Creative Access Notes for a Film Poem by Razia Aziz, Naomi Foyle and Wendy Pye.
The two sound files are followed by the texts.
Audio Description Notes.
Credits.
AUDIO DESCRIPTION NOTES
‘Salt, Snow, Earth’ is a one-minute filmpoem of fast-paced imagery delivered through split screens framed in black, jump cuts and superimpositions, deftly edited in time to the jittery, clattering rhythms of the percussive soundtrack and its punctuating sighs. The filmpoem opens with close up images of a diverse range of hands, young and old, in various shades, tattooed, beringed or nude, aggressively making six different signs for Salt, Snow and Earth – a claw, a slap and a fist, as in the poem, and the three words in British Sign Language: motions suggesting sprinkling salt, falling snow, and flat land. At the line ‘And So It Goes’, the hands give way to a dizzying carousel of archival images of human violence, suffering and protest: world war one heavy artillery, African child labourers, enslaved African Americans, child prisoners in a concentration camp, suffragists, contemporary protestors for Palestinian liberation, overcrowded refugee ships, a Nazi procession, the Ku Klux Klan, modern far right marches, and more, almost too fast to register, interspliced with imagery of environmental devastation: cracked earth, a forest fire, belching smokestacks, exploding munitions. The hands return, their incessant game now joining the historical imagery, which proceeds in a dizzying march though military helicopters, Hitler youth, the Black Power movement and a fist painted like a rainbow with a pink heart on its wrist. With that colourful burst of defiance, the archival footage falls away and the hand game dominates the screen again, the hands superimposed over each other now as they hurtle toward the film’s ominous conclusion: black and white footage of snowfall, dark trees, a mushroom cloud, more snow and trees, the torso of a man making the BSL sign for the planet – a large circle – then fading away into a screen full of snow. To get the same feeling as watching Snow, Snow, Earth, you might like to spin in a circle as you listen to the filmpoem. Again and again and again.