Walking Backwards into the Sublime

Ye Mimi’s video project, “Was Being Moved” combines animation with real film images and brings together two forms of art expression: poetry and film. This project appears to be something different than two genres being expressed at once, and rather combines poetry and film into creating its own, single genre.  

“Was Being Moved” depicts animated postcards to a Mr. Parade, the author telling him about feeling a man push them to move or walking backwards to be able to see further. These postcards are interspersed between images and videos of crowds and strangers in busy cities. These images express just as much thought as the words do, and they eventually come together when the postcard writer shares a song she wrote. Most of the words and the video seem to be almost random, not really supporting each other but providing something new to say. As she sings, different images flash through, mostly out of focus or distorted in some way. We are not exactly sure what we are seeing, but this works perfectly as these phrases in Mimi’s poem also do not seem to be perfectly clear in their meaning.  

The poem and the video work together to express Mimi’s theme. Devitt states that genre is created through reoccurring situations and the response to them. We find genre in a text by looking into the context of a text, looking for the situation. He also claims that “genres construct and respond to situation” and when we bring two genres together, they need to dynamically work together to aptly express the message (Devitt, 4). Ye Mimi brings together film and poetry and erases the border between the two, creating her own genre.  

This could definitely be considered a sublime project. Though her words often seem simple, there is a lot to process within the poem. One line in the poem is “After listening to the cow and sheep that walk along a sunny day, even the smallest ear starts to shine”. This alone is a strange concept.  Sublime does not necessarily mean profound or emotion-provoking, but does seem to require a sense of deep insight, according to Longinus. Ye Mimi seems to grasp this concept well. Her metaphors and lyrics meld with the videos so well to create something to think about.