Five Bells. - Review - audio-visual reviews

Afterimage, Nov, 1999

Five Bells, produced by Roar Film, Australia (Tel:03-6224-9866 or e-mail roarfilm@trump.net.au). Produced by the two-person collaborative team of Roar Film, Five Bells is a gorgeously illustrated multi-textual exploration of the eponymous 1937 poem by Australian Kenneth Slessor. In the poem, a lifetime occurs in the mind of the drowning main character as five ship bells ring in the city harbor. Occasioned by the tragic death in 1927 of Slessor's young co-worker, newspaper illustrator Joe Lynch, the poem has been an enduring cultural marker for Australians and has been voted "Australia's Favorite Poem."

The CD-ROM moves smoothly from the complex sepia-toned image of a cluttered desk in a dark attic that serves as a visually-based hyper-linked site map to a number of multi-media explorations of the poem, its author and its subject. These include a 15-minute live film realization of Lynch's last hours and ultimate demise with a voice-over of the poem to the original newspaper account of Lynch's drowning to music both created for this project and taken from that era. It also includes audio tracks of other Slessor poems read by several well-known contemporary authors as well as a comprehensive bibliography of both Slessor's work and critical writings about it. This collaborative project includes input from graphic artists, filmmakers, writers and musicians. Five Bells is a complex, yet easily-navigated arid poetic tribute to the young life lost that inspired a work that has endured for more than six decades.