pearson has had to address a number of basic questions about her relationship with the poem, and the poet who wrote it. For example, until I saw this video, the question of who recites a poem to us when we read it off the page never occurred to me.

How would you film your favorite poem?

Here’s an animated poem from a poet-artist team in Melbourne. Irish-born Sean O’Callaghan reads his poem, “You See More on Foot,” and is accompanied by the art of Thomas Morison. The animation here illustrates the narrative development of the poem, and the pacing seems to match O’Callaghan’s voice quite well. Do you agree?

I’m keeping a Playlist for this pair’s work.