The Blue from Heaven: a legend of King Arthur of Britain
- Submitting institution
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Norwich University of the Arts
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- NUA-SJH-02
- Type
- Q - Digital or visual media
- Publisher
- -
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2019
- URL
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https://nua.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/id/eprint/17345
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
-
- Research group(s)
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A - Created and Contested Territories
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Suzie Hanna’s collaborations with poets and scholars of literature led her to animate Stevie Smith’s drawing to accompany her poem ‘Childe Rolandine’ to help advertise Smith researcher Dr Noreen Masud’s conference on the poet. Hanna’s research into Smith’s life and poetry eventually resulted in an animation and reading of the poet’s ‘The Blue from Heaven’ using Smith’s drawings and drawing style.
The film is part of Hanna’s ongoing research and practice of poetry animation that makes an innovative contribution to interdisciplinary research into representations of poems. Hanna identified over 70 of Smith’s drawings that she considered appropriate for the animation. She adapted Smith’s drawing style and animated Smith’s drawings, such as the poet’s drawings of birds and women. Similarly, she took colour and texture references from this and other poems to develop the animation.
Hanna used unpublished drawings Smith made to accompany the poem held in the Stevie Smith Archive at the University of Tulsa. She secured permission to use and animate Smith’s drawings from the poet’s Estate. She approached Glenda Jackson to read the poem informed by the actor’s research and understanding of Smith’s life and work as she had played the poet in the 1978 feature film 'Stevie'.
Hanna identified a range of character stereotypes to express the way that divergent male and female aspirations and attitudes to relationships are explored in Smith’s poetry and in her drawings. Moreover, Smith’s drawings often suggest different readings of the text than the tone or content of the poem itself. The film reflects the rhetorical nature of the structure of Smith’s poem.
For Hanna, Smith’s drawings and poems are deceptively simple, with simplicity being the essence rather than the opposite of complexity.
The Blue from Heaven premiered at the Athens Animfest in March 2019 and won an award in 2020.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
