WB Yeats Exhibition
The Yeats Exhibition is on at the National Library of Ireland and recommended for Yeats lovers above all else. On arrival there is a dome shaped multimedia layout that greets you with bright pictures and the sound of William Butler Yeats himself, Sinéad O'Connor and others reciting Yeats' poetry. However I felt a bit disappointed in the sound mixing as it seemed a little invasive at times and barely audible the next. The images that are incorporated in the background are special but occasionally a little too blinding on the eyes. Which somewhat upsets the ambience they were targeting for. The layout seemed somewhat haphazard as they line up ornaments from Yeats' personal collection in the middle of the room enclosed in glass casings. While interesting, it does seem more thought could have been made to given to making more room to stroll around instead of zig zagging from one place to another.
A personal highlight though would be the little rooms off to each side. There are four altogether and are accompanied by TV documentaries on Yeats set to rooms that are intended to remind people of what could possibly be the living conditions for Yeats at the time which come complete with creaky wooden floorboards. But that's about only one highlight I could list in which everything else seemed to disappoint me. The computer aid that was intended to help educate us more about Yeats didn't seem to function fully at times and was more interested in catching my fingerprints and putting them into psychedelic colours. Overall it seemed like a bit of a damp squib but for the creaky floors and the rooms that harken back to olden times. I may not sell this particularly well for people to go out and bask in the personal world of Yeats with his many lives as a poet and playwright and also the tales of Maud Gonne and many other romantic liasons. But for purely historical purposes, it deserves its place.
A personal highlight though would be the little rooms off to each side. There are four altogether and are accompanied by TV documentaries on Yeats set to rooms that are intended to remind people of what could possibly be the living conditions for Yeats at the time which come complete with creaky wooden floorboards. But that's about only one highlight I could list in which everything else seemed to disappoint me. The computer aid that was intended to help educate us more about Yeats didn't seem to function fully at times and was more interested in catching my fingerprints and putting them into psychedelic colours. Overall it seemed like a bit of a damp squib but for the creaky floors and the rooms that harken back to olden times. I may not sell this particularly well for people to go out and bask in the personal world of Yeats with his many lives as a poet and playwright and also the tales of Maud Gonne and many other romantic liasons. But for purely historical purposes, it deserves its place.
If you are reading this, then you will wonder why this has anything to do with film in general. Indeed, when I wrote this, I was thinking the very same thing myself. To my mind it had precious little to do with what I had thought of when I went into this class thinking of Film Studies. The objective was to write a blog about this. So this is basically how it started. With something that I thought was completely off subject. There was something to do with a pictures that would subtly change and you were supposed to be immersed in the sound of voices as they would read out the words of WB Yeats. But the sound was a bit faulty. Having said that, there wasn't really anything to see. We had less than half an hour before it closed for the night, hardly enough time to make an impression and write over 500 or more words on something like that. I managed to get the work in anyway even though I wrote it a week afterwards admittedly in a state of apathy.
ReplyDeleteWhat could I have done better about this essay? I don't know, I think if given more time and if I had given more interest into the subject at hand, I might have given more energy into writing this. As it was, I didn't feel like I was learning anything, all I could see where that things weren't working properly, the sound mixing was horrendous and things that were supposed to work didn't. There's not a lot you can do about that. I also wish that it was more about watching a film at the Irish Film Institute and making a review of the film we had seen but it wasn't to be.