Meshing Text and Performance

In recent years, the distinct art forms of "poetry slamming" and "spoken-word" have moved out of coffee houses and into the mainstream, heralding a convergence of poetry with performance. Unfortunately, those who explore poetry through visual media always run the risk of yielding a result at odds with the poem's intended message; or, even worse, one that reflects badly on the poem itself. A casual viewing of the films exhibited in the Museum of Fine Arts October 16 program, "Poetry on Film and in Performance," indicated that a fine line still exists in the video arts world between visualizing poetry and misrepresenting its message.

Rachel Libert and Barbara Parker, winners of awards at various film festivals, including the San Francisco Film Festival, the National Poetry Film Festival and the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival, offer hope that poetry can be successfully and responsibly integrated with film. Their representation of Patricia Smith's "The Undertaker," in a film of the same name, is a wildly successful example of how visual imagery can reinforce the spoken word.

"The Undertaker is a first-person account, told from the undertaker's perspective, of a visit from a mother who has just lost her son in a gang- or drug-related slaying. The undertaker is charged with steeling himself against the gore, the blood and the tragedy in order to reconstruct the destroyed face and "exploded head" of the victim, so his mother's "dreams of her baby / in tuxedoed satin" can be fulfilled. Libert and Parker intersperse video of Smith's recitation of the poem with shadowy figures, discreet images of hands molding flesh onto the skull underneath and childhood playground scenes almost ominous in their innocence..

Smith's own experience as a seasoned "slam" artist is evident: her delivery of her own piece is remarkable. The viewer quite literally gets chills watching Smith's fury overtake her face during the most powerful part of the poem, when the undertaker fights off an urge to "take [the mother] down / to the chilly room, open the bag" and confront her with the remains of her son, so she can grasp the reality of his death, "wither finally, and move on."

Perhaps the only weak point in the entire 5-minute film comes at the very end, when the undertaker receives a phone call and remarks that "another homeboy [is] coming home." Ending on such cliche terms turns out to be a little anticlimactic, especially when compared with the intensity and originality of language and ideas maintained through the rest of the piece.

Video and performance artist Kip Fulbeck offers a similarly vivid perspective with his piece "Some Questions for 28 Kisses," although his offering is less a video performance of poetry and more a creative film with a poetic soundtrack. "28 Kisses" offers a montage of visual and aural images (including film clips and written and spoken words) all of which depict stereotypes of Asian men and women, especially in their sexual interactions. The clips, for instance, all feature scenes in which white men and Asian women are embracing. Meanwhile, questions roll across the bottom of the screen: "Do they really have small penises?"; "Have you heard the term 'asiaphile'...how about 'rice queen'...[or] 'pagoda worshiper?"; and "Why does People Magazine list 50 beautiful people with three Asian women and no Asian men?" Overlaid on the video itself is a sequence of readings from personal ads for Asian women, dating services bolstering white male-Asian female relationships and letters to the editor which reinforce stereotypes of "flawless skin and waist-high embraces" and short, domineering Asian men.

Fulbeck ends with a brief epilogue, in which he remarks, "My dad's white. My mom's Asian. What am I supposed to think about these images?" This final speech, discussing the necessity of art to sometimes infuriate to achieve its purpose, accrues even greater vehemence: it's spoken alone, apart from the plethora of visual images and overlapping speech which compose the rest of the piece.

There, in fact, lies a fault with Fulbeck's film as a whole: too often important ideas are lost as the viewer frantically tries to make sense of the disorder of processing three different types of information all at once. Most annoyingly, two voices can almost always be heard in the soundtrack to the video, reciting different speeches simultaneously, and a great deal of the effect of either speech dissipates in this technique.

The final complete film was a premiere of "Sex Without Love." Perhaps offering a play on the "in too deep" idea, the film interposes footage of preadolescent children diving into a swimming pool with Sharon Olds' recitation of her poem of the same name. But "Sex Without Love" is not so sophisticated cinematically as the other two films shown, and the result seems a bit more like a home video soundtracked with poetry than an actual cohesive performance. In addition, Olds' words are spoken much too solemnly for the context of the visual images and, indeed, for the message of the poem itself. With lines like "faces red as steak" and "gliding over each other like ice-skaters over the ice," the piece deserves a more upbeat rendition, reflective of the complexities of young love, than the priestly tone it receives.

Although "Sex Without Love" tries hard not to be moralistic about teenage sex, the entire effort, in its tone, pace and solemnity, reminds the audience of a "Life...what a beautiful choice" commercial. Missing is the dubious examination of loss of innocence--in its joy and its amorality--which the poem itself would more aptly convey.

The MFA may have only featured these three short films for one evening (in most cases with live presentations by the artists themselves), but the indication was clear: spoken-word, poetry slamming and video-art are fast making their way into the art-world's equivalent of mainstream culture. Unfortunately, though, the performance also offered a warning about the complexities of adapting literature into a visual medium.

Note: Saul Stacy Williams, Nuyorican Poets Cafe 1996 Grand Slam Champion, also performed at the exhibition, but a clip from his upcoming film Slam! Slam! was not available for review.