Wander at Will
This piece is Amazing!
The Visuals ... Beautiful!
At some points in the film,
I felt it reach inside my chest
and massage my Heart.

~ Barbara Kinney
Eurydice in the original
ballet Orpheus

One minute teaser - click here


Bayne Williams Film
ILE IFE Films

28:00 min. Digital Mixed Media 2025
An Ode to DEI

Based on a true poem by James Tate
Read the Great Poets

Images and sounds drawn from the films of Bruce Williams
from the films of Abbott Meader
from the films of the Arthur Hall Collection
and from the films of Montfaucon Research Center

What good is life without music.
But that's impossible,
one shuffle has always led to another.
One man hears it start on his lathe,
a mother beats her eggs.
There's a typewriter in the next room.
Two cars are angry at each other.
The baby downstairs is wet again.
I remember the voice of a dead friend.
Everything speaks at the same time.
Music will watch us drown.

Images of an ancestral shrine from Memphis, Tennessee
including pictures of Arthur Hall, C. Edward White
Milton Batiste, Billie Holiday

Bhinda Keidel, solo saxophone


Elegy for Arthur Hall
Wande Abimbola

Yoruba Odu from the 256 books of Ifa Divination Poetry
Professor Abimbola is the Awise of Ife

New Orleans Jazz Funeral archival footage from Milton Batiste
Fat Tuesday and all that jazz
Requiem
Nin Nin Wo
Choreography by Arthur Hall


2nd Stanza

I write letters to all those from whom I receive
and to many of those from whom I don't.
I read books, anything, useless piles of random
insufferable rubbish for which, in my torpid panic,
I fall through time and space each day
in my foolish way, remembering only the present feeling,
not the village with its face of death,
nothing to be carried secretly in a car.
I move from the stiff-backed chair
to the brown leather one
as the day wears on. And then finally
the couch, allowing the spirit to leave
the broken body and wander at will.
Lately it's a pasture of Holsteins she longs for.

Images and music from TABLEAUX DES INDES GALANTES
French baroque opera (1735) by Jean Phillip Rameau

Excerpts from "We dream this river whole"
by Walter Easton


A Prophesy (1975)

They are are colonizing more and more.
Now they are entering the Amazonas forests.
That are cutting all, all, all.
They are not leaving rests for reforestation.
They don't think in it.
And it's a great danger if the world continues in this form.
In a hundred years, it will be destroyed.


3rd Stanza

There's a certain point in each evening when I have to put on
some really soul-shattering rock-and-roll music and comb my
hair into this special caveman fright-wig. I've done as much as
two or even three dollars worth of damage to my apartment in
one hour of all-stops-pulled Bacchic, Dionysian celebration
and revolution of this great dull life, so fascinating it hypno-
tizes you and then puts you to sleep, only to never know the
ending. It's strange though, no one ever complains. Is it what I
feared all along? We are playing the same song and no one has
ever heard anything.

Train Station poem excerpts
Walter Easton, Was it Vishnu or just his name
Elizabeth Gordon McKim, Mud Matters
Martin Steingesser, Money Medicine Poem
Etheridge Knight, The Uncle Disappeared
Gwendolyn Brooks, But I'd say it's fine
Allen Ginsberg, Howl

A complete poem
Langston Hughes, Harlem [2] (A Dream Deferred)

Bob Dylan, Subterranian Homesick Blues (excerpt)
William Shakespeare, Hey Ho, the Wind and the Rain (excerpt)


Ghanaian Drinking Song
Wulomei in the USA

Song in the Ewe (pronounced EH-WAY) language
Performed by Arthur Hall
as taught by Saka Acquaye

Images of Saka Acquaye and Wulomei's 1980 USA tour
With clips of "Sasabonsam" (Folk Opera)


Poetic Interlude
For Jonas Mekas

Dance Therapy & Movement Education
Walter Easton, conclusion of Was it Vishnu or just his name


Silent Movies
2:31 after John Cage

Obatala / Baxter State School for the deaf / Angel of the Hours
Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus
Walter Easton's Mud Man


The Last Stanzas of
Read the Great Poets

People read poems like newspapers, look at paintings as
though they were excavations in the City Center, Listen to Mu-
sic as if it were rush hour condensed. They don't even know
who's invaded whom, what's going to be built there (when, if
ever). They get home. That's all that matters to them. They get
home. They get home alive.

O Fortuna from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana
Medieval Latin from a Goliardic poem

So what it's been burgled. The heirlooms. Mother's rings, fa-
ther's cufflinks. They go to a distant island and get robbed
there. It's the same eveywhere. Read the great poets, listen to
the great composers. It's the same everywhere. The Masters.
The Thieves.


To create a little flower is the labor of ages.
William Blake

Crow Lament
Siouan language from southeast Montana


End titles / Credit scroll


Preview available to selected film festivals
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