TRAVERSE CITY -- Thomas Lynch recalled the first time he saw a dead body.
"I wasn't frightened, but I was changed," described Lynch in "Learning Gravity." The film will be screened today and Friday at the Traverse City Film Festival.
Since that boyhood encounter, the Milford funeral director has cared for many corpses and penned numerous poems. His writings form the backbone of Irish director Cathal Black's 2007 documentary, the title of which comes from one of Lynch's poems.
"It was an attempt to try and interpret his world and interpret his poetry through images ... and try to stand beside him and look at what he looks at," Black said.
"Learning Gravity" was filmed in Milford, in Ireland at Lynch's ancestral home, and at Mullett Lake, where Lynch keeps a place. Lynch reads excerpts of his essays and his poems to the accompaniment of scenes that depict his work.
The film does not take a traditional documentary approach to story telling. Black told Lynch: "I don't really want to follow you around and see you having breakfast." The result is visual and contemplative, sometimes stark, colored in wintery white, blue, black and gray.
Lynch, shown in one scene wearing a dark coat, bow tie and round glasses, narrates. He stands on a frozen sheet of Mullett Lake, a spot "sufficiently distant from the hub-bub downstate." He reads from an armchair in front of a crackling fire. In other scenes, the viewer sees the cottage in Ireland Lynch inherited and learns about the author's ancestors.
The writer is a National Book Award finalist for "The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade." He was featured in a Frontline documentary on PBS, and the creator of the HBO television series "Six Feet Under" credited Lynch's essays as an influence. Still, Lynch was "a little shaken" but flattered to be the focus of Black's film and the filmmaker's close reading of his works. Certain images from the film stuck with Lynch.
"There are things that just absolutely take my breath away," he said. "I don't think in visual images so much, except, I am really keenly interested in how one art form can sort of borrow, beg or steal from others to create its own new thing. I am really very interested in that, and I do it myself."
Black wanted to make a film that was "in its own way, a poem." He described it as a kaleidoscope of thoughts and images of the journey Lynch takes with the dead and the poet's journey from Michigan to Ireland, where Lynch is fairly well known, Black said.
"Learning Gravity" screened at the Telluride Film Festival, where Traverse City Film Festival executive director Deb Lake saw it and recommended it to Michael Moore.
Black participated in a filmmaker panel on Wednesday. Lynch also is scheduled to attend the festival. The film will be shown at 3 p.m. today at the City Opera House and at 9 p.m. Friday at the Old Town Playhouse.
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