Laura Paul’s debut poetry collection, Film Elegy, is a work of vibrant intensity, exploring the ebb and flow of grief, the weight of loss, and the decline of celluloid. The book takes form as the translation of a fictional film into text, “modified from 16mm” onto thick white paper. Each page a frame, each frame an image-turned-poem (or maybe a poem-becoming-film). Paul edits the work into short stanzas pockmarked by slashes, asterisks, ellipses, set into white 16:9 frames laid overtop a black background (the dark room of the theater). In this setting, the text of the pages begins to feel like pin-pricks through the screen, small shadows playing in the light. Each introspective passage a brief glimpse into what’s looming behind the bright bulbs of the projector.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve had the chance to speak with Laura about her book, what led to its creation, its presentation, the relationship between grief and cinema, the inescapability of capital, radical empathy, and how all of this fits into her larger artistic project.
Mike Corrao: Film Elegy has a very demanding presence. It’s a large black book—maybe 8.5 x 11 inches with an all black cover, all black pages. It’s not so much bound as it’s bolted together with two large screws. The title is printed very simply in a silver-inked sans serif. In some way it resembles a movie script, but mutated/altered/transfigured in some way. What influenced this design? Often the cover, the exterior feels like a gateway into the object, and with Film Elegy this gateway felt so stark and intentional.
Laura Paul: There’s a lot of reasoning behind the design, and the fact that it mimics a film script from the outside is definitely part of it. As for the overwhelming presence of black space in the book, that was an intentional choice with multiple reasonings. One was that the reader opens the book without the orientation of any white pages, which was the closest design I could develop that would mimic walking into a movie theater and taking a seat—I wanted the text to be a projection, in a way, and this was a graphic nod to that. It’s like a portable cinema space, Film Elegy! Another aspect to the black pages is darkness often gets perceived as being a void, of absence. Since the book rotates on what is lost and no longer there, the black helped capture that—I feel like I wrote the black. There’s also so much interplay in cinema about lighting and illumination—you could argue the whole art form is predicated on light—so I didn’t feel like I could write a book about film as a physical medium without playing with contrast on the page.
I think in a funny way, even though I wanted gestures towards “absence,” the framing of the text in the white box of the “screen” actually focuses the reader more. It calls more attention than sparse words swimming in a plane of all white. I didn’t want the black text to be lonely! Instead, I wrote mainly black pages so the words could flicker back into the dark and merge into a shade of belonging. It’s also worth wondering: Is the darkness encroaching? By the end of the book, it’s “lights out,” in a way.
The overwhelming feeling I had when writing Film Elegy was one of failure. I can’t see it any other way than failure amidst collapse. I tried for many years to make a feature film, to get a television pilot I wrote made, and it never worked out. The reason I ended up studying film itself is a tragedy, although mostly no one has seen it that way. My whole life, the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do was write. In 2006 when I was eighteen years old I went to NYU for a summer literature program. Within weeks of being in the program, I was raped. I couldn’t write afterward, but I could watch films. It threw my life on a completely different path.
People often talk about Joseph Campbell’s theory of The Hero’s Journey and how after being called to initiate the quest, the hero faces challenges but has magical guides that help him navigate his development. My life doesn’t graph onto this at all.
Instead, my life feels like this: After I graduated from high school, I left home to become a writer like a baby bird attempting to fly out of the nest and immediately plunged to earth only to have my wings torn apart by a wolf who was waiting at the bottom of the tree. I imagine the only way I escaped from being completely devoured was by frantically crawling into a root system that the wolf could not enter and then pretending to be dead for some time in order to survive.
For years after I was raped, I kept trying to write, but my soul had left my body. I was a walking corpse until the year 2014, the year writing came back to me. Because I spent eight years from the time I was raped until the time when the spirit of writing returned, I learned what a hell it was to inhabit not being able to write. Because of this experience, once writing returned, I vowed to forever center it as my primary practice, my worship, my guide. I’m a very loyal bride, a good wife. I just happen to be married to an act, not a person. I’m just so thankful it returned, that I returned, that hopefully I never have to live another second of my life like that again. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. I find it easy to relate to writers who go mute from abuse.
Last year was the ten-year anniversary of when writing returned to me. Traditionally, the gift for a tenth wedding anniversary is aluminum, which most couples probably scoff at, but is intended to symbolize strength and resilience, as aluminum is quite durable. Funny enough, aluminum powder is still used in filmmaking for practical special effects like explosions because it’s so flammable. Gaffers still utilize aluminum sheets for lighting sets, so what a remarkably appropriate material to commemorate this cinematic demarcation, the year of Film Elegy’s release!
2024 wasn’t only the year in which I had a book published for the first time, but Film Elegy is the eleventh poetry collection I’ve written. If you cross out the first one, there’s a strange poetics to it. What an odd experience, I don’t try to make sense of anything anymore.
Chris Marker is another filmmaker who I adored, and mourned, besides Amy Halpern, to whom my book is dedicated. In 2012, I was in a drug store in Cobble Hill when my friend texted me to tell me Marker had died, and I began to sob publicly while buying cold medicine. In his film Level Five the main character’s name is Laura.
In his film Sans Soleil, he opens with this narration:
The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: one day I’ll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black.
I frequently don’t see happiness, but I do see black. It’s helpful to see a shape, or line, of difference, maybe that’s the path to joy.
James Baldwin says, “If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”
Ironically, I’m only quoting men here, although Chris Marker puts his text in a woman’s mouth. Unfortunately, I love men. I love men so much that I want to liberate them from their position as oppressors.
I feel punished by men every day. Can men feel the shape of my oppression? Do they care? I need men to feel the harm being done to women, and for men to understand how they suffer, how they lose by depriving the manmade of the feminine. In writing Film Elegy I was told that my voice was similar to Plath’s, the “raving avenger of womanhood.” Men should be so grateful that feminine expressions of wrath are frequently displayed with much more compassion than is warranted. I’m showing that right now. Did you hear the story about the Arizona preacher who was attacked by a woman with a baseball bat because he had a sign saying “You deserve to be raped”?
Later in Sans Soleil, Marker has this line, “All women have a built-in grain of indestructibility. And men’s task has always been to make them realize it as late as possible.” This quote inscribed itself in my chest in 2023 after I was temporarily made homeless because of a lover’s violent rage. Men taught me that I was indestructible early on, and continue to so frequently to the point that I understand now that I am immortal. When will men learn that I am indestructible, and they are the ones destroying themselves?
That’s my answer to your first question, Mike, which started off simply about design. I think we both deserve an island vacation for the reading and writing required of this labor. The island I most want to go to is Heart Island, not because of the name, but because of its clock tower, although I believe the heart too is a kind of clock tower.
Maybe we should make a book together instead, although the vacation sounds better. Every book I’ve ever written has been like a vacation, albeit a challenging one, full of effort. That probably makes it more akin to a pilgrimage, but it’s curious how by entering so far into a subject, I’ve felt at a greater remove from other parts of the world, like a vacation. I guess this is why writing is sacred to me—do I dare claim it brings me closer to something like truth, or love, or piercing clarity, or possibility? At the same time it takes me further from illusion, I hope.
It often feels like any attempt as a writer or maybe more generally as an artist to explain any single choice you’ve made in your work becomes an explanation of the work as a whole—of everything that lead to the work existing. The design exists to house the text, the text exists because of a desire or a need to create it, that desire or need comes from these experiences. But at the same time, as you say, there is something so deeply interior about writing. Often I’ve felt like I was performing an exorcism on myself to pull the work out of me, but inevitably it’s always a failure. Some part of the text or the thing that creates the text remains within you. After the book is done, six months later, a line appears in your head that could have gone in the book, or a voice that feels tethered to that moment/work/voice. Do you feel this with your vacations as well? After you’ve come back, do you find yourself still wearing the metaphorical flip-flops? Holding a beach towel?
Unfortunately, with this book, I don’t find myself holding flip-flops or a beach towel, but do wish that I had brought a fire extinguisher. What continues to be revealed is that Film Elegy is not only tethered to the past, but to the future.
I play with concepts of fire and light throughout, despite being taught never to play with matches as a kid. When I was in film school at UCLA, the theater’s projectionist showed us the safety mechanisms they had in place to shut down the entire projection booth with steel doors in case one of the archival nitrate prints ignited and everyone had to be evacuated. This is a risk with historical films of that material.
The word “fire” appears on four different occasions in Film Elegy; I refer to “burning” five times. “Flame” has three separate cameo appearances. In the book, I use a series of five asterisks ***** as a graphic designation for the flickering beams of light that enable a film’s appearance in the dark. Those sparks of light punctuate the entire book.
Recently I learned that at least one copy of Film Elegy burned in the Eaton Fire in Los Angeles. The owner of the destroyed copy and I met up in Palo Alto, a city neither of us lives in, as we are both without permanent residences right now. Palo Alto is also where Eadweard Muybridge worked on sequential series of photographs, consequential to the development of motion pictures. It’s also a city where Google, Facebook, Tesla, PayPal, Apple, and Lockheed Martin have had offices.
My friend and I went to the movies. I felt so safe as we sat next to each other in this restored movie palace that first opened in 1925—it’s nice to know some things withstand the test of time. It was warm inside on a winter night. Movie theaters have often functioned as places of refuge for me when I’ve had nowhere else to go.
We saw a ninety-four-year-old film called The Miracle Woman, without realizing that it ends with an auditorium that catches on fire. It depicts an audience evacuating in a stampede out of the building while it’s in flames.
My friend’s home and all of his possessions burned to the ground in early January. After we watched the film, we got dinner and as we sat outside in the unusually warm California night, I watched the flames of a patio heater dance behind his head as he described the incineration of all of his worldly possessions.
It’s almost like the city of Los Angeles was built on nitrate film stock. The ecology is exploding; this is what happens when Indigenous lands are stolen and replaced with the volatile materials of violence.
The land of the Tongva people was incorporated as Los Angeles in 1850. This is the same time that the first human-made plastics are developed, turning into the formation of celluloid—required for film. This is the decade when there’s interest in combining new photography technologies with movement. It’s also when Eucalyptus trees are introduced to California, which are dangerous because of their volatile oils and the fact that they shed extremely flammable debris constantly.
I recently read an essay, “Mining the History of Photography,” by Siobhan Angus. She argues that the development of this technology cannot be separated from the colonial practices of extracting minerals and metals, the raw materials required to form them. Sometimes when I look at my phone, I wonder about the slaves involved in lithium mining who are used to produce these devices.
In Film Elegy, I consider film as a “medium of war machines” and interrogate the history of “the metals / of our industry / war metals for war times.” The language of film is telling—we’re told to “shoot” and “capture.”
I don’t necessarily feel tethered to 2022, the year that I wrote the book, but I am highly devoted to the future. I still can’t settle on whether or not Western visual technologies are irredeemable, a further inquiry. I can’t settle on an answer, I can’t settle down geographically, I don’t want to be a settler, despite my race.
There’s a way the use of these technologies emanates with an intense anxiety. They’re the result of horrific practices and histories (as you’ve already said), and yet they are increasingly tied to our everyday lives. Often in ways that feel inescapable. Lithium mining, cobalt mining, the environmental impact of server maintenance, the run-off from paper mills. Often these atrocities are obscured from the end product, or in a more pessimistic view, more easily ignored by the user. The violence of film in a way feels more honest. Its dangers (at least in part) are not so obscured. With this highly volatile end product, this language of “shoot” and “capture.” In translating that medium “modified from 16mm” onto the page, how do you translate as well the violence within it?
There’s a tremendous amount of violence in the making of these material products, as we’re both acknowledging, but I think what came out of writing Film Elegy is also the violence that occurs because of seeing, or not seeing. I have another manuscript explicitly centered on the brutality of surveillance, but I was incited to write Film Elegy after the death of a filmmaker I loved and worked for, who was underseen.
Throughout the book, I mention harm that has occurred in and around film sets in the name of art. Workers are hurt or killed, sacrificed for the sake of the end product, which is the moving image. One of the things I like to do as a mental exercise is to imagine what occurs on set and then imagine the camera being removed. Would we accept these conditions, would we continue to participate in these reenactments, if no one was watching? If there was no final art?
There’s already been a lot written about the underrepresentation of certain groups in the arts, but I’m also interested in the violence of misrepresentation. Of what’s allowed to be seen. Black actors get cast as slaves over and over again. Minority writers get published if they write trauma porn. Even all the reboots and reprints! We’re only being allowed to see the past regurgitated over and over again. Not what could be.
This is systematic violence, which can be harder to view because of its scale. In Film Elegy, I play a lot with focus—I’m zooming in to the smallest units, my direct experience, my relationship with Amy, and then constantly pulling back out to try to view the US film industry as a whole, the last hundred years.
I am trying to draw light to these violences, but more so with the book, I am trying to become violence’s opposite. For me, a way to do that is to push back against not seeing—that’s a large part of my ongoing practice as well. It’s a good challenge to attempt to articulate perspectives on macrostructures. As well as witnessing what others can’t stand to look at, to not turn away.
A couple years ago, I wrote a letter to my friend Vi Khi Nao saying this, “My eyes are strong enough to receive the news of your pain and I promise not to shield them.” I find the act of witnessing an act of love. It’s something I feel very strongly that I’m called to do.
But more and more, I find myself centered on the concept of liberation. That seems to be the best word for my goals. To attempt to see things as they are, to not force things to portray an unreality or untruth. To me, that is a liberatory act. Beyond it being a loving thing to do, I think we can liberate each other by doing this. What might occur if we stopped lying to ourselves?
Film itself seems to encapsulate this tension between witnessing and artmaking—that violence of misrepresentation. Witnessing something and then morphing it into a narrative or a set of preconceptions. You mentioned Chris Marker earlier, who often seems to perform a very true kind of witnessing. His film Stopover in Dubai immediately comes to mind (in which he uses CCTV footage to map the assassination of Al-Mabhoub by Mossad agents in the Dubai airport). Amy Halpern, who the book is dedicated to and many of the poems/pages address directly, similar to Marker, seems interested in these unconventional but truer depictions, representations, experiences of reality. How has her work and your working closely with her influenced the way that you approach these concerns in poetry?
My experience of Amy was that she was a very impassioned person, who was deeply invested in the people, plants, and animals around her. I don’t feel as if “witness” is quite the right word for her, as I think her seeing came from a true sense of being very involved in her surroundings. So I guess that’s what I was influenced by—seeing her not hold herself separately from what was going on around her.
This is maybe more general, but even though she was an experimental filmmaker with less “industrial pressures” on her personal work, there are always cultural expectations, societal pressures. It was extremely influential to work with her when I was so young and to see how to get things done in the world as a woman with an independent creative vision. Maybe that was the balance: She wasn’t falsely cutting herself off from the world, but she was true to her creative impulses.
I took away some practicalities, too. In her work, she didn’t stray from abstraction, which I don’t think US audiences value at large in the same way as in other countries. I hated to see how her work was overlooked. I was also shaped by this frustration; it not only made me want to resist aesthetic conformity, but it also made me want to be more insistent and savvy in convincing people about the value of my own work. Maybe I haven’t been too successful at that in prior years!
Poetry often gets seen as something abstract and emotional, ironically both valued and devalued for these same reasons. At least in the short amount of time Film Elegy has been out, I’m really proud of what I’ve been able to achieve socially and culturally with the book. The audiences for the book haven’t just been poets or writers. I’ve gotten all these cinephiles interested in it, and slightly less expectedly, a lot of people who are in the midst of grieving a loss. A big part of the book’s readership is grievers, which maybe all of us are right now. I’ve had a lot of people approach me saying Film Elegy has been meaningful to them because they’ve had someone close to them die and are grappling with that.
In the US, poetry has been culturally cornered as a thing that doesn’t have much use except at weddings and on Valentine’s Day. I tried to have very little expectation going into the release of my book, plus I’d never launched a book before, so I really didn’t know what to expect. But I have to say, more than anything, I’m really proud that I proved that poetry is relevant. Not just to academics and PhDs. For everyone who needs it. No matter their backgrounds or what those needs might be.
When I introduce the book at events, I frequently tell the audience that after Amy died, I had to write Film Elegy; it was something that immediately came out of me. I think people get that on a primal level. If you’ve experienced a death, it does unpredictable things to you. It transforms what comes out of you, how you view time. For me, it reframed urgency. Death punctuates and punctures. It’s the ultimate period, the last sprocket hole. I’ve tried to show that viscerally. I’ve tried to show the hole; I’ve tried to point to the absence, the black, the end.
Mike Corrao is the author of numerous works including the novels Gut Text (11:11 Press) and Rituals Performed in the Absence of Ganymede (11:11 Press); the poetry collections The Persimmon is an Event (Broken Sleep Books) and Under Reef (Onomatopee Projects); the plays Smut-Maker (Inside the Castle) and Cephalonegativity (Apocalypse Party); and the essay collection Surface Studies (Action Books).
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