Poem Films #1: 'Negative Space'

A death, a sea in a suitcase, and the things best left said.

I told you I’d be banging on about short films. I’ve written already about how the Oscars see them, what they mean to the big feature animation studios, and just how central they are to animation history. This is a medium, after all, where producing a feature has been prohibitively expensive for many (although technological developments mean this is less true than ever). Many of the greatest animation directors have never made one, and may not even have aspired to; they made their name through short films only.

Long story short: I’ve got a long list of shorts to discuss. Today, I’m approaching them from a different angle.

People working in animation are fond of comparing shorts to poems. Sometimes they add that features are like novels. I see what they mean. Those making shorts are less beholden to the marketplace, more able to work almost or completely alone, and so better placed to experiment with narrative or visual language or whatever else interests them. Self-expression rises to the surface. The brief runtime breeds concision, allusion, metaphor. The great directors are often great poets.

Erlkönig (2015) by Georges Schwizgebel, which is inspired by Goethe’s poem of the same name.

I like this analogy enough that I’ve been tossing it around my mind for a while, and recently thinking about it quite literally: what of shorts that work with verbal poetry? There are plenty. The various versions of Chaucer and Goethe; the many Bukowski adaptations; some that incorporate the original text, some that don’t; some for which the filmmaker writes their own poem. What do these films tell us about how the poetry of animation differs from that of the written word? How do the best ones create beauty? What do they borrow from the poem they are working with, and what do they add?

I’ll be looking at a range of films-with-poems in this and future posts, starting with Negative Space (2017) by Ru Kuwahata and Max Porter, a Japanese-American couple based in the US who also go by Tiny Inventions. The film adapts the poem of the same name by Ron Koertge. Start by reading it here and watching the film below, then read on…

Koertge’s poem tells a short story lucidly, and Kuwahata and Porter adapt it faithfully, keeping the son’s narration in voiceover while more or less showing on screen what he describes. We’re in a stop-motion world of delicate miniatures made from natural materials. Puppet animation can mirror the paraphernalia of childhood play, and the directors exploit this well, their choice of technique setting the atmosphere for the return to the narrator’s boyhood world, which is equal parts memory and imagination.

Right from the off, they also weave in their own ideas. Koertge’s poem is light on metaphor but the film is rich in it. Early on, the road to the father’s funeral turns into the zip of his suitcase, the journey literally opening up the way into reminiscence.

Just before, we saw the clothes pack themselves into the suitcase. Had Koertge described self-packing clothes, it would have seemed jarring or affected. But in the film, we accept the image: these things happen in animation, and it makes sense that the clothes, the crux of the bond between father and son, would carry their own spark of life in the son’s view of things.

Kuwahata and Porter then develop the metaphor. When the son, as a boy, is dropped into the suitcase, the items of luggage form a swash of water, dragging him down to a submarine world where they float about like marine life. They move freely and expressively, unlike the humans themselves—especially the adults—whose gestures are restrained. It is through these objects, as the poem tells us, that things are most strongly felt and communicated.

There is a tenderness here that I find moving. In the poem, the packing instructions, staccato sentences crammed into a tight paragraph, read like curt orders from a stern man. In the film they are spaced out, leaving room for the playful visual elaborations to unfold. The mood is softened by the son’s voice and the shy string music.

The text of a poem has a special integrity, each word contributing to rhythm as well as meaning, even in free verse like Koertge’s. You don’t edit poetry lightly, so it’s worth looking at how Porter and Kuwahata modify the text. They don’t add or remove any lines, but they do tweak a few. There are two significant changes. Where Koertge writes, “Then he’d pretend to put me in the suitcase, and we’d laugh,” they omit “pretend to” and “and we’d laugh”; and at the end, where he writes “him laid out in that big carton and me crying and thinking …” they cut “crying and.”

Laughing and crying are things the filmmakers could show, making the spoken words redundant. But they don’t. When the son is placed in the suitcase—here we enter the earnest realm of a child’s imagination, where there is no “pretend”—he doesn’t laugh so much as look about in astonishment. Later on, as he approaches the casket, he is shot from the back, from a high angle: we don’t see his expression at all. In a way, then, the emotions in the film are more muted, more ambiguous. Albert Birney’s underplayed narration affirms this, as does the framing: we are in medium and long shots most of the time, keeping a discreet distance from the characters. But all this is balanced against the tenderness sparked by the film-specific cues.

Which leads me to the ending. Without the crying, the film magnifies the droll irony of that killer punchline: “Look at all that wasted space.” The line rests on a visual metaphor, the casket reminding the son of a suitcase. But Kuwahata and Porter, although working in a visual medium, need the words to make it land. The analogy between suitcase and coffin, and how space is used in each, isn’t obvious to the viewer (we probably wouldn’t notice it without the words); the son makes the comparison because of how he sees his father, and it is surprising and incongruous and apt all at once. It’s a complex, intimate thought, and I couldn’t think of a way to communicate it as succinctly in images as with words, which are so effective at conveying thought.

Whenever I watch a short film that uses a voiceover, I ask myself whether it could work without the narration. With Negative Space, I got stuck at the end. We need the last line, and so we need the whole thing. Kuwahata and Porter expand beautifully on the poem, exploiting the specificities of animated film, but they also know that some things are best left said.