~ Nationality: Australia ~
Cuando Fui Clandestino / When I Was Clandestine by Juan Garrido Salgado
This recent collaboration between Chilean poet Juan Garrido Salgado and Australian filmmaker Ian Gibbins incorporates other texts in the process of evoking quite different places from where the film was shot, which could’ve gone wrong in so many ways, I was astonished by how well this all works—how authentic everything feels. Ian has posted some process notes which are worth sharing in full:
Juan Garrido Salgado immigrated to Australia from Chile in 1990, fleeing the Pinochet regime that burned his poetry, imprisoned him, and tortured him for his political activism. Since then, his poetry has been widely published to acclaim, and includes eight books, anthologies and translations. His readings are renowned for their passion and dedication to social justice. His latest collection, The Dilemma of Writing a Poem, has just been published by Puncher & Wattman.
Some time ago, we decided to make a video of one of his poems. It was a hard choice, but we settled on Cuando Fui Clandestino / When I Was Clandestine from his collection of the same title, published in 2019 by Rochford Press. The poem is strongly autobiographical and refers to time he spent in Moscow as well as living under curfew in Chile.
Making the video was a challenge. It was not possible for me to film in Russia or Chile, and, in any case, the political and social changes have been so great in each country, it was not clear what footage would be appropriate. We could have used archival footage in the public domain, but, in general, I prefer to use my own original footage in my work. Given that Juan has lived in Adelaide for many years now, we decided that I would film sites around the city that reflected the mood of his original experiences, while being clearly set in a contemporary context. All the footage was taken at night at locations I know well. A few scenes have been composited from more than one site. We went back to a key location not far from where Juan lives to film him there after dark with his poetry.
The music is an original composition, written and performed by Juan’s son, Lenin Garrido. After a small amount of editing, the structure of the music ended up being a key element in pulling together the various components of the video.
The language of the poem is complex. Although it is published in Spanish and English, we decided to have the spoken word element only in Spanish. A truly bi-lingual version would have been ideal, but we decided it was not necessary this time.
Part of the complexity of the poem relates to its references to the work of other poets: Nicanor Parra, Pablo Neruda, Vladimir Mayakovski and musician Violetta Parra. In recognition of the use of public walls for propaganda, advertising, street art and protest, excerpts from the poems referred to in Juan’s text appear on dark walls, in different languages, alongside public domain portraits of the authors. These are the poems and their sources (click on the texts for relevant links):
El Premio Nobél
Nicanor Para: Antipoems – How to Look Better and Feel Great
New Directions 2004Домой! (Homeward!)
Vladimir Mayakovsky: Maximum Access
Sensitive Skin Books 2018Oda al Hombre Sencillo
Pablo Neruda: Odas Elementales
Editorial Losada 1954
The Grains Are Rough Here by Claire Rosslyn Wilson
A poetry film in eight parts, The Grains Are Rough Here is by Australian-born writer, film-maker, researcher and editor, Claire Rosslyn Wilson. Footage and sound were collected in Melbourne, Chiang Mai, Singapore and Barcelona, the latter her current place of residence.
In the video notes she describes the film as “a suite of 8 videopoems”. Indeed, each of the eight parts could stand alone, but I find them cohesive as a single film. The intertwining of personal and political reflection is emotionally affecting. Rhythmic repetitions of words, phrases and lines deepen the sense and impact of the text. The effective editing of images and sounds suggests an experienced film-maker.
Wilson speaks her own poetry in the film, accompanied by subtitles. To some this may seem unnecessary doubling up. But I enjoyed being able to visually read the poetry at will, as well as to hear it, allowing different perspectives on the writing. The 13-minute duration invites an easy shifting of focus across each element of the film.
From the ‘About‘ section of her website:
I take an intercultural and interdisciplinary approach that explores creative ways to look closely at the world around us. This stems from my personal experience working in a number of cultures (Australia, Spain, Thailand, Singapore), which has given me an appreciation for the importance of an open and multifaceted worldview, necessary when adapting to diverse cultural contexts.
Cultural Submissions by Caroline Reid
Written in a free-associative Australian vernacular and littered with local references, Cultural Submissions is by Caroline Reid in Adelaide. It evokes episodes in places on either side of the continent and the endless drive between the west-east poles of Perth and Melbourne.
For the video, Caroline speaks the prose-poetic text in a downbeat drawl, layered in a call-and-response fashion by sound engineer Jeffrey Zhang. This heightens the sense of thoughts rolling over each other and subjects changing as if melting in mid-sentence. Film-maker Patrick Zoerner brings together a series of slowly dissolving images that provide a poetic visual space for the voice to take centre stage.
Cultural Submissions can be read on the page at Verita La. It is from Siarad, a collection of Caroline’s poetry and prose published by ES-PRESS in 2020. The video was part of an interesting program curated by Jacqui Malens for the 2021 Poetic City event in Canberra.
Moving Poems has previously featured three other videos from Caroline’s writing.
We Are The War by T&DA
A fascinating experiment in AI-generated videopoetry from an artists’ collective in Sydney, written and directed by Tyrone Estephan.
We Are The War | CLIP-Guided Storytelling & Speech Synthesis
At T&DA we have explored leveraging the latest technologies to create ‘We Are The War’, an animated graphic novella poem, where both the images and narration were generated through visual and audio synthesis.
Created using prompts inspired by children’s book illustrations and the lines of our poem, images were generated using Midjourney. The narrator was generated through speech synthesis software that only needed 15 minute sample of talking.
To add parallax and depth to the scenes we used neural Z depth extraction.
Using these tools we tell the story of children’s metaversal shenanigans as realities of recent years bleed into their locked down lives. We can think of this technology almost as if it’s a 10 year old expressing itself, which felt like the perfect means to convey the sentiments of the poem.
Tyrone Estephan – Written & Directed
Sean Simon – Visuals & Post
Josh Kell – Online Editor
To Touch & Taste a Comet by Caroline Reid
Caroline Reid‘s marvelous poetry and performance combines with film-making by Patrick Zoerner in this videopoem, To Touch & Taste a Comet. The poem can be read on the page at Cordite Poetry Review. It is the first in a collection of Caroline’s prose and poetry titled Siarad (a Welsh word meaning to talk, to speak). From a review of the book by Alison Clifton in Stylus Lit:
Reid’s poems and short stories are allegorical in their impact: seemingly mundane events are elevated to the symbolic and the sacred… While Reid’s striking similes and surprising metaphors are a true joy, her observations about the human condition are also brilliant – in turns poignant and pointed… To find novelty in the commonplace, seek the exceptional in the banal, and write thought-provoking observations without resorting to cliché – these are remarkable skills.
Last month we shared another of Caroline’s outstanding collaborative videopoems, murder girl gets wired.
murder girl gets wired by Caroline Reid
murder girl gets wired is written and spoken by award-winning South Australian poet and performer, Caroline Reid. She describes its subject as “hard-edged urban youth culture in late night small city Australia”. The film-maker in the collaboration goes by the artist name featherfurl, and also makes music and gif art.
The eerie suburban images are night-time photographs that are given filmic motion via subtle and unusual visual effects. The soundtrack, engineered by Jeffrey Zhang, is a stand-out feature, with two softly-layered voice tracks accompanying the central reading of the poem.
The inventive use of simple media elements, coupled with the powerful writing, creates outstanding videopoetry in this piece.
murder girl gets wired is the second film we have featured at Moving Poems from Caroline Reid and collaborators. The first was Lost, a finalist in the Ó Bhéal Poetry-Film competition in Ireland in 2019, and part of Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Germany in 2020.
