A Journey Of Enlightenment About The Visual And Performing Arts Projects

By Author: emaly su
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Why take time for projects on "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"? Why teach the poem at all, except, perhaps, in a British literature survey or a study of the Romantics or an AP course?

One of my students offered an answer last year in her project proposal: "This ballad is an old sailor's tale that travels to lands all over the map, a tale that takes any listener from any time and place through a journey of enlightenment about self." For this reason, Mariel gathered the class around her in a circle and unpacked from a battered suitcase the vintage album she'd made with stained pages on which she'd written, in faded ink, passages from all seven sections of the poem.

But she had replaced certain ...
... "key words" with equivalents in various foreign languages "to convey my sense of the poem's mystery and universality." For each page she made a visual representation of "the symbolism that lingers in the verbal images"—a different medium for each mood, including collage, cutouts, charcoal, and fabrics. "I want to show that this ballad is a universal story that can liberate all who read or hear it."

Mariel had been struck by the penance required of the Mariner—the agonizing "wrench" that compels him to recount, over and over, his experience of sin, guilt, isolation, and grace.

I pass, like night, from land to land; I have strange power of speech; that moment that his face I see, I know the man that must hear me: To him my tale I teach. (Coleridge 23)

Many students are drawn to the familiar experiences of guilt and isolation. Two boys collaborated on a film about an army vet tormented by memories of having killed a civilian. In their film script, the man lives as a recluse, turns to drugs, and finally commits suicide. Noah was taking Advanced Art Photography, and Pat took Media Arts. In his reflection on their project, Noah wrote the following:

Our skills complemented each other well. We both thought guilt was the most interesting aspect of the poem and that it would lend itself well to film. The Mariner is able to deal with his guilt through blessing the water snakes, and the albatross falls from his neck; he spends the rest of his life doing penance by re-telling his story. But in our film the character is never able to come to terms with what he did and can only take his life. We wanted to capture the desperation the mariner feels after his crew is killed and the hopelessness that ensues until he's able to pray.

Pat did more than I did during the editing process, due to his familiarity with the Final Cut editing software. My photo experience helped with cinematography and where to cut shots. We wanted to use montage and a powerful soundtrack to tell the vet's story . . . After we came up with the story, we brainstormed various images we could use, symbolic ones and ones to help make the set authentic-looking. We set a date for shooting, and in between Pat wrote the voiceovers for us to discuss.

We shot the film in my basement, with an old mattress on the floor and a battered TV to provide more images, and we also shot in the bathroom, where we used a tight frame to exclude anything that would suggest an upscale room and focused on reflections of the guy's face in the mirror. We used just one actor, to stress the vet's reclusiveness and because it was easier. Nick is an amazing actor, and it helped that he'd already read the poem. . . .We used a variety of editing techniques and spent a lot of time choosing music.

I think the fourth goal is where we're weakest and we chose to sacrifice this a little, because we made our own story and so maybe it can't 'enrich the audience's experience of the poem.' Actually, many students wrote in their assessments that Pat and Noah's project did enrich their reading by making them think about the question of how guilt works differently in different people.

Several wondered if the vet had any religious beliefs he could have turned to; they felt that even though the Mariner cut him off from God by killing the albatross, he wanted to pray and some force worked in him so he could "bless" the snakes he'd earlier seen as ugly. They suggested the vet had deliberately chosen to isolate himself and couldn't make an effort to communicate in any way—which, they said, would lead to the total separation of suicide.