As part of his
first exhibition (Mahu, June 6th-26th,
2015) SJ Fowler kindly invited me to curate a night exploring the relationship
between film and poetry. The evening was really enjoyable, generously attended
(all crouched, sat and sprawled in the modest gallery space) and happily
stimulated a lot of talk about the films. It was a privilege to be involved in
something that was met with such enthusiasm and, surrounded by his floor to
ceiling scrawl (Steve Fowler’s exhibition centres around the improvised
creation of a novel over a condensed and demanding period of days – the pages
surrounding him on the gallery walls in towering columns) in the company of a
poet whose work and approach to poetry I find so continually inspiring. I was
also particularly excited by the possibility to contact filmmakers whose work
has engaged with the threshold of visuals/language/poetry and film with such diverse
and challenging artistry.
I began the
evening with a presentation that meandered in and out of poetic diction and
digression – as a tribute to the hybridised form and exchange that the event aimed
to present.
The text was as follows:
arranged and rearranged
in emphasis and intention
opening up an exchange between
and across mediums where
Like is lyric ‘I’ to subject
as lens is seeing eye to object
neither speaking on behalf
but half of speaking out of
nowhere
Or as a gesture of translation: from
language to light, reversed from image to text, frame to word to frame and page
to screen, or as screen as page and film as poetry
and back - to poetry reimagined as film.
Taking time between
takes to find time between frames, or framed as time taken. Time as framed
might be spoken
by film syntax
in the grammar
of cutting
How rhythm
movement
& focus
constitute our reception
of meaning, our
ways of meaning –
as found,
projected, disrupted,
ambient,
curated, referential
pointing to the
world, presented as a world.
In his 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera,
Dziga Vertov
proposed a ‘truly international absolute
language of cinema’.
In contrast - Abel
Gance, the French film director known for his silent epics J’Accuse (1919), La Roue
(1923) and Napoléon (1927) remarked
that ‘the marriage of image, text, and sound is so magical that it is
impossible to dissociate them in order to explain the favourable reactions of
one’s unconscious.’
Surrealism
celebrated cinema as a way to emulate and reveal the unconscious, to enter the
darkness of a cinema as if into a shared communion of sleep, to watch dreams
play out across the screen. In 1928 the surrealist Man Ray directed a short
film in response and accompaniment to Robert Desnos’ poem, entitled L’Etoile de Mer :
A swinging disc
of light silhouettes a starfish as it turns in black…the handwritten title is
penned by Man Ray who, in describing his reaction to Desnos’ poem said ‘There was no dramatic action, yet all the elements for a possible
action.’
A Circular window opens ( a clouding
through as blur
we watch the woman
her garter
pulled up towards her thigh)
deferred desire
begins
the
gazing first line of Desnos’ poem:
‘Women’s teeth/
are objects/ so charming.’
One of the
earliest film poems
male desire and
its frustration experienced as a dream/ in a dream
Whose dreams
film/ and poetry’s film dreaming as who
the surrealists
found poetry
(like
the unconscious)
as
a subterranean glimmer
in films that
had no intention or acknowledgement of such readings.
Louis Aragon
observed that
“on
the screen, objects that were a few moments ago
sticks
of furniture or books of cloakroom tickets
are
transformed to the point where they take on
menacing
or enigmatic meanings”
For Aragon film
could “endow with a poetic value that which does not yet posses it”
the surrealists
embraced the early comedy of Mark Sennett, Chaplain and Buster Keaton, &
found the pulp banality of the Fantômas haunted
by mystery,
weird and unintended
moments that
coax the film’s dream into speaking.
Ado Kyrou, the
Greek filmmaker and writer extolled
the virtues of
popular film, advocating that we should
“learn to go and
see the ‘worst’ films; they are sometimes
sublime’
Suggesting now an afterlife for Adam Sandler films,
the Transformers franchise & Eddie
Murphey’s Norbit,
In thinking
about film poetry a trajectory of experimentation suggests itself from
the visual
influence of Cubism, Dadaism – Hans Richter, Ferdinand Léger and Marcel
Duchamp, the French Impressionism of Germain Dulac, the Surrealism of Man Ray,
Dalí and Buñuel ------ influences picked up and developed in
the American Avant-Garde in Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger and Stan Brackhage …but,
like the surrealist appreciation of populist film, poetry also inhabits the
history of narrative cinema.
A history that
is not confined to Hollywood or populist codes but that often sought to combine
or respond to the concept and praxis of poetry.
Jean
Cocteau’s Orphic trilogy 1930/1950/1960 – a card game ends in suicide –
applause – walking through snow – ( )
– a gloved underworld – guardian motorcyclists – the ruined city – passing through
mirrors – a radio speaks through –
static
– intercept – speaks through – interpret – séance – the chirping speaks through
fogged
crackle of overheard – afterlife – of poetry as a return – brought back in
sound
through
sight – afterlife – in film – as film
Pier Paolo Pasolini published his first
collection of poetry in 1941
and continued to write throughout his
life. He would often describe his work
as the cinema of poetry
after realising with disappointment
the intent and nature of American
Avant-Garde film,
Pasolini declared his belief in narrative poetry in film.
Ingmar Bergman’s
1966 film Persona overlaps, splits
and merges the identity
of two women as
the material of film is itself seen to rupture: straining to show,
to represent, to
pierce the image and repeat the image. Enacting a trauma
beyond words but
relating to language, a failure of language and the imagining
of film as
language. The montage at the film’s start: a crucifixion, an erect cock,
a tarantula, a
silent comedy, man is chased by Satan, the slaughter of a lamb and a boy wakes
up in hospital
a
boy turns on a TV “What is your name?”
the boy backs away from the screen, we
inhabit the screen – it is in black and white
“My name is Yuri Zhari” comes the reply
from inside the screen, we see it
as though we are there, as if there is no
screen. It is an adolescent with a stammer;
he continues to be questioned by a
physician, “look right into my eyes” she says.
We watch her hypnotise him
until, having declared the release of his tensions,
he is able to say – without
stammering: “I can speak.”
This is the beginning of Andrei
Tarkovsky’s 1975 film The Mirror.
Tarkovsky
understood poetry as a genre
beyond literary
definition, not as a genre
but existing in
and as the indiscernible
movements of being –
beyond coherent logic.
For Tarkovsky,
the indiscernible movement
Of being is time. Film, as the medium
best equipped to
render time was for him
consequently the
perfect art of poetry.
Poetic cinema
was not symbolic cinema.
It should be,
according to Tarkovsky, metonymic
to call upon
intuitive
association
from which
disparate parts ------- move towards
in suggestion of
the film brought together as a whole.
as Joseph
Cornell, the American artist and filmmaker suggested:
“It is not the carefully composed
images
but rather their ultimate relationship
to each other that generates the poetic
connection”
Cornell collaged
old film reels, worked from found materials, observed still moments of the
ordinary in a park, on the subway,
the city’s back street rambling
in reverence of a stone angel
In
1936, spliced and edited,
a cheesy jungle melodrama
East of Borneo (1931)
re-cut and presented
as a feverish ode to its
female lead Rose Hobart…
the poetics of
position, arrangement, combination: “Collage as language”
constellate
glances, coming back to it/ to ‘catch it’, something like deep forest or
tapestry where the everyday is found suspended as the occasion
from the aviary
whose ceiling dreamt of snow or the shadow box that is dreaming still, impossible
to fix in words but speaking
Cornell worked
with other filmmakers of the American Avant-Garde: Larry Jordan, Rudy
Burckhardt and Stan Brakhage
Brakhage
referred to his own work as “filmpoems”, reading with a religious commitment
the poetry of Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, William Carlos Williams, Ezra
Pound, Louis Zukofsky, Robert Creeley, Michael McClure and Ronald Johnson.
Communities
intermingled, friendships, correspondence and the continuing of a
conversation
In the US: The
Beats, The Black Mountain School,
The New York
School…all were influenced by
and in turn
influenced their contemporaries
in the
underground film scene:
from Kenneth
Anger and Jack Smith
to Alfred
Leslie, Robert Frank,
Rudy Burckhardt
and Andy Warhol.
Allen Ginsberg stares
out from his screen test
John Ashbery stares
out from his screen test
Ted Berrigan,
Diane de Prima, Marcel Duchamp,
Willard Maas,
Harry Smith, Joe Brainard, John Weiners,
John Giorno, Susan
Sontag…all staring out from Warhol’s screen tests
Before eyes
opened in factory light, screened at a slowed down 16 frames per second, and a
year after Ian Hugo’s film Bells of
Atlantis ----- a film with a voiceover by Anais Nin reading from her
hallucinatory book House of Incest:
“My first vision of earth was water veiled. I am of the race
of men and women who see all things through this curtain of sea and my eyes are
the color of water.”------
on October 28th
1953, Cinema 16 held a symposium on “Poetry and Film”
The impressive
panel included: Maya Deren, Dylan Thomas, Parker Tyler, Arthur Miller, Willard
Maas and Amos Vogel. It was here, between the unengaged comic quips of Dylan
Thomas that Deren put forward a distinction between
the horizontal
and vertical |||| in film
the horizontal embodied
the linear development of plot
presented and
experienced over sequential time
the vertical
embodied the suspended exploration
of associations
that can co-exist in a moment
Concerning the
use of language within a film, Deren reasoned:
“[W]ords are not
necessary when they come, as in the theatre, from what you see…However if they
were brought in on a different level […] as if you were standing at a window
and looking out into the street and there are children playing hopscotch. Well,
that’s your visual experience. Behind you, in the room, are women discussing
hats or something and that’s your auditory experience. You stand at the place
where these two come together by virtue of your presence. […] a curious
combination of both, and that is your resultant image”
language should
not name what is shown
in feeble
overlay – a tautology that crowds and detracts
but in a near
alchemical difference or disjunction that together
inflects image
with language and language with image
Brackhage went
on to develop what he referred to as “visual ineffables”, films he believed
could stimulate experiences of perception and recollection outside of language
as it was currently defined, films that were haunted by movement, tone and
texture but ‘un-nouned’, devoid of recognisable shapes, objects or subjects – a
beyond or before of language. A creation of “light glyphs”
In
the 70s the primary vein of experimentation in American poetry
was
channelled into L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry
materiality
of the word as object, signifier stripped of transparency
placed
above and before its referent --- its filmic counterpart
in
the structural/materialist experimentation of Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton,
Owen Land and Tony Conrad (amongst others) and in the UK the prominence of the
London filmmakers Co-op.
FIXED
FRAMING. MEDIUM SURFACED. AS GROANS MOVE
SKIN
OF FLICKER. BEAM OUT THERE PROJECTION BEAMS.
SCREEN
SO GRIT LOOPING PRINT.WEIGHT OF.
WEIGHT
OF IT. WEIGHT OF LIT. WAITING AS
THE
PROCESS.PULLING. MOVE . MINUTES
MATTER.
WAITING. FOCUS. WAVE OF LENGTH. OF
CINEMATIC
BORED INTO. FOCUS. AS WAVE BORING.
DURATION
LENGTH SCORED ON SURFACE OF
MEDIUM.
TOUCHING LIGHT AS LASTING. AGAIN
UNTIL.
WAVES. AGAIN IS LASTING OVER FRAME. SAY
IS
SAYING READING IN RAY IS STAYING FILM
SCREENED.
FILM SCREENED IS FRAME STATE
Not new but always
having been there,
“so magical that
is impossible to dissociate”
not new
but gaining in
popularity
in proliferation
William Wees
published the significant essay “the Poetry Film” in 1984.
Poetry film
festivals began to appear in the 90s, alongside television commissions and a
growing interest expressed in literary poetry societies.
The 90s also
inaugurated the publication of ‘Film Poem Poem Film”, a periodical brochure
from the South London Poem Film Society, emerging alongside regular Film Poem
programmes curated by Peter Todd at the National Film Theatre. On the back of
this momentum came work from the filmmaker and poet, Tony Harrison, and the
call for ‘rules’ and manifesto rhetoric
the
notion of the British film poem seemed – at least for a small coterie –
impatient to assert its own identity – a voice that, in the flurry of
increasing popularity and institutionalised support, seemed to stray from a
history of genuine interrogation and innovation towards weaker concepts of
hybrid collaboration and dogma: the poem film, the film poem, film poetry
It continues as
not new, but always having been there
Online platforms
more affordable camera technology
the conversation
accelerates
available and multiplied
streaming, archived, linked,
sampled, shared and found
as collage in montage
as uninspired, uninteresting
pretentious and infuriating
as with the internet
oceans of shit
through which, occasionally,
the profound or unexpected breaches
where the between of film and poetry
is reminded of its
continuing experiment.
arranged and rearranged
in emphasis and intention
opening up an exchange between
and across mediums where
Like is lyric ‘I’ to subject
as lens is seeing eye to object
neither speaking on behalf
but half of speaking out of
nowhere
Film Programme:
1)Alice Lyons & Orla McHardy - 'The Polish Language' (8:22)
2) David Kelly &Joshua Alexander - 'Warming' (6:43)
3) Marc Neys (Steve Ronnie) /Swoon - 'If Grief were to Disappear' (4:20)
4) Lila Matsumoto & Adam Butcher - (3:38)
5) SJ Fowler & Joshua Alexander - 'Animal Drum' (6:05)
6) Chiara Ambrosio - A Walk Through Wooda (10:36)
7) Vessela Dantcheva - 'Anna Blume' (10:50)
8) Ed Atkins - 'Warm, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths' (2:47)
9) Abigail Child - 'Mercy' (10:14)
2) David Kelly &Joshua Alexander - 'Warming' (6:43)
3) Marc Neys (Steve Ronnie) /Swoon - 'If Grief were to Disappear' (4:20)
4) Lila Matsumoto & Adam Butcher - (3:38)
5) SJ Fowler & Joshua Alexander - 'Animal Drum' (6:05)
6) Chiara Ambrosio - A Walk Through Wooda (10:36)
7) Vessela Dantcheva - 'Anna Blume' (10:50)
8) Ed Atkins - 'Warm, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths' (2:47)
9) Abigail Child - 'Mercy' (10:14)
