CROW

‘Nobody was quite sure how Crow was born.
Different stories were told.

Out under the sun stands a body.
It is growth of the solid world.

It is part of the world’s earthen wall.
The earth’s plants—such as the genitals
And the flowerless navel
Live in its crevices.
Also, some of earth’s creatures—such as the mouth.
All are rooted in earth, or eat earth, earthy,
Thickening the wall.

Only there is a doorway in the wall—
A black doorway:
The eye’s pupil.

Through that doorway came Crow.

Flying from sun to sun, he found this home.’

Poetry (c) Faber, FSG.

Dark, viscous tar bursts into white noise flames as kaleidoscopic blood and bodies morph and writhe and then calmly change. Blue tears flood into cells and stars and icicles. Lava burns and acidic lines and surfaces throb, in fractal bursts of colour and guts and blackness, visceral towers and veins.

Horribly hypnotic and unnervingly beautiful, the Apocalyptic assault of Creation is made impulsive and frightening and pure in Yoav Segal’s adaptation of Ted Hughes’ seminal cycle of poems, CROW – a dark reconception of the Adam and Eve tale of Genesis and the beginning of time. Hughes himself described CROW as his masterpiece, and the controversial poems certainly exhibit a creative lucidity and confidence of style which is arguably unrivalled in the rest of his career. It is in CROW that the poet’s previously direct engagement with natural phenomena segues into narrative mythicism, and Segal’s filmic sequences certainly do this justice in their simultaneous ambiguity and decisive organic form. But despite the evidence of living matter there is a darkness to the film which is made all the more poignant in the knowledge that these poems followed the death of Sylvia Plath, and a barren period of mourning for Hughes.

As micro and macro collide, stars burst through cells into space and under skin…

Filmmaker and theatre producer Segal began his work on CROW with an interpretive dance piece with Handspring UK theatre, makers of Warhorse. This led to the short film seen here: a time-lapse animation of organic processes taken from context and made visual in a manner owing much to Structural-Materialist filmmakers of the ‘60s such as Hollis Frampton, yet never straying from the power of telling a story. Segal was granted exclusive access to recordings of the poem read by Hughes himself, thereby weaving a weight and depth to a visual interpretation which already carries considerable strength on its own. Music by Leafcutter John adds a layer of melodrama which far from seeming over-operatic simply heightens the sense of narrative in the piece.

But no words can describe this film better than those which inspired it. We see ‘mistings of skycrapers___webs of cities’; ‘misty ballerinas___The burning gulfs___the hanging gardens’; ‘translucent, starry spaces’. And all this we feel through the tactile, nay grotesque, visualisation of filmmaker Yoav Segal; all this we hear in the calmly booming voice of the poet himself; all this we see through the eyes of the CROW. We are ‘NOT STARING OUT AT IT THROUGH WALLS//OF MY EYE’S COLD QUARANTINE//FROM A BURIED CELL OF BLOODY BLACKNESS’. We feel it. It is visceral. It is real. There is a sense of haptic visuality, as the eyes of the skin feel the very pulse of CROW and Creation course hot-blooded through cold veins and searing flesh. The very skin of the film is inscribed, microscopically, indexically, with the keenly felt presence of life in its initial, most primal sense. As micro and macro collide, stars burst through cells into space and under skin, and in every ‘vital fibre’ of my being, I am CROW.

CROW premieres at 14.00 on Friday 19th September at “Encounters”, Bristol’s short film and animation festival, as part of the “Strange Encounters and Beauty” strand. Click here to buy tickets.

httpvh://vimeo.com/95423972