FILMS
EMILY DICKINSON: A CERTAIN SLANT OF LIGHT
Julie
Harris takes viewers into Emily Dickinson’s home in Amherst,
Massachusetts, to couple and contrast facts about the poet with her
extraordinary, original insights. A recluse in her father’s mansion
on Main Street, Dickinson composed almost all of her remaining work
here. From cellar to cupola, the film invokes her “certain slant
of light” while Harris recites Dickinson’s poetry or prose.
Other locations are Amherst College, Mount Holyoke Seminary, the town cemetery next door to her childhood home, and commanding views on the shores of the Connecticut River. The paradox of Dickinson at home exercising a limitless imagination, announced in her startling poem, “The Brain is Wider than the Sky,” underlies the whole program (30 min.).
