comment-The Song of Blake - Key-1 The Song of Blake - Key

Though the smaller version of this movie is currently loaded online, I’m trying to figure out how to stream the big, 350 MB version – it’s currently on Bowdoin’s servers, but this big file invariably crashes my browser as it tries to digest it. A shame, because besides your original drawings, put into animation, are themselves worthy of a larger stage than the reduced file affords. Plus your experiments with sound levels are a little mangled in the smaller file – the vocal track seems overwhelmed by the cinematic music maybe more than you’d like.

Conceptually, technically, artistically this is a standout project. Without your key and without exposure to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a viewer of this movie might be puzzled; but the key takes that viewer in hand, point him or her to points made in E1 and E2. What could strike the uninitiated as jumbled (music over voice, description clashing with image) turns out to be a strong presentation of “impositions” that characterize Blake’s multimedia referencing of the infinite. Your vision is most vividly portrayed by those overlapping Proverbs of Hell, which lay over each other (as a vocal track lays over it and itself) to such an extent that the individual lines seem like a gap-filled barrier – I could imagine the jumble as a prison being built with the stones of law.

Most all of the graphics in this project convey double-edged creations: traps that nevertheless suggests striving & freedom. The imposition of your own drawings (of a bird in darkness, or a burst-open head, or most strikingly a pen on Blake’s page) seems to consistently elaborate on this theme.

In the 350 MB version of the movie, your reading of passages of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell isn’t so drowned out by the music track. Nevertheless, I can hear you playing with levels - letting words get swamped by the soundtrack, and then reemerge. The incorporation of sound is your biggest addition to William Blake’s media, and your specific choice left me with some questions. Did you pick the Forrest Gump theme for some specific reason? I haven’t seen the movie, but didn’t it have to do with a fairly man superimposed onto history? Maybe there’s a level of irony I’m not reaching here – and the key’s not helping me out. Or maybe you picked the music simply for its swampy, pull-all-strings cinematic feel. Or maybe there was no real thought behind the music selection – though your careful justification of most all of this project leads me to dismiss that scenario.

Technology marches on, and I think it won’t be long before you’re able to mix in touch and – God help us – smell into such a collision of media. The only thing saving such an effort from cacophony is what we clumsily call “vision” – luckily this project has plenty of that!