Poetics and Film 1980–2024 A Retrospective by Martin Sercombe
I am so pleased to share this really fascinating insight into the development of leading British experimental filmmaker, film poet and poetry filmmaker Martin Sercombe, now living in New Zealand. As an artist your work changes over the years (alongside artistic influences), and even changes mediums, and this creative process, across time, is really significant both personally and historically, for the field. I have worked across textiles, painting, experimental film and writing in a number of genres since the 1980s and before, so Martin’s retrospective really gels with me. It is all the more poignant as his journey has now arrived at experimentation with poetry film and AI, not necessarily an easy or accessible transition, but one made seamlessly in his case. He is also one of the contributors (with poet Thom Conroy) to Frame to Frames : Your Eyes Follow publication, with his AI poetry film Night is Paper (see later).
Martin
My relationship with poetry film began in the 1980s, a period when a large and vibrant community of experimental film makers were sharing ideas, with the support of the London (and regional) Film makers Co-ops and later LUX in the UK. As part of this movement, my work reflected a fascination with abstract and non-narrative synesthetic cinema. For me a synesthetic film involves a pure language of light, movement and sound. Traditional forms of storytelling are abandoned in favour of forms more akin to music. Visual kinetics, dynamic montage and the integral rhythms of a work are brought together to create an intimate synthesis of sound and image.
My formative influences were many. I studied on the UK’s first time-based media degree course at Maidstone College of Art, run by video artist David Hall. His notable works included TV Interruptions in which images such as a burning TV set were broadcast unannounced within the normal schedule of a Scottish television station. I immediately embraced his philosophy of defining art forms which could subvert media conventions.
Another key influence was Harry Smith’s Early Abstractions 1946–57 which combined jazz improvisations with imagery handpainted directly onto 35mm clear film. This, alongside another early pioneer’s work: Hans Richter’s Rhythmus 21 suggested innovative ways of defining a language of pure image, sound and rhythm.
Early Abstractions: 1946–57, Harry Smith.
Rhythmus 21, Hans Richter.
This manifesto was further developed by experimental filmmakers such as Pat O’Neill, who abstracted kinetic subjects such as machinery and dancers via multi-layered optical printing. His work prompted my fascination with compositing and transforming many different image and sound sources in the cause of lyrical abstraction. A documentary about his work can be seen here.
This quote by Stan Brakhage has stayed with me throughout my career as a filmmaker: “Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception.” Brakhage thought of his film work as visual poems and as ways of seeing the world through eyes free of pre-ordained definitions. Likewise, much of my work begins without a script, allowing the immediacy of the moment in a given space to cue each artistic decision and the gradual evolution towards a structured piece of work.
Poetry felt like a natural addition to this approach, its lyricism and ability to subvert narrative conventions lending itself to the synesthetic genre. I saw its role as a means of replacing a conventional story arc with something looser, less prescriptive and closely married to the worlds of music and song.
Over the years I have explored many relationships between a poetic text and the moving image. In early works, such as In Motion (see below), text is seen as a metaphor for the landscape, to be absorbed by the reader in a random, fleeting fashion. Working with Sianed Jones and Cris Cheek, text became a highly fluid and malleable cue, which can be magically transformed into music, vocalization, performed gesture or animation. In later works, such as One Sunday in Winter I have thought of the poem as a parallel thread that develops alongside the moving imagery, one supporting but not explaining the other. Most recently, (Find me a Word, Songs of Vanishing etc) I have looked once again at ways a poem can become a landscape, both in concrete visual terms, and as descriptor.
In Motion (16mm 1981)
In Motion is one of a series of three short 16mm films supported by Arts Council England as part of their Film Makers on Tour Scheme. Together with Track (1980) and East Coast (1982) the three films explore visionary journeys through a range of land and seascapes.
In Motion expands upon a text from the first timetable printed by the Grand Junction Railway in the 1830s celebrating the pure joy of watching the world pass by from a train window. Words are displayed in a tracking matrix, inviting the eye to scan them left to right, or up and down, as one might a passing vista. I created the animation using a Bolex camera on a rostrum, then passed the film through the camera a second time to create the kinetic background of sunlight through passing trees. The film continues along a mountain stream in Cumbria, ending in a rapid-fire montage of zooms through plantations in North Norfolk.
In the following years, my artist film work sat on the back burner, whilst I developed my role as director of Media Projects East. The company focused on media work within the community, exploring social issues, local history and media education.
I returned to artist-led work in the late 1990s. The digital revolution had made non-linear video production accessible to low budget independent film makers. I bought my first PC driven editing system, running an early version of Adobe Premiere.
Singing the Horizon (SD Video 1997)
There followed a summer of journeys to Halvergate Marshes in the Norfolk Broads in collaboration with composer Sianed Jones. Sianed brought her voice and violin, I came with a digital camcorder. Together we responded to the transient visual qualities of marshland, light, sky and bird life through improvised music and image capture.
The film contains no text, but I like to think of it as a poetry film thanks to its lyrical approach to the dialogue which evolved. Sianed brought her knowledge of Mongolian Long Song and sang the horizons and whispering reed beds. I spent around three months exploring new found ways to layer and transform the imagery using the tools inherent in Premiere. This ability to matte together many different image sources echoed the optical print techniques of pioneers such as Pat O’Neill.
I passed a silent edit to Sianed, who then meticulously edited her field recordings to match the flow of the imagery.
Tongues Undone (SD Video 1998)
Singing the Horizon was well received at the Worldwide Video Festival in Amsterdam. This laid the groundwork for our next collaboration, funded jointly by Tom Van Vleit’s festival fund and Eastern Arts in the UK. The work is a three-way collaboration between myself, Sianed and performance poet Cris Cheek. It was conceived as a single screen work integrated into a live performance staged at the Melkveg, in Amsterdam.
The performance began with Cris and Sianed chatting at the bar, indistinguishable from the audience. Operating an animated light beam from the projection booth, I signaled the start of the performance by spot lighting the performers. I then led them away from the bar inside the beam of light, which contained a poetic ‘score’ comprised of abstract symbols and marks. Cris and Sianed’s role was to translate this score into vocalisation and gesture as they slowly followed it around the room to the central stage.
Cris and Sianed then exchanged vocal statements over dense layerings of live triggered sound samples. They also translated these statements into physical gestures and expressions. My camera in turn recorded these gestures, then stretched and spun them across a multi-screen installation behind the performers, using a live time lapse technique.
For the single screen work, Cris and Sianed recorded a sequence of poetry and song works in a white infinity cove, whilst responding to their live video feed. This allowed them to play creatively with the space they were inhabiting, leaping in and out of the frame, dancing with multiple images of themselves or watching the camera explore their throats as they sang! Post production allowed me to introduce my own voice into the dialogue by adding animation and graphic effects to the white ‘canvas’, in direct response to their poetry.
The project felt like a landmark, suggesting innovative ways performed poetry can be carried into new realms, combining aspects of live music, theatre and the moving image in a single work. It set the stage for much of my later experimentation.
Maud (SD Video 2000)
The starting point for this project was the classic poem Maud, by Alfred Tennyson, which tells, in first person monologue, the story of a man’s obsessive and unrequited love for a rich lord’s daughter.
“Come into the garden, Maud,
For the black bat, night, has flown,
Come into the garden, Maud,
I am here at the gate alone;
And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad,
And the musk of the rose is blown.”
The film was shot in landscapes in North Norfolk and Taupo, New Zealand. The use of slow shutter cinematography allowed me to abstract each location by painting the ambient light qualities. This technique was designed to also ‘paint’ the protagonist’s emotions, as the narrative leads him from an innocent state of pure love into abject misery, upon his rejection by Maud.
The soundtrack is largely composed of electro-acoustically treated fragments of the poem, deconstructing the words and syllables to generate a dense aural soundscape. Each spoken phrase, having first delivered its narrative intent, is recycled in many different ways to reveal its musical, rhythmic and concrete qualities.
When the film was presented at the World Wide Video Festival in 2000, Sianed Jones walked onto the stage in front of the cinema screen in the persona of Maud. Hidden inside her Victorian costume was a series of electronic triggers linked to sound samples. In this way she accompanied herself on violin as she sang her response to her rejected lover.
Delirium HD Video 2006
Delirium is a collaboration with sound artist Matt Warren, who shared an artist’s residency with me in Brisbane in 2006. It is a portrait of the city, evoking a mood of agoraphobia and disorientation, reflecting my own sense of discomfort in the midsummer tropical humidity. I wrote its poem whilst collecting infrared imagery in the city parks and along the river.
I jitterbugged into jungle city
a shimmering delirium
of clustering geometries
splicing clouds in a black light sky
I was lost on my way to Indooroopilly
to catch a pied Butcherbird
or catch a pied Currawong’s
silvery cry…
I passed the mute fine cut and poem to Matt, who then sang the words in the style of a Gregorian chant. The film was premiered at Raw Space Galleries in Brisbane, then screened in Melbourne and Hobart during a short summer tour.
I moved to Auckland, New Zealand in 2014 to be closer to family and explore new work opportunities. Soon after, I began lecturing at Auckland University of the Arts, teaching undergraduates 16mm film and digital video production. The current fascination with analogue film making techniques allowed me to share my love of the Bolex with a new generation of creatives.
In 2016 film maker Robin Kewell and I launched Lyrical Visions, an annual showcase of short poetry inspired films and animations. Initially, we used it as a platform for my own work, alongside that of the university students and lecturers. Gradually, other local film makers got involved, including performance poet Gus Simonovic.
Find Me a Word (HD Video 2017)
Find me a Word was my first collaboration with Gus, commissioned for screening at the annual Going West Writers Festival. It was shot around the creeks and bays of Titirangi, on the edge of the Waitakere Regional Park. I took fragments of his text and integrated it into the landscape through animation and travelling mattes. The intent was to expand on the ways both poem and visual counterpart might be read and interpreted. The soundtrack was composed by Canadian sound artist Sylvi MacCormac. The film is featured in Moving Poems.
One Sunday in Winter (UHD Video 2020)
One Sunday in Winter was a lockdown project, made in home confinement during the COVID pandemic of 2020. Unable to take my camera on location, I decided to make a drawn animation, using a Wacom drawing tablet, in conjunction with the drawing tools in Painter and Photoshop.
It was inspired by a day trip to Karekare, a wild and beautiful expanse of untouched coastline in West Auckland. It tells its story via hand written haikus and digital painting. The film is composed of several layers of moving imagery, each with its own rhythmic pulse. Each layer relates to another kinetic visual element observed within the landscape, such as the waves, clouds or gulls in flight. The film evokes the sudden changes in weather typical of a winter’s day, as the film moves from sunlit calm, across a windswept ocean into rain drenched twilight.
Sometimes the text was written in direct response to an image sequence, at other times, the animation was prompted by the writing. In this way the two grew together in a very organic way. The music was composed by Richard Ingamells and Richard Reynolds.
Night is Paper (UHD Video 2022)
This work marked my first venture into the world of AI generated imagery. It was made during an artist’s residency in Palmerston North, supported by Massey University, Palmerston City Council and Square Edge Community Arts Centre.
The film invites viewers to eavesdrop onto the lives of shadowy characters engaged in obscure rituals, unfolding within a painterly labyrinth. I developed a visual style inspired by Japanese sumi-e pen and wash illustration on handmade paper and Javanese shadow puppetry. Using the Midjourney AI tool, each new image was created by subtly changing variables in the text prompts sent to the generator. Additionally, one image was often used to prompt the next, leading to a sequence akin to the frames of a painted graphic novel.
The film is a collaboration with novelist Dr Thom Conroy, who wrote the text. He watched the film just before falling asleep for three consecutive nights, then waited for inspiration to come via his dreams. On the third morning his text came to him almost fully formed and he passed it back to me to integrate into the image and soundscape.
The piece was selected for Frame to Frames: Your Eyes Follow II Ekphrastic Poetry Film Prize, FOTOGENIA film festival, Mexico City, 2023 curated by Sarah Tremlett. It can also be seen in the accompanying bilingual book available from Poem Film Editions at liberatedwords.com/store
Songs of Vanishing (UHD Video 2024)
Songs incorporates AI generated video and animation. My chosen tools were a DSLR camera, Photoshop, Premiere, Midjourney and Runway. The latter is currently one of the leading AI video generation tools, and is capable of creating short video clips prompted by still images and/or text descriptions.
The idea began simply as a study of the movements of fog through a range of landscapes at dawn and dusk. As the film progresses, the fog inspires a quiet but sombre celebration of nature, involving shadow figures moving through a surreal forest world.
I feel it is a natural companion to Night is Paper, exploring a similar tone and mood. However, this time I wanted to draw on a broader range of visual techniques. I integrated images of forest details created through in-camera multiple superimposition, fictional landscapes generated in Midjourney and animation generated in Runway. I sought to blend the three sources seamlessly, so that any distinction between ‘real’ and ‘artificial’ becomes completely blurred.
The text can be read, in one sense, as the voice of the land and forest rising out of the mist. Again, it evolved in parallel with the imagery, with one suggesting the other as the film took on its final shape. Inspired by e.e. cummings’ playful and innovative use of word layout, each line of the poem explores different ways of co-existing with the landscape and the film frame, appearing and vanishing like the fog it describes. The soundtrack by Manuel Gordiani was selected from the Free Music Archive.
The Dance of Light (UHD Video 2024)
To further explore the potentials of AI driven choreography, I embarked on a dance inspired piece, working with virtual performers in virtual landscapes. It is still impossible to prescribe the exact parameters of an AI generated shot, such as character movement and continuity, camera cues, lighting etc. The algorithms make many unexpected decisions, sometimes impressive, often not! In making this film, my role as artist felt more akin to that of art director, attempting to reign in the wild imaginings of a team of virtual creatives! So, rather than taking an overly prescriptive approach, I let their imaginings lead the work, as it developed into a meditation on ritual and dance as a celebration of nature.
It is AI’s ability to emulate almost any artistic style that most interests me. I see it as a new means of generating synesthetic abstraction that can echo my earlier work. I also wonder how it will transform the landscape for other creative professionals. Soon AI photography and video will become indistinguishable from their ‘real-life’ counterparts. Many cost and labour intensive processes will be replaced by descriptive computer driven commands. Whilst this could remove the need for large budgets and teams of specialists, it risks making many valuable, traditional skills redundant. However, my feeling is that computers will never replace the innovative, evolving nature of human creativity.
Reflecting on my journey over the last 40 years, I feel each project has been another step towards understanding the profound synergies that can co-exist between poetry, sound and the moving image. For me the medium is a perfect platform for exploring collaboration between these complementary disciplines and finding fresh ways to synthesise them into new artistic forms.
Further Links and Reading
A documentary about the work of Pat O’Neill
Stan Brakhage – Stellar (1993)
A History of Experimental Film and Video – by A. L. Rees
Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943–2000 – by P. Adams Sitney
