The video I want to focus on today is one of my favorites, produced in 2012 and shown to me not long after that when I was a senior in high school. It’s entitled “A Finger, Two Dots Then Me” and was written by Derrick Brown in response to the passing of his wife (If I’m remembering correctly.)
As I was watching the video again this week, I noticed so many rhetorical elements that I hadn’t focused on before. In high school, I was so concerned with language and writing, that I really only paid attention to the words Brown was speaking (which are incredibly powerful). However, this time around, the topics we’ve been discussing in class gave me a new lens through which to see this performance. Suddenly, I was able to appreciate the juxtaposition of images of childhood and senility, earth and space, death and life. I was able to see how the spinning of the movie reel around 3:42 mimic the line “and the planets begin to spin,” providing a re-envisioned take on the focal point of motion.
One of the things that really interests me about this video is the way it allows the written and spoken word to intersect with traditional videography. Poetry was one of the original modes of expressing love, around since the days of epics like Beowulf and refined until reaching a height in the Elizabethan era. In the late 1800s, we started to see the onset of new media like the moving picture, with Melies and Lumiere providing unique ways to capture spectacles and life moments. In more recent times, the advent of spoken word poetry as an art form has grown, springing up primarily out of coffeehouse performances. So we have all of these disparate historical moments that collide in this one video. To me, that’s wicked cool. It reminds me a lot of the Kracauer reading, which emphasized how photography was actually one of the birthplaces of film. Early on, as we discussed in class, individuals hypothesized that film would completely replace photography, eliminating the need for still shots by providing for a more exciting medium. However, the opposite has proven to be true. Instead of replacing photography, film enhanced it. In much the same way, innovative video techniques and posting abilities (fostered by the rise of the internet) have not replaced old forms of entertainment like poetry, but rather proliferated and transformed the genre into something that is still widely viewed and enjoyed today.
Getting back to the video techniques themselves, I want to speak a bit more about the layering that is seen in Brown’s video. In many ways, it reminded me of a collage, with realistic scenes like the one of the old man in the hospital fading in over washed-out “memory” scenes of childhood play. Then, we get still, face-on and profile shots of Brown himself reciting his poem, with stars that look like they were drawn by children contrasting with the light bulbs all around him. There is so much layering in this video, in fact, that it almost becomes impossible to track or order. This keen use of collage is one of the major factors contributing to the film’s success. It’s very clear that the poet is going beyond the realm of the present to advance an idea of eternality that weaves all of the many moment’s of one’s life together. In the end of the video, this aim is further exemplified by the quick montage of many different life moments which Brown calls “holy, holy, holy.” The scenes fly at the viewer, never staying long enough to be fully understood, but working together to give the impression that life is flying by and yet is fully harmonious as a beautiful whole. The film is chock-full of metaphors, and I get chills each time I revisit it.
There are so many more things I could say about “A Finger, Two Dots Then Me,” but for now I’ll stop writing and leave you with enough time to fully enjoy it!
