The conclusion of poet-filmmaker Tim Cumming’s new film of a poem about London. Though the entire film is over 13 minutes long, the repetition of certain images and tropes serves as a connective glue, and the language has sufficient energy to make the film seem much shorter than it is. (Watch Part 1.)

A new film from UK poet and filmmaker Tim Cumming, who notes on Vimeo:

First part of a two-part film of a London poem The City Inside. You could call it an inner city revealed.
Every metropolis dweller has their own inner city, an internal map organism that grows through space and time. This is work in progress. Status may change.

An author-made filmpoem by British poet Tim Cumming, who notes at Vimeo that

A line from one of Raymond Chandler’s thrillers inspired the start of this poem, Shelley’s Ozymandias inspired the end, and time gave me the middle, worked on through the winter and spring of 2014, taking for its model Richard Seifert’s 1972 Brutalist Kings Reach Tower by Blackfriars Bridge, where I worked for a number of years at a west-facing window on the ninth floor in the Programmes Department. The soundtrack includes field recordings from Novi Sad, Posnan, Rue Git de Coeur in Paris, and Soho, and the fire was lit in a pot belly stove sometime in 2007.

Tim Cumming‘s description at Vimeo is worth quoting in full:

A new film poem by Tim Cumming written on a walk from Hampstead Heath station to the Steeles in Belsize Park where he was offered snuff laced with cocaine and heard the story of Moll King, good mixer of Georgian London, a famous bawd and the inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders. Includes footage of witch dolls, amulets, mandrakes and more from the Museum of Witchcraft in Boscastle, birds on the wire at Bodmin, Lord Byron and the waters of the Thames from Woolwich Dockyard, the paintings of Austin Osman Spare from the 2010 exhibition at the Cuming Museum in south London, 8mm archive film of The Towers in Corfe Mullen in the 1960s and wooden figurines carved in the 1980s by the hand of Peter Cumming.

Tim Cumming is a major British poet-filmmaker whose work I’ve just recently learned about. Radio Carbon was especially interesting to me since I’ve been watching a lot of archaeological documentaries in which radiocarbon dating features heavily. Here’s the description from Vimeo:

When cosmic rays strike the atmosphere they create the radioactive isotope carbon 14, which can be detected in living matter and decays at a fixed rate over many millennia. Radiocarbon dating is the method by which we measure prehistoric time, and with which our own detritus will one day be measured.
The filmpoem Radio Carbon takes this transient yet permanent record of time as a personal metaphor, fashioning a hypnotic journey into the human past, from the neolithic to the present moment.
It’s a film with eternity at its centre, the vastness of space at its core, and a reverie of images clustering to the lens like the flashing in a stranger’s eye.

This is in 24 numbered sections, and may be viewed as a sequence of separate, interlocking filmpoems with recurring motifs. Cummings shot the film’s 8mm footage in addition to doing all the editing — a major undertaking for a film of this length. His profile at Salt Publications says that Radio Carbon “was premiered at the Renoir cinema in 2009 and at Port Eliot Festival in 2010.”