Output details

Letter to the World

This animated film interprets and represents themes from the poet Emily Dickinson’s life and works. Underpinned by interdisciplinary research into Dickinson’s experiments with hybridity and dual identities, the film investigates the poet’s reduction and enlargement of territories and spheres of influence, her poetic egotism, lucid descriptions of miniature worlds and nature, her mathematical precision, and ultimately, her triumph over death through the legacy of her mind. The film expands interdisciplinary research into the substantially underdeveloped applications of animation and sound design to the interpretation and representation of literary figures, and is innovative in contributing to broader debates on new forms of literary criticism.

The film was produced for the 2010 ‘Emily Dickinson International Symposium’, at which both the film and the underpinning research were presented. Following its initial screening the film was presented at the ‘International Sylvia Plath Symposium’, Indiana University (2012) and ‘6th Berlin ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival’ (2012). The research was also disseminated at the ‘Transatlantic Exchanges’ conference, Plymouth University (2010), ‘American Imagetext’ conference, University of East Anglia (2011), ‘Liberated Words Poetry Film Festival’ (2013) and Hanna’s public professorial lecture ‘Poetry and Animation’, Norwich University of the Arts (2011).

Hanna’s animated imagery is developed from detailed research into 19th century portraiture, maps, events and technologies. It is a physical manifestation of Dickinson’s working methods and poetic tropes including an obsession with geographic geometries and comparative scale. Through animating silhouettes of the American actress Elisabeth Gray integrated with stop-motion object and shadow theatre, Hanna creates an innovative ‘double’ aesthetic, in which two forms of representation imply a third, mirroring poetic metaphor’s dislocation of time and space. Dickinson’s poetic imagination predates the technological possibilities associated with late 19th century moving image and sound technologies, and Hanna exploits the poet’s filmic descriptions of nature, refracted through changing lenses in dramatic miniatures.