Bristol Literary Film Festival – Frame to Frames, Cancer Alley and an exciting diverse programme
BRISTOL LITERARY FILM FESTIVAL
I am really pleased to be part of the newly launched Bristol Literary Film Festival this year. It will also be nice to catch up with Lucy English again, who is presenting the important and timely ecopoetry film Cancer Alley from Outlier Moving Pictures (Pamela Falkenberg and Jack Cochran). I will be promoting the Frame to Frames : Your Eyes Follow bilingual, ekphrastic poetry anthology (and prize) alongside examples from its QR-linked screening.
This is the fifth stop on the book tour for Frame to Frames (FOTOGENIA, Mexico City, MX; REELpoetry, Houston, USA; Weimar Poetry Film Festival, Weimar, GER; Leeds Trinity College, Leeds, UK, and next month will be Maldito videopoetry festival in Albacete, Spain.) I will include some of the films that were inspired by the painting Huapango Torero by Mexican artist Ana Segovia (including winning film Love Spell Cast in Petals by Meriel Lland and Huapango Torero by Pam and Jack).
A Love Spell Cast in Petals by Meriel Lland
Bristol Literary Film Festival is the brainchild of Festival Director Anthea Page, sister of well-known, award-winning poetry filmmaker Diana Taylor. She was also previously Director of the widely comprehensive yet inviting Newlyn International Film Festival (where Lucy and I were jurors). She says that ‘running the Newlyn IFF definitely helped in my decision to run a new festival in Bristol’ and in terms of its unique title she comments ‘I believe that we are the first ever to combine a literary and film festival!’.
Not only can she boast this accolade, but the festival also supports St Peter’s Hospice ‘I have been involved with raising funds for St Peter’s Hospice for the last couple of years.’ Their website encapsulates the wonderful work they do:
‘St Peter’s Hospice is a local charity that provides care and support to adults who are living with a progressive life-limiting illness in the Bristol, South Gloucestershire and North Somerset area. We have been established for over 40 years with the majority of our support provided in people’s homes. People receiving our care have a wide range of conditions, including cancer, heart failure, lung disease and neurological illness. Support is focused around the physical, psychological, social and spiritual issues that can arise as a result of serious illness, in order to improve the quality of a person’s life. Everyone is unique, and we provide support with that in mind.’
Rather like Newlyn there are lots of interesting aspects to this festival: not only International Poetry Films but also documentaries including Colin Thomas’ ‘Dead Man Talking’ about Thomas Hardy and his methods of research, and Zennor Spirit of Place from the fascinating book by Bob Osborne with film by Diana Taylor (a perfect creative partnership).
Photograph from Zennor Spirit of Place, Bob Osborne and Diana Taylor
In light of Anthea’s support of the Hospice, I am also looking forward to hearing presentations on subjects shedding light on how we respond to life-threatening illness, such as Tumorous Testicles Just Say Cancer by Afsheen Panjalizadeh, and also Martin Smith’s presentation Matters of Life and Death. Also, the extraordinary film presentation by Juliet Butler of the book The Less You Know the Sounder you Sleep, the true story of conjoined Russian twins, Masha and Dasha Krivoshlyapova. There also will be an interesting book presentation by Susie Parr on Henleaze Lake (a swimmer’s paradise) and fascinating highlights from Bristol Film and Video Society (1934 to 2024). Attendants also have the opportunity to socialise and take part in a writers’ forum and learn about Creative Writing for Wellbeing, or catch up with Bristol Poets at the Festival Café. I guarantee this will be a lovely gathering with much to discover!
Frame to Frames : Your Eyes Follow / Cuadro a Cuadros : Tus Ojos Siguen is published by Poem Film Editions via liberated words.com/store
or see top right of Home Screen.
Poetics and Film 1980–2024 A Retrospective by Martin Sercombe
I am honoured 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
Frame to Frames Ekphrasis interview with Patricia Killelea for Moving Poems
It was a real pleasure to be interviewed on ekphrasis and adaptation by leading poetry filmmaker Patricia Killelea (Associate Professor at Northern Michigan University) for Moving Poems.
I had just been to the We Need to Talk about Art : Ekphrasis Now conference at Leeds (on the tour venues for the book) and had a good sense of what I wanted to say. She came up with some really insightful and detailed questions and it was a real pleasure to give thought to the answers. There is also a link to the documentary on ekphrastic poetry films made for REELpoetry and the screening in its entirety for FOTOGENIA. There was more of a focus on films based on Huapango Torero, but all the films have been mentioned.
Looking forward to the next presentation of the book at Bristol Literary Film Festival on the 27th October.
Sarah
Joint forces: collaborating in poetry film by Janet Lees
My Instagram tag is ‘everything is poetry’. Writing this piece, I’ve been thinking of changing it to ‘everything is collaboration’. I love what the poet Matthew Rohrer says about poetry: ‘I’ve come to believe that the writing of all poems is a form of collaboration’. He talks about collage poetry, ekphrasis and ‘collaborations with the voices that I heard on the brink of dreaming’. He asserts, ‘There is no creation out of nothing on this Earth. There’s only making new things in collaboration with other things.’
I’ve sometimes said that I stumbled into making poetry films and then stumbled into collaboration. Recently I’ve come to realise that this is not true (top fact: the Estonian word for making poetry is lluletama, which also means to lie). As a child I drew, painted and wrote poetry and stories as a matter of course. From the moment I was given my first camera, my beloved Grandad’s box Brownie, at the age of 11, I took a lot of photographs too. I listened to music endlessly as a teenager – not all of it great, but most enduringly Kate Bush, David Bowie, Leonard Cohen and other similarly poetic songwriters. So there was some early cross-fertilisation going on between the three key elements of a poetry film: words, visuals and sound/music.
My undergraduate degree was split equally between visual arts and writing. Ultimately my focus was photography and poetry, and key to the course was integration of the arts. My thesis was on the concrete poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, with whom I corresponded for several years. He collaborated with a wide range of artists – his famous gardens and temple at Little Sparta are in part a homage to collaboration. So the principles of integration and collaboration became formally embedded into my creative DNA.
After graduating I lived in a creative wilderness for many years due to depression and addiction. I didn’t write poetry, I didn’t make visual art and except when I was out of my head I didn’t listen to music – it was just too painful. In the spring of 2011, a few years into recovery, I spontaneously began noting down words and phrases from ads on the London Underground. Suddenly, the words bewitched me: their music, their dark comedy, the other things they were saying – the way they compelled me with great urgency to rearrange them into skewed, oddly lucid pieces. I didn’t know then that there was a term for what I was doing and that poetically speaking it was a perfectly legitimate thing to do: found poetry.
An accidental (or intuitive) collaboration
I showed these strange broken little poems to a photographer/videographer I worked with, Rooney, and he combined them with his footage to make strange broken little films. Again, we had no idea that what we were doing was part of an established and rapidly burgeoning genre within the art world: poetry film.
Sarah Tremlett says that poetry films “link and fuse previously separate art forms as well as both intuitive and measured decision-making, and are often made as collaborations between poets and filmmakers.” Rooney and I were certainly fusing separate art forms, we were obviously collaborating, and we were most definitely making both intuitive and measured decisions. Our process was at first entirely intuitive, from my noting down of words from adverts to Rooney’s initial decision to put the text with video footage. The measured decisions included my rearranging the found text into new poems, and Rooney choosing specific clips from his large portfolio of footage to pair these with.
high voltage acts of kindness
This was the beginning of my return to poetry: reading it, writing it, falling back in love with it. I enrolled on a Masters’ degree in Creative Writing, driven by the need to better express the latent poems of my own that were storming through me, and demanded to be written. It was also the beginning of a series of collaborative poetry film partnerships.
Rooney has been a huge influence on me; we have worked together for many years and his creative and philosophical vision is there in some form in all of my poetry film work. The hours of darkness, one of the first films I created independently, shows his direct influence – for example in the single take, fixed viewpoint and, crucially, the dissonance between the text and the visual.
This is something we’ve both always felt strongly about: that what you see on screen should not generally be a literal illustration of what you hear, or read. It doesn’t have to be an outright dissonance, sometimes more of a slant approach, in which the visual echoes, or converses with, or helps to unpack a certain aspect of the poem. And when there is dissonance, it can have consonance at its heart – perhaps there is an energy, or atmosphere, or emotion in the poem that is mirrored in the visuals, even though they do not literally illustrate the words.
I like what Tom Konyves says about the poetry in a videopoem, “My view is that ‘poetry’ is the result of the judicious, poetic juxtaposition of text, image and sound; the poetry in a videopoem thus ceases to be simply the text element…Instead, an entirely new form of poetic experience can be produced.” As he says, this new poetic experience is “more than a narrative told in visual terms.” It’s in the judicious poetic juxtaposing of text, visuals and sound, through a series of intuitive and measured decisions, that the magic happens.
The hours of darkness
Collaborating with composers and musicians
Of all the art forms, for me music is the purest vehicle of emotion; it speaks directly to my soul. A few years ago I was lucky enough to see Suzanne Vega live. I wept through the entire show, transported back to a time in my early twenties when I was bereft after a break-up and would spend night after night curled up on the floor listening to her, the epitome of a ‘small blue thing’. Sound, too, is incredibly evocative – wind chimes, the old-fashioned telephone pips, a cricket match being played, the soundscape of a beach in summertime – and lends you the same ability to travel in time.
Over the past few years I’ve collaborated with several different musicians. My most recent collaboration is with the composer Mablanig, aka Bruno Cavellec, who is also a well-known painter. Bruno’s paintings have always touched me deeply, and it’s the same with his music. There’s something he does, an interweaving of darkness and light, sorrow and bliss, whether in paint or musical notes, that completely resonates with me – and his voice is quietly devastating.
Bruno says, “Ever since I first saw Janet’s videopoems, I’ve been an admirer of her very distinctive style and powerful narrative. With her work, it’s almost as if I discovered a brand-new language, so unique and expressive, which I find deeply moving and inspiring. There is such beauty and a great sense of aesthetic in what Janet creates. This collaboration is a dream come true, a soul-to-soul project. The resulting film is a deeply introspective piece in which past and present share the space to pay tribute to those who left a mark on us.”
This was an ambitious project and a true multidisciplinary collaboration from the start. We set out to make a triptych entitled Nine moons, incorporating Bruno’s music and painting, my poetry and film/photography, and both our voices. Using Zoom, as we are in different countries, we had several sessions in which we talked generally, and then more specifically about the project. We already knew we had a lot in common, and through these sessions we discovered many more commonalities.
Through this process we realised we wanted to bring more of ourselves to the work. This manifested in the form of personal photographs of people close to us, which Bruno, a Photoshop expert, edited into some of my photographs of abandoned and derelict places. This sequence forms the third part of the triptych, in which the music, visuals and text come together in way that to me feels seamless and transcending – and which for both of us is a deeply emotional experience.
On its first screening in June 2024, Nine moons won Best International Poetry Short at the Bloomsday Film Festival in Dublin.
Nine moons
The first musician I collaborated with was George Simpson, whose awe-inspiring music I came across via Instagram. I was blown away by his album Still Points in the Turning World, notably the tracks Sextacodareprise and Artemis. So I got in touch and asked him if he would allow me to use his music. Thankfully he said yes, and the results were the films A boat for sorrow and Huntress. The former was a collaborative work in more ways than one; I made the poem using randomly (intuitively) selected words and lines from a pocket edition of selected poems by W.B. Yeats.
I sent George early drafts of each piece to check he was happy with the pairing of the music and visuals which in both films were abstracted and animated stills. In the case of Huntress I changed the title of the poem to more closely tie in with the music, Artemis being the Greek goddess of hunting (and I’d never come up with a title I was happy with before). The notion of being a huntress in the context of bearing witness to the inescapable realities of the Anthropocene worked with the poem and also felt empowering; better to feel yourself to be a huntress than a helpless observer.
Huntress
The composer Richard Quirk and I collaborated on a project which became the poetry film Still here, and we’re currently in the contemplation phase of our next collaboration. He had shared some of his music with me and I was particularly struck by the haunting, bleakly beautiful track Dream Thieves. Richard also writes poetry and in his music I think there is a particular poetic sensibility.
All the elements of this collaboration just fell into place. I’d been to visit Dungeness, a place that is deeply embedded in me even though I only spent a snatched few hours there. I knew I had to make a film that somehow conveyed the essence of this irredeemably bleak yet somehow comforting place, which seemed to tell a momentous, universal story of what it is to live in the Anthropocene and simultaneously evoke an intensely personal, profoundly felt response that transcends this life.
Dream Thieves was just so exactly right, tuning directly in to this story and this response. I had taken quite a bit of footage while at Dungeness, but made the (measured) decision to populate the film only with stills, apart from the moving footage at the beginning and at the end – these are akin to a curtain rising and falling, bookending a contemplative experience which happens in its own ‘beyond’ space. Also while at Dungeness, a poem that I’d written some time ago kept coming into my mind. It was made on a Poetry School course, a found text piece incorporating words and lines from a beautiful short prose piece by Majella Kelly about the last man on an otherwise abandoned island.
Of the effortlessness that marked this collaboration, Richard says, “Collaboration at its best takes no struggle with combining ideas. It provides the inspiration that shows the creative goal. It may not show you how to get to that destination, but you know with certainty that there is something you are working towards and the creative energy is primed and waiting to be utilised. It will provoke new methods, a sudden and fresh way of thinking without any conscious request for different resources. When it works it is highly enjoyable and rewarding. When it isn’t working, your gut will know very quickly and in my experience the project should be abandoned immediately.”
A composer and musician I’ve collaborated with on several projects is Tromlhie, aka Martyn Cain. As well as being an outstanding creator in his own right, Martyn is part of Post War Stories, a dark, dynamic three-piece band with the sound of something much greater. I’d worked with Post War Stories on the videopoem The worst thing by far, and Martyn shared some of his own music with me. One track in particular resonated deeply. The result was the poetry film Nowhere to go but on, which again has a collaborative poem at its heart; in this case a Cento, a traditional form dating back centuries, in which the poet borrows lines from published poems to create a new poem.
This film is a mix of footage and animated stills. I typically use apps to create animated stills, most notably Motionleap. I’m no animator – although this is a skill I would love to learn, given the time (which there is never enough of) – so find this kind of off-the-shelf app really useful for bringing subtle motion and effects to photographs.
Nowhere to go but on
Martyn and I also collaborated on the film What I fear most is becoming ‘a poet’, based on a poem by Katerina Gogou, which won the Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film competition in 2021.
I was invited to make this film by filmpoetry.org, the excellent videopoetry platform of the Institute for Experimental Arts in Athens, who commissioned 10 poetry filmmakers from around the world to celebrate the work of 10 Greek poets. Katerina Gogou died as the result of an overdose in 1993 so I was unable to work with her, but I researched her life exhaustively which brought me closer to her and her poetry. She was a blazing spirit, Greece’s greatest modern anarchist poetess. Born into the Nazi occupation of Greece, she lived through the years of far right military junta oppression and the country’s resurgent anarchist movement in the 1980s. An activist herself, she became a prophet of the movement and her poems anthems for it.
So, turning one of Katerina’s poems into a poetry film was a huge responsibility. I felt it was important to have a piece of music specially created to do justice to her legacy, so commissioned Martin to compose a piece for the film. Again, this film is made up of animated stills; I sent Martyn several of these, along with the poem. The soundtrack he created was, as I’d hoped it would be, perfect: a brooding elegy to defiance, fear and incipient despair. Fire and smoke are twin visual motifs running through the film; the fire broadly representing social unrest and Katerina’s burning desire for social justice, the smoke a sense of being burned out by life. Both these recurring motifs worked so well with Martyn’s simmering, off-kilter soundtrack.
What I fear most is becoming ‘a poet’
I’ve learned through experience that collaboration only works when the partners are on the same wavelength. This is most definitely the case with Martyn, who says, “Janet and I have similar creative visions, which makes the process of producing the films an enjoyable one. Our mutual stylistic approach leaves me open to really explore the themes without worry that something will be suitable or not. This makes the final film a true collaboration despite us being in different rooms or countries when creating our pieces.
As a self-taught musician, when we were commissioned to create What I fear most is becoming ‘a poet’, the subject instantly resonated with me. I knew there was a need to break some of the music theory rules so decided to offset the timing of the violin. This not only played with the classical convention of keeping strictly to a theory, but also helped to give a sense of disorientation that Gogou felt as a poet. The constant low distorted crackles are samples of the Greek shipping forecast, another reference to being lost and found.”
Collaborating with poets and artists
The poet, artist and composer Paul atten Ash and I embarked on a collaboration during the first coronavirus lockdown, and while we didn’t exactly make a poetry film together, I’ve realised that the video I created in response to his brilliant track Stasi probably counts as one (text can be spoken or sung in a poetry film).
Also, this was a truly all-encompassing collaboration which helped to keep us creatively absorbed and sane during difficult times. It started out as a linear ekphrastic conversation; we agreed to respond to each other’s poems and images. It rapidly escalated into a multi-layered storm cloud of interrelated creativity – images, poetry, film, music – one of the results of which is a multimedia book featuring Paul’s prose poetry and my art photography, alongside a series of poetry films, currently in progress.
Stasi
My next-to-most-recent collaboration was with the poet Jane Lovell, on her poem ‘Blame the Fox’, which won the 2022 Rialto Nature & Place competition. I love Jane’s poetry and we share a longstanding concern for nature and the environment. Jane had seen some of my poetry films and had liked what she’d seen, so all this was a good start – we clearly had quite a bit in common. Nevertheless, it’s a huge deal to take the precious thing that is someone else’s poem and turn it into a poetry film. Even when you like each other’s work, there’s no guarantee the poet will like what you do with their poem.
I spent a lot of time with this incredible poem, feeling my way into it, letting it inhabit me, thinking about scenarios that could work – particularly what kind of visuals might complement the poem in a slanted way, without telling it literally. One day I went out with my camera on the North Yorkshire coast and there was a haar, a dense sea mist which didn’t lift all day. As soon as I started filming I knew it was right. There is such a strong sense in the poem of being disconnected and deluded, of being blind – the line Blame us. Born blind. was tolling in my heart all day. The mist felt like the perfect metaphor for this blindness and disconnection.
I told Jane about the footage and images, and she liked the approach. We listened to some potential music tracks and there was one we both liked. To my immense relief, Jane was happy with the final result: “I was blown away by how closely Janet’s film matched my own imagined landscapes of the poem, perfectly capturing the atmosphere and mood.”
A note on the music here, which was licensed via www.artlist.io. I have an annual subscription with Artlist which allows me to use any track from their vast library. In the instances where I’m not collaborating with a musician, I prefer to use licensed music because the range and quality are outstanding, there won’t be any rights issues (which can be a risk when you download music for free from the Internet) and, crucially, the artists get paid each time their music is used.
Blame the Fox
Collaborating with poetry filmmakers
I wasn’t quite sure where to place this in the essay, because my collaborators in this case are both creative polymaths. As giants of the poetry film scene, Marc Neys and Dave Bonta are both long-time poetry filmmakers who need no introduction. But Marc is also a visual artist and prolific creator of phenomenal experimental music, while Dave is a poet whose profoundly transformative poems made while walking I sincerely hope will be published as a collection soon.
In 2020 Marc and I collaborated on his album The Secret Language of Light, a transcendent mix of field recordings, strange sounds and hauntingly beautiful ambient music, complemented by my meditative abstract videos made from animated stills.
Reflecting on our work together, Marc says, “It has been an inspiring journey. Each time, I composed music for Janet’s short videos or edited photographs, finding the process akin to drifting with a current. Her images are so evocative and atmospheric that the music seems to create itself. The synergy between her visual vignettes and my compositions feels effortless and profoundly satisfying.”
In 2023, in a completely unplanned way, Marc, Dave Bonta and I collaborated on what I guess you could call a trilateral ekphrastic video poem. It started when I threw a pebble in the river. When I shared a mirrored version of the clip on Instagram, Dave responded with a stunning poem, Psalm 2. Then Marc responded to the video and the poem with several different pieces of music. We chose one of these and he put all three elements together to make a video poem. It was a magically effortless experience, and I’m sure this was at least in part due to us all being poetry filmmakers.
Marc went on to make a series of videos with different loops of the footage, pairing each one with original music to create a whole range of moods and interwoven, flowing stories in one cohesive, mesmerisingsymphony-like piece. This features on his Bandcamp as a mini-album entitled we meet ourselves, while the whole audio-visual piece can be heard and viewed in its entirety on YouTube.
Internal collaborations, interpersonal connections
Something that has come into focus for me while writing this essay is the process of collaborating with one’s own pain. We all carry pain, it’s the inevitable price of being human. But we don’t like pain, so our learned response is to push it down, to look the other way. This can lead to much deeper trouble. My descent into addiction, for example, was the direct result of trying to avoid pain. Living this way was an often nightmarish experience, caught in a relentlessly self-punishing compulsion and severed from my own creativity. The fallout of addiction is layer upon layer of pain and shame – way more than you started out with before becoming dependent on alcohol or drugs, or whatever your poison is.
If you’re an artist, you’re sensitive. If you’re sensitive, you feel pain acutely – I think this is particularly true in these times of terrible wars and ecological breakdown, with the numberless losses that are happening every hour of every day. Many of my films have entailed honouring pain, feeling it fully, working closely with it – whether it’s a specific personal sorrow, as with It is said or pain for the world, as with Huntress and Nowhere to go but on. Making each one has been a deeply cathartic and transcendent experience that for me is an integral part of the poetic experience itself.
It is said
As well as being a creatively potent release, working with pain can be powerfully connecting. I have been profoundly affected by poetry films that focus on subjects ranging from personal grief to planetary devastation and as a result have felt an instant connection with the poet/filmmaker – felt them as a kindred spirit. People have told me how deeply they’ve been touched by a poetry film, and how it mirrored or echoed their own emotional experience. Someone once said, “You have shown me your soul and it spoke to mine.” The viewer, of course, completes the meaning of the work; the deeply meaningful, ultimate collaboration.
References:
https://lithub.com/all-poetry-is-collaboration/
https://www.sarahtremlett.com/about.html
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261724253_Address_to_E-poetry_Conference
Frame to Frames : Your Eyes Follow – tour: LEEDS TRINITY UNIVERSITY, 6 JULY
Really pleased to be presenting Frame to Frames : Your Eyes Follow / Cuadro a Cuadros : Tus Ojos Siguen at
We Need to Write About Art: Ekphrasis Now, Leeds Trinity University on Saturday, 6th July.
For those of you who don’t know, Frame to Frames is a unique bilingual publication with poems on artworks and a QR link to the 17-film poetry film screening based on the poems, first held at FOTOGENIA, Mexico City, winter 2023. The festival painting I selected as a potential prompt was Huapango Torero by Mexican non-binary artist Ana Segovia, and the theme was taking a stand against animal cruelty and machismo. Other artists followed their own equally inspiring artworks and paths.
The Frame to Frames project celebrates three creative forms: art inspiring art, translation and intermedia. So often in watching poetry films the poem passes you by, but the book allows you to press pause, really take in the poem on the page then return to the film. Here, it is possible to see how words and meaning can be transformed through the filmmaker’s process.
BILINGUAL DOCUMENTARY MADE FOR REELPOETRY, HOUSTON, WITH A SELECTION OF THE FILMMAKERS
See https://vimeo.com/929116208 for a bilingual documentary on the making of the project from five of the poetry filmmakers.
CURRENT TOUR DATES
The Frame to Frames project has screenings at: FOTOGENIA, Mexico City, December, 2023; REELpoetry, Houston, April, 2024; The International Poetry Film Festival of Thuringia, Germany, May, 2024; ‘We Need to Talk about Ekphrasis Now’ Leeds Trinity University, July, 2024; Bristol Literary Film Festival, October, 2024; Maldito Festival de Videopoesía, Albacete, Spain, November, 2024.
Artists: Patricia Killelea, US; Tova Beck Friedman, US; Alejandro Thornton, AR; Colm Scully, IRL; Janet Lees, UK (Lois P Jones and Elena K Byrne, US); Martin Sercombe, (Thom Conroy) NZ; Pamela Falkenberg & Jack Cochran, US; Csilla Toldy, HU, IRL; Finn Harvor, CA; Javier Robledo, AR; Beate Gordes, DE; lan Gibbins, (Judy Morris); Carlos Ramirez Kobra, MX; Penny Florence, UK; Meriel Lland, UK; Ana Pantic, RS; Sarah Tremlett (UK).
COPIES AVAILABLE FROM
Click on the link top right of the LIBERATED WORDS Home Screen to order copies or go to
liberated words.com/store
LEEDS TRINITY SYMPOSIUM
https://www.leedstrinity.ac.uk/events/events/we-need-to-talk-about-art-ekphrasis-now.php
Organised by Oz Hardwick, Leeds Trinity University and Cassandra Atherton, Deakin University, Australia, the symposium focuses on ‘current thinking devoted to ekphrastic responses to artworks in diverse media’.
As they state: ‘While James A. W. Heffernan’s monograph, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (1991), remains one of the most influential works on ekphrasis, his definition of ekphrasis as “the verbal representation of visual representation” is becoming increasingly inadequate.’
A central focus of the event is Oz and Cassandra’s book launch – Dancing about Architecture and Other Ekphrastic Maneuvers (mad hat–press.com) which includes poems responding to a variety of types of visual media, including: TV, photography, dance, architecture, film etc. A real must-buy.
Papers that interrogate ekphrasis in relation to these subjects and many others are included in the symposium with sections as follows: ‘Moving Words’; ‘Learning Encounters’; ‘Ekphrastic Lives’; ‘Ekphrastic Identities’; ‘Ekphrastic Collaborations’; ‘Looking at Gender’; ‘Testing Boundaries’ and ‘Other Angles’.
I am really pleased that Janée J. Baugher – one of the judges of Frame to Frames and author of The Ekphrastic Writer : Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction (McFarland, 2020), will also be there from America. She will be presenting on ‘Science Ekphrasis: Teaching and Learning Applications’. Baugher explores the extraordinary breadth of this subject with a powerful abstract, which may give you a clue to the promising day ahead:
‘—there’s a myriad of opportunities for cross-disciplinary engagement. In the classroom for instance, art-viewing can lead to a deeper understanding of technology, engineering, mathematics, and the human body. Examples include photomicrography, an art form that unites digital time-lapse stills of specimens seen through light microscopes; the kinetic sculptures of Alexander Calder, which can be studied for their relationships with the ancient art of origami; the digital art of Hamid Naderi Yeganeh whose mathematical formula drawings of birds in flight are as beautiful as they are instructional, and the Körperwelten Exhibition, the long-running traveling art display of plastinated human bodies. In a world in which we can often feel divided, viewing art as a means of teaching and learning can help us to feel evermore connected.’
I think that says it all.
EVENT LOCATION:
Village Hotel Leeds North, 186 Otley Road, Headingley, Leeds LS16 5PR
Drumshanbo final call for poetry films
I am really pleased to put in a final call for poetry films for what promises to be a really memorable event in this beautiful, watery lakeland town (with extraordinary floating boardwalk across Acres lake) in County Leitrim 22nd to the 25th August.
As they say on the website: the festival ‘brings together some of Irelands finest writers and poets to celebrate the written word. As part of this we host an annual Poetry Film competition open to filmmakers and poets from everywhere. Each year we have an evening where we screen the shortlisted films as part of the festivals opening ceremony.’ They have a substantial First Prize of €500. Please apply via Filmfreeway at the following link – FilmFreeway
You can see the scenery, culture and friendliness alone are worth the visit, so why not organise a trip?
Rules & Terms
Please apply via Filmfreeway by Sunday 30th June 2024
The Poetry Film should be no longer than 6 minutes, and have been made since Jan 2023.
Max two films per competitor.
Poetry films in all languages are accepted but, if not in English or Irish, subtitles or captions in English should be provided.
Responsibility for copyright and third party authorisations lies with the creator.
Curator: Colm Scully
