Silent all These Years: The Voice in Isabel Fleiss’s Office
(2022)
The Voice in Isabel Fleiss’s Office is Jim Haverkamp’s beautifully realized film enhancement of the poem of the same name by Virgil Renfroe. The poem is written in the voice of Dr. Fleiss, who is treating a patient for the condition of cobwebs in her larynx. This idea becomes an extended metaphor for the pernicious, long-lasting effects of unvoiced thoughts and feelings. In the film, we see Dr. Fleiss (Jane Holding) in her office, talking to her patient (Jessica L. Hudson) as she administers treatment. Holding does a wonderful job with the poem, pulling off that tricky balance between speech which embodies the poetic resonance of the text while still sounding like ordinary, conversational speech. In Hudson’s wordless role as the patient, appropriate for someone whose main characteristic is repressed speech, she conveys layers of unspoken fears, regrets, and anger.
In Renfroe’s poem, the doctor dispenses helpful advice about how to heal oneself from the ill effects of self-censorship. “Every time one whispers longingly the cobwebs loosen,” says the doctor. “But,” she cautions, “love is not enough.” She promises to install a “device” that will enable the patient, in the future, to clean out her larynx by herself.
Dressed in a surgical gown which resembles a priestly vestment, Dr. Fleiss’s office is lit by a stained glass window, indicating the treatment is spiritual rather than physical. A few, well-crafted special effects evoke the creepy idea of cobwebs in the throat, without getting bogged down in overly literal detail.
Before we meet Dr. Fleiss or hear a single line of text, Haverkamp has created a sequence of images which hint at a backstory for the poem, suggesting some of the “troubles” which the patient is so busy not talking about. A momentary glimpse of infant formula warming on the stove raises the notion of a mother’s regrets, and she is also depicted, with a few concise details, as extremely down on her luck, and struggling to get by. These hints are general enough to evoke the emotional atmosphere of a life of unvoiced grievances and worries, without pinning down the character in a way that limits the viewer’s ability to hear the poem’s multiple resonances. In short, the images function poetically rather than as a definite storyline.
One of the film’s visual leitmotifs is to linger on images of strand-like objects: pipelines, railroad tracks, heating ducts. These images echo the internal cobwebs which are examined in the poem. The doctor’s office itself is adorned with networks of string. The film is beautifully lit and shot on black and white 16mm film, giving it a retro feeling that fits with the doctor’s none-too-modern looking office.
Poetry films are a powerful form of cinema, and quite popular, as one can see by the proliferation of film festivals and websites dedicated to the genre. It is always tricky to construct a film from a poem, and there are myriad approaches to the form, just as there are myriad types of poetry. In a poem with a narrative setting, such as this one, the challenge can be to visualize this narrative in a way amplifies the poem’s imagistic effects, so that the filmed version draws on the emotional resonances of the metaphors, relating them to everyday experiences, without the extra weight of too many naturalistic details. Haverkamp is able to achieve this balance with consummate skill, creating a poetic film which embodies and honors the spirit of Renfroe’s text while opening up some of its hidden dimensions through his command of the art of cinema.
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