30 |
International Poetry Film Festival of Thuringia
“ow(n)ed” (2014) 7:00 min.
What remains to be said of the ‘owned’? What are they ‘owed’? An ode… This postmodern vision of human slavery revisits and juxtaposes the voices of the known sufferers with the voices of an unrelenting materialist culture; in between, on-screen and off-screen, we build towers – only to dismantle them. Sometime last year, my friend and poet Lionel Kearns sent me a cell-phone video his wife had recorded of a team of “Castellers” they found while travelling in Catalonia, Spain. Two things about the video struck me: surely, I thought, this climbing on one another’s shoulders, this building a structure – there is an allegory here; furthermore, on the purely visual level, the portrait orientation of a cell-phone positioned in the center of the screen enables 2 text spaces to appear on either side of the image – producing a triptych of image and text. With that in mind, I waited for the text and the soundtrack to present themselves. In 2014, I happened to be reading “American Slavery: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses”. I had also come across Melissa Brewer’s “betterthanTV” channel on YouTube (now removed), specifically her jazzumentaries (jazz soundtracks added to stock/archival footage), which is where I found Jim Hobbs’ Drunk On The Blood Of The Holy Ones. With the help of my son,
