Psalm for the Rapture: the movie

I’ve just been reminded that it’s Oscars night. I was very pleased to discover this afternoon that the Internet Archive has a movies and film section, which includes some classic films (I just re-watched my all-time favorite comedy, His Girl Friday) and a lot of Creative Commons-licensed stock footage. I lost no time downloading some of the latter to illustrate an old poem — which I see I illustrated with snapshots the first time around. (For a straight-text version, see here.)

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Brent Goodman has just dipped a toe into the videoetry waters as well. Check out Meat to Carry Our Minds.

3 Replies to “Psalm for the Rapture: the movie”

  1. Very cool. What images! I’ll have to listen again. I captured the feelings of the poem, but not the words. I was too busy feeling the sound of your voice as I watched the dark blasts whip the buildings away.

  2. Glad you got something out of it. I’m actually wishing I’d tried to write a new poem for the footage rather than recycling an old one that only half fits. My thinking, such as it was: better not to try for too close a match between words and images here. It would be very easy to overdo it.

  3. What a fascinating piece of work. I like the poem very much; hearing it aloud, I like it even better. The juxtaposition of words and images, though, is what really knocks me out of the park. I like that it’s such an associative piece; the images don’t illustrate the sound, it’s more that the sound is being brought to bear on the images. (Making it in that sense not unlike a fanvid, though a pretty surreal one.) Nice work.

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