Private Project

Wander at Will

A poem film. Not a story film. Not a documentary. A film poem, a rich collage of image, music, spoken word, and cagy silence in a montage of unique content and poetic import. English language melds with a Yoruba elegy, French baroque music, an Ewe drinking song, Medieval Latin, and a Crow lament in a translingual whole.

  • Bruce Bayne Williams
    Director
    Snake Dance Teacher Dance
  • Project Type:
    Experimental, Short
  • Runtime:
    28 minutes 2 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    April 6, 2025
  • Production Budget:
    10,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States, Brazil, Colombia, Peru
  • Language:
    English, French, Latin
  • Shooting Format:
    16mm, 8mm, videos, digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
Director Biography - Bruce Bayne Williams

In 1967, the first student film I worked on featured a big black bug inspired by Kafka's METAMORPHOSIS. The bug makes a cameo appearance in my current work WANDER AT WILL. Also in W@W are clips from the student films I made with Rick Pedolsky, MARVEL and RANCID ACID. One film always seems to lead to another. I worked on films with Rick in NYC and Philadelphia, including SO HAPPY with Joelle de la Casiniere, which led to LE PETIT TOURISTE in Peru and TABLEAUX DES INDES GALANTES in Colombia. Back home in Maine I made SEASONS and KING KONG IN A BLANKET, and with my Maine man Abbott Meader, SNAKE DANCE TEACHER DANCE, which led to AMERICAN ODYSSEY for the American Orff Schulwerk Association and to 50 years of work in African and African American dance and culture for the remarkable artist Arthur Hall, including ORISUN OMI (THE WELL) in Brazil and ARTHUR HALL'S OBATALA and over 250 hours of films and tapes in the Arthur Hall Collection, now in the Special Collections Research Center in the Temple University Libraries, waiting to see what AI can do with fuzzy looking videos. Clips from all these films are hung loosely on a poem read long ago by my niece and nephew in my current work WANDER AT WILL.

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Director Statement

Jonas Mekas spoke of the poetry of film by way of literary analogy, in addition to the documentary as essay and the narrative film as short story. WANDER AT WILL aspires to be a film poem while literally exploring poetry in film, everything from the usual talking heads through the written word in titles in various combinations, in sync and out of sync, to "silent movies," which may be closer to what Mekas had in mind, e.g. some of Stan Brakhage's films. John Cage holds that there is no silence so long as we live. READ THE GREAT POETS provides something of a backbone for the film, and I also flesh it out with the kind of film poetry Mekas had in mind : echos of Maya Daren in the films of Abbott Meader and other independent filmmakers here and there, Bruce Connor, Brakhage, and Mekas himself. As a schoolboy, I met both Mekas and Cage. In W@W, I call both their names, remembering the voices of dead friends.