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for the centennial of his birth in 1987, as Ackerman's
animation was a homage to Norman MacLaren, made a few months
before MacLaren died.

   In the hour of decision, though, we chose to make a film of
that particular poem because it met certain real-world needs of
independent filmmaking. First, Primiti Too Taa was the right
length. The beautiful miniatures I had been performing with my
collaborators in First Draft (Andrew McClure and Susan
McMaster) each took under a minute to unfold; others of my
pieces were five or six minutes in length and would likely
demand elaborate animation. But the company in Toronto that
developed film for Ed charged for a minimum of one hundred
feet. That's about two and a half minutes of film.
Coincidentally, my improvisation based on the Ursonate lasted a
little over two minutes.

   What's more, the sound poem was conceptually easy to 'type.' 
It demanded no shading of grain elevators with x's and o's. 
A single letter can become a character in this drama. When I say
FFF, a file of F's snakes across the screen. A few choruses of
rakete rinzekete rakete rinzekete rakete rinzekete  
fill the screen with off-kilter letters until BEEEEEEE  spirals 
out from the centre, obscuring the rinzekete's and BO! 
scatters all the letters at once, clearing the field for the next 
verse of the poem. There is rudeness and growling in Primiti Too Taa, 
but in greater measure there is laughter and dancing.

   Ed Ackerman's first film, Sarah's Dream, a Plasticine-animated
story of Ukrainian immigration to Manitoba, has a sound-track
recorded live, in real time, by a sound-effects crew of seven.
At a presentation in the lecture theatre of the National
Gallery, Ed showed two films side-by-side: Sarah's Dream, the
animation, and the voice and sound-effects crew recording the
Sarah's Dream soundtrack while watching the silent film on
screen.

   Primiti Too Taa was made in the opposite way. The sound-track
was recorded first, the typewriter drawing laboriously
synchronized to it later. The day after Ed drove to Ottawa to
meet me, I was in Studio A of my friendly neighbourhood
broadcaster, CKCU-FM at Carleton, recording the soundtrack for
the film that was still barely a notion in our two heads. Then,
with the soundtrack in the can ($18), Ed and I sat down to 'do
the storyboard' - to outline the action of the film.

   There must be some kind of story, after all. Not that anything
needs to happen, but there's a beginning, a middle and an end.
I have always tried to use my visual imagination to the max in
poetry, and never with as much freedom as in this collaboration,
 where Ed volunteered to do all the tedious
typing. Together, we plotted the

Descant 64 / 65  Spring-Summer 1989  Volume20, Number 1 and 2  "Filmsounds"

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