I had a question back here.
And I have the microphone.
[LAUGHTER]
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.
And just--
You're talking about the rain and walking around?
Yes.
OK.
What--
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
like a very telling moment in terms
of this inconsequential behavior.
So what he's reporting, of course,
is that there's somebody not doing anything.
[CHUCKLING] And so I wanted that to just
accumulate as the piece goes on, and then contextualize it
at the end.
I mean, 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 Utopian, liberatory dimension
that connects the body, which is redolent
of the universe with language.
And so that, for me, just really sunk the whole mood
of the piece I guess.
Julie had a question.
(FAINTLY) I'm not sure if it was a question, but what do you,
maybe, think about [INAUDIBLE].
Poetry is very-- it's filmic.
You create your own images when--
oh.
(LOUDLY IN MIC) Poetry is a filmic medium.
In a 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 film, but re-recorded medium--
ride that rail?
[LAUGHTER]
Know when to pull--
know when to pull back or give 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.
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.
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.
I mean, we also saw that moment with those lynching--
you know those lynching photographs where you see
the 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, going right across the bottom
of the photograph, all of the White faces, both 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 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--
like, there is some-- it's tied.
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.
(SOFTLY) I like that.
Because I think one of the things I notice about Claudia's
films, these two pairings especially,
is that she really plays with reflective surfaces.
And so both pieces rely on the sense of reflection.
They're calling you into a sense, 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 framing of the image that was influenced by films?
Do you remember the conversation?
I remember it vividly because it cost 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,
I need to, and 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 million of years people have been making poetry?
So poetry is visiting the page.
It's visiting--
[LAUGHTER]
--very briefly.
[APPLAUSE]
And so I think it's the same with the cinema.
The minute cinema appeared in human consciousness,
it immediately penetrated our way
of framing, which relates to what you're saying.
So that's why it becomes a double tool.
The poem and the film are bound 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 depth to them.
It's 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 depth of dimension-less 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 that dimension, that 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.
[LAUGHTER]
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.
I think it also hits the subconscious faster--
sound does-- than images.