The Art of Poetry Film with Cheryl Gross: “Death And Co”
Death And Co
Poetry by Silvia Plath (“Death & Co.”)
Directed by David Lobser
Produced by Troublemakers.tv for The Poetry Movement, the Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation
2015
Death And Co is so damn creepy and disturbing that it makes my skin crawl. I love it. The animation is awesome. I’m still trying to figure out how it was done. My guess is the artist(s) used Maya or Cinema 4D. The dark, atmospheric quality gives the viewer a feeling of being in a dreadful, unearthly place. Plath leads us into this strange and unsettling world where there’s no turning back. Like it or not, we must deal with living in her bitter reality.
Sylvia Plath’s prophecy offers us a disturbing glimpse into a place where suffering is the only feeling that exists. It’s both sad and enlightening, but unless you’re a lover of darkness and dystopian forecasting, this is a very hard place to sit and digest. It’s as if we were able to insert a camera into Plath’s mind and capture her nightmares. This video is successful in exposing just that.
Is Plath a soothsayer? Possibly. As we know, she suffered from depression and committed suicide at the age of 30. The Vimeo description of this poem states that she suffered from postpartum depression. I’m not a mental health clinician but upon reading a bit about her history, she had made several attempts at suicide. This leads me to believe she was bi-polar. However, at the end of the day Plath was and still is one of America’s greatest poets regardless of what demons haunted her. Perhaps without this infliction, or inspiration if you will, the world would have been robbed of a literary great.
I also would like to give credit to Troublemakers.tv. They did a fabulous job in capturing the unsettling genius Sylvia Plath is known and admired for.
- About the Author
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Brooklyn native Cheryl Gross is an illustrator, painter, writer and motion graphic artist living and working in the New York/New Jersey area. She is a professor at Pratt Institute.
Cheryl’s work has appeared in numerous films, TV shows, publications, and graces the walls of many corporate and museum collections including: Zebra Poetry Film Festival, Berlin, New York Times, Riverside Museum, Riverside, Ca., The Museum of The City of New York, Mississippi Museum of Art, Laforet Harajuku Museum, Tokyo, Japan, Artist-In-Residency, Kunstlerhaus, Saarbruken, Germany. Finalist Elizabeth Hulings Foundation, 2014, Artist-In-Residency Program, Dilsberg, Germany, 2015, four-time recipient Eileen Kaminsky Family Foundation Residency, Jersey City, 2018-2020, Art Fair 14c 2021-2023, Competition Winner, 2015 Ó Bhéal Poetry Film Festival, Cork, Ireland.
“The work, metaphorically travels through two different forms of representation: abstract and realism, thereby creating a narrative that embraces a socio-political point of view. My narrative follows my childhood fantasies, which focuses on lifestyles that are usually viewed as male dominated.”
