~ theory ~
A month of women’s poetry film: some observations and questions
Film critic Laura Mulvey in 2010 (photo: Mariusz Kubik, CC BY 3.0)
Did you notice? I didn’t notice myself until about two weeks in that I’d only been posting videos or films directed by women and featuring the work of women poets. At that point, I wondered how long I could keep it up (pretty much indefinitely, it turns out) and whether anyone would ever notice and ask about it (no one has). The last video featuring a male poet was on 27 October (“The Laundry Can Wait” by Cyril Wong, directed by Sarah Howell), and the last film directed by a man was on 24 October (“Dancing Lesson” by Rachel Kann, directed by Bradford L. Cooper). Which is not to say that men haven’t played key roles in making some of the things I’ve featured since, as editors, videographers, composers, etc., just that women occupied the lead roles.
The point of this post is not what a great, enlightened guy I am (ask my partner how often I interrupt her in the course of an average conversation). But it seemed like a fitting response to the on-going revelations of rampant sexual harassment and assault in Hollywood and beyond. And the exercise does raise some interesting questions, I think:
1. There are a LOT of good women directors of poetry films at all levels of professionalism and ability. So many of them are now “regulars” at Moving Poems that I can go quite a few days without posting anything made by a man, purely by chance, just as sometimes I may go for a week or two without posting any women. Does this mean that the number of men and women active in poetry film and videopoetry is roughly equal? Or might it be partly because male directors gravitate toward certain types of poetry (Charles Bukowski, for example) or filmmaking (superficially pretty shots) that don’t interest me as much? I’m really not sure.
2. Contrary to stereotype, female poets might be, if anything, less likely than their male counterparts to shy away from the technical challenges of making their own videopoems. Or perhaps women are just more adventuresome, or less likely than men to be narrowly focused on following traditional routes of advancement as poets?
3. Thinking about the major, long-term collaborative partnerships in the world of English-language poetry film, I actually can’t think of any that are exclusively male. If both partners aren’t female, than either the poet or the filmmaker is going to be a woman. I’m sure there must be exceptions to this, but the fact that I can’t think of any off-hand dovetails with another thought I’ve often had over the years: Could it be that women are more open to creative collaboration in general?
4. As hybrid forms, videopoetry and poetry film benefit from hybrid visions. An openness to collaboration would therefore be a huge advantage. But mightn’t it also be a disadvantage from a careerist perspective, luring people away from a single-minded focus on their own work necessary to, for example, qualify for tenure at an American university?
5. The male gaze has long been a tool of oppression, reducing women to objects. It’s worth remembering that this very insight came originally from a feminist film critic (Laura Mulvey). So wanting to have more women behind the camera is potentially more than just a matter of wanting to be fair and give equal opportunity. Might it not open up the possibility of depicting the world in new, potentially revolutionary ways, as feminist film critics suggest? What might the female gaze and hypermediacy mean for poetry film in particular?
6. Do videopoems or poetry films made by women have any unique characteristics that we might identify? For example, are there certain kinds of shots that female filmmakers use more often than men? Do women gravitate more than men to certain strategies of juxtaposition or disjunction in videopoetry?
7. What about poems and films of feminist advocacy? Is it possible to be prescriptive and suggest the best poetry film-making strategies to move viewers toward a greater sympathy with and understanding of diverse perspectives?
8. I’m obviously no scholar, but I can think of one cynical explanation for why women directors and poets might be so well represented in poetry film and videopoetry right now: it’s not prestigious yet. Historically speaking, as soon as a woman-dominated art, craft or industry begins to make money, men elbow in and quickly take over, whether it’s brewing beer, making textiles, or even writing computer code — a woman-dominated field until the mid 1970s. Could the same thing happen with poetry film? If it does, one day editors like me might have to work quite a bit harder to avoid posting any male-directed films for a month.
I invite comments below on any of these points. Email me if you’d like to submit a post. (And personal stories are just as welcome as critical analysis.)
Exploring Contemplative Effects in Text-Based Video Poems
In 2005 I first began experimenting with rhythmic effects in relation to text-based, minimalist video poems as an extension of my work as a painter, filmmaker and writer. Influenced by a fusion of concrete poetry, feminist inquiry and structuralist and surrealist experimental film, I wanted to approach the essence of poetic structure in a reductive way, reconsidering the route to meaning through the traditional double pattern of verse – metre and rhythm – in moving, audiovisual terms.
Whilst contemplative effects exist across all forms of conventionally character and narrative-based poetry film, I wanted to strip down and magnify the prosody (rhythm) itself, and the letter became an ideal form, bringing less-suggested context to the inquiry. My aim was to focus on a series of minimal, visual text-based video poems as a way of exploring the remediation (Bolter and Grusin, 2000) of aural or verbal prosody in page-based verse. I am terming these video poems rather than poetry films as they weren’t created from pre-existing poems, but more as artworks with the screen as canvas. Within this formal definition I was interested in creating a particular type of contemplative effect, where a letter or word slowly disappears and reappears, that I termed de/rematerialising prosody. (Apologies for the weighty terminology!) The combined sequential, linear word with the cyclical form for me represented the two essential formal components of the verse form, but revised in a dynamical way through motion.
My initial experimentation with moving visual verse became a research project entitled Re: Turning – From Graphic Verse to Digital Poetics: historical rhythms and digital transitional effects in Graphic Poetry Films. I went on to deliver papers or organise exhibitions/talks around the subject at: Chelsea College of Art and Design, including the work of artist Liliane Lijn; VideoBardo ‘For The Earth’ conference in Buenos Aires 2012; MIX conference in Bath (2012 and 2013); the e-poetry conference, Kingston, 2013; The Southbank Centre Poetry International Festival of Love in 2014; and TARP audiovisual festival, Vilnius National Gallery of Art, 2015. A more in-depth account of contemplative effects and prosody will be included in the forthcoming publication The Poetics of Poetry Film, co-authored with Zata Banks, including essays from many of the top practitioners in the field.
My work has always looked over its shoulder to historical forms that expanded on the dual verbal/visual letter (or verbicovisual as the Brazilian concrete poetry Noigandres group have stated, following James Joyce’s neologism in Finnegan’s Wake). As is commonly known, in the mediaeval period illuminated manuscripts such as ‘Books of Hours’ (commissioned books of religious/spiritual contemplation) featured large initial letters of opening paragraphs that were also pictures depicting the scene being verbally described. In a similar way, several hundred years B.C. prayer wheels containing short, linear texts were turned or spun by Buddhist monks as a means of attaining enlightenment, effectively turning texts according to the natural rhythm of the wheel of life, dissolving the linear word in the cyclical elements beyond human control.
As such the dual word as image and the deconstructed linear word, subject to turning, has historic precedents, and these deconstructions of the word align with the need to access spiritual concerns. It is hard to ignore that the very foundations of verse, metre and rhythm are also said to have a spiritual base. As the English critic and poet T.E. Hulme (1883–1917) has noted in his Lecture on Modern Poetry (1908):
The older art (double pattern of traditional form) was originally a religious incantation … The effect of rhythm, like that of music, is to produce a kind of hypnotic state, during which suggestions of grief and ecstasy are easily and powerfully effective …
The binary, dual aspect of a letter as both visual and verbal, and also linear but also turned in poetic verse form, sat at the centre of my research. However, I was deterred by my supervisors from mentioning anything to do with spiritually related matters. And I should point out that I am not inferring in an absolutist way that a moving poetry film can create spiritually uplifting effects. What I have aimed to do is to appropriate and translate, in a form of broad metanarrative, historical structures and conventions as approaches to weaving a thoughtful and contemplative surface in its own right, as opposed to creating a poetic dramatic narrative containing effects. As can be imagined, many types of poetry film can be argued to utilise contemplative effects (knowingly or not) and I will discuss this further in the upcoming publication.
In 2005 I made a work that referenced the ‘carmina figurate’ in Renaissance texts, where typically a sacred image was picked out in red letters against a field of black type so that a holy figure could be seen and meditated on during the process of reading. The resulting film, Blanks in Discourse 3 — which became known as Mistaken Identity — was a commentary on consumer depictions of female identity. Found black text copy from women’s magazines became a foil against which the words I and Home were added in red, but juxtaposed with a computer error beep.
The resulting beep made a sonic pattern that, when shown in a gallery in Lithuania, created a delicate, random, plaintive ‘tune’ or irregular sequence. In some ways the pattern of notes, without direction or timing, evoked a sense of disconnection, but also pathos; of subjectivity and soul trying to play out within an out-of-control social environment.
Mistaken Identity, colour, sound, Sarah Tremlett, 2005.
As poetry is a temporal art, I sought to integrate metronomic time or interval measure with the durational or flowing rhythmic elements. This applied to both the aural and also the visual patterns before our eyes. In the early films I did not include voice, as I considered that an extra decipherable element in meaning creation, so that text, sound and image became the sole fusion of forms. I also examined ways of thinking about audiovisual structure as pure structure: repetition, blank space, cut-ups alongside minimal soundscapes. It is also important to note that my films and all the films in this essay have no definite beginning or end, which is why they cannot be defined by length; there is no narrative trajectory, simply a continuous play of audiovisual pattern that can be endlessly looped, and gradually interpreted.
There is some correlation between non-dramatic poetry films (more or less without a plotted narrative) and a more consciously affective reliance upon metronomic and rhythmic patterning. A still, framed space that changes and alters durationally, but not in tune with a sequential narrative, can have an effect on us that may be hard to put into words. One aspect of such a space can be its non-referential function. It does not talk of another space or time, but only its own being; which is why this sort of film is more accurately described as a video poem and most purely when the audio as well as the visual is newly composed, and relates back to the space, rather than associated with any other situation.
AMAM/AMMA, contemplative, minimal, graphic video poem; colour, sound, Sarah Tremlett, 2010.
As a minimal, contemplative form of graphic video poem, my work AMAM/AMMA in its letter formation comprises two paradoxical parts concerning the binary nature of the relationship between self and mother or mother and daughter. This work takes the words AM and MA, which not only palindromically, phonetically and visually but semantically create a parallelism of prosodic form with content. It asks the viewer to consider how the paratactical relationship between the two groups of letters which seem interchangeable function alongside the sound of a heartbeat. In minimal video poems we are not only examining a gestalt dialectical play between the parts and the whole or the text and the rest of the image, but also the dynamic motional play within the text itself. This work uses an irregular, fluttering, pulsing motion to explore a different understanding of beat or metre, and how blurring can have a conceptual relation to content, the tremulous nature of new life, as well as blurring boundaries of identity. Meaning is saturated throughout audiovisual form and content, supporting but testing Roman Jakobson’s theories of equivalence (1960) based on purely verbal poetic forms. On a wider scale, the dual pattern of constant beat (the heart) that underpins the rhythms of life in the womb and ‘outside’ also happens to be the core double essence of traditional verse-based poetry. The parallel between the way of human ‘being’ and the prosody of poetry might have a correlation that could explain the effects of poetry far deeper than we can imagine.
Thought Acts, B&W, Steve Fossey, Liberated Words II, 2013.
Another film concerned with de/rematerialisation of text and included in Liberated Words II at The Arnolfini, Bristol, in 2013, is British artist Steve Fossey’s Thought Acts. Here the sway of text and light with a moody soundtrack shifts between legibility and pattern: a fluctuating de/rematerialisation of text operates, as in AMAM/AMMA. The filmmaker is concerned with the visual effects of light and pattern and their inclusive relation to meaning. The disappearance and reappearance of visual text in itself encapsulates a form of gradual change through motion, a transitional effect that could be utilised to produce either slow cyclical repetitive rhythms, sometimes in relation to metronomic aural beats, or metronomic visual effects.
Les Lieux de Memoire by British artist Tamsin Taylor, which I included in Liberated Words poetry film screening at MIX 2012, is a slowed-down filming of a verse poem that has been scattered with water (seemingly tears), reconstituting itself through film reversal. Slowly we see the poem reappear, transcending conventional temporality, accompanied by the occasional blip, blip sound of what must have been the flicking of water onto the page. This echoes my film Mistaken Identity, in the heightened attunement to the smallness of random, repeated, identical sounds. This sublime video poem, which also engages with the liminal aspect between materiality and language and what I would term ‘elemental sound’ is an example of a de/rematerialisation process in a very profound and direct way. Les Lieux de Memoire asks us to engage with its very process of creation, its fundamental becoming or dynamic of change.
Les Lieux de Memoire, B&W, sound, Tamsin Taylor, Liberated Words I, 2012.
In Unrest by Italian artist Marco de Mutiis (included in Liberated Words I, 2012), the beginnings of a de/rematerialisation process have come into play, bringing forward the blank into a type of temporal form. Here words are diffused before blurring or disappearing alongside an eerie, repetitive, muffled ‘bleep’ sound, creating a metronomic sense of isolation — a non-narrative within a semi-narrative of scenes that seem played out rather than lived.
Unrest, colour, sound, Marco de Mutiis, Liberated Words I, 2011.
The metronomic interplays with the abstracted rhythms, and it is as if we are the systems that control us; we are discourse, but a discourse that is pre-written and out of our control; we don’t make it, we align with it. In fact, at a far bleaker and catastrophic level we are written or we are erased. To me this film contains signs of traditional prosody but in a new, conceptual way; and these rhythms appear to be embedded in the very fabric of our accelerated, overly-constructed human condition.
In my video poem She/Seasons/Contemplating Nature I aimed to blur the conceptual divisions between culture and nature, combining de/rematerialising prosodic texts from women’s magazines accompanied by metronomic star sounds and a pulsing coloured sphere that changes from cool to hot colours. She/Seasons/Contemplating Nature generates a cyclical return in four chromatic movements or phases which begin with ‘winter’ (in terms of colour) and return to it again and again on an endless loop. As the blurred effect increases, so the figure/ground (Arnheim, 1974) distinction lessens. Letters lose symbolic meaning as they become diffused into pattern. This cycle of chromatic prosodic change occurs as the text and the image slowly emerges and disappears. In some senses then, we can view the text and image as we might view the simple shapes of nature around us: trees and flowers which are subject to alteration due to the passage of seasons and time. American poet Stephanie Strickland’s notion of text decay (Kac, 2007) springs to mind but in this film the whole screen changes at once.
She/Seasons/Contemplating Nature, Sarah Tremlett, 2010/11.
In all the films mentioned, text has remained in its traditional, linear form yet also operates as visual, turned text. Meaning shifts between and as a fusion of text-based verbal language and audiovisual rhythms and effects, with almost non-existent narrative and a screen behaving as a contemplative canvas. Examining prosodic elemental forms is an attempt to naturalise how poetry works: how it weaves sounds and felt moments to create what we call ‘poetry’, or measured words through time. But whether an absolute comparison can be made between the verbal notational structures of verse prosody and those created via the moving audiovisual image is another question completely — one we will continue to debate for years to come.
REFERENCES
Arnheim, R., Art and Visual Perception – A Psychology of the Creative Eye. London, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974.
Bolter, D.J, & Grusin, R., Remediation – Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: The MIT Press, 2000.
Hulme, T, E., Lecture on Modern Poetry, 1908.
Jakobson, R., ‘Closing Statements: Linguistics and Poetics’. In: Thomas A. Sebeok, ed. Style In Language. Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1960, 357.
Kac, E., Media Poetry – An International Anthology. Bristol: Intellect Books Ltd, 2007.
In Retrospect: a Manifesto and its Underpinnings
Last summer, I was invited to present a keynote address to the Poetry/Translation/Film conference organized by the University of Montpellier. Like a tour guide, I selected 19 videopoems, introducing each one. The venue was the Utopia, an aging, funky little cinema.
A few months ago, the organizers contacted me that they intend to publish a book of the proceedings and they were going to include my Manifesto, translated into French. Could I add a text “in which you look back on what you wrote then, say if there is anything you would revise if you were to rewrite your manifesto now, tell the reader of any developments between now and then, and what you foresee for the future?”
The questions were apt, as it occurred to me that it was around this time, 5 years ago, that I began writing what turned into the Manifesto. So here it is.
For those who may have trouble accessing Academia.edu, here’s the same PDF, uploaded with Tom’s permission to Moving Poems. —Ed.
Great introduction to film poetry… on the radio
I just listened to an excellent, 45-minute program on BBC Radio 3 called “Crossing the Border – Poetry and Film.” Though understandably UK-centric, its survey of the history of poetry films and film poetry gave due credit to early Soviet filmmakers and other international influences, and talked in some detail about the earlier conception of a film poem as simply a non-linear, lyric film. The highlight of the program for me was hearing Tony Harrison and Peter Symes explain the collaborative working process for their ground-breaking poetry films of the 1980s, articulating ideals strongly reminiscent of those of videopoetry pioneer Tom Konyves from the other side of the Atlantic. I liked the attention paid to the link between poetry film and propaganda or advertising, which is a connection I don’t see spelled out very often. And I appreciated Alastair Cook’s positive assessment of what the democratization of access to filmmaking tools in the digital age has meant to the genre and those who practice it.
The program is now available on the website (and at iPlayer), though if I’m not mistaken BBC will block access to any IPs not originating in the UK, so international listeners may have to connect through a proxy. It’s well worth the hassle. Here’s the show description:
Right from the birth of cinema, film-makers have experimented with poetry in film. Matthew Sweet explores this overlooked history.
The Russian pioneer film-maker Dziga Vertov developed his celebrated montage technique out of Mayakovsky’s poetry and the GPO Film Unit’s ‘Night Mail’ with W H Auden’s closing poem owes a good deal to these Russian experimentalists. Starting at the unlikely site of the studio where scenes from ‘Night Mail’ were shot and recorded eighty years ago, Matthew establishes this iconic film as an important blueprint for poets and film-makers since.
In recent times, the poets Tony Harrison and Simon Armitage have both made documentary films where their poems replaced conventional commentaries. Matthew hosts a reunion between Tony Harrison and his collaborator, the film director Peter Symes, as they relive the powerful moment of filming of the exhumation of a body in a Neapolitan necropolis. This moment poses core questions about film poems: what does the viewer hear and see, how do word and image relate to each other? With Simon Armitage, Matthew learns how his poetry on film gives a voice to the marginalized. Now, a burgeoning movement of experimental film-makers are creating a new space for the production, curation and distribution of film poems in festivals and in digital media, so as the mainstream media fragment, film poetry is returning to its avant garde roots as was exemplified by early film poem makers such as Germaine Dulac and Maya Deren.
Producer: Emma-Louise Williams
A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3.
For those who haven’t seen Night Mail, here’s a YouTube upload.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkLoDg7e_ns
Stefanie Orphal on the aural dimension of poetry film
German literary scholar Stefanie Orphal, author of Poesiefilm: Lyrik im audiovisuellen Medium [Poetry Film: Poetry in the Audiovisual Medium], has an essay up at Poetryfilmkanal on “The fascination of hearing poetry films.” Here’s an excerpt:
In recent years there has been an increasing awareness of matters of sound and acoustics, in film studies as well as in other areas. Our understanding of poetry film can benefit a lot from this development. The principal point that we can take from this research is this: Not just on the level of signs, in terms of text-image-relations, but on the level of perception itself sound and image are fused into something completely new, into a third thing that is more than the addition of both elements. While experimental film maker Maya Deren meditated on this effect as early as 1953 on a podium on poetry and the film, contemporary scholars like film theorist Michel Chion have systematically laid out how what we hear, shapes what we believe only to see in the audiovisual experience.
One of Chion’s central terms is ›synchresis‹, by which he describes the psychophysiological phenomenon that lets us attribute discrete events that we see and hear simultaneously to the same source, e. g. the dubbed voice to the actor on screen. Such an effect – also called cross-modal association – is subtly operative in the perception of all audio-film, but it is crucial to the experience of poems in an audiovisual context, because voice over poems are often clearly not part of a diegetic world and what we hear is set apart from what we see creating counterpoint and contrast. But even in the most modernist and experimental efforts of counterpoint or of contrasting sound-image-relations, in our perception both sound and image are always drawn together, contaminating each other as Michel Chion puts it. The effect of this play of forces can be intriguing. What is fascinating about poetry film, to me, is the stunning effect when such a complex combination of elements brings about something new, the impression that something is revealed in the image or in the poem.
Interview with Tom Konyves at Connotation Press
In her latest “Third Form” column at Connotation Press, Erica Goss interviews videopoetry pioneer Tom Konyves. Goss’s usual pattern of paraphrasing and quoting from a conversation conducted by telephone gave way here to a more standard question-and-answer format, and the interview delves into aspects of Konyves’ background which were new to me. Here’s how Goss herself summarized it:
In this interview, Tom discusses, among other things, making his first videopoem on ½” reel-to-reel videotape, the medium of video being “unrecognized” by Herman Berlandt, Director of the San Francisco Poetry Film Workshop, what text-image relationships have in common with male-female relationships, and falling in love with language as a child.
I particularly liked the story of how Konyves came to make his first videopoem. But I think the most quotable bit is from the end of the interview:
Text-image relationships are no different from male-female relationships. Sometimes they get along, sometimes they don’t. They get along when they are totally aware of the other’s “potential” as well as their own. For each has the potential to be effective in different ways. They don’t try to overpower the other or usurp each other’s roles in the structure of the work. A particular image provides the only possible context in which the words are intended to be experienced. When they “complete” each other, the work is “pure poetry”. And once you’ve realized that, you will always associate the images with the text of the work. They have become soulmates. How many “video poems” have this attribute? Watch one, then close your eyes and listen to the words. Can you picture the scene? Throughout?
Do go read the whole interview.
New essays on poetry film by Nissmah Roshdy and Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel
The German website Poetryfilmkanal has been sticking to its schedule of monthly featured poetry films and weekly short essays. Much of the content is in German, of course, including a recent essay by ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival organizer Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel, “Poesiefilme, Festivals und soziale Netzwerke,” but Google Translate gives the gist of it.
Fortunately for us monolingual types, the latest essay, by Egyptian filmmaker Nissmah Roshdy—”Poetry Films: A Genre Alien To A Poetry Nation“—is in English. Roshdy brings a unique perspective on a uniquely poetry-drenched culture:
For some reason, Arabic Poetry, which is only the most significant form of art produced by the Arab world and considered one of the most visually rich and sophisticated breeds of poetry, had never officially taken part in the conversation of poetry films worldwide in a noteworthy manner. It sounded crazy to me, but I figured that it’s not surprising if you actually consider how many Arabs today appreciate or even understand their own poetry. But regardless of that, the main problem I saw was because of how poets and visual artists in the Arab world have no interest in collaborating with one another. The issue, as I see it, is from the literary experts side. For many writers, the argument usually made is that the beauty of poetry must be in the words only and how they manifest themselves visually in the imagination of each reader. However, this notion should not be threatened by the discourse of poetry films, because a poetry film is essentially a manifestation of the imagination exercise we go through while reading a poem. The defining line here is in accepting a Poetry film as an example of a visual representation of a poem as seen by one person.
Robert Peake on “poetry, film, and the dance of memory”
The American-British poet and poetry-filmmaker Robert Peake is the author of this week’s essay at Poetryfilmkanal: “Mnemosyne’s Tango: Poetry, Film, and the Dance of Memory.” I thought it was one of the most original things I’ve read about the the genre.
The relationship between art and memory has long been a family affair, since Mnemosyne is the mother of the Muses. In fact, some of the earliest uses of both poetry and film were for recording cultural history – either by compressing an epic tale into alliteration and rhyme to facilitate memorisation, or by compressing light and sound into physical media. Compression leads to portability and potency, but also imposes unique constraints, which have evolved into our current understanding of the distinct artistic possibilities of each discipline.
In format, the auditory and visual natures of film and poetry are clearly different. Yet a flickering screen can be viewed like a page, and a poem can be read like a script. The cæsura, line break, and stanza break in poetry mirror film’s range of visual transitions. Clearly, they have some fundamental moves in common. How, then, does the poetryfilm best come together to fascinate, transport, and change us?
Peake’s essay is the latest addition to the Magazin section of Poetryfilmkanal. Previous installments in this series of short essays have included “Poetryfilms: when poetry and film have a flirt,” by Eleni Cay; “CINEPOEM – or – Take a Walk on the Wild Side,” by Cathy de Haan (in German); my own essay, “The Discovery of Fire: One Poet’s Journey into Poetry-Film“; and “Redefining poetry in the age of the screen,” by Tom Konyves.
James Wine’s film Östersjöar available to watch for free in memory of Tomas Tranströmer
The great Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer — one of my personal top ten favorite poets of the 20th century — sadly passed away in March, but he left behind an impressive body of work, including a 30-minute film based on Baltic Seas which he collaborated on with director James Wine. Moving Poems readers will remember Cheryl Gross’s glowing review from this past January. James wrote me a few days ago to pass along the link to a special in memoriam page where Östersjöar can be seen in its entirety. Visitors are encouraged to share their thoughts and impressions, as well.
I hope James won’t mind if I share a bit of his letter. He indicated that this is a rough draft for background “director’s notes” to be officially released soon:
When we first made this filmpoem back in early 1990s, Tomas & I talked about film and voice. About Rilke’s excitement for the “wire recorder” for poetry and the early essay by Octavio Paz that said poets would inevitably explore film, television and computers.
Tomas used to say that sometimes readers should have a film projector on their heads to read his poems. He played with the juxtapositioning of close-ups and wide roaming angles in his poems. Moving images are throughout his works. He thought most contemporary poetry was influenced by films, as are our dreams. In “Östersjöar” he even uses the term “close-ups.” He thought it would make an interesting study to compare poetry today with that of 200 years ago, observing the influences of photography and film upon poetry.
Tomas said this poem was his “most consistent effort to compose music.” Every image, every word has “tonal” equivalences, harmonics and counterpoints, in this poem, which he a called “a bag into which I put everything.”
Recently, the longtime Tranströmer reader Helen Vendler put it this way to us: “It’s a poem that lacks nothing.”
Indeed. Poetry, music, images still and moving – all elements of the translation of that “original poem in silence” that Tomas always cited.
Poetry is not to be explained, rather its experience explored. And in this new version we explored early drafts of the poem, checking its “documentary” nature with Tomas as we went along. This revealed many new insights, some things he could only grasp intuitively when he wrote the poem in 1973.
“He thought most contemporary poetry was influenced by films, as are our dreams.” It’s worth remembering here that Tranströmer’s day job was as a psychologist. He was also a pianist, whence in part his strong feeling for music.
Recent talks on filmpoetry and videopoetry: Alan Fentiman, Tony Williams, Ross Sutherland, Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel Dugas
Terra Incognita: Mapping the Filmpoem is a beautifully shot conversation between filmmaker Alan Fentiman and poet Tony Williams. Two years ago, they collaborated on a documentary about the link between walking and poetic inspiration called Roam to Write, which is also very worth watching. As for Terra Incognita,
This film paper was shown at the “Topographies: places to find something” conference at Bristol University on 15th May 2015.
This is the beginning of an ongoing discussion. We would welcome any comments or suggestions for other film poems to look at. [link added]
https://vimeo.com/127866132
And here’s a very different talk: Ross Sutherland‘s Thirty Poems / Thirty Videos: End of Residency wrap-up for The Poetry School. I’ve been sharing some of those videos at the main site, but you can watch them all in chronological order at the Poetry School blog or in reverse chronological order at Sutherland’s Tumblr.
It’s instructive to compare these two videos. Right away, the difference in production values should clue us in to the gulf that separates these two aesthetic philosophies. Fentiman is a trained filmmaker, as shown by the care taken even to coordinate their wardrobe with the background, while Sutherland’s vlog-style video seems relatively unpremeditated and completely unedited, with the annoying result that the sound and picture get badly out of sync by the end of it. But Sutherland’s background as a maker of poetry videos is in literal videotape:
So in some respects, the aesthetic differences between these two talks, both in their style and in their substance, can be ascribed to the distinction between poetry film and videopoetry often drawn by Tom Konyves, for example in his recent essay, “Redefining poetry in the age of the screen“:
The way I see it, the writer who uses “poetry film” automatically designates the work as more film than poetry. I myself began to create what I called “videopoems” when I was more a poet than a video artist, so I naturally considered these works as “poetry”.
However, it’s not quite that simple, because none of these gentlemen seems quite ready to think of a film or a video as a poem per se; some of Sutherland’s videos are mere illustrations of pre-existing texts, while Fentiman and Williams speak favorably of Alastair Cook’s Filmpoem model, which goes part-way toward Konyves in its embrace of the centrality of poetic juxtaposition of images and text. But most interesting of all, I think, is the fact that the talks converge in emphasizing the positive results that can come from working ekphrastically: starting with film footage or found video and writing a text in response. So more than anything, I think, the differences here reflect a difference in venue and audience. Sutherland is making web videos for a younger audience weaned on YouTube remixes, vlogging, and live performance poetry, while Fentiman and Williams are oriented toward the film world with its focus on art houses and festivals, and perhaps share a preference for more mainstream, page-poetry.
Incidentally, for those who’d like to see Sutherland in person, there are still tickets available for the second run of his Standby For Tape Back-Up performance at London’s Soho Theatre, July 6-11.
Bridging the gap between these two talks is a third pair of talks given by Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel Dugas in late April at the Galerie Sans Nom in Moncton, New Brunswick, as part of the Text(e) Image Beat videopoetry exhibition. These however are available not in video form but as a PDF. LeBlanc alludes to the influence of yet another audience and medium: television.
Creators are now presenting their texts visually and / or performing their poems. Many have realized that messages can be effectively conveyed using the multimodal character of video poetry. Similarly to advertisements created for marketing campaigns, these works are characteristically short, less than 5 minutes in duration. You have probably all seen the new ads that read like poetry, drawing you into new lifestyles through product placement. Picture the mood and a message without the bottom line and you might be closer to the concept of video poetry.
She goes on to say:
While many of the historical examples of text(e) / image / beat used in combination do come from advertising / product placement / war propaganda, the tools and techniques out there for relaying messages have become highly accessible for artist use in this new century. In the late 1990’s when access to digital tools opened up, artists stepped in to embrace the possibilities for expanding their use. While New Media currently tends to imply experimental computer programming, video use in storytelling continues to hold interest.
Whether working with images, text and sound or all three, these media tools offer the possibility of bringing something that has escaped from the marketing machine we are all rolling with, and sometimes under. It is the possibility for impacting an internal change through a product that is not defined by its bottom line. It might be through ideas embedded in a world apart from imagined clichés. It might be an opportunity to change the pace, which at times might be useful for resetting the clock.
Do read the whole thing. Brief as it is, her talk opens up new avenues for thinking about videopoetry, at least for me.
As for Dugas’ talk, “DONNER UN SENS AU MONDE ENTIER,” I don’t know French, so I’m not entirely sure what he said, but I gather from Google Translate that there’s some emphasis on the influence of video art, the relationship with political and environmental activism, and the central role of the digital revolution. His conclusion:
Lorsque j’ai commencé à écrire de la poésie, j’ai aussi commencé à expérimenter avec le super-8, créant des bandes sonores en direct pour mes films. Le mélange du texte, de l’image et de la musique semblait une opération naturelle, mais aussi magique. Il ne s’agissait pas seulement d’un va-et-vient entre le texte, l’image et le son : la nouvelle entité devenait une traverse pour découvrir quelque chose de nouveau. Nous savons maintenant que l’espace entre les disciplines est fragile, que les murs sont maintenant pénétrables et nous sommes reconnaissants pour cette évolution des choses. Nous pouvons enfin voyager d’un genre à un autre pour essayer de donner un sens au monde entier.
[When I began to write poetry, I also started to experiment with super-8, creating soundtracks live for my films. The mixture of text, image and music seemed a natural process, but also magical. It was not just a back-and-forth between text, image and sound: the new entity became a crossbar for discovering something new. We know now that the space between disciplines is fragile, the walls are now penetrable, and we are thankful for this evolution of things. We can finally travel from one genre to another to try to make sense of the world as a whole.]
Tom Konyves at Poetryfilmkanal on “Redefining poetry in the age of the screen”
Poetryfilmkanal have just launched a new series of short, guest-contributed commentaries on “the fascination of poetry-film,” beginning with the Canadian videopoetry pioneer Tom Konyves. I found his essay, “Redefining poetry in the age of the screen,” admirably clear and precise. He begins by discussing semantics, anticipating, I think the usual objection from British and German commentators that film is a better word than video.
Man Ray’s »cinépoème« and Maya Deren’s »filmpoem« sang the praises of film at a time when commercial/entertainment ventures first threatened the aesthetic potential of the new art form of film; it was not about exploring a new form for poetry. In the early ’80s, William C. Wees recognized that the use of poems had become prevalent in short films; he differentiated these »poetry-films« from »film poems«, i.e. poetic films, including films without words. Substituting »video« for »film« effectively deflected the »mystique« of celluloid from the conversation.
Konyves also suggests that terms in which poetry follow rather than precede film- or video- are preferable if you want to give primacy to the poetry rather than to the film. This is certainly true for English, where word-order plays a key role in semantics. Given how international and multilingual poetry-film and videopoetry have become, however, I think it’s incumbent on all of us who think critically about the genre(s) to try to understand how a poetry-first or film-first emphasis might best be expressed in each language.
In the second part of the essay, Konyves strikes a distinctly conciliatory, even ecumenical tone for someone best known in recent years for a manifesto:
Similarly, not all texts, including written-poems, can be expected to produce a desired new meaning when juxtaposed with images. If the written-poem was originally perfect, it would not need to be completed with images. Yet videos are made to promote these written-poems and are most worthwhile; otherwise these poems would not reach a wide public. Their »meaning« is not intended to change nor will it change in a visual context.
I’m not sure I agree that there’s such a thing as a perfect, finished poem, and therefore I like to imagine that it might be possible for a true videopoem to be made with any poetic text. But that’s kind of an absolutist position, I guess, and could easily be used to devalue films/videos that are simply made to promote poems, rather than recognizing them as equally worthwhile as Konyves does.
Brief as it is, I found the essay thought-provoking. Regular visitors to Moving Poems won’t be surprised to hear that I very much agree with Konyves’ over-all emphasis on videopoetry as poetry. My own, upcoming essay in this series will be much sloppier in its terminology, I’m afraid. In part, that’s because of my role as a blogger/curator rather than a theorist or critic: I tend to accept whatever terms poets and filmmakers themselves use for their creations. But I do fear that my use of “videopoetry” as the catch-all category at Moving Poems has muddied things a bit.
Fortunately, we have Tom Konyves to step forward periodically and clarify things as only he can. Go read.
