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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In the last few years, Dartmouth undergraduate Cece King studied Arabic in Morocco through a State Department scholarship, traveled to Texas as a legal assistant/interpreter to advocate for asylum seekers, and was appointed to Manhattan Community Board 8 to represent her district in New York City. This past year, she helped found the education startup Curious Cardinals, featured in Bloomberg. She is currently a production assistant on IN THE MAKING, a documentary set to premiere this fall that explores whether the systems meant to nurture emerging artists are failing. Inspired by Emily Dickinson’s poetry and her professor Ivy Schweitzer, Cece turned to film and co-created the two-part short series Violent Logic with her classmate Clara Pakman during the first few months of the pandemic. She chose to translate the poem A still Volcano Life to film to visually explore why Emily Dickinson associated herself with an unassuming volcano ready to explode.
- Runtime2 minutes
- DirectorCece King
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.”
*************
In the last few years, Dartmouth undergraduate Cece King studied Arabic in Morocco through a State Department scholarship, traveled to Texas as a legal assistant/interpreter to advocate for asylum seekers, and was appointed to Manhattan Community Board 8 to represent her district in New York City. This past year, she helped found the education startup Curious Cardinals, featured in Bloomberg. She is currently a production assistant on IN THE MAKING, a documentary set to premiere this fall that explores whether the systems meant to nurture emerging artists are failing. Inspired by Emily Dickinson’s poetry and her professor Ivy Schweitzer, Cece turned to film and co-created the two-part short series Violent Logic with her classmate Clara Pakman during the first few months of the pandemic. She chose to translate the poem A still Volcano Life to film to visually explore why Emily Dickinson associated herself with an unassuming volcano ready to explode.
- Runtime2 minutes
- DirectorCece King
