I saw a movie, in cold blue and dark grey colors (film-noirish, dark palette, like at dusk but with no street lights or any artificial light). A woman was running through a labyrinth of streets, looking like Hong Kong (small alleys, lots of cables and laundry lines, the ground wet), with her face towards us, the camera moving backwards in front of her. Something scary was chasing her, but I couldn’t see what it was. As the tension grew, her possibility of escape felt more and more desperate. Then, in the middle, the tone got much lighter and the sense of danger became almost comedic, like a chase scene in a screwball comedy, it was a different place – open space, with a desert, and the formless pursuer increased in number to the degree of a mob, with the addition of more threatening, yet still unclear, presence. Then the chase returned, with the same woman in focus. At the end, with the drum roll, something unfortunate and horrible was about to happen: the sudden pause of the music suspended the suspense. I’m not sure.

Editor’s note: Also see Ivan and Holden’s second collaboration “The Dungeon Headcase”.

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Holden Liang Qichao is a PhD student at the Department of English Language and Literature. [Click here to read all pieces by Holden.]

Ivan Delazari is a PhD Fellow at the Department of English Language and Literature currently engaged in a musico-literary intermediality research project. He presented a paper titled “Fictionalization of Shostakovich: Verbal Music in William T. Vollmann’s Europe Central“ in the Autumn 2015 Research Seminar Series. [Click here to read all entries by Ivan.]