I voted today, and it inspired me to mark the occasion with a short film featuring the Edison recording of Walt Whitman reading 'America.' If this resonates with you, feel free to share it and leave a comment. Let's encourage as many people as possible to vote with Whitman's powerful words in mind.
America, a short film by Eduardo Montes-Bradley
It all began, fittingly, in Brooklyn. First, my trusty old Bolex jammed. Frustrated, I took a moment, and that’s when I stumbled upon an Edison recording of Walt Whitman reading "America." His voice seemed to cut through time, stirring something in me. Not long after, I was stopped in my tracks by a towering campaign billboard promoting all the wrong ideas for the upcoming presidential elections. It felt jarring, disconnected.
Just around the corner, I found a lab and dropped off my film to be processed, hoping the images might help me make sense of everything I had just encountered. As I waited, Whitman’s incomplete reading echoed in my mind—a fragment of a poem that still speaks with relevance today.
In the end, what I was left with was a tangled reel of thoughts, images, and Whitman’s words—a reminder that history, like poetry, is often unfinished, but it never stops resonating.
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