By A Magnolia Moon - Short Film

 

By a Magnolia Moon

At dawn, isolation 

By a high star the feeling is as clear clear sky

Fine rain arc to back

Horizon tilt voices free descend 

Feathery winds, linger, I could 

In thistledown, fluffy with soot 

Play with me, water and sun, dares us to be free, 

For animals: home is a hollow wintry night 

A windpipe, sea-wood, blurred,

Noble; yet naked nothing

I made this short film as a final project for my Modern Irish Literature class. Although from the surface it might not seem to have much to do with Ireland, I borrowed quite a bit from what we read in class. In fact, the words of the poem were lifted from various Irish poems. 

The overall theme of the film was collage, specifically used as a "vast structure of recollection" (Proust). Lifting straight from my project proposal; 

"By taking pieces of memories, or borrowed words, I’m able to reconstruct an impression. The fragments represent memory in its honest form. We don’t recollect places in their entirety, but through a mosaic of sounds, sights, or language. This project, for me, is a representation of my home, the animals I share it with, and how I experience it all through memory."

I layered photos I've taken of the land around me with paintings and clippings of plants found growing on the sides of roads and paths (and buttons gifted to me by my Grandmother). The sounds, likewise, are a mixture of the Chuck-Wills-Widow that sings around my house at night, birdsong after rain, a chime on my back porch, an Irish tenor banjo, the out-of-tune piano in my basement, my mother walking down the stairs, and my own humming. 

It was important to me that I tell the story of the animals and landscapes around me, considering my home is theirs as much as it is mine. They populate the rhythms of my day, from my morning coffee to the evening thunderstorm on the back porch. I feel I have a duty to represent their lives, to break down the idea of a "chain of being" where I exist somewhere above and in possession of the life around me, as if I could ever be separate from it.

Thank you for taking the time to experience and consider my creative work.

-Mary W.