Word to Image: Cinema inspired by poems

curated and notes by Konrad Steiner


Cinema is used here in a response to poetry. These tapes and films were chosen out of the American experimental tradition to exemplify various techniques of marrying the two arts. Poetry as the art of utterence and cinema the art of showing, both whole on their own, don't easily make a good couple. But these film and videomakers have taken up the challenge anyway by responding to the spirit and the letter of the poet, creating an original cinematic writing. Cinema and language meet head on, not unified as in conventional film, but remaining distinct and dancing, stepping on toes, wooing each other with the charms of mouth and eye and mind. You'll see images' own syntax shuffled, blended, chafing and dovetailing with language, you'll hear and read poets' work while seeing and hearing filmmakers' work. It's like having two extra senses!

• Peter Herwitz, Songs of Degrees: With a Valentine (the 12 February) As To How Much
  Super 8mm, 5min color/sound on cassette (1990)
• Thad Povey, Under a Broad Gray Sky
  16mm, 5min, color/sound (1995)
• Rick Hancox, Waterworx
  16mm, 6min, color/sound (1986)
• Marcus Nascimento, Video Haikai
  video, 8min
• Nathaniel Dorsky, excerpts from "What Happened to Kerouac?"
  video transfer, 8min

I N T E R M I S S I O N

• Abigail Child, Prefaces
  16mm, 10min, color/sound (1981)
• Henry Hills, Kino Da!
  16mm, 4min, color/sound (1981)
• Martha Colburn, What's On
  16mm, 2min, color sound (1997)
• Jim Flannery, Photoheliograph
  16mm, 12min, color/sound
• Stan Brakhage, First Hymn to the Night -- Novalis
  16mm 3min color/silent (1994)"To write 'purely visual perception' is to write a meaningless phrase. Obviously. Because every time we want to make words do a real job of transference, every time we want to make them express something other han words, they align themselves in such a way as to cancel each other out. This, no doubt, is what gives life so much charm. Because it is by no means a matter of awareness, but of vision, of simply seeing. Simply! And the only field of vision that occasionally allows one merely to see, that doesn't always insist on being misunderstood, that sometimes allows its followers to ignore everything in it that is not appearance, the inner field."
  Samuel Beckett,  Le Monde et le pantalon, [1945]
  

Books to Movies: Readers' verdicts

The silver screen and the printed page have been nearly inseparable since the very first black-and-white movies flickered in dark theaters more than a hundred years ago.

And why not?
Novels, short stories and even nonfiction works provide an endless treasure of stories and characters.
That doesn’t mean something isn’t occasionally lost in the translation. For every “Gone With the Wind” or “Lord of the Rings” there’s a “Bonfire of the Vanities.”
So we asked a panel of film buffs and our readers to share their picks of the best and worst adaptations of books into movies.

A sampling of what our readers consider the best and worst movies ever made from books:

The best movie adapted from a book is "The Wizard of Oz" (1939).

Yes, quite a few elements in the movie are different from L. Frank Baum's book (silver slippers anyone?), but the core story of a little girl from Kansas being stranded in a fantasy world of wonder and danger remains.

This movie has stood the test of time and is loved all over the world. When I was a child it would come on only once a year, and I can remember anticipating its arrival almost as eagerly as Christmas morning.

Even when I watched it on my grandmother's ancient black-and-white television --and the movie never turned to color -- it was still a fantastic experience. If you doubt the power of this movie, try watching the eyes of a child seeing it for the first time.