Janet Leigh is Afraid of Jazz by Marsha de la O
The latest videopoem by Matt Mullins, who writes:
Here’s Janet Leigh; she’s afraid of jazz in reverse as an overlay to diagrammatical stereographic explanations. The knife-blade shrieks are Doppler warps to a molasses of strips teased. Unimaginable synchronicities abound. The drain eye has an arm and spins water into sound. It’s all very pointed in its touching.
poem: Marsha de la O
concept/direction/audio-visual composition: Matt Mullins
Vimeo description
Via the Filmetry Archive. The poem by Marsha de la O was one of the texts supplied to filmmakers for their 2024 contest; this film placed second. I was especially impressed by how Mullins handled the challenge of including and suggesting jazz elements in the soundtrack without simply deploying a jazz track, giving the film an allusive depth and working to counter-balance what might have otherwise seemed too cerebral an approach to the imagery. And given the long history of jazz at poetry readings, Mullins’ Beat-style vocal delivery seemed just right to my ear.
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Dave Bonta is a poet, editor, and web publisher from the Appalachian mountains of central Pennsylvania.
[…] Mullins, who took second place at this year’s Filmetry 24: The Poetics of Cinema with his film, “Janet Leigh is Afraid of Jazz,” which is based on a poem by Marsha de la O and was previously profiled by Moving […]