So then I decided to make an ~art film~.
Who is the Somaturge?
The Somaturge is the main character associated with Somaturgy productions. The character both is and is not me. The character is... a refined, focused collection of aspects of me, reflective of many of the elements of my personality that are most essential to who I am... but not all of them, and not in a balanced way.
The Somaturge is a fictionalized and idealized self. Idealized in the sense of having what I feel to be an "ideal" personality based on a few primary components, not in the sense of being without flaws. The Somaturge is an incredibly flawed character -- but in a way I control and in a way I find interesting and entertaining. If sometimes in a somewhat sadistic way.
The Somaturge is genderless, but mostly meant to be read as more "male" than "female." I'll therefor use "he" to refer to him. So... he is a mad scientist with the heart of a poet. You don't see much of the mad scientist element in this video, but that's to come soon enough. He can be played to comedic or dramatic effect as necessary, having somewhat of a leaning towards the archetype of the "sad clown." He has, naturally, a sordid past and manically unstable life in the "present."
There has always been a Somaturge character somewhere in my repertoire of creative works -- a character I invent and play with who fits more or less this same pattern. So I can't say that there is actually very much of this character that I've based on other people's works -- but to give credit where it is due, there are a few who helped to shape the naming and definition of the Somaturge and his purpose.
First and foremost, the word "Somaturge" is one I first saw in the book Iron Council by China Mieville. That character, Judah Low, is one of the three fictional characters I most identify with, the other two being Therem Harth rem ir Estraven from The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin and Pierre Gringoire from Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo. From that book comes part of the idea about golems connecting with stories, but I really learned about golems a very long time ago, from the movie It!, starring Roddy McDowall (my favourite actor of all time) as a museum director's assistant who discovers how to bring a golem to life and use it to his own advantage. It's a blatant rip-off of Frankenstein but I like it so much better.
There will be a lot more to be said about the Somaturge as this project lurches forward, so I think I'll leave it at this for now until other aspects become apparent through my ability to SHOW them in videos as well as EXPLAIN them in over-long blog entries. Just know that there's more to the character than the rather emo critter you see in the video above.
About This Series
Somaturge poetry WILL be a continuing series. I have been a life-long lover of poetry and I strive to show others how to appreciate it. There are so many people who say they "hate" poetry, usually because some dumbass grade school or high school teacher "ruined" it for them by forcing them to dissect some poor dead sap's verses to the point of meaninglessness. It's tragic. I've kept several blogs in the past that consisted only of reposting poetry I enjoyed, but I think dramatizing it and reading it aloud may help to get the point across and translate to a broader audience what I see and feel and hear when I read my favourite poetry. I want to do that with the Somaturge (as opposed to reading as myself or any other character I make up for other video series) because I think poetry should be as genderless as I try to make that character, open to interpretation from everyone. The Somaturge will inevitably end up cast as different "roles" (just wait until I'm ready to tackle J. Alfred Prufrock, JUST YOU WAIT, muahahaha!), but still remain always himself in some sense. I like the challenge of that. And I like thinking that I can eventually hone my film-making skills enough to make my dramatized readings entertaining and interesting enough to make my favourite poems accessible to more people.
Additional Notes
Just as a point of interest, that's not real wine. I mean... it could have been, but it's not. It's water that got colored as a side-effect of my testing out a science kit I want to review on polymer properties. The dyes turned the water the color if white wine. I funneled it into an old bottle and poured and pretended to drink it.
Why didn't I use real wine? Well... because I'm still sadly a recovering victim of a cold that tricked me into thinking I'd recovered from it, then hit me again the day after my filming session for my last video. So now I have an annoyingly persistent cough and am living off Hall's cough drops.
I don't know if you've ever tried to mix cough drops with wine, but trust me... the taste is a lot worse than pretending to drink dyed water. Besides which, I don't exactly need any alcohol to make my brain fuzzier than it's making itself at this point. :P It would have been a waste of good booze to use real wine when I wasn't going to drink it. But I think this looks real enough.
And finally... it's worth noting that most of the footage you see here comes from the FORTH time I filmed this. The first takes, based on my original concept, were filmed in Mouse's parents' boiler room, of all places... I had this idea about being backlit and shooting a silhouette against the weird diagonals of the woodwork under the basement stairs... and it might have been pretty cool, if I hadn't shot all the takes I did about three centimeters to the right of where I should have been, leaving a tiny sliver of a bulb exposed, but it was enough to make all of that footage totally useless. Except for the audio track, some of which is pasted into this video over my NEW footage.
And I honestly do like this better -- the original footage is just... a talking head. I feel like this at least makes a gesture towards telling a story and setting a scene. It is vague, but I like it, I like that it contributes to the development of the Somaturge's character by letting me ~act~ instead of just showing... a talking head.
Lesson learned: Art evolves.
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