Boiler
From the Archives
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9m 2s
A young couple heads home for the holidays to find themselves trapped at a family dinner where awkward tension boils into rage. Avant-garde filmmaking based on a poem by Bob Holman, “Boiler” marches to its own beat, a weirdo vision directed by Nicholas Motyka. This isn’t your average meal — for starters, the dinner is placed in a dark void under a spotlight. Quotidian chit chat is replaced with a series of flamboyant recitations, as in: “Eat those dogs / And call up those numb numbers.” Across the table from the blabbering father are his daughter and her partner, who largely sit in silence, until they’re forced to react. Made as a part of the Visible Poetry Project, which tasks filmmakers to create visual interpretations of original and classic poems, Motyka’s film has no designs on clarifying the precise meaning of the poem (you can read it here about a third of the way down the page), but mirrors the spark of its language with uninhibited visuals and melodramatic characterizations. Motyka previously directed “Young Shadow,” which we featured last March.
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