The Daily Glance
Michael Slosek's A Sequence for Cinematic History raises many questions, and the questions begin with the title due to the preposition for. For--is the chapbook a sequence to be added to something called Cinematic History? Is the sequence something be presented like a gift to cinematic history like a little known story? The questions continue in the chapbook. Are we reading sequences that are inspired by films or a film? Are we reading poetry influenced by film techniques so that they seem cinematic? Are these poems showing film makers what they could do with language using techniques they are already familiar with? Is the chapbook showing us how we've become so conditioned by film that we can only see our own images through film techniques? The poems in the chapbook seem just out of focus, so that we could say they consist of signs or images fragmented or just not seen clearly.*** Ultimately, I'd like to see this chapbook as part of a longer book to see if that would narrow the amount of questions or add new ones.
*** The out of focus feeling reminds me of a repeating scene in Wong Kar-Wai's Fallen Angels. Since I don't know Chinese, I was watching the film with subtitles, and there was a scene that kept repeating in which we see a sign on the outside of a building near an elevated train. The sign is in Chinese, and I wanted to know what it said and knew that it was important, but I felt cut of from it as if it was out of focus.
Michael Slosek's A Sequence for Cinematic History raises many questions, and the questions begin with the title due to the preposition for. For--is the chapbook a sequence to be added to something called Cinematic History? Is the sequence something be presented like a gift to cinematic history like a little known story? The questions continue in the chapbook. Are we reading sequences that are inspired by films or a film? Are we reading poetry influenced by film techniques so that they seem cinematic? Are these poems showing film makers what they could do with language using techniques they are already familiar with? Is the chapbook showing us how we've become so conditioned by film that we can only see our own images through film techniques? The poems in the chapbook seem just out of focus, so that we could say they consist of signs or images fragmented or just not seen clearly.*** Ultimately, I'd like to see this chapbook as part of a longer book to see if that would narrow the amount of questions or add new ones.
*** The out of focus feeling reminds me of a repeating scene in Wong Kar-Wai's Fallen Angels. Since I don't know Chinese, I was watching the film with subtitles, and there was a scene that kept repeating in which we see a sign on the outside of a building near an elevated train. The sign is in Chinese, and I wanted to know what it said and knew that it was important, but I felt cut of from it as if it was out of focus.
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