In 1983, American poet Lyn Hejinian traveled to the Soviet Union as part of an artists' entourage accompanying the Rova Saxophone Quartet on its musical tour of the country. During that time, Hejinian hooked up with Soviet poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, and over the next five years, the two struck up an intensely personal correspondence. Letters Not About Love is a sampling of the epistolary dance between these two poets (read voice-over by two actors). Provided with a list of evocative words by filmmaker Jacki Ochs ("grandmother," "neighbor," "poverty," "book," etc.), the two poets riff and wander around these concepts, each putting his/her unique cultural spin on the response. Now, there's nothing I love more than a juicy compilation of literary correspondence. The best of these exchanges give a real sense of lives lived, a glimpse of the real personalities, in all their messy glory, which lie behind the creative force. On the other hand, there's something labored, self-conscious, and oddly uninteresting about the correspondence presented here--as if the poets were verbally posturing for an unseen audience (amazingly, Hejinian points this out herself: "I find myself not paying attention to the world as it is, but the world as it might fit into my next letter to you.") And oh, those accompanying visuals!: a bubbly, distracting stew of oblique bi-continental imagery and home movies. I suppose the idea was for this expressionist camera work to be richly textural and visually contrapuntal to the poets' words. Unfortunately, the results come across looking more like a Levi Dockers ad for perestroika. A marginal buy for larger public and academic collections (Lyn Hejinian is one of the leading lights of the post-'70s Language Poetry Movement, which may hold some interest for large literature collections). Aud: C, P. (G. Handman)
Letters Not About Love
(1998) 59 min. $179. New Day Films. PPR. Color cover. Vol. 14, Issue 2
Letters Not About Love
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