Poetry, animation and sound

Animation and sound seemed obvious mediums for exploring Plath's intensely visual, somatic and creative world, in which, to iterate the message of her diary entry, material reality is subject to the compressions and compositions of her lived-with sightlines and visual frames. To return to that 1949 diary entry: here is a young woman acutely aware of her position in the world, her particular temporal and spatial locations; a young woman with the ability to draw fastidiously and carefully the outlines of things as they are. We might, then, read her sentences as an extended audiovisual phenomenological sequence: “At the present I am very happy sitting at my desk and looking out over the bare trees around the house across the street – the chilly gray sky like a slate of icy marble propped up against the hills.”Footnote ⁶ The sentences unfurl through a frame of self-conscious self-realization. Plath is annotating herself coming into view in her own mind. Her protagonist is Plath the sensing subject on the “lookout” for forms but also ways of portraying those forms in visual and auditory languages. Plath is producing her own self-consciously drawn frames, controlling the content of that mental frame, moment to moment. As an onlooker of herself, the young Sylvia Plath documents herself as a seeing, listening and perceiving subject, drawing into audiovisual consciousness her immediate relations to the material world. Animation is a medium built upon a sequence of rapidly replaced images. Hanna notes that the animated film can compress time and circumstance to a tiny fraction of indicated action and emotion, as distance, gravity and scale are reimagined and re-imaged in a sequence of rapidly passing frames and sounds. This creates a parallel experience to reading a line of poetry that can transport the reader in a few words (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

The Girl Who Would Be God moodboard showing Suzie Hanna's initial response to creation of a visual narrative and graphic style, referencing Plath's teenaged artwork, the 1949 diary entry and her “Cinderella” poem.

Plath's early artwork is full of collage. Here we find evidence of a mind that likes to carry words, sounds and images elsewhere. In the early stages of devising the film, Hanna consulted the work of Eduardo Paolozzi, who, in 1948, the year before Plath's diary entry, was creating pop-art collages, a technique taken up very soon after by Richard Hamilton. Both artists typically locate images of young women alongside modern appliances in collaged domestic scenarios. In Plath's journal entry she lists items in her room, including books, photographs, drawings and furniture. Hanna filmed a real seventeen-year-old girl for the role of the Plath-persona, selected for her resemblance to Plath's juvenile painting of Snow White, completed in the late 1940s.Footnote ⁷

Built frame to frame, moment to moment, animation asks the viewer to imagine what it is that might be happening in between each frame, in the blink of an eye, in the moment of not-seeing. Filled with sound, these spaces between frames open onto the consciousness and elicit semiotic liberation, continuously forming and dissolving the figures depicted in each image. Poetry, animation and sound rely upon intense and intuited experiences of the ambiguous and the absent, a poetic of connotation that nonetheless moves towards denotation and then away again, elsewhere, back to new connotations and new associations. Poetry, sound and animation refer to the words, sounds and images apparent on the page, on the screen and in the environment; at the same time they make equally large gestures towards what is not there, but might exist in offscreen space. Taken together, these separate but overlapping processes make a richly reciprocal and productive partnership in which one medium comments upon and informs the others.

The Girl Who Would Be God was devised as a mixed-media animated film in response to the large body of Plath manuscripts, letters, journals, artwork, scrapbooks and ephemera held at the Lilly Library, Indiana University. In a deliberately self-conscious manner, the film commits to showing off the process of image and sound construction: how Plath and the filmmakers select, edit and position props in order to create their fantasy audiovisual worlds.

Mixed-media animators, like sound designers, go in search of materials that will stretch the boundaries of their own practice; in other words, the medium encourages an inherent reflection upon its own processes. Plath's diary entry is itself a form of self-critical private assemblage. Plath's own relation to mixed media, her music, drawing, painting, scrapbooking and collaging techniques, as well as the cultural and material forms of self-representation found in her poetry, letters and journals, suggest an imagination intent upon producing multiple forms of self-representation.

As her Lilly Library scrapbooks reveal, Plath hoarded page after page of popular magazines and journals. From these, she produced several political and cultural commentaries parodying American domestic life: a life, as she saw it, full of absurd gimmicks and rituals, designated costumes and props. Plath was an avid dramatizer and myth-maker of the domestic and the daily and it was from this perspective that the authors began to devise the film.

Extending methods of assemblage into the film's narrative, the authors combined Plath's diary entry with its romance story – of a young self in search of an exciting future, and her juvenile poem “Cinderella.” Perrault's original Cinderella story is an allegory for the everyday girl who makes it to the top. Plath's “Cinderella” poem, written sometime in the early 1950s, transfers this story into a radically internalized scenario. At the heart of the poem is the image of a revolving glass palace, a magical poetic kaleidoscope that stands as a conceit for poetic metamorphosis. In this glass palace material images are filtered and transformed, turned into something “like” the original but not quite:

The glass palace generates myriad associative forms, captured in the images of light and reflection that, in turn, produce other reflections. Plath's glass palace is a metaphor for imaginative association. In this associative world, several rose candles can generate the idea (the mental image) of a million flagons. This is the world of fairy tale and allegory in which one idea rapidly produces a new and different version of itself, elsewhere. But this is the business of allegory: to say something that is otherwise to the here and now.Footnote ⁹

The plot and the protagonist

Cinderella is a fantasy story for young girls who long to imagine themselves elsewhere; as such, it became not only a central narrative but also an informing aesthetic of the film. Hanna worked closely with the forms and palettes of Plath's juvenile paintings of Disneyesque heroines, the saccharine rose pinks, yellows and iridescent blues copied from Disney's 1940s films: Snow White (1939) Fantasia (1940) and Cinderella (1950). To these images she added photographs of a real girl: what, in aesthetic terms, was a collaged representation of Plath herself and a sort of visual allegory.

Allegory is a method of producing double meanings and double forms at once.Footnote ¹⁰ It portrays split temporalities, here and there, past and present, present and future. Allegory is always in the process of taking meaning elsewhere.Footnote ¹¹ Plath's juvenile writing is built upon an allegorical desire for “other worlds.” Alongside the story of Cinderella sits another early poem, “Aerialist,” whose principal trope is that of a tightrope walker performing her potentially deadly nighttime routine:

The Girl Who Would Be God traces this dramatic movement from private world of bedroom to public world of spectated performance. Read more metaphorically, the film tracks the course of Plath's inner world: the choreographed and unchoreographed movements of her imperious imagination.

The film needed an allegorical protagonist to stand in for Plath herself: a figurative representative, a person. The poet Emily Dickinson, one of Plath's self-professed literary foremothers, wrote, “When I state myself, as the representative of the verse, it does not mean me, but a supposed person.”Footnote ¹³ Hanna was sure that the film should encourage thinking about Plath's created worlds through a figure that might stand in for her, based less upon Plath herself than upon one of her painted archetypes: Plath's 1940s rendering of Snow White. In this archetype of the female romance plot, the necessity of transformation is everything.

As a child, Plath's mother read her the Brothers Grimm tales and later in life she translated some of these tales from the German.Footnote ¹⁴Snow White was Disney's first animated feature film, released in 1937 when Plath was five years old; as such, it is the prototype of the commercial American film that Plath grew up with. The relationship between storybook and film is a potent but also crucial elision. In between the storybook and the film there exist many young readers, viewers and lives, several generations of young girls imagining themselves as Snow White and then, perhaps later in life, as Sylvia Plath.

Hanna's selection of a seventeen-year-old girl who resembled Plath's Disneyesque Snow White allows viewers to identify with the idea of Sylvia Plath as a lived person. The “supposed person” of Sylvia Plath reaches across the film as a literary and cultural objective correlative (to use T. S. Eliot's term) of her imaginative work. The chosen actress was brunette, not blonde, and this visual contrast to the historical Sylvia Plath introduces an interesting tension into the film. In the animated character-person of Plath you don't get what you expect. The historical Sylvia Plath remains backstage, in the offscreen world of the film, signalled and suggested but not represented. Animation and sound design revel in offscreen worlds, the invisible exits and entrances between the world represented and the world that is intimated in the senses and the imagination. Poetry likewise suggests uncompleted metaphors, thoughts still ongoing at the end of the line, an invisible threshold between one line and the next where all the business of private individual interpretation goes on.Footnote ¹⁵

Consequently, thresholds and lines became one of the film's shaping internal conceits. The line between inside and outside world, between the imagined Plath's domestic space and the grander allegorical world of the Cinderella plot, gave the film its structure. The narrative content is forged from a combination of the 13 November diary entry and the early “Cinderella” and “Aerialist” poems. A young girl sits in her bedroom imagining her future. She climbs out of her window, along a tightrope to a castle where she meets a dashing stranger. They dance. As with the original Cinderella story, time interrupts her, and she leaves the dance hall. But in the authors' version of the Cinderella story, the young woman leaves no slipper behind. Instead, she takes a pair of scissors from her reticule, cuts around her two-dimensional paper prince and rolls him up like a piece of canvas. Suddenly, her prince is portable. She escapes into a starry night through the hole left by the cutout prince. The next moment we see her back in her bedroom with her tiny trophy, placing him inside her toy theatre next to a cutout version of herself.

The world of the toy theatre brings to the film its internal narrative and one that comments on the process of animation itself. The young Plath-persona sits at her desk cutting images of boys' faces from magazines and pasting them onto faceless dolls. Here is Plath the young creator and animator of her own tale, moving small cutout images of her fantasy world and placing them inside a three-dimensional doll theatre. From inside the theatre we hear a miniature piano playing a composition based on Debussy music that Plath herself practised as a young pianist. She types in time to the music, as piano and typewriter merge into a metaphor of her musical self. The object world of the film comments on the hours of laborious work with paper (cutting, gluing, measuring, drawing, colouring in) from which the film itself emerges. Paper, in a sense, is the creative base of much animation, which begins with storyboarding, drawn gestures of shape and movement filling the oblong shapes of the imagined screen.

Something little known about Plath is her intense interaction with cutout paper dolls. As archives held at the Lilly Library, Indiana University evidence, young Sylvia Plath inhabited a kingdom of paper dolls. Within that realm she nominated a leading doll, Stella, her doll-prototype and starry version of herself. Plath created dozens of costumes for Stella, all individually designed, a plethora of possible selves.Footnote ¹⁶ Plath did not make animation films but her creative instincts are similar to those of an animator: she created small, malleable, portable images, simulating a sense of real world meets fantasy, moving through space and time. But how is time counted in animation except by a series of small stop–start movements, micro-units of counted movement and stasis, the alignment of action and sound?

A few technical facts are needed to understand this. The Girl Who Would Be God was ultimately created through a series of live-action film frames in which five out of twenty-five frames were selected for each second of film time. These images of actors were imposed into three-dimensional composited environments made from two-dimensional objects collaging the paper world of Stella with a live actress; in turn, it produces a mutable line of interpretation built upon composited characters acting in a metamorphic space.

Dance and music are a central part of the film's action, creating a carefully choreographed relationship with space. Sound and music open up the process of interpretation, generating a sonic world that simultaneously enhances and diminishes the relationship between the viewer and the hypervisual world of animation, whilst consolidating historical and cultural references. Plath's poetry is full of auditory and choreographic information. Take these two sets of lines from “Cinderella”:

Simmons worked directly with these musical and choreographic descriptions, and the auditory “ticking” heard by Cinderella, not to isolate the sound of a ticking clock, but to identify the manipulation of timing in this moment in Plath's life. Metric ticking sounds start as soon as the young girl appears onscreen: her hands play the typewriter keys, percussively, to music. The “caustic ticking of the clock” develops into a larger sonic sensation: in the metallic sound of Plath's cutting scissors and in the paper Foley that produces a repetitive brittle noise as it is cut and crumpled – lending tactility to the film's surface. Through these procedures the film substitutes musical time for clock time, poetically choreographing past, present and future.

Music and sound embody both political and emotional responses; they heighten particular moments of consciousness and elevate sensations; they can enhance, explain and configure visual information onscreen. Simmons devised the soundscape to reflect his documentary research into Plath's own teenaged “soundtrack.” Reflecting the phases of youth described in Plath's diary entry and poem, the soundtrack encompasses the tunes she played at the piano as a teenager; the popular forms of music she would have heard in the Massachusetts of the late 1940s; and her auditory and material descriptions of people, objects and environments. In the film, music underpins and constructs movement: the movement of the girl, the dancers, and the timing of camera moves through landscapes and interiors. The film's music and sound design are reflective and subversive, embodying differentially Plath's power to extend childhood happiness and her burgeoning desire to control adolescent experience. As Jacques Attali writes in his influential treatise, “with noise is born disorder and its opposite: the world. With music is born power and its opposite: subversion.”Footnote ¹⁸

And so the high-drama moment of the film: when the Plath-persona crosses from her window ledge along an imaginary high wire to a fairy-tale forest and distant castle (images from Plath's juvenile painting-world). It is a series of quiet noises, sounds not music, that identify tentatively with this moment, as Plath's persona hovers between childhood comfort and adolescent experimentation. A harp string under pressure, a finger (Hanna's), pressing the catgut into the wooden body of the harp, creates a distorted sound noisily resonating through wood. Sounds that magnify the environment, drawing attention to the threshold over which Plath's persona moves, include pine fibres creaking as the forest sways in the breeze. Travelling back to the film's musical introduction, these sounds extend the bowed cello that accompanies the camera's path through autumn trees encircling Plath's childhood house. In such a way, sound and music produce a nexus of sensory ideas, in which the sound of a resonating wood instrument is also a metaphor for the body as a vessel for sound, thought and transformation: all of which brings us back, through a sonic circuit, to the young Plath nervously crossing her suburban high wire, over a landscape of fairy-tale pine trees on her way to the castle (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

The Girl Who Would Be God. Animation frame of the girl crossing her high wire to the castle.

At the moment of the high-wire crossing, silence is also the sound of fear, suggestive of the moment when object consciousness meets a heightened consciousness of sound. The red shoes provide a synecdochic representation of the young girl moving out of her familiar space into the world of adult engagement, the social world of dates and debutante balls, the cultural formulae of heterosexual romance. As she moves towards the dance hall, she hears a noisy Irish reel, popular in Massachusetts of the late 1940s: “Speed the Plow,” a contra dance whose counted rhythm is four beats by four. This tidy and symmetrical rhythm sits at the intersection of Plath's threshold between childhood and adolescence, reflecting a young and rather hygienic culture of provincial dating. Momentarily, Plath's persona revels in late childhood, though this soon disintegrates as her Cinderella dances tango in a power game with her prince.

Moving shoes and counted time through sound are metaphors for constituents of poetry and dance. Poetry is built upon a carefully counted metric pattern of which the basic unit is the foot. Likewise, dance is built upon temporal rhythms of feet moving through space. The film's red shoes are a metaphoric representation of the rhythms of poetry, dance and music tracked across space and time. The red shoes that pass from inside to outside world offer a useful metaphoric summary of the passageway between lived experience – the seventeen-year-old Plath in her Winthrop bedroom – and the Cinderella who climbs out of her window in search of a larger reading of herself. What makes this film unlike the Cinderella story is that Hanna's Plath-protagonist returns, at the end of the film, not to marriage and the romance plot but to her own creative play: her toy theatre and paper cutouts, the prince and Cinderella figures she moves and animates. We leave Plath as content as we see her in her diary entry, playing with the possibilities of romance, but still safely outside it. By the end of the film, the teenage Plath is enacting romance in her tiny doll-play; only her red shoes, left out on the windowsill, hint at her willingness to take up more unforeseen and untold adult adventures.

The metaphorical plot

In Letter to the World the poet's working methods shape the film's plot. The production was created from animated silhouettes of the American actress Elisabeth Gray integrated with stop-motion object and shadow theatre. This technique lends the film its central “double” aesthetic, in which two forms of representation imply a third: and so the embodied actress (in silhouette behind a screen) suggests a shadow version of the nineteenth-century daguerreotype of Emily Dickinson. This life-sized figure collapses into a miniature version of Dickinson: Dickinson as a tiny paper puppet that zooms out of the bedroom window towards the airy clouds, echoing the trajectory of the young Plath's moving from her bedroom world to her Cinderella fantasy.

This formula of two forms producing a third is one way of thinking about metaphor, if we define metaphor as the process by which one body of language is carried over to a second body and, in this process of transport, produces an abstract third. Neuropsychologist Iain McGilchrist has summarized metaphor as a language that carries us across a gap; metaphor is a kind of linguistic transport that begins with embodied experience, followed by a movement away from that experience, and then a final return. In metaphorical language, “Everything has to be expressed in terms of something else,” but this something else is always related to the first experience of embodied life.Footnote ³⁰ McGilchrist quotes the German philosopher Jean Paul Richter, who makes the point, “Ingenious figures of speech can either give soul to the body or body to the spirit”; metaphor reminds us of the common life of the body. Whatever metaphor produces is always related to the first body, as a child is in some ways always related to his parents.Footnote ³¹ The notion of the metaphoric third is implied in the film's shadow-lantern imagery, an aesthetic produced by strongly contrasting light and dark sequences and one that references nineteenth-century silhouette portraiture and the emergence of the daguerreotype as an early form of photography. “None pursued invisibility as strictly as Dickinson”:Footnote ³² her silhouette conveys contemporaneous details of design, dress and action whilst representing her physical body at one remove, literally behind a screen. “The Soul selects its own society, then shuts the door” (Fr. 409).

Recent scholarship has noted that American transcendentalist philosophy forges a specific connection between the material and the spiritual. Dickinson's poetry, as we have already noted, wrestles with the desire to make manifest what cannot be seen. The early experimenters of photography, L. J. M. Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot, conceived of photography as a natural process in which “light inscribed itself onto itself”; that is to say, light built on top of light, choosing natural surfaces as its platform.Footnote ³³ This film plays sharply with light and dark, brightness and shadow, and the narrative follows an interplaying sequence of frames that sets light against dark, indoors against outdoors.

The first sequence poses the poet against a window frame cut into four dark-blue squares. Inside the frame sits the white round of planet-earth-cum-moon. Dickinson the poet-persona is seen tossing letters through the window; these are her letters “to the world that never wrote to [her]” (Fr. 519). In the blink of an eye, the poet becomes miniature, and flies through the window to join her beloved bee. Together, they sup nectar and kiss the heads of flowers. But this erotic communion is interrupted by the outbreak of a storm, signalled by the sound of Civil War gunfire. Dickinson's most productive period of writing was the early years of the Civil War, 1860–63. Triggered by the sounds of war, an image of a volcano appears. Hanna and Simmons show how sound itself generates and impacts imagery, as gunfire leads to the image of spewing lava and fire. Soon after, the entire screen begins to flicker with the impact of sound and poet and bee fly off to avoid danger.

In Dickinson's metaphoric world, volcanoes signify the eruption of speech, the violent act of communication after a long period of silence. The metaphor describes, what is, for her, the violent, rupturing act of writing: “Vesuvius dont talk – Etna – don't – one of them – said a syllable – a thousand years ago, and Pompeii heard it, and hid forever – she couldn't look the world in the face afterward” (L 233). What she calls her “still – volcano – life” (Fr. 517) is Dickinson's dormant and silent repository of poetry. It is this world of silent words, words heard only inside the poet's own head, words left hidden and unspoken, that is the film's ultimate metaphor.

At the end of her brief adventure with her bee companion, the poet returns home and begins to prepare the end of her silent life. She passes back into her room through a stormy liquid layer that resembles early photographic silver process. As the image clarifies, we see her preparing a private funeral for her bee, wrapping him in a shroud made from her own veil, laying him inside her pen case and closing the lid. Emily dips her finger into ink leaking from her pen, and pushes her finger down on paper to leave a print. This image metamorphoses into an inky picture of the Earth, a gesture to Dickinson's metaphors of empirical rule over self-created territories (“How many legions overcome the Emperor will say,” Fr. 136); here a version of the world is created from her own fingertip.

Dickinson wrote to a world that “never” wrote to her, many of her letters went unanswered, and her poetry often reflects her views of what the world might have made of her (“I took my Power in my Hand/And went against the World,” Fr. 660) A letter from the world arrives, but when Emily opens it she is quite overwhelmed to find a map as big as herself, a physical manifestation of her obsession with geographic geometries and comparative scale (“Size circumscribes – it has no room / For petty furniture – / The Giant tolerates no Gnat / For Ease of Gianture,” Fr. 707) (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

Letter to the World. A letter in the form of a map that the world sends to Emily Dickinson (detail). Mapmaker: Christa Harris.

The map's design was inspired by the cartographic endeavours of pioneer pathfinders such as Daniel Boone (“Hurrah for Daniel Boone,” she cheers in her early poem “Sic transic gloria mundi” (Fr. 2), and battle maps that were popular during the American Civil War. Instead of naming locations, the map's typographic content is taken from Dickinson's own critique of herself, reflecting her comments through a distorted cartographic mirror of her own body, on her hand “you never wed,” on her eyebrow “too superior for prose,” on her mouth “singing too loudly,” and in her heart “possession.” This is the only scene in the film where we hear the voice of the poet: the voice of Dickinson the poet and the person who, as she approaches the end of her life, resorts to reading aloud harsh condemnations of herself. Losing patience with her own self-critique, she screws up the map into a ball which becomes a revolving planet; a tiny Emily is found kneeling on top of the planet, folding her fascicles and storing them in a chest. This ritual of compression and folding is a reminder of Dickinson's relationship with metaphor: what her speaker calls “the apparatus of the dark” (Fr. 1140), the unrevealed and undisclosed operations of the imagination passed through language.

It is a well-known fact in the Dickinson story that after the poet's death, Dickinson's sister-in-law, Lavinia Dickinson, discovered her poetry fascicles buried within a rosewood chest. Each fascicle comprised four to seven sheets of paper folded, stacked and then sewn together with twine, holding between eleven and twenty-nine poems: forty books of poems, 1,775 poems.Footnote ³⁴ The film responds to this fact with a final return to the poet-as-paper, as the character of Dickinson transmutes back to the two-dimensional puppet form and folds herself inside a flat silhouetted black-and-white chest, pulling the lid down on herself. Hanna's point was to show Dickinson enacting her own burial, folding herself away inside a flat-hinged chest with a small rose window. Dickinson's rosewood chest is the symbolic location of her funeral service, which she conducts herself. Moments later the chest explodes into a firework display of falling flowers, a signifier of Dickinson's herbarium garden rehydrated and brought back to life. But the exploding flowers, accompanied by the sound of musket shots, remind us of Dickinson's enormous poetic output, her most productive period during the years of the American Civil War, 1860–63, and her large literary legacy. As the credits run, flowers are replaced by papery moths made from pages of Dickinson's poems; these are hybrid creatures that return the film to her natural theology, the demands of “Bring me a sunset in a cup.”

Letter to the World ends with the poetry moths fluttering in the smoke and light of a magic lantern. Dickinson died two years before the earliest surviving motion film was shot, but Hanna's point is that her poetic imagination pre-dates the technological possibilities associated with late nineteenth-century moving-image and sound technologies, and forms of recording and representation. Her view on Nature is refracted through a close-up lens that suddenly, and without warning, shifts to a larger, more panoramic view. “The Bees – became as Butterflies,” her speaker declares, an image she “takes” to be “Giants – practicing / Titanic Opera” (Fr. 627). In Dickinson's quick metaphorical transferences we sense a poet who identifies with the detail of the botanist and the filmmaker, but who longs, like the young Plath, to know the omniscient view.