Do Not Go Gentle

A note for viewers: This video is in vertical portrait format and looks especially good on your phone and in full screen. It also has a high quality sound track which comes across well with earphones. 

Hera Lindsay Bird is the poetical iconoclast of Aotearoa New Zealand, and the queen of over-sharing. Her poems deal variously with outdated sitcoms, voluntary urination and sexual fantasies with famous dead (and sometimes living) poets.

Accused of narcissism, she responded by pointing out that “it’s kind of funny when people talk about young women’s writing as being narcissistic. I mean how many novels are there about a middle-aged professor having an extra-marital affair with a young co-ed?” (Guardian, 2017). 

In Do Not Go Gentle, Bird takes Dylan Thomas’s angsty demand for a passionate life and a meaningful death as a starting point for this exposition into an intimate – if fraught – relationship. 

Where Thomas’s original work is a passionate cry for “wild men” to “rage, rage against the dying of the light”, Bird’s is contemplative, asking simple questions: “what’s so bad about going gentle …? What’s wrong with the good night?”

Luke McPake’s animated film places all this in the context of the beach at sunset, the space where things end and other things begin. His animation explores the simultaneous edge of day and night, and land and sea.

Both the poem and the video embrace the questions: why are we drawn to these places? And why – when we get there  – are we obsessed with documenting them photographically? Is it banal? Or – as Susan Sontag might have it – murderous? Or are we just in it for the Likes?

Hera Lindsay Bird (left), Luke McPake (right)

Credits:
Written and read by Hera Lindsay Bird
Produced, lllustrated and animated by Luke McPake
Poem recorded by Jordan Smith at Native Audio
Location sound recording by Luke McPake
Additional sound recording, mix and master by Timon Martin

Special thanks to Kate Newton, Yamila Palatnik

Commissioned by Going West Writers Festival with the support of Waitākere Ranges Local Board, Auckland Council and Creative New Zealand