In 2010, Jaden Smith co-led The Karate Kid alongside Jackie Chan, a reboot of the 1984 martial arts classic. I was eight in 2010, and you would not have been able to convince me that this film was anything other than the most important piece of art in human history. In the film, Jaden is poor, Black, scrawny, obsessed with karate, bullied relentlessly, and living with his single mother (terrifically played by Taraji P. Henson). Watching this son and mother duo was the closest I have ever felt to superstardom. Finally, they were making movies about us—we poor Black and brown karate kids.
While trying to fill holes in my manuscript last year, I passed the time by playing with lightsabers and doing air karate (I will eventually regret admitting to this). Revising a project about my childhood with my single mother and swish-swishing through my bedroom brought an image of Jaden in that final scene where he performs a whooping crane backflip kick. I immediately rented The Karate Kid on YouTube. The last time I saw it, I was prepubescent, so seeing Jaden practice “jacket on, jacket off kung-fu” in cornrows returned me to my young, awkward body. It took me back to fighting to keep a straight face as Momma fixed my tender head with cornrows; it took me back to seasons where I imagined our porch’s wood posts were Wing Chun training dummies.
Writing on films and the visual arts often allows that kind of traversal. Over the last six months, my poetry has been exclusively ekphrastic (that being, writing that describes or responds to another piece of art that is usually visual). My love for writing ekphrasis lies in how it forces our eye to become an internal organ. Exploring what we see in art gives insight into our interior world—our obsessions, our specific fears.
Within the genre of writing on artwork, films might as well be entire galleries or museums filled with visual and auditory material. Add to that the wealth of secondary material surrounding the filmmaking (interviews, posters, trailers), and films can easily become hotbeds for poetic responses. Just this year, an anthology on film-based poems was released through the Pacific Coast Poetry Series: Poetry Goes to the Movies, edited by Suzanne Lummis. There’s a great deal of excitement in poets taking films to task, with some utilizing the space of a collection to fully explore just one film (see Tarta Americana by J. Michael Martinez).
How does Film Ekphrasis contrast with the more traditional painting-based ekphrasis? Imagine two poems: one responding to Ernie Barnes’s The Sugar Shack painting, the second responding to Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. In writing both poems, we may ask ourselves similar craft questions: (1) is the goal to write a self-sufficient poem that wouldn’t necessitate viewing the original art, (2) where is the tension and/or unity between the voices of the original art and our voice as the responding poet, and (3) what will we omit or ‘lose in translation’ from the original art and what new material can the we add to the conversation. On the other hand, the different venues or mediums of these pieces bring distinctive concerns. One poem about one film usually does far more omission than one poem about one painting. Where do we even start with Sinners—all sorts of questions pop up: do we approach the film through its plot, should we choose one potent scene or character, what should we do with the soundtrack, how much “catching up” should we do for an unfamiliar audience, are we even aiming to write toward an unfamiliar audience? These questions should excite us.
For my own writing, I try to keep in mind that ekphrasis is largely a game of omission and selection. It reveals so much about a speaker to see what their eyes and ears are focused on. For example, when I see Ernie Barnes’s The Sugar Shack, my eye is drawn to the gentleman in a blue hat sitting near the stage, slumped over and motionless as he is surrounded by a dancefloor of liquid-bodied blues folk; what does seeing him say about me (spoiler alert, dancing makes me break out in hives)? In responding to films, the omissions mean even more because of how much more visual, auditory, and plot details we’re choosing to omit. It means even more to focus on a five-minute scene or one shot in a 90-minute film.
In “Jaden Smith Stole Our Role in The Karate Kid” and my other ekphrastic work, I am practicing what it’s like to bridge and break the points of contact between the visual and the written form. That means discovering where I’m bringing my own history into my viewing; that means seeing where the film and I are talking past each other, what are our hangups? In practical ways, it means getting creative about the form and POV; the swooping lines and harsh enjambments of my poem were an attempt to embody the karate, and the “we” voice was a gesture to communicate how seeing a Black family like mine represented on screen made me feel spiritually tied to all the families and young BIPOC kids who must have experienced the same awe in finally seeing themselves.
There is a special tension within ekphrasis between our urge to describe an artwork by its own terms and the urge to reveal how the artwork subjectively affects us. In other words, there is a push and pull against what the writer is seeing and how they are seeing it—a tension between the filmmaker and the poet. The spark, then, is conveying what devastates us about the art and why it attracted our attention. We aren’t after a flat recounting of the facts (that’s what the IMDb summaries are for). In seeing what the art is trying to say, we shouldn’t forget what we are trying to hear.
For me, even after all these years, I still can’t shake how desperately I will always want to be Jaden Smith at the end of this movie, handing a karate trophy to his proud mother.
