Sara Suarez
08/31/2013
Screen Poetry: Creating a Verse Film
INTRODUCTION
At first glance, poetry and filmmaking may seem at odds. Poetry is ancient;
film is relatively very new; poetic composition requires only language while film
production tends to involve large teams of people. But the visual elements of film
have their own poetic qualities: the combined rhythm of actors’ movements, camera
movements, and editing; the moods and implications built by carefully manipulating
color, light, camera angles, sound. Even something akin to rhyme can arise in the
repetitions of any of these features. In this project, my aim was to create a film
which is itself a poem: I attempted to translate the most recognizable constraints of
formal poetry – rhyme, meter, line breaks, and other elements – into the visual
language of film.
As far as I could tell from my preliminary research, the idea of a verse film is
unexplored territory. Yes (2004, dir. Sally Potter), in which all dialogue follows
iambic pentameter, has been called a “verse film,”1 but the verse in question is
separate from the film. Filmmakers have matched images to recorded recitations of
poetry, but I found no films which actually followed a specific poetic structure in
their visual elements. I hoped to discover ways to translate formal poetry’s essence
into a form for moving images, and to create several structurally experimental short
films according to various traditional forms of poetry.
RESEARCH
I began by looking into the history of formal poetry, and studying the
elements of poetry. I was searching for insight into the functions of different poetic
features; I hoped to find out what purposes poetic constraints such as rhyme serve
in poems, in order to decide how best to translate these constraints into visual
forms.
As it turned out, I learned less from studying books about poetry than from
poems themselves. I have always enjoyed reading poetry, but during this project I
read way more poems than I usually do. It was useful to study ways that other poets
have pushed the limits of certain forms. The same proved true for my research into
experimental films. While it was interesting and somewhat helpful to read articles
about experimental filmmakers, it was much more inspiring to actually watch films.
I paid particular attention to filmmakers’ choices in lighting, camera angles and
movements, color, and sound, while at the same time reading about how to
manipulate these elements in a cinematography textbook. Additionally, I consulted a
collection of writings by the experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Much of these
are somewhat incomprehensible, but they helped show me how I might go about
writing down plans for the verse film before shooting it.
Annette Grant, “Verse film pits love against the clash of cultures,” The New York
Times, Jun. 22, 2005
1
When I began the project, I had been most interested in creating a sonnet
film. I had expected that the sonnet’s fame, deep history, brevity, and variety of
constraints and traditions would make it an ideal place to start. It turned out to be
far too complicated as a starting point. I turned my attention to the villanelle form,
which allowed me a little more freedom, but still required attention to a highly
distinctive format. Of the villanelle’s five tercets and final quatrain, each stanza
features at least one of two refrain lines, which repeat alternately throughout the
poem’s nineteen total lines. The villanelle also seemed the perfect fit for the
strongest idea I had for a poetic subject: a loose retelling of mankind’s Biblical fall,
from Genesis.
Therefore I switched my focus from sonnets to villanelles. I studied the
form’s history and consulted a number of villanelles such as “One Art,” by Elizabeth
Bishop, “The Waking,” by Theodore Roethke, and even the deceptively titled
“Villanelle: The Psychological Hour,” by Ezra Pound (not really a villanelle at all).
Studying ways that other poets had pushed at the limitations of the form – for
example, creating variation in the repeated lines or changing the rhyme scheme –
helped me figure out which components of a villanelle were most essential, how
different poetic elements functioned within the poem’s structure and meaning, and
how I could go about translating these elements in a way that would preserve some
of the feeling of verbal villanelles.
TRANSLATION
The composition of the verse film began with translating poetic elements into
filmic ones. Here are the rules I determined:
Line: The filmic lines of a verse film should reflect, in length, the lines of a
verbal poem. For a villanelle film, therefore, there should be nineteen sequences of
similar length. The actual duration of these filmic lines defied planning ahead of
time, so I had to wait until after shooting to figure out how long they would be.
Meter: The qualities of meter and rhythm seemed from the outset very
closely related to the speed of editing in film. Initially I planned to set a strict rule for
some kind of meter for the verse film by determining, for example, a certain
duration of time between cuts, or a number of cuts per line. I soon decided it was
more important to make the lines flow more naturally than this method would
afford. In the various villanelles I read, poets tended to use iambic pentameter to
loosely constrain the words while preserving a natural-sounding flow to the
language. The issue of meter proved difficult to organize ahead of time, and I let
most of it wait for post-production.
Rhyme: From the beginning I saw various possibilities for visual rhymes in a
verse film, such as repeating elements of mise-en-scene. What I considered when
determining a method of rhyme for this verse film was how to create a visual link to
earlier lines, without linking their meanings. Verbal rhymes, after all, link words that
are usually otherwise unrelated. The best way I saw to visually rhyme for this
specific verse film was to repeat certain types of camera movements at the end of
filmic lines. The villanelle has only two rhymes across nineteen lines, so I discounted
the idea of visually rhyming via mise-en-scene – it would have taken way too much
time to try and find so many different ways of matching the same objects or colors
without making them completely. Instead, I decided to rhyme by repeating camera
movements: this allowed me to show whatever I wanted in a constrained way that
didn’t reflect on the meaning of whatever might be visible.
Unlike the verse film’s meter and duration, its rhymes had to be planned out
ahead of time so I could account for them during production. Thirteen of the
villanelle’s lines use one rhyme, while the remaining six have a different rhyme. For
the more common rhyme I chose a less noticeable camera movement: an upward
motion of the camera. For the less common rhyme I opted to twist the camera.
Line and stanza breaks: The simplest way to represent breaks between
filmic lines and stanzas was to separate them with black video. I separated stanzas
with about three seconds of black video, and lines by about one second. I also used
sound to distinguish the lines – some elements of the soundtrack overlap lines, but
for the most part they remain fairly separate.
Additionally, I decided to avoid using any dialogue or narration in the verse
film. The decision was not a poetic constraint: as the poem is in the visual elements
of the film, using words would not make it less of a verse film. But I felt the verse
film, as a primarily visual work, should never require words, and I merely wanted to
make this clear.
COMPOSITION AND PRODUCTION
After setting constraints for the villanelle film, I turned my attention to
figuring out the content. I never wrote a verbal poem for this project. Instead, I
made an outline of numbered lines, which I filled in with descriptions of what
actions should happen in each line, and which rhymes each line should use.
I wanted the villanelle to be somewhat narrative, but I left the refrain lines
fairly non-narrative because of their frequent repetition. After figuring out the basic
story, I planned out the refrain lines and built the rest of the narrative around them.
In this preliminary plan, I wrote the villanelle as if these refrain lines were repeated
segments of a longer narrative, so that each repetition would look like a flashback.
In the course of production my idea changed so that they were far more vague than
planned, and I had to re-organize the rest of the lines to account for the narrative
information I decided to leave out of these refrains. Additionally, once I actually
began shooting the video for the verse film, a number of completely new visual ideas
occurred to me and I had to re-organize the lines yet again to accommodate these
new elements. The resultant film hews fairly closely to the words I used to describe
it in my initial outlines, but it departs dramatically from my original visions for it.
I shot the verse film with a DSLR camera (a Canon Rebel t4i), which afforded
the ability to shoot high-definition digital video with a variety of different lenses for
expressive purposes. I borrowed several lenses from Swem Media Center, as well as
a tripod, audio recorder, microphone, reflector, and lights. It took six straight days to
shoot the film, with a lot of help from friends, who let me use their house as the
main location for the verse film.
Shooting the verse film noticeably improved my facility with the equipment
from day to day, so much that by the end of the sixth day I wished I had more time to
re-shoot all the footage from the first day. For the most part, however, I found it
fairly easy through the entire process to make my images look how I wanted them to
look. Some of my ideas proved too complicated to pull off, but working around those
difficulties gave me different ideas that I even came to prefer. For example, I wanted
to show the woman in the verse film approaching a set of red curtains from a
distance of about twenty feet, surrounded by total blackness, and with stairs visible
behind the curtains. I did not have the spare time or resources to make this happen,
so instead I hung the curtains from a tree outdoors and lit the scene (with car
headlights) so that only certain elements would stand out. When I saw this scene in
front of me, the tree and its green color suddenly felt necessary. It became a central
part of this verse film.
POST-PRODUCTION
Editing the film happened in two stages. For the first part, I worked on
cutting and combining the images I had captured into a functioning – but silent –
villanelle film. Then, once the verse film was visually complete, I added a soundtrack
created from sounds I had recorded during production and in various places I
visited over the summer, and with various musical instruments.
I used a lot of computer-generated effects in the visual editing. I used Adobe
Premiere Pro for most of the editing, but when I wanted to apply more complicated
visual effects to the video I used Adobe After Effects. Some images had lighting or
color errors that required touching-up, but most of the effects I used were for more
expressive purposes. For example, I altered the colors so that much of the first half
of the verse film is brightly colored and clear, but in the second half the setting is
darker and more bleak. On several occasions I manipulated the colors in the images
to leave only one color in an otherwise unsaturated image, and I changed the colors .
Because of the creative earthquakes I experienced during shooting, the
editing process suffered some upheavals as well. I re-organized the lines again and
had to edit some clips to accommodate visual rhymes that I hadn’t shot. As one of
the verse film rules was to make all the filmic lines the same length – which I had
determined, by editing the refrains, to be more or less thirty seconds – I had to
shorten some lines and lengthen others, evicting images I loved in favor of some I
had earlier discounted.
Finally I finished the visual editing and began work on the soundtrack. From
the beginning of the project, I expected the soundtrack to be mostly non-musical,
simply because I would not have time to write music for an entire short film. I did
end up setting some segments to piano music that I created; much of this music was
improvisational. I used various other musical instruments to create tones that I used
for soundtrack effects rather than as part of musical phrases. There were certain
sounds I recorded specifically to include in the film, such as the various water
sounds in the soundtrack: waves at the beach and water hitting a boat. Other times, I
discovered sounds that later became useful -- construction sounds I encountered in
Richmond, for example, and a sound recording I idly made while playing with the
audio recorder one day. Just like the visual editing, I applied a lot of computerdriven effects to the soundtrack. I wanted the soundtrack to be fairly removed from
the scene, and not grounded in very obviously real sounds; to make it sound more
removed from reality I applied a variety of speed, pitch, and reverberation effects. I
used both Adobe Premiere and Audition to edit the sound. I used different sounds to
symbolize concepts related to the subject matter, to emphasize important moments,
connect different elements of the narrative, and to affect the mood of certain scenes.
The sound didn’t really make the film more verse-like than it was, but it added an
important dimension of expression to the film’s poetry. I titled the villanelle film
“Villanelle: Genesis,” and uploaded it to the video-sharing website Vimeo.com.
CONCLUSION
One main goal of this project was to discover if it would be possible to
construct a film according to poetic constraints, and if such a film could translate
into a visual format something of the experience of reading poetry. I was surprised
to discover that the entire filmmaking process resembled the process of composing
poetry far more than I ever expected it could. Although I followed strict constraints
of form even in the initial phase of planning out the film, the entire process still
allowed for spontaneity and improvisation in all stages of production, defying my
initial expectations that I would have to plan strictly every detail ahead of time. Even
after all my opportunities to shoot video had passed and I was fully in the postproduction stage, it was possible to manipulate much of the video so that I could
modify and refine different aspects of my verse film.
I also attempted to capture the quality of being “poetic” in the verse film. This
had less to do with the poetic structures that guided the film than with its content,
appearance, and soundtrack. It helped that the structural constraints, and my
avoidance of all words, forced much of the poem to unveil itself indirectly.
Additionally, I used a lot of eye-catching color contrasts and camera movements, as
well as systems for color and sound symbolism within the narrative of the poem. In
other words, as well as translating the obvious structural requirements of formal
poetry into a visual format, I also looked for ways to visually convey and manipulate
poetic qualities such as tone, symbolism, and metaphor. Such elements were
essential to the poetic quality of the verse film. Winding them into the film’s
poetically structured skeleton made this villanelle film a successful synthesis of film
and poetry.