POETIC MONUMENT

VIDEO

Poetry has always been the most touching and ambiguious literature genre. The word “Poetic”, derived from poetry, can come to mean nearly anything in this context and the word loses  any descriptive power: various ideas, associations and situations are created simultaneously by one single word or expression or sentence, and thus making the poem appear to be almost always changing and full of life. Thus, it is the ambiguity of poetry that makes it immortal.
On the opposite, visuals are often more precise and clear: it’s hard to keep the texts’ ambiguity and variety through the process of visualization.

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

I chose Shakespeare’s Sonnet18 as a source text, trying to explore the possibility to visualize the content while keeping the poem’s original ambiguity.

➞ Research Dossier

In The Colour of Pomegranates, the director Sergei Paradjanov attempted to fuse poetry and movie by seriously exploring the potential of visualization the ambiguous word “ poetic”: he used a lot of Symbolism of imagery, repetition of movements and subtle sound design to recreate a poetic visual narrative. This movie inspired me to visualize poetry as well, so I analyzed the movie’s structure and visuals, and combined its narrative pattern with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, using my own emotional interpretation as a hinge to create a poetic “monument”- a narrative environment to represent the immortality resulting from the ambiguity of poetry.