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 →Murder Ballad Monday→“Omie Wise” at the Movies
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“Omie Wise” at the Movies

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Here is Dylan Tuccillo’s award-winning short film, “Omie Wise — A Folktale.”  It presents another contribution to the legend, I suppose, with a modern, if not entirely realistic setting. 


I’ll keep my thoughts, when I add them, to the comments section.  I want to avoid introducing spoilers here, but I am very interested in what you think about how this piece ties to the song.  What do you think–faithful to the original or not?  


Omie Wise – A Folktale from Dylan T on Vimeo.

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Comments

“Omie Wise” at the Movies — 5 Comments

  1. You know, I wonder if this really is very much like something you mentioned in an earlier post. You suggested that the Omie in the ballad is playing some weak cards in life. The short presents the same.

    Though the broader narrative does not match that of the ballad, the girl at the center of it all is still vulnerable. She must face death, albeit in different ways between the two. Love and lust intertwine as well. She is ‘damaged’. Even if we can’t relate to that feeling (and I always forget how many of us CAN), we can all relate to love, lust and death. Oh, yes.

    Unlike the ballad, the girl in the short is redeemed. She finds love AND life. The ballad never takes us there, seemingly; except, for me, in my experience of the music. The trick is that that performance itself wakes me up. It revives me.

    The short, for me, was the same.

  2. Amazing work here, and totally new to me. I want to explore this more, but don’t have the time right at the moment. In short, minutes after watching it, my gut feeling is that there is something about this deeply connected to the song for me. It chews some of the same emotional ground, but it’s not about narrative similarities. The symbolism throughout is powerful, and I’m sorting through it… the apples, the worms, the weeds, the earth, the fish, the water, the radio dial… ugh, I can feel it churning in my subconscious, and I know it’s working in that same place the song does, but I can’t say in what ways yet! More soon…

    • I just now watched this, and I agree. I don’t quite know what to do with this yet, but it’s churning. I do think it works in the same place the song does. The relief I felt at the end was palpable.

    • Yeah, if that film had let me down at the end, it would have been crushing. The disappearance of Sam was pretty disturbing to me. The blood on the cloth; and so much else. It just had to be ok.

    • I think we have the fear for Omie in the film primarily because we know the song, and because the narrator tells us that the most notable thing about Omie was “all the terrible things that kept happening to her.” But despite the music, the events that happen to Omie, and what the narrator says, other signals pointed away from a dire ending for me. I guess I had a hunch that if it was going to go that way, it would have been more realistic. I still had my doubts about Kit.

      Pat commented on Facebook the other day that “the song plays the singer.” I think that’s right, although I would say that the singer, unlike the viewer, takes some kind of responsibility for unfolding the narrative. And, in a song like “Omie Wise,” the singer takes up multiple roles in the narrative—a third-person narrator, Omie, and John Lewis. (For these purposes, at least, I think the listener is more like the singer than the viewer.)

      In the movie, though, we are more passive as viewers, and if we inhabit the perspective of anyone, it is Omie. That’s probably why a tragic end for her would be particularly hard to take in the movie, even though it’s a given in the song. With the song, the singer or listener takes up the song because of the known outcome. We probably need Omie to survive the movie for the same reasons we need to sing/hear the song.

      If you’ll pardon the pun, it’s hard to do an apples-to-apples comparison here because of the differences between the media. I think Tuccillo recognized the differences between film viewers and song singers/listeners, and crafted his folktale with that in mind.

      Also, on an unrelated note, I just noticed that Pete Seeger’s grandson, Tao Rodriguez-Seeger, provides some of the music for the film.

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