Review Film

I know you’ll hate me for this: artists aren’t special (what? huh?). Anyone who hauls a kid or parent to doctors, school, or care facilities; gets themselves to work everyday; manages to interact socially with at least one other human being; balances their checkbook; or survives one more day struggling through the hell that is poverty, sexism, war, and racism is an artist, folks. We of the word, brush, note, celluloid, or clay are posers if we buy into the idea that we are the handpicked arbiters of the human condition. Like that guy who is a talented plumber, we are good expressing our creativity with our chosen medium. But when artists get sucked in by the cult of personality, many act like pretentious dickwads (while always unfortunate, it is usually really fun to watch).

The everyday-artist, that mom trying to keep food on the table and her kid safe from the selfishness and violence out there, doesn’t have time to give a shit about art, much less a pretentious dickwad. She’ll take a good plumber over a good writer any day of the week. Thankfully, there are no artists of the pretentious dickwad variety in Bob Bryan’s recent documentary “GV6 The Odyssey: Poets, Passion, and Poetry” (Graffiti Verité, 2006). Unfortunately, as hopeful as Bryan seems in his effort to document a talented group of contemporary poets and their processes, “The Odyssey” could stand another go in the editing suite.

The poets interviewed show themselves to be approachable and genuinely passionate artists. The problem is that we never really get to know them. Documentaries should offer the outsider an insider’s perspective. Bryan’s eye wants this, but his film gets hijacked by too many abrupt cuts and confusing additions that are, well, kinda silly at times. During Johnny Masuda’s reading of a poem, viewers are offered a quick scene of someone putting on surgical gloves. What? The poem responds to a trauma remembered through a hospital experience. The glove scene is campy, so it knocks the viewer out of the piece. Interestingly, Masuda is sitting in an art studio crammed with paintings. Hmmm, possible context? Why do hospital gloves make us care about Masuda’s poem?

The viewer does not need to know about awards or accolades to embrace these artists as poets. It helps to understand it as part of their history, but the work read in the film proves their talent. What we want is a glimpse of their lives and who they are. The flesh and blood Wanda Coleman or Brendan Constantine, whose attention-grabbing interviews are sliced up throughout the film, never materialize. This dispersal of interview material is not unusual for a documentary; yet, what promises to be a funny and engaging discussion with Constantine gets devoured—often mid-thought—by a whirlwind of puzzling scene changes. Other key conversations on the writer’s process, like a scene with Suzanne Lummis, lose meaning against a menagerie of images and voices. Just as Lummis seems about to make a point about the fears expressed by her student writers and the writing process, the camera cuts abruptly to another poet reading his work.

Along with those of Coleman, Constantine, and Lummis, there are other promising moments in “The Odyssey.” The scenes with Jennifer Kwan Dobbs, Jawanza Dumisani, Harryette Mullen, Marie Lecrivain, Shahe Mankerian, Kamau Daaood, and a rad bearded crone enticingly named FrancEye guarantee insightful and honest expositions on the artistic process. Again, due to choppy editing, these conversations show up as unfinished. Bryan tries to harness the pace for a few seconds by including family pictures in Coleman’s and Dumisani’s scenes, but they come off as loose ends because their purpose remains unexplained by the film as a whole. The titles that are offered as a handrail don’t help. They aren’t purposeful enough to offer a map, and the use of different type fonts just gets confusing.

Promising is what this film is, but it isn’t quite answering the questions it asks on the back of the DVD cover: “How are Poets able to conjure provocative mental images, stimulate secret passions, stir-up complex and unresolved personal issues in their audience?” Um, I don’t know. The personification of “Poets” with a capital “P” might be telling. It is as if an enamoredBryan is too intimidated by these poets to close the gap between audience and subject. The lack of intimacy leaves what could be a good film a bit flat and hard to sink into.

A browsing of the website gave me the impression the film is meant as both a documentary and an educational film—the Graffiti Verité series looks pretty cool, in general. Even so, “The Odyssey” needs some smoothing out to stand out on its own as a film about poets and poetry.