Reaching The Head Through The Heart in Between Spirit and Stone

Interview for Poesy Magazine
by Brian Morrisey © 2022 

Where did you find the idea for your film, Julia Vinograd: Between Spirit and Stone?

This film found me. Back in 1986, my first housemate in San Francisco gave me a copy of Julia Vinograd’s The Book of Jerusalem. Having moved to California to become a filmmaker, I was immediately struck by the cinematic quality of these poems. Each one is a story vividly painted with words. I sought out Julia, recorded her reading the entire collection in 1989, and moved to a kibbutz near Jerusalem with the expressed goal of making a short film about them. But I was a young artist and the poems were beyond my grasp. I intuited that I’d return to the project much further down the road when I had earned more lived experience as a human being and found my voice as an artist. The feature film I’m making today highlights the three most crucial chapters of Julia’s life: the historic People's Park uprisings; the infamous Café Babar poetry scene; and Julia’s sublime Jerusalem poems—which still send chills up and down my spine when reading them over thirty years later.

Will we see and hear Julia in the film?

Julia passed away in 2018 and only one audio interview with her survives. For someone who was so omnipresent on the streets of Berkeley, blowing bubbles and hawking her books, I’m stunned and saddened that there is so little moving image footage of her. Nor do any on-camera interviews with her exist. However, you can tell a lot about a person from the remnants of a life lived in service to the written word. So I’ll transpose words from Julia’s writings to visualize and embody her presence. For example, animated lines of her poetry and correspondence will interact with footage of the neighborhoods she inhabited: moving down sidewalks, wrapping around telephone poles, and weaving into the architecture of Telegraph Avenue. I’ll reconfigure Julia’s hand-typed poems into three-dimensional portraits and employ her typewriter to produce text-filled footsteps that I’ll animate to convey her polio-inflected limp.


frame still by Ken Paul Rosenthal from photo by Richard Misrach

Are you concerned that audiences will expect to see Julia performing her poems?

Yes, but I also feel that the dearth of such performance footage will encourage viewers to sift through the miscellaneous artifacts of Julia’s life like an archeologist and piece them together like a puzzle. Julia’s poetry is very colloquial in tone and sprinkled with concrete metaphors. Audio recordings of her reading her poetry will be intercut with the interviews so it will feel like she’s in dialogue with her writing peers, close friends, and fellow activists. I believe that viewers who aren’t familiar with Julia’s writing or her story of thriving in the face of multiple disabilities will become enchanted by her resilience, unabashed nonconformity, and deeply humane poetry.

The Jerusalem poems are entirely unlike anything Julia had written before. What inspired them?

The origin of the Jerusalem poems was an utter mystery to Julia. That they were received in the wake of a thunderclap more than consciously written, as if her hand was being guided by an unseen force. Each poem is a conversation between God and the city of Jerusalem, who are both personified as antagonistic lovers. When Julia tried to sell them on the street, her fans refused her, thinking she had found God or religion because the Jerusalem poems weren't as accessible as her street poetry.


front cover of The Book of Jerusalem

I too was caught off guard by the Biblical and mystical imagery of The Book of Jerusalem poems only to realize that they were essentially love poems and morality tales.

Absolutely. The conflicted dialogues between a personified God and city of Jerusalem pose deep questions about human morality: Why do we keep doing unacceptable things to each other? Who are we really? Where do we go from here? Can one do violence for something you love? By infusing Biblical archetypes with the rhythms of contemporary speech, these poems help us navigate the existential journey of human triumph and despair more intimately.

Julia believed that in her lifetime, her street poetry would make her famous while after her death, the Jerusalem poems would make her immortal. After the original edition was released, she continued writing Jerusalem poems. In 2017, the year before she passed away, she dumped a heap of new Jerusalem poems in my lap. Her publisher, Zeitgeist Press intends to re-release the original edition—for which she won an American Book Award—and include many unpublished Jerusalem poems.

Are you going to film in Jerusalem?

Yes. While I could easily license previously shot footage of Jerusalem, I feel called by that city, just as I did over thirty years ago when I first attempted to make a short film based on The Book of Jerusalem. This calling is deeper than simply wanting to frame shots with my own eye. It’s about allowing the spirit of an unfamiliar land to inhabit me the same way that anyone who has traveled experiences the mundane becoming magical. For me, an ordinary telephone pole might suddenly appear as a scepter, or a talisman, or a place marker for an unseen story. In one Jerusalem poem, Julia referred to a dead child’s lunch box full of lightning bolts and in another to exploding parking meters. She may have been inspired by a lunch box or parking meter she saw in her native Berkeley. But I’m curious how those same objects, when filmed in the city of Jerusalem, might resonate more profoundly as visual metaphors in the film when referenced by a Jerusalem poem.

 
frame still by Ken Paul Rosenthal

The work sample on the film’s website has some wonderful commentary by people who were close to Julia.

We’ve completed seventeen camera interviews with Julia’s fellow poets, publishers, park activists, even her building manager! They’ll deepen our understanding of the unique counterculture where Julia thrived, as well as deepen our understanding of what made her tick. I set up the interviews so that the viewer can look directly into the eyes of the speaker and feel as if they are in conversation with them. I also positioned the interviewees against a black backdrop so that the space around them can function like a blackboard. Quotes about Julia or cited lines from her poems will appear on screen and then slide off frame and into the world where Julia worked and wandered.

frame still by Ken Paul Rosenthal from photo by John Storey

How will the film conclude? In most documentaries that profile a deceased subject, the last chapter is their death.

I’m not interested in turning a final page, closing the book, and rolling the credits. I’d like the film to end with interviewees reading the last poem in The Book of Jerusalem in rounds, followed by a recording of Julia reading the last stanza. I envision this as a euphoric, triumphant note on which to end the film. I cannot imagine a more fitting coda with which to honor Julia's legacy than a selection from her masterwork.

What would be the ultimate success of this film?

My dream is for the film to premiere at the San Francisco International Jewish Film Festival in the magnificently appointed Castro Theater. I’m coveting a local premiere because the epicenter of our fan base is the Bay Area and that community of activists and artists is very connected to the film’s core issues and themes, namely: the legacy of non-violent resistance on today's climate of civic unrest; living outside the conventions of what mainstream society considers normal; and creatively transcending your limitations.

I’d also like the experience of watching this film, like all my work, to be transformative. To offer audiences an emotionally immersive experience that reaches the head through the heart with beauty as the gateway. If viewers feel moved emotionally, they will recognize aspects of themselves in Julia’s story. Above all else, Julia Vinograd: Between Spirit and Stone will convey what we see in Julia’s eyes: compassion, contemplation, and illumination.

Julia Vinograd circa 1967