~ Poet: Matt Mullins ~
scrambled transmission #3 by Matt Mullins
This month, American writer and poetry film artist Matt Mullins released a new author-made video poem on his Vimeo channel, titled “scrambled transmission #3.” It’s the most recent work from Mullins, who took second place at this year’s Filmetry 24: The Poetics of Cinema with his film, “Janet Leigh is Afraid of Jazz,” which is based on a poem by Marsha de la O and was previously profiled by Moving Poems.
“scrambled transmission #3” leads with an interesting soundscape, one which reflects the poem’s title, by way of a fuzzy, mechanical, radio-out-of-tune loop. It pairs well with the black and white found footage. The film’s opening image highlights a compelling fusion of insect and machine, and its following frames continue riffing on this same visual theme, which often make use of repetition. This piece also uses intertitles, so between the footage and its filter and the text on screen, “scrambled transmission #3” makes direct connections with the silent film era.
The poem itself, voice-overed by Mullins, evokes something of Hunter S. Thompson in its themes and tone: a third-person narrative in fragments highlighting mundane acts of violence and estrangement on a “typical atypical day,” mind-altering substances, memory, and American underground art subculture. Overall, the links between the insect world and the human psyche are made quite clear through the poem’s intertitles, voice-over, and found footage. I also thought that the delivery of the poem, particularly its cadence and sense of addled urgency, vaguely recalled the Beat Poets.
As for the filmmaker himself, Mullins’ description of his latest poetry film is refreshingly simple, as he writes: “Some things, one hopes, are self-explanatory.”
View the videopoem here.
3 Erasures at War by Matt Mullins
An author-made videopoem from earlier this year by Matt Mullins, who probably needs no introduction here. As someone who’s dabbled in erasure poetry myself, I was impressed by how well he handled that. There’s quite a lot of free footage of the 1934 New York World’s Fair at the Prelinger Archives, which I’m guessing might be what gave Matt the idea for the videopoem in the first place, but regardless, I think he made good use of it, taking a kinestatic approach for a pleasing contrast with the longer screen-times of the text elements. The soundtrack glues it all together, incorporating Hendrix’s rendition of the US national anthem from Woodstock.
In Darwin’s Dream by Matt Mullins
A brand-new collaboration between two seasoned poetry-film pros, Spanish director Eduardo Yagüe and American writer Matt Mullins, who edits the mixed media section of Atticus Review. Although Matt’s own videopoems are often very effective, here he supplied just the text, voiceover and music, and Eduardo did the rest — the same division of labor as in their 2016 film The Hero is Light. The actress here is Rut Ayuso.
The Hero is Light by Matt Mullins
Usually, the American poet and electronic literature expert Matt Mullins makes his own poetry films, but for this one he teamed up with Spanish director Eduardo Yagüe, providing only the poem, voice and music. The poem is dedicated to the Soviet artist Eva Levina Rozengolts (1898-1975), a drawing of whose appears in the credits. According to the Museum of Russian Art website,
Eva Levina-Rozengolts was one of the few Soviet artists who managed to creatively transform and express the trauma of Stalinist repression in a striking visual language.
Trained in the celebrated VkHuTeMas, the hotbed of early Soviet avant-garde, Eva Rozengolts worked as a textile designer and later a copyist at the Soviet Artists’ Union production studios. She was arrested in 1949 and sentenced to ten years of exile in the depth of Siberia where she lived in a settlement on the Yenisei river, in the Krasnoyarsk region. She was assigned to work as a woodcutter, wall painter, and later medical assistant. After returning from exile, she regained her creativity, undeterred by age and failing health. In fact, it was after her return from Siberia, that her talent came into its own. Unknown to the broad public, her work stirred the attention of the new generation of unofficial artists that emerged after Stalin’s death. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Eva Levina-Rozengolts became recognized as one of the outstanding figures of the ‘lost’ artistic generation of the Stalin era.
Yagüe shot the film in Stockholm with actress Carolina Rosa.
Sundowning by Matt Mullins
A collaboration between Marc Neys and Matt Mullins, who writes:
Alzheimer’s/Dementia includes a phase called sundowning during which the afflicted cannot shake the sense that there is somewhere else they must be, regardless of where they are. This includes the need to go “home” even if one is already home. The videopoem comments on this condition even as it comments on how Alzheimer’s/Dementia takes the sufferer “away” from loved ones while that loved one is still in their presence.
Editing original footage/Music: Swoon (Marc Neys)
Direction/Poem/Recitation/Audio-Visual Composition: Matt Mullins
Arion Resigns by Matt Mullins
American poet and electronic literature expert Matt Mullins, who has previously made some compelling videopoems on his own, collaborated with filmmaker Marc Neys (A.K.A. Swoon) for this one, as he notes in the Vimeo description:
A film by Swoon. A collaboration with Matt Mullins. Matt Mullins put together a recitation and score for a piece he’d written loosely based around the myth of Arion—a minor Greek god of music and poetry—that plays out in the context [of] corporate America. He pulled aspects of this myth into the score sonically, worked his recitation into it, and sent it off to Swoon, who came back with a visually compelling counterpoint that enhanced the poem’s subtext.
(Update, 28 March) Marc has blogged some fairly extensive process notes, including this:
I loved how he constructed a track around his poem. A scape full of (birdlike) noises that invited me to dive in.
The video is a splitscreen-storyline where I play out a female and male character (Thanks Rebekah, aka Softly Galoshes)
I took words from the poem and paired them with illustrations from other words from the poem. Those pairs blip throughout the video…
We wrote back and forth about certain visual decisions I made;Matt: “I like what she represents and I like her demeanor and the things she does. I’m just wondering if a man giving off a similar insomniac/doubt vibe might be bring out more of the poem’s layers. His facing us would still give a counterpoint to the man’s back in the window while also adding a kind of visual echo of the narrator. But I don’t know, there are things about the woman I like as well. What do you think?”
Me: “I specifically picked out a female face to open up that perspective. To avoid people relating the narrator to the face…”
Things like that.I believe the idea, the poem, the track work pretty well together. We were happy enough with it to set up a few more collabs. I’ve sent Matt a bunch of unfinished video’s, raw editings, visual ideas,… to play around with. More to follow this one soon, I guess.
