Strange things...

So today I decided to try a little bit of an experiment to see how other people interpret Dickinson, and I found this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwVZtT9uDNM

It is, to say the very least, a creative...unique....silly interpretation of Dickinson's "Because I could not stop for death." The question I must ask is how this helps one to understand the poem? Yes, it incorporates visual aspects of the poem, and (I would only suppose) places the work in a little more of a contemporary mindset.

What I found particularly interesting about this video was how it portrayed Emily Dickinson herself. In the beginning, she is the typical dark, bothered, surly, recluse character dressed in white and sunk in a depression that separates her from the rest of the world. But, through the quirky approach they take towards the work, Emily becomes a little bit more human. Does this make the poem easier to understand at all, or is it just a creative...and, I must say again very silly in my opinion, approach to poetic interpretation.


Then, there was this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjlqWWkQ79Q

This is a much more artistic interpretation of the work. The lack of any spoken poetry will certainly make the work slightly confusing to those who are not familiar with the poem, and it would probably be a little more advantageous to watch the work as you read along with the poem. Still, all that being said, I felt that it was a really unique interpretation of the poem, obviously incorporating all of the visual elements of the work, but in a much more abstract way.

Anyways, I felt this was an interesting approach to attempting to understand a work. Creating both of these videos would require the filmmaker to have an understanding of the poem itself, but clearly the videos in of themselves are made with the intention of helping others to understand them. I think their goal was accomplished in some ways, and not in others.