Today, Friday, holds the white
Paper up too close to see
Me here in a white-out in this tent of a place
And why is it there has to be
Some place to find, however momentarily
To speak from, some distance to listen to?
W.S. Graham, "Malcolm Mooney's Land"
This Friday finds me thinking of films and fevers. Tonight, Montclair Film at Cinema505 in Montclair, NJ, is hosting ILLUMINATIONS: SHORT FILMS OF DISCOVERY. This cycle of films by Newark-based filmmakers Marylou and Jerome Bongiorno adapt Rimbaud's prose poems, published posthumously as ILLUMINATIONS. The original work could be described, as Gary Indiana called Henri de Montherlant's CHAOS AND NIGHT, "a brackish fever dream." The Bongiornos have re-purposed/translated/reimagined Rimbaud dazzlingly and preserve the fever pitch.
Hear an interview with the filmmakers and me on WBGO: http://www.wbgo.org/post/montclairs-cinema505-screens-illuminations-short-films-discovery
Creation, construction, imagination: these films assemble arias of agitation and ambiguity. Brilliant! Beautiful! Unsettling in necessary ways...
...in ways W.S. Graham, who was born 100 years ago, brought to poetry,, interrogating language and living beside and inside it. How do we concoct our subjectivities on the bristling word hoard? "What is the language using us for?" queries Graham in an eponymously-titled poem. How do we translate ourselves into art and vice versa? Fevers abound as we attempt to assess and assert, doubt and derail...rethink, rework, rebuild. Fevers, FIEVRES, FEVERS! This Friday's heat induces feverish inspiration, hot spells of the imagination...