The WRIF Emerging Filmmakers Contest showcases the talents of young filmmakers (age 18-30) living in VT & NH. These films were selected to be shown at WRIF because they resonate with the festival's independent, creative and community-building spirit. We invite you to pay what you can for this screening to contribute to prizes for the Audience Award winners, which will be announced at the end of the festival!
Emily Dickinson’s poetry is particularly cinematic, employing imagery and auditory elements to generate a rich sensory experience for the reader. Cece King and Clara Pakman sought to create short experimental films that manifested the sensory effects of reading Dickinson’s poetry. The two-part short Violent Logic, based on the Dickinson poems “A still Volcano Life” and “I felt a Cleaving in my Mind,” explores the idea of a “split self,” one that simultaneously exists in and beyond the domestic sphere.
Set in domestic spaces during April of the COVID-19 pandemic, the films do not overtly associate lines of Dickinson’s poetry with specific images to prevent them from imposing narratives on poems whose author refused to title her work. Instead, they abstractly evoke the concept that breaking out of a state of mental domesticity is a violent process, which Adrienne Rich summarizes in the following quote: “It is an extremely painful and dangerous way to live–split between a publicly acceptable persona, and a part of yourself that you perceive as the essential, the creative and powerful self, yet also possibly unacceptable, perhaps even monstrous.”
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Clara Pakman is a sophomore at Dartmouth College who spends a lot of time thinking about topics such as game design, cognitive science, philosophy, English literature, poetry, and art. She is pursuing a major in Cognitive Science and minors in Computer Science and Human-Centered Design with the intention of injecting poetry into science and toppling the materialist view of the universe. Outside of that, Clara has spent much of the last year researching feminist film studies, evaluating the representation of female characters in video games, and working with the Dartmouth Film and Media Studies department to analyze the performance styles of early actresses in archival film collections. Inspired by her spirit guide Emily Dickinson, she produced the short film “A Cleaving” in the two-part series Violent Logic with her co-creator Cece King to explore and translate the dissonance between Dickinson’s conventional domestic existence and her explosive artistic force.
- Runtime2 minutes
- DirectorClara Pakman
The WRIF Emerging Filmmakers Contest showcases the talents of young filmmakers (age 18-30) living in VT & NH. These films were selected to be shown at WRIF because they resonate with the festival's independent, creative and community-building spirit. We invite you to pay what you can for this screening to contribute to prizes for the Audience Award winners, which will be announced at the end of the festival!
Emily Dickinson’s poetry is particularly cinematic, employing imagery and auditory elements to generate a rich sensory experience for the reader. Cece King and Clara Pakman sought to create short experimental films that manifested the sensory effects of reading Dickinson’s poetry. The two-part short Violent Logic, based on the Dickinson poems “A still Volcano Life” and “I felt a Cleaving in my Mind,” explores the idea of a “split self,” one that simultaneously exists in and beyond the domestic sphere.
Set in domestic spaces during April of the COVID-19 pandemic, the films do not overtly associate lines of Dickinson’s poetry with specific images to prevent them from imposing narratives on poems whose author refused to title her work. Instead, they abstractly evoke the concept that breaking out of a state of mental domesticity is a violent process, which Adrienne Rich summarizes in the following quote: “It is an extremely painful and dangerous way to live–split between a publicly acceptable persona, and a part of yourself that you perceive as the essential, the creative and powerful self, yet also possibly unacceptable, perhaps even monstrous.”
*************
Clara Pakman is a sophomore at Dartmouth College who spends a lot of time thinking about topics such as game design, cognitive science, philosophy, English literature, poetry, and art. She is pursuing a major in Cognitive Science and minors in Computer Science and Human-Centered Design with the intention of injecting poetry into science and toppling the materialist view of the universe. Outside of that, Clara has spent much of the last year researching feminist film studies, evaluating the representation of female characters in video games, and working with the Dartmouth Film and Media Studies department to analyze the performance styles of early actresses in archival film collections. Inspired by her spirit guide Emily Dickinson, she produced the short film “A Cleaving” in the two-part series Violent Logic with her co-creator Cece King to explore and translate the dissonance between Dickinson’s conventional domestic existence and her explosive artistic force.
- Runtime2 minutes
- DirectorClara Pakman
