A Run-Away-Train jumps tracks with the text in this experimental FilmPoem. A contrapuntal collision of sound, imagery, and words. This Train transports Saints and Sinners, obdurate hearts and fresh beginners…
Jim Hall is a 2-time Peabody Award winner for his work in television as part of an investigative team. The Peabody Award is considered the Pulitzer Prize of broadcasting. Working as a cameraman at TV stations around the United States, he became a digital Gypsy moving from town to town telling stories, starting first in his hometown of Pocatello, Idaho. His camera lens has captured lost souls on their way out and fallen angels on their way back up. An Experimental filmmaker and poet now, his FilmPoems have screened at festivals internationally, including two of the biggest, the ZEBRA in Berlin and the Video Poetry Festival in Athens. Hall won the International Prize at the Art Visuals & Poetry Festival in Vienna last year. Pathetically, he writes his own Bio and hopes people see through all the folderol.
Director Statement
Trains transcend the space-time continuum. They are moving metaphors. At the end of our journey we arrive at our fate. “Zuerst” was a poem written by acclaimed Austrian Poet Sophie Reyer. This experimental FilmPoem shuttles the viewer in a different direction than the text. Zuerst takes a critical look at the Western World and it’s beginnings against the backdrop of legendary literary quotes and the poet’s own musings carefully embedded in the body of the poem. The FilmPoem couples that text to Run-Away-Train full of contradictions revealed by quick cuts and imagery bonded with a sonic score that jars the senses. This train doesn’t trundle towards that final station…it screams. All aboard!
