Document Type
Essay
Abstract
[First paragraph]
"Every medium, in its presence, presents its own absence." This was the mantra running through my head as I lay flat on my back, eyes closed, on the concrete floor of a dark, empty room in the Dorsch Gallery in Miami, an extra dose of Klonopin running through my blood to calm my nerves before the show. It was the explanation of why I would soon be entering the Gallery’s yard to participate with Walter K. Lew and several University of Miami poets in the strange phenomenon Lew has dubbed "movie telling," or live film narration. It was, on some level, what drove the many guests to sit outside to witness something most of them were unfamiliar with as an art form, the sense that, in the face of absence, we want new socialities, between people, between media, new connections that are not wholenesses but supplements to the absence presented by communication in the age of total media.1 Poetry needs cinema, cinema needs poetry, and we need each other, even if none of these brief meetings leads to completion. Poets of the unreeled are also poets of the (un)real, come apart like the disorganized, prematurely born body imagined by Jacques Lacan, negotiating spaces and apparitions of consciousness that are always too real and not real enough.
Repository Citation
Clinton, Alan. "Absence and Sociality in Live Film Narration: Poets of the Unreeled in Miami." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 11, no. 4, 2011, pp. 1–6. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol11/iss4/7
Program for "Poets of the Unreeled"
Comments
PDF program for "Poets of the Unreeled" event is available for download as an additional file below.