Still from The Casket of Lady Rowena by Ben Winter, screening Friday, December 11.
Wherever you were last Friday night—if it wasn’t the BMA, don’t repeat your mistake tonight. Be there for the final screening of original films by area filmmakers, The 48 Hour Film Project: A Cinematic Celebration of Edgar Allan Poe.
This fantastic journey into the macabre was curated by Baltimore’s Rob Hatch, a talented videographer whose work has been featured on HBO and The Discovery Channel as well as in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9-11. Participants were given a theme—Love & Loss, Fear & Terror, or Madness & Obsession—from the BMA’s exhibition Edgar Allan Poe: A Baltimore Icon. The filmmakers then chose a character or a line from a Poe story. As Hatch explained, because this was a celebration and not a competition, he elected to give filmmakers more than 48 hours to complete their work if needed. The results show his wisdom!
Speaking as the curator of the BMA’s exhibition, I was thrilled with the high level of creativity evident in Charm City’s filmmakers.
Some stuck close to the author’s plots and words. In Life in Death, Franciska Farkas, Diana Gross, and Amy Genevieve Kozak created an elegant and powerful rendition of Poe’s The Oval Portrait, a short story about an obsessed painter who dabs at his bride’s portrait for so long that she expires before it is completed. Poe’s words narrate romantic scenes shot at local historic sites, The Cloisters in Baltimore County and the Garrett Jacobs Mansion in Mt. Vernon.
Still from Life In Death by Franciska Farkas, Diana Gross, and Amy Genevieve Kozak, screening Friday, December 11.
In Rabbit Hole by Nick Prevas, the male character sought his lost Lenore of The Raven fame. Here, however, the lovely but weird lady suffers from narcolepsy. Like Alice in Wonderland reborn, she appears and disappears from a closed coffin, sucked into a dark space where a huge dancing rabbit presides over mysterious events. Parts of this film were shot in a warehouse in Pigtown. Clearly, Baltimore offers no end of evocative sets!
Stephanie Barber captured the essence of The Tell-Tale Heart in her film of the same name with incredible economy—no blood, no gore, just a bare wooden floor and the terrifying beating of the victim’s heart.
Other filmmakers brought Poe’s concepts very much into the 21st century. In The Purloined Letter by Many Americans Productions, a slightly pompous statesman seeks a missing disc—the digital version of the damaging letter that is stolen from a member of the royal household in Poe’s short-story, The Purloined Letter.
Bryan “Grasshopper” Robinson’s Recess moves further away from a one-on-one correspondence to Poe’s writing, but captures perfectly the writer’s fascination with unbalanced minds. Two obsessed women—one unreasonably focused on board games, the other a devotee of fragrances inserted in fashion magazines—seek friendship with each other. Suffice it to say, their obsessions get in the way!
Chris Lamartina’s drawings for The Immature Burial invent a graveyard romance between a boy and girl that culminates in the dismemberment of a cat, which seeks vengeance by decapitating his murderer (the ultimate revenge of Poe’s feline in The Black Cat).
You can see some of these shorts, plus a whole new set of films at the BMA tonight from 8 p.m. to 10 pm. And try to see the filmmakers’ inspiration, Edgar Allan Poe: A Baltimore Icon, open from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.
The exhibitions and screenings are both FREE! Come early; space is limited and there was a very full house last week.
Mark your calendar
Look for Streetfilms in Baltimore with special guest Clarence Eckerson Jr. at the Metro Gallery on January 5 at 5:30 p.m. Streetfilms produces videos that show how cities around the world are reclaiming their streets for pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders.
Doreen Bolger is always on the move because she can’t stop seeing, supporting, and writing about the arts in and around Baltimore City. Her lengthy love affair for the arts began in Long Island when her father, an executive in the textile industry, brought home breathtaking fabrics every night from the heart of the garment district. 