Our film A Ball Is for Throwing (After Adrienne Rich) is an experimental response to Adrienne Rich’s poem of the same name. The poem moves with a lightness which belies its densely packed images. The reader is ushered along from stanza to stanza, but upon reaching the end they may be unsure as to what they’ve just read, feeling the need to double back and start again. And upon rereading it opens up, suggesting more and more possibilities. Our film aims to move with the same freedom and playfulness between the realms of the concrete and the abstract, between an object’s material existence and the associations a mind forms around it.
We used Rich’s text as a basis for a series of images—some taken from the text itself, and some our own—that we hoped would sit naturally alongside one another, approximating in some way the experience of reading the original poem. We looked for the possible resonances between a group of often disparate images, and so the exterior world—the sun glimpsed from beneath through the ocean’s surface, clouds drifting across the sky—and the interior world—a pair of hands drawing a circle on paper, a circular window looking out onto the street—coexist in an attempt to form a new set of associations. We wanted to explore the linkages between the physical and the metaphysical, between the real and the imagined in a similar way to the original poem.
Any attempts we made to include Rich’s text in the film itself, either as text on screen or through voice-over, came off as awkward and had the effect of crowding the images. We thought it was important that the images were given the space to breathe and stand on their own, and so we decided to remove the text. The only auditory element in our film is a piece of ambient music that unfolds gently in the background. We thought that the pace of the music itself matched the pace of our edits, and we lined up a development in the piece—the introduction of a bass line—with what we felt was a key moment in our film, where footage of dye running through water is laid on top of shots of a group of circular objects—an apple, an orange, an egg, a mug.
It’s been a challenging and rewarding experience to create a piece of work based around such a singular and idiosyncratic text. We hope that through our creative decisions, that we’ve managed to do the original poem justice. And we also hope that the film works as a stand-alone piece—that some of the images that we’ve set alongside each other surprise and interest those who see it.
References
Rich, A 1957, A Ball Is for Throwing, Poetry Foundation, viewed 20 October 2020, <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=27402>.