Song of Hiawatha
A journey through changes in media over timeRemediation
Remediation, or taking the content of one media and putting it into another, changes and redefines a literary object. It can either “emphasize a difference rather than erase it, which is pitched as an improvement of the old medium while still attempting to remain true to the original,” as Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin wrote in the article “Immediacy, Hypermediacy, and Remediation.” Immediacy, Hypermediacy, and Remediation article
Other Remediations of Hiawatha
With the advent of new technology, poetry like the Song of Hiawatha has been remediated many more times. In 1952, Hollywood created a full-length movie based on the poem.
"Ojibway tribe member Hiawatha is sent by his chief to investigate the warlike intentions of the neighboring Dakotah and Illinois tribes that routinely trespass into Ojibway territory.
Director: Kurt Neumann
Writers: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (poem), Daniel B. Ullman (original screenplay) (as Dan Ullman) | 1 more credit »
Stars: Vince Edwards, Yvette Duguay, Keith Larsen |
To view on YouTube, click on the link below:
Western Movie: Hiawatha 1952More Remediation Possibilities
I created a video with a segment of the poem as an example of another way this poem could be remediated.
This is a lumiere style video of Multnomah Falls, Oregon, with a stable camera position, overlaid with an excerpt from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem "Song of Hiawatha" where Longfellow compares the beautiful princess to a waterfall. I also added a little piano music composed from piano notes downloaded from Freesound ( https://freesound.org/people/TEDAgame/). In addition, you can hear the sound of the waterfall, punctuated periodically by the sound of dogs visiting the waterfall.