I had a question back here.
And I have the microphone.
This is for Christine.
Some people were talking in the intermission
about that repetition, when that repetition of that line
gets really heavy duty.
They both put their hands over their hearts
and were like, yeah, I could hardly bear it.
And it made me wonder about the process for you,
and how it felt when you decided to start repeating that.
You meant the rain, the walking around?
Yes.
OK.
Yeah, "what became the rain," that particular line that
was repeated again and again and again, yeah.
Well, that's taken directly from the 9-1-1 call.
So I thought that was just a great moment of--
a very telling moment, in terms of this kind
of inconsequential behavior.
So what he's reporting, of course,
is that there's somebody not doing anything.
And so, I wanted that to just kind of accumulate
as the piece goes on, and then contextualize it at the end,
I think, to give the whole thing more of a
through line, in addition to the discussion of sound
and thinking about sound as a kind of utopian liberatory
dimension that connects the body, which is redolent
of the universe, with language.
And so, for me, that just really sunk the whole mood
of the piece, I guess.
Julie had a question.
I'm not sure if this is a question,
but what you made me think about was that poetry
is very-- it's filmic.
You create your own images.
Poetry is a filmic medium in the way it creates insight.
And the reverberation of the relationship
between the words and the sound make you imagine or see.
So, I don't know, the way film and poetry come
together is full of risk, in a way,
in case one drowns the other.
So how do any of you--
or even not necessarily a film but a recorded medium--
ride that rail?
Know when to pull.
Know when to pull back, have your space.
Well, one of the things that's interesting to me
about using film with talking about race
is that the problem with racial issues
has to do with what is seen, right?
So it is all about the body.
It's all about whiteness, Blackness,
how one is perceived, how one looks,
how one sees what one is seeing, all of that stuff, right?
So that subject, to me, seemed intimately tied to film.
And we saw that moment with the Rodney King video.
I mean, I think the Rodney King video,
it's the moment that threw it up.
We also saw that moment with those lynching-- you know,
those lynching photographs where you
see the sort of white spectators running on the bottom and then
the two lynching bodies.
That especially famous one where the two lynching bodies
are there, and then you have the sort of--
going right across the bottom of the photograph, all
of the white faces of invested, not invested,
interested, not interested, amused, not amused, whatever.
And so, I feel like that the idea of the image and the way
in which the image is tied to this kind of knot
at the soul of American culture that tomorrow
and the next day still means that one in three Black men
are going to be put in prison for no reason.
It's deeper than the image, and yet it is the image.
And so, the film seemed to be the place
that I could work on that.
The text is another issue.
But for me, it was important to begin to look at what is seen
and to talk about perception through film.
I think one of the things I noticed about Claudia's films,
these two pairings especially, is that she really
plays with reflective surfaces.
And so, both pieces rely on a sense of reflection.
They're calling you into a space of reflection
via the windows and the way that images get
projected onto those windows.
So I think that is something that's
very particular that you're doing, in those two pieces
especially.
I want to say something also.
I think it was Rosa Alcalá.
Was it in one of your essays or was it
in one of our conversations that you observed something
along the lines of what Julie just said about the poems
being so cinematic?
Do you remember, Rosa, that there
was a sort of framing of the image that
was influenced by films?
Do you remember that conversation?
I remember it vividly because it caused me an impression
that you had noticed that.
And I want to relate that to the fact
that we're hearing the off-the-page meditation.
Because when you first invited me
to an off-the-page, the first immediate reaction that I had,
I thought it was very funny.
Because, in truth, poetry has always been off the page,
for millions of years.
How many billions of years people have been making poetry?
So poetry is visiting the page, is visiting very briefly,
you know.
[APPLAUSE]
And so, I think it's the same with the cinema.
The minute cinema appeared in human consciousness,
it immediately penetrated more our way
of framing, which relates to what you're saying.
So that's why it becomes a type of tool.
The poem and the film are, like, born to come together
and to fight.
And I think it's a really beautiful, fantastic tension
of possible and impossible in that framing
because, as you were pointing out, for example,
I love the films that you showed because, precisely, they
have a sort of depth to them.
Like, they're not images.
They're going into transparencies
as ancient oil painting used to do
or as the rock paintings used to do.
If you look at the rock paintings that
are 20,000 years old, 40,000 years old,
it's really a depth that's completely
unrelated to the Western perspective.
It's a sort of depth of dimensionless dimensionality.
And that is really something that film
and the connectivity of sound, for example,
when you ask us to close our eyes,
we immediately go into the dimensionless of space
because sound is like that.
For example, in the Indigenous cultures of the Americas,
the images--
visual images-- are never to be trusted
because they're considered to always be hallucinogenic.
Nevertheless, sound is always trusted because sound tells you
how to survive.
You see, if somebody is coming at you, you will hear it,
not see it.
And I think it also hits the subconscious faster,
sound does, than images.