While almost everything posted at Moving Poems Magazine is opinionated in some way, this is the place for more sustained questioning: essays, reviews, manifestos, provocations and shots across the bow.
I’ve always been fascinated by sound. When I was at art college a very long time ago I was electrified by the way directors like David Lynch combined sound effects, music and voice to fantastic atmospheric and emotional effect.
So when I was invited to curate a series of films for this year’s REELpoetry festival in Houston, I knew straightaway that even though sound wasn’t the most original of themes, I wanted it to be my focus.
I chose eleven films by ten filmmakers, a tip-of-the-iceberg look at how different poetry filmmakers build soundscapes that play a leading role in creating the emotionally immersive world of the poetry film.
There were hundreds of films I could have chosen, but my way of whittling down the selection was choosing the films that have the most emotional punch for me personally. So, these are also some of my favourite poetry films.
Fran Sanders, Festival Director of REELpoetry, says, “Janet Lees’s beautifully curated selection of poetry films highlights the dynamic power and subtle influences of soundscapes, providing wide ranging examples of how they animate our emotional responses and impact our visual involvement.”
To get under the skin of how they manage this feat of animating our emotional responses, I asked the filmmakers for insight into their decisions regarding sound. Here are those insights, along with the films, in the order they were screened at the festival.
Lament
This animated film by Afroditi Bitzouni is inspired by the poem of the same name by Miltos Sachtouris, with music and sound design by Kyriakos Charalampides and Giuliano Anzani.
I love the way the sound works with the visual here, right down to how the poet’s voice is integrated. There’s a constant sense of threat and precariousness, but at the same time a dynamic feeling of hope – the irrepressible energy of life.
Afroditi says, “I wanted audiences to engage with the poem on multiple sensory levels. The sound is composed of narration, flute recordings, foley, and analog synthesizers, which were later digitally processed. The music aims to complement and emphasize the poet’s raw diction and articulation, while simultaneously aligning with the fast-paced rhythm of the animation.
“A series of musical phrases creates a sense of continuity leading toward a resolution that never arrives. Instead, the sound generates a constant climax that persists until the poem’s end, when everything dissolves into the void.”
Beyond Words
Directed by Helene Moltke-Leth, this deceptively simple film is based on a poem by Else Beyer Knuth-Winterfeldt.
Helene says, “Sound has always been a key focus in my work. At the first art school I attended at 19, I created a sound piece that was showcased in a sound cinema designed for the event. Later, I became one of the first female electronic DJs in Copenhagen, which led to a four-year role at Denmark’s national radio. My documentary filmmaking education at the National Film School of Denmark also emphasised sound design. All of these experiences have shaped my deep love for sound in my creative process.”
This film opens with sounds of mass communication and city life, a masterful combination of sound effects and music that propels you into the film. And then, sudden silence, accompanied by a black screen. Out of this, like dawn rising, emerges a natural landscape, combined with slower, gentler music and natural sounds.
“My idea was to juxtapose busy, everyday life with the calming stillness of nature, reflecting the spirit of the poem,” said Helene. “This contrast came together beautifully in the editing process, particularly with the jarring sound of the truck that transitions the audience into the calmness of nature.”
Throughout the film, one recurring note sounds. For me, this anchors everything and adds a layer of meaning. It feels like the tolling of a bell, a lament for everything we’ve lost and stand to lose, if we do not heed the call to respect and reconnect with nature.
Body Electric
There is stupendous subversion at play in this largely purloined piece by the inimitable Mike Hoolboom. Bookended by other footage, the body of the film is a stolen ad – an iPhone commercial in which an electric socket laments in song how much it’s missing being connected to the phone (because the phone’s charge lasts so long).
The film opens with a forest fire, before switching to the iPhone footage, accompanied by partially repeated broken phrases and electronic sound. The roar and crackle of flames, followed by unpredictable synthetic noise and the hypnotic anaphora – delivered in a robotic voice that somehow holds both bafflement and yearning – are fantastically effective in creating a world of deep unease and existential sorrow you can’t look away from.
Mike says, “The soundtrack is mostly stolen. I cut it to fit the iPhone commercial (more or less) then only added layers of electric bulbs, buzzes, line hums, etc.”
Our Bodies
Another brilliant example of subversion, this time by Matt Mullins, which I find completely mesmerising. I love how it’s a fully found poetic experience – visually, textually and sonically: a recycling of a broadcast by the Christian televangelist Oral Roberts. Its soundscape is incredibly effective – whenever I think about the film, I can recall the sound with great clarity.
Matt says, “The soundtrack is directly tied to the source material and the creative process for that particular piece. The uncarved block of marble I started with was the original footage/soundtrack of that Oral Robert’s televangelist broadcast. When it came to me to make a visual/sonic cut up/erasure out of that source material/sermon, it seemed natural to do a cut up/loop of the music that accompanied the broadcast as the soundtrack/score.
“So what you’re hearing is a loop and distortion of the original organ music soundtrack that was played live at the beginning and the end of his sermon. I took that audio, looped it, added some dirt and other effects and let it gel with the visuals. It all happened rather organically and was part of that piece’s fever-dream process, which was basically two twelve-hour days back to back that resulted in the finished videopoem.”
What the Thunder Said
Pamela Falkenberg and Jack Cochran are a mighty double-act on the poetry film scene. Their immersive soundscapes are momentous and at the same time curiously intimate. I would recognise a Jack-and-Pam soundtrack anywhere, and it always feels as though it’s playing inside my head.
This film is a masterclass in propulsive sound, which dovetails with the unfolding found poem (based on ‘The Wasteland’ by TS Eliot), and Pam and Jack’s drive-by footage, to create a kind of poetry road movie.
Pam says, “The footage was filmed after Jack wrote the cento poem, and we went out on location to find evocative footage that matched the tenor of the lines of the cento. We had some specific locations we wanted to use, including White Sands National Park in southern New Mexico, and Gary, Indiana, once an important part of the US steel industry, but now largely moribund. And we also shot whatever we saw in transit that seemed relevant to the poem.
“Most of the film was shot using our iPhones, because the stabilization is remarkable. We wanted a soundscape score that would function as diegetic sound. Some of that sound was stuff that we’ve recorded and saved as a library, but a lot of it is sound that other filmmakers and sound guys share on the internet, and some of it comes from Final Cut Pro and other editing software resources. Compared to what it was like to create analog sound mixes using 16mm film flatbed editing equipment, which was state of the art when we were young, digital video and audio comes close to nirvana.”
Here we have whistling winds, howling winds, and what Pam evocatively calls “empty and fearful winds”, along with eerie melodic water sounds, industrial noise, and a symphony of insects.
Pam explains, “Another reason we like to make soundscapes to accompany our poetry films is that they function like a musical score. A lot of our poetry films involve the natural world, and we like the idea of using natural sounds in a musical way to create a soundscape. Our soundscapes are composed from imagined diegetic sounds. We think about what we want to hear, and go looking for it, and sometimes we find it. Other times, we find stuff we weren’t exactly looking for, but is unexpectedly evocative. Sometimes serendipity works for us, so we try to stay open to it.”
Unseen
This breathtakingly powerful film by Helmie Stil, with a soundscape by Lennert Busch, is based on a poem by spoken word artist Sjaan Flikweert.
The poem is inspired by women who have endured domestic violence. The power of the film’s soundscape lies in its quietness, a direct contrast with the ear-splitting loudness of domestic violence. The whispered words and underwater-muffled sounds speak to silencing and suppression.
Helmie says, “The idea of whispering the poem came from interviews I had with women in a safe house. Some of them told me they whispered to their children and in general they had the feeling they should whisper in the house so they didn’t upset their husbands.
“Personally I think you listen more carefully to the poem because of the whispering. You really want to hear what is said, so the voice gets a stronger position. The whispering also gives a feeling of intimacy, it draws you into the inner world of the woman. It symbolises that the women are heard and seen.
“The underwater sounds emphasise the isolation. When you are underwater, the sounds are subdued and you get in your own world. Your inner world becomes more important, and it’s just yourself. You hold your breath. Women who experience domestic violence always hold their breath, but in their day to day life. I wanted to give the audience the same feeling (of holding your breath) while watching the film.”
Future Perfect
Ian Gibbins is renowned for his propulsive soundtracks and this film is no exception. It harnesses the energy of a music video while simultaneously subverting that energy with dystopian messages from a futuristic Babel. The language in the film is not so much deconstructed as blasted apart, accompanied by a terrifically exciting maximalist soundtrack.
Ian says, “I recorded the voice first: it’s one of the Apple text-to-voice readers that comes with the system. I liked the American tinge to the accent for some reason. The main text is so abbreviated that it’s actually hard to read in real life, so I wanted to see how the text-to-speech would work. Ususally I have to tweak the text a bit when I do this so that the machine reading says the right things, but this time I just went with whatever it produced.
“I wanted the soundtrack to be loud and aggressive, so then I wrote the music and fitted the vocal around it. As is my usual process, the tempo was set to make synchonising the video and audio edits easier – 120 bpm. Once the basic audio was done, I did the text animations to match it. As the video came together, I went back and redid some of the audio – eg the rising tones that come in during the word lists. Getting the final sound mix was tricky: I wanted the vocals to be clear but well embedded in all the noise of the backing.”
Swallow #8
I’m a huge fan of Kristy Bowen’s videopoems, and there are several I could have chosen. I chose this one partly because it sits at the opposite end of the maximalist-minimalist spectrum to Ian’s Future Perfect, but mainly because when I first saw it (courtesy of the Moving Poems newsletter), it stopped me in my tracks.
When I found out that Kristy made it when she had zero experience of poetry film, I was even more impressed. As well as being a great poet, she is also a natural at creating the ‘new poetic experience’ Tom Konyves says a poetry film should be.
Kristy says, “When I was working on the series, I was very new to making video poems, so I was sort of all over the place. I used public domain music for some, my own voiceovers for others. This particular piece felt like the visuals carried most of the weight, so I went with something that allowed them a bit more room and attention. I found it on archive.org which had many recordings of natural sounds that were free to use. It is probably the most silent of the SWALLOW pieces, but it may be my favorite because of that. That spareness was something I kept in mind going forward and as I worked on other series.”
Demi Demons
While there is no ‘official’ poetry in this film by Martin Gerigk, there is language, in both the chapter headings (commandments from the ‘Book of the Eel’) and the distorted words, cries, whispers, murmurs and hums that shimmer through Martin’s masterful soundscape.
At REELpoetry, Chris Pacheco, the director of Festival Fotogenia, talked about the diverse ways in which poetry can be found in film, not always in words. I feel that the combination of iconography and sound in this film creates its own poetic narrative. As he explains below, Martin has synaesthesia, as do I, although we experience it in different ways. In poetry and literature, synaesthesia is a rhetorical device or figure of speech where one sense is described in terms of another. It’s used to great effect in poetry, and poetry film, with crossings-over of visual/text/sound, is a great vehicle for it.
The soundscape in Demi-Demons is mind-blowing, an epic poem in itself, underpinning a momentous film that is currently earning accolades from many festivals as it does the rounds of the experimental film circuit.
Martin says, “I am a synesthete by birth, which means that I experience specific colors, shapes, and movements when I listen to music, speech, or sounds. As a professional music composer, I use this ability to enhance the visual elements of my films by creating soundscapes that synesthetically align with what is shown on screen.
“For Demi-Demons, I sought out particular sounds and noises that synesthetically correspond to every element in the overall visual composition of each scene, combining them into a complex, narratively driven audible landscape. Often, I position these sounds within a virtual space to express the three-dimensional structures I perceive in the scenes. For the vocal elements, I created specific spoken, whispered, shouted, murmured, and sung patterns, which were recorded, edited, and integrated into the soundscapes to achieve the distinct demonic quality required for the film.
“Each sound element is treated like a musical note in a conventional composition – a technique I developed a few years ago. As a result, the soundscape of Demi-Demons, in combination with the film’s visual style, is not merely a soundtrack but rather an orchestral audiovisual composition.”
Demi-Demons is not yet on general release, but the trailer more than gives a flavour.
I c
A clock ticks, a heart beats, and the whole film ‘blinks’. This perfect marriage of sound and vision is a terrific way of introducing the film as a sentient being, a conceit which Helene Moltke-Leth pulls off with great skill, wit and elan in this hugely engaging and powerful film.
Voice is at the heart of I c’s compelling soundscape. The first voice we hear – the ‘I’ voice of the film – is intimate, seductive, pulling you in. From there we switch to another voice, then another, then the voices speaking together. The voice changes keep you hooked, as do the tick and the heartbeat that sound throughout the film.
Helene says, “It is the film itself that is the protagonist in ‘I c’. Usually, the film is the form and the illusion we buy into through which we follow a main protagonist and supporting characters who must undergo a development. In ‘I c’ it is the film itself, which develops from woman to man, from younger to older, from individual to a multi-gendered ‘we’ – from the individual’s questions of identity to the survival of the planet. This ‘we’ is ultimately an omniscient voice coming from within Mother Earth, which articulates the serious climate crises that all of humanity is facing now, no matter who you are. I believe it is important to raise questions in art and this film is one long line of questions.
“Right from the onset and ideation of ‘I c’ I wanted the sound image to consist of a heartbeat and a ticking bell. These sounds symbolically fit well with the narration of the voices. A heart that beats is an absolute necessity for us to be alive. The ticking bell indicates that we need to change our behaviour in this world, otherwise the heart will stop. Both sounds also give the narrative momentum. The rhythmic heartbeat acts as a bass drum, and the ticking bell as a hi-hat. As the work evolved, I also wanted to incorporate the sound of water into the work – both the notion of being below the water surface as well as in the middle of dripping rain. The sound of water gives a dynamic to the soundscape, and water is a common thread in humanity. We cannot live without water, and if we continue life in the way we do now, consistently warming the earth, then large masses of ice will melt, and many people and communities will be flooded by water.”
Build me a Cottage
The soundscape of this beautiful film by Pat Van Boeckel, based on a poem by the legendary Fernando Pessoa, is simple. A straightforward combination of natural sounds, a relatively spare musical score, and voice. Straightforward, yet perfectly balanced. Sometimes there’s just too much going on sound-wise in poetry films. While maximalism can be brilliantly effective when handled well, it can sometimes be intrusive, drowning out the poem and the visuals, preventing you hearing, seeing and feeling them.
Because of that perfectly balanced simplicity, this soundscape lodged itself in my consciousness the first time I saw the film two years ago, and stayed there. Like a river, it brings with it the poem and the beautiful and astonishing visuals, in a work of art that for me is unforgettable. The two-note refrain that sounds throughout the film set up a permanent echo in me; when I think of those two notes they bring back the entire film in vivid clarity. This is one of those rare poetry films that cracks my heart wide open. I think that is a lot to do with the choice of music and how it layers with the natural sounds and the deep, resonant voice, ending with a descent into silence.
Pat says, “From experience, I’ve learned never to choose a poem in advance and then look for images. During the filming of this project, I was invited as a visual artist. I first created a house made of white fabric in an old, abandoned factory where they used to process wool.
It was in Portugal, so naturally, I had brought a collection of Pessoa’s poetry with me. I had already filmed everything except the naked man at the end. I only shot that scene after I was certain I wanted to use this specific poem.”
The way Pat describes his editing process, in terms of the part music plays in it, coincides exactly with mine.
“Once home, I could gain some distance with time. Searching for and finding music gives me a sense of direction and hope that it might become something worthwhile. Music raises the bar because I often find it so beautiful and powerful – it helps me push past my occasional bouts of insecurity.
“When I have the music, I usually let it guide me entirely. The music ‘dictates’ the editing process. I then add the background and consider where the emphasis should lie. In this case, the sheep and how the silence builds toward the end, making the stillness even more profound.”
For those who are not familiar with REELpoetry, it is one of the highlights of the international poetry film festival circuit.
This year the festival ran between 31 March and 12 April, expanding its online presence to show a huge range of films, including juried submissions from 14 countries, many of them premieres, as well as themed programmes curated by invited directors. An addition for 2025 was a series of poetry videos created by young artists aged 18 and under.
Every year the festival also features the vibrant REELcafé, hosted daily by Fran Sanders. This virtual space provides a platform for filmmakers, poets, videographers, viewers, curators, creatives, submission judges, and friends both old and new to connect, converse, and network.
Matt Mullins’ videopoems have been a mainstay of this site since 2011, when I ran across his first one, Highway Coda, so it was fascinating to hear how he originally got into videopoetry and what he’s discovered along the way. He prepared this talk for the virtual-only portion of REELPoetry 2025, which ran from March 31 to April 9.
Matt has made a visually interesting presentation with overlays of the videos under discussion, and speaks fluently off-the-cuff (or from hidden notes, perhaps) rather than reading a prepared speech. The result is a real gift for students and scholars in the field, but more than that, I hope, an inspiration to other poets and filmmakers interested in upping their game.
I write poetry, I write fiction, I write screensplays, I am as I mentioned a musician, so I have this kind of unique skill-set. I’ve done a lot of film studies, I apprecite visual imagery, I appreciate visual composition, I appreciate sonic composition, I appreciate linguistic composition, and so back then, in 2010 or so, when I first stumbled upon this artform of videopoetry, I just kind of felt like I had found my home.
A perfect title to a magnificent piece of work by Chaucer Cameron and Helen Dewbery. On Wednesday 30 October I was fortunate to be able to attend the live event at The Club for Acts and Actors in Soho (London UK).
The evening began with a support act – Rishika Williams, performing a long poem called to be heard. I knew trauma and violence to be the theme of the night, and Rishika performed beautifully and delicately, conveying her writing with a powerful yet quiet presence on the stage.
Rishika Williams performing to be heard
Then after a short break, the audience were presented with a 10-minute ‘making of’ film aboutIn an Ideal World I’d Not be Murdered that introduced the audience to the hard facts that the film deals with prostitution and sex work and that the work was based on Chaucer’s direct experience of that world.
In an Ideal World I’d Not be Murdered is described as a film that is:
“…both a fictional and re-enacted story, and contains fragments of memory from London’s underworld of prostitution in the 1980s. Told in 12 poems and 3 voices.”
Film still: In an Ideal World I’d Not by Murdered by Chaucer Cameron & Helen Dewbery
Then in the ‘making of’ film, both women express some of the thoughts and processes that went into the development of this piece as a work of poetry film, Chaucer talking about the writing and her experiences, and Helen talking about her approach to filmmaking and the decisions she made with this film.
This was an unexpected way to start their presentation, revealing some of the film before the actual event and discussing what it does and how, before watching. A ‘York Notes’ if you like (for many years the classic book series for UK school students to cram their English Literature study for exams without necessarily reading the actual literature).
But on reflection now, I think it was a masterstroke. It gently eased the viewer into the themes and the subject matter and gave context and purpose from the creators themselves. This is a film not aiming to shock or illicit debate. Helen’s website explains:
”Prostitution is often depicted as a spectacle. What’s not represented enough, particularly in film, is the mundane. The mundane together with the constant stress of anticipation. So, I wanted the film not to screech ‘this is my traumatised, victimised body’, but more simply ‘these are my wounds, my ordinary body wounds’. Prostitution narratives often end in some kind of triumph or rescue, but life is more nuanced, and can’t be neatly captured, it’s often not quite legible. The realities for anyone in these situations are constantly gaslit by others who tell a different story or who don’t allow them to tell their own stories. The realities expressed in this poetry film-collection are ongoing. The end leaves the living and the dead side by side. It’s not concluded, the narrator is ‘hooked’ – somewhere, somehow, we are not told.”
So then, onto the film itself, presented next. It is a stunning success. I was very excited to see the finished work because I’d been present at an early reading of some of the poems given by Chaucer at the International Poetry Film Festival in Athens in 2019. Then I had seen an early draft, and then a later version, of one segment – Hooked – which I was honoured to curate into a screening of films last summer. So I felt I was celebrating the end of a long creative journey.
Film still: In an Ideal World I’d Not by Murdered by Chaucer Cameron & Helen Dewbery
The film exceeded my expectations. For me, Helen’s aesthetic treatment for the film, the variations she introduces into her imagery, and the pace, work effectively. A favourite moment is when Helen combines text and image into the digital advertising screens seen in the film. The film is long for poetry film, at 32 and a half minutes. But it doesn’t feel that long. It feels like it achieves what Chaucer Cameron has set out to do, and left me wanting more or to see it a second time.
The trauma in this film is a difficult theme to discuss or respond to as someone who has experienced nothing comparable. But it is a valuable film to be absorbed, and if not understood fully because it is so far removed from personal experience, then it is to be drawn from. Delivering more compassion for others in extremely difficult or harrowing situations would be a start. While for those who do understand the kinds of burden represented, I imagine the film has something priceless to give.
I can, however, reflect on a comparison with the work of Mike Kelley which I saw recently (a major retrospective exhibition is at the Tate Modern, London UK until 9 March 2025). Kelley has made many works that I confess I love. More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaidand The Wages of Sin (1987) was as compelling to see in reality as it had been in images. Kelley has made works that explore memory, repressed memory syndrome, and traumatic experience (including Educational Complex, 1995 and Sublevel, 1998) and has stated: ‘We’re living in a period in which victim culture and trauma [are said to be] the motivation behind every action.’ (Interview with the writer Dennis Cooper, 2000)
The Wages of Sin (1987) by Mike Kelley at Tate Modern
At one level, Kelley’s work examines and challenges popular culture and its treatment of trauma experiences and the expectations that popular culture generates. He questions, not validates, repressed memories and trauma. I understand Kelley to have been, therefore, on a wholly different track to Chaucer and Helen. But it feels pertinent to consider his work in relation to In an Ideal World I’d Not be Murdered. Kelley’s work highlights the problematics of trauma ‘culture’, while this film has been sensitively and successfully navigated to avoid those problematics. This film isn’t a provocation.
Sublevel (1998) by Mike Kelley at Tate Modern
But I’d also like to offer the contrast that Kelley’s work is often literally big and loud. He achieved a big art world career, now firmly underlined by that Tate Modern retrospective – putting him alongside Picasso and whoever else you might think to name. The assured, bold approach is easily available to many men. Yet so many women creatives I speak to are so often quieter, less confident to take up space in the world with their work (literal or metaphoric space), yet their work is no less important. As when I chose to screen a segment of what became ‘In an Ideal World …’ in my curated programme in Cambridge last year, inspired by what is so illuminatingly described by Mary Ann Sieghart in her book The Authority Gap, the opportunity for women to tell their own stories with assurance, with confidence that they will be heard, and knowledge that their authority to do so will be respected, is still limited.
‘In an Ideal World …’ is currently existing largely under the radar and, sadly, unlikely to be screened in Tate Modern any time soon (There might be a more appropriate venue but equally why not there or somewhere similar? You take my point at least). The inappropriate popular culture around traumatic personal experience has not yet been blown apart, and the authors of this film understandably feel they need to tread extremely carefully and lightly.
Film still: In an Ideal World I’d Not by Murdered by Chaucer Cameron & Helen Dewbery
This film deserves to be seen widely, and I wish Chaucer and Helen every strength to find (and show it to) more audiences, because the opportunities to do so likely won’t fall in their laps. It doesn’t fit the profile of most poetry film festivals who principally show shorter films with wide appeal. I wish too, that we had an art world that opened its doors more readily and more supportively to work like this one, and was less filled by the large or loud.
Over the span of three children, and 15+ years of connection with schools, I have frequently despaired of the fundamental way in which English Language and Literature is taught here in the UK. The language component is best addressed by Michael Rosen in his poem The ‘Expected Level’ (according to the National Curriculum) (published in Listening to a Pogrom on the Radio, Smokestack Books, 2017). And I do blame the curriculum, rather than individual teachers.
As Michael shares the poem in full on his blog, I’m going to copy it here because it so well worth a read:
Writing at the Expected Level
Michael Rosen
If you can write and make sense remember, it’s not enough If you can write and make people laugh remember, it’s not enough If you can write and make people cry remember, it’s not enough If you can write and make people desperate to know what happens next, remember, it’s not enough If you can write and make people feel good, remember, it’s not enough If you can write and make people think and wonder, remember, it’s not enough If you can write and make people want to be where you went, remember, it’s not enough If you can write and make people want to be some of the people you’ve written about remember, it’s not enough If you can write and make people want to read more and more and more remember, it’s not enough
But: if you can write something that no one is particularly interested in, no one is desperate to read more and more, no one laughed or cried or wanted to be where you went or wanted to know what happened next, no one wondered about what you had written, yet, you included commas, semi-colons, colons, expanded noun phrases, fronted adverbials, and embedded relative clauses over and over and over again that’s enough.
I can say, without a doubt, that the curriculum here in England utterly stifled any interest and enthusiasm any of my three children had in writing. I firmly believe the interest and enjoyment has to come first in order to move forward, and to be fair – we did have a primary school head who did believe in this as a philosophy to get children to read. But she was an outlier, a marvellous maverick in leopard print who wasn’t going to let a National curriculum get in the way of children learning.
On the literature side, none of my children has built a positive relationship with literature either, and my biggest gripe is the restricted selection of texts that are studied, which certainly doesn’t help in finding one’s connection to it. Certainly at GCSE level (age 16) there are too few contemporary texts. In my view, and backed up by those far more informed than me, such as Mary Ann Sieghart and Professor Bernadine Evaristo, there is a sheer lack of diversity in the material studied.There is not much we can do about the restrictions of the curriculum itself, but as poetry filmmakers, I do think we can, at least, add poetry film as a way in to enjoying and interpreting the set texts that are studied across the world. Wouldn’t reaching just one student and enthusing them be brilliant, and more than one be amazing?
My son said to me ‘Mum, why don’t you make one of your films on the poems we do at school?’ – and now that is firmly on my to-do list. But it struck me that we could all have a go. I couldn’t do justice to all the texts anyway, and nor should I.
So with these thoughts in mind, I thought I’d have an explore. Maybe these needs have already been addressed? I chose London by William Blake to investigate as a sample. This is one of the set texts for GCSE English Literature in England within the theme of ‘Power & Conflict’. I searched on YouTube as this is the platform that teachers and students are most likely to search.nnThe top six results give three results by well known actors. We get the voice and still photograph of Ralph Richardson. Yawn…
A headshot film of Toby Jones…
And a moody film by Esquire magazine, featuring Idris Elba…
There’s a ‘dramatic’ reading, with archive still images (in a not very dramatic treatment)…
An extract from a Simon Schama BBC documentary The Romantic Revolution featuring Hip-Hop artist Testament…
And an illustrative approach by English teacher and illustrator, Robert Simpson…
I think the last two are the most appealing and engaging in terms of bringing me closer to Blake’s poem. But I think the poetry film community could create something infinitely more exciting and engaging than any of these.
The last film by Robert Simpson is actually part of a wider attempt to do what I’m suggesting. On his YouTube channel Comics & Lit he has a series of films and says:
“My aim is to deliver captivating and visually stunning revision materials specifically designed for literature students who are preparing for their literature exams. With my unique comic art style illustrations, I strive to breathe new life into a range of texts, making them come alive for a new generation of students. Currently, I’m hard at work crafting beautifully illustrated readings for the AQA Power and Conflict collection. Additionally, I’m producing insightful analysis videos that delve into the intricate themes and elements found within power and conflict poetry and Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet.”
It’s an ambitious start, in less than a year from the earliest videos as well, but I feel I’ve seen better films in animation/illustration as well as other modes of filmmaking, and so still think we can do more for students. Maybe a competition/festival would be a way to get people involved in making the best poetry films for schools across the world? Or why not just do one or two anyway?
In the summer, I attended MIX Digital Storytelling Conference 2023 … and reviewed the event for Moving Poems. I briefly mentioned the excellent keynote speaker at the event – Adrian Hon. But I realised that his talk has prompted some wider thoughts about collaboration in poetry film. Adrian Hon is big in the computer gaming world, and a particular plea in his speech was a call for creatives (in the context of MIX he meant largely writers but I think his point applies to visual artists equally) to be involved with technology at all stages of development and production of a project. Creatives need opportunities to prototype ideas so that they can better understand how a project might develop when people with other skills work on it. I wholeheartedly agree, and hope his vision will have influence. A popular question for any creative is to explain how a project came into existence, and what happens behind the scenes in the development of a project. In particular, in the poetry film world where so many films are made by such small teams or partnerships, it is common to talk about or be asked about how the filmmaker has collaborated with the writer. Do they get involved together at an early stage as advocated by Adrian?
Coyote Wedding – drawing and poem by Brittani Sonnenberg, film by Jane Glennie
I began reflecting on the films I have made, and they have come about in numerous different ways. I’ve made films from pre-existing poems. This means having a personal response to a poem and expressing that in film. But even this simple beginning can have different situations. Do I know the poet personally or not? Do I have any contact or discussion with the poet before or during the making of the film? Is the contact in person, or by email/messaging? Have I chosen the poem? Or has the poet chosen me to make a film? I think all of this can change the dynamic in the filmmaker’s relationship with the poem.
Film still – I’ll write about it later – Jessie Jing
Sometimes the poet might be the filmmaker themselves. There are lots of examples to explore on Moving Poems – search ‘author-made videopoems‘ and you will find Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel Dugas, Jessie Jing, Marc Neys, Matt Mullins, Janet Lees and many more. Early on, I decided I would try to make a film from my own writing, and though the result is similar to my other work in its technique and imagery, I know that my approach to the visual ideas in this film felt very different because as I wrote the words I had images in my mind.nnI have made work collaboratively with writers. I’ve discussed the ideas for a film with a writer who went away and wrote a poem, recorded the voice and then I made my film. I’ve discussed ideas for a film with Lucy English for her Book of Hours project, then wrote a short second voice response to her poem (Glitter – December evening in the Book of Hours), so the writing became a joint poem, and then I made the film. I collaborated even more deeply with Rosie Garland for Because Goddess is Never Enough.
Having discussion and input into projects has been rewarding in all instances – but it was quite different with Rosie. This time, the idea for the project came from me. I researched the subject and gave a dossier of material, texts and images to Rosie. She came back to me with snippets and first drafts which we were able to discuss and develop, and she was very open to my edits and changes to words and the ordering of the poems of the final piece. I also changed the first and third person voice around in some places. Some of the changes and edits happened as I worked on and developed the films. There have been dynamics that I have enjoyed, and I’ve been stimulated by collaboration. But equally it can be enjoyable to just try making a film in response to only the words of a poem – to be responsible for the reading (whether myself or choosing another voice), and be free of any connection to the writer. Marie Craven has told me that she will sometimes make a film without necessarily asking the poet first – she wants to try things out in an independent way that might not necessarily work. Then if she finishes the film she will ask later, and has only once had a rejection.
If the thought of taking Marie’s approach worries you, then there is no shortage of out-of-copyright poetry to play with. Or, as a final thought – there is also found poetry and erasure poetry to play with, another scenario for a filmmaker to explore. In fact this was my route into poetry film before I knew it existed as a genre. Channel Swimmer was my first film, and it was made with texts extracted from two novels. Often a very successful process for Matt Mullins, for one.
I can’t pinpoint what the differences might be in the end results of any film, but I do think that this idea of changing the dynamics of involvement in a project is a very interesting part of my filmmaking journey. Some approaches have felt more comfortable and successful, and some less so. I encourage you to mix it up and experiment with something different to your norm.
Editors’ note: the symposium titled New Art Emerging: Two or Three Things One Should Know About Videopoetry took place on 5 November 2022 in Surrey, BC, Canada. It was convened by the renowned theorist of videopoetry, Tom Konyves, who also curated a related exhibition program, Poets with a Video Camera: Videopoetry 1980-2022. Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel H. Dugas were guest speakers at the symposium and kindly accepted our invitation to write an account to appear here at Moving Poems Magazine…
To start, instead of cutting the information down to fit, it might be easier to just start a new videopoetry blog. That is not a serious proposal, it is just that every videopoet holds the potential to write a book in a conversation and each videopoem is a complete story in itself. Writing a report from within is new for us and to begin, we admit that our comments must be somewhat biased.
On Friday night, November 4, a major windstorm blew through the Lower Mainland with the City of Surrey being one of the hardest hit in the area. Large trees, weakened by months of drought, had been toppled, and on Saturday morning scores of BC Hydro customers were affected. Surrey was at the epicenter of the storm and the Gallery was without power but not powerless. Thanks to the quick action of Jordan Strom, Surrey Art Gallery’s Curator of Exhibitions and Collections, Rhys Edwards, Assistant Curator, and Zoe Yang, Curatorial Assistant, the symposium was efficiently moved to the Surrey Public Library, a stunning building in the City Centre. The schedule had to be retooled into a shorter program, but the room was packed and ready to see all the facets of this videopoetic diamond.
The symposium audience
To contextualize the place of the smposium it might be useful to have some information about the exhibition. From the gallery’s website:
Poets with a Video Camera presents the largest retrospective of videopoetry in Canada to date. The exhibition features over twenty-five works by some of the world’s leading practitioners. It is organized around five categories of videopoetry: kinetic text, visual text, sound text, performance, cin(e)poetry.
The title is a reference to Dziga Vertov’s 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera that has become iconic in experimental film discussions in advocating for a complete separation between the language of theatre and literature. Similarly, Konyves argues for videopoetry to be thought of as outside of poetry and video art. Instead, Konyves states that it is a form that is in its “early days . . . still in a process of redefining poetry for future generations.” This exhibition shows the humorous next to the serious, the experimental alongside the genre bending, the ironic with the sincere, and the timely together with the timeless expressions of this new form.
Jordan Strom opened the Symposium and introduced Guest Curator, Tom Konyves.
Tom Konyves
Tom stated his intention to provoke dialogue and to challenge perspectives. While developing a course in visual poetry for the University of the Fraser Valley, Abbotsford (2006), he had come to realize that he needed more sources for videopoetry than his own work. After contacting Heather Haley, she sent him 76 examples. From there, he came up with a definition of videopoetry that proposed a triptych of text, image, and sound in a poetic juxtaposition. He was able to further clarify his research findings in Buenos Aires when he met Argentinian artist Fernando García Delgado. Finally, Tom arrived at the idea that the role of the videopoet was that of juggler, visual artist, filmmaker, sound artist, and poet. He concluded that, within that mix, the videopoem as an art object, poetic experience, and metaphor, is created.
Sarah Tremlett
UK-based videopoet Sarah Tremlett delivered the symposium’s keynote speech in which she spoke about her definitive volume The Poetics of Poetry Film, as well as the importance of sound and subjectivity in an artist’s experimental audiovisual journey. Through her own work, as well as her contributions to the examination of poetry film, film poetry, and videopoetry, Sarah occupies a central place in the videopoetry world. While addressing the symposium, she also introduced her current work: research into a complex family history, spanning several centuries.
Heather Haley and Kurt Heintz spoke of their individual activities and collaborations in what is recognized as their history in the world of videopoetry. Their presentation, titled Entangled Threads: How One Canadian and One American Poet Took on Technology and Charted a Genre, proposed an engaging exchange on the shared commonality of early events linking not only poets in different geographic locations, but also text/voice to technologies. Among these commonalities was the early 1990’s Telepoetics project, a series of events using videophones to connect poets. As noted by Heather Haley on her website: “[…] before Skype or Zoom poets were using videophones to connect, to exchange verse, despite a myriad of limitations and challenges. […]”
Kurt Heintz and Heather HaleyAdeena Karasick
Poet, performer, essayist, media artist, professor, thinker Adeena Karasick, and artist-programmer, visual poet and essayist Jim Andrews delivered a high-powered and mesmerizing performance of Checking In, a work about our insatiable appetite for information. Jim’s coding meshed seamlessly with Adeena’s texts and her high-level acrobatics of spoken word and movement. Through the fusing of voice, text, and image, Jim’s video, and Adeena’s recitations/movements, the two delivered a performance that never missed a beat!
Founder and Director of the VideoBardo Festival, Javier Robledo (in absentia), planted himself onto a sofa and placed a bird cage on his head to present a playful performance/poetry mix. Reminiscent of early 20th-century Dada performances, he closed the performance when he blew a whistle that mimicked a caged bird. In his video presentation, and speaking about his work P-O-E-S-I-A, Javier spoke about the importance of the performative gesture and its repercussions in articulating meanings.
When we spoke with Annie Frazier Henry a few days following the Symposium, she felt energized by taking part in the event. She is a writer with roots in theatre, music and film. In her presentation, she mentioned the influence that E. Pauline Johnson had on her growth. She generously expressed that the warm and safe space created by the meeting was about all of us. Grounded in her perspective, Annie talked about encouragement and relevancy. The words from her 1995 poem Visions resonate forward to the contemporary platform of videopoetry:
I don’t want to see stars in my eyes I want to see stars in the sky, Where they belong
When you enter a room There’s invisible war paint on your face And it looks good
Annie Frazier Henry
Fiona Tinwei Lam, the Vancouver Poet Laureate (2022-2024), presented The Plasticity of Poetry, a series of videopoems based on the dilemma of plastic pollution and its dizzying accumulation. Many of Fiona’s works are collaborative endeavours with animators. She also screened the work Neighborhood by Pamela Falkenberg and Jack Cochran which they state “is a look at modern life in the suburbs as the world courts climate disaster.” Neighborhood juxtaposes a poem by Fiona over live-action and animated scenes of suburbia. At the root of all of these works resides a deep desire to make a difference in the world.
Fiona Tinwei Lam
As for us, we presented Rust Never Sleeps: Nuances in Collaborative Creation, a talk on collaborations and the diverse ways that we have collaborated while continuing to each work on our own individual projects. Collaboration begins with a discussion, and that exchange frames the outcome of any project. It is a shared authorship and to work in such a way, one must be ready to let go of preconceived ideas and to be ready for whatever might arise.
Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel H. Dugas
Conclusions
To accommodate the time frame for the venue afforded by the library, the Q&A was pushed to the end of the day. One member of the audience, Surrey-based poet Brian Mohr, has a story worth mentioning. When he showed up at the gallery to see the exhibition on Saturday morning after the storm, he was redirected to the library. He knew about the exhibition but not about the symposium. Brian, who is in the process of making his first videopoem, went with the flow and ended up participating in the event. He had a question for the panel about using video games as source locations for videopoetry. Several presenters addressed his question and according to discussions we had with him later, the symposium gathering was of utmost importance to his development as a videopoet.
Just as Jordan Strom finished his closing remarks, a loudspeaker announcement resonated through the building: “The library will be closing in five minutes!” Videopoetry is all about timing, and so was the conclusion of the symposium.
A symposium is designed to bring together, a group of people with common interests. When they come away from the meeting, they should have learned something new, made new connections, and should have possibly established the grounds for future collaborations. The Surrey Symposium made visible a complex web of relations and affinities between videopoets. It revealed the contour of a community of artists/poets, and affirmed that we are not isolated, that we are not living in a vacuum; that we have a place in the world. This sentiment was echoed in a comment that Kurt Heintz wrote on an email thread after the Symposium:
While I have long been aware that I’m not the only person doing what I do, I’ve often felt quite solitary. And so, one of the biggest takeaways for me is simply having experienced a critical mass of minds, if only for a weekend. Certainly, we’re all very different people with different perspectives on the art we make and/or study. Our critical languages often differ. And we’re far-flung; the exhibit plainly speaks to the international origins for poetry in cinematic form. And yet, that very mix is what actually pointed to a body politic.
This symposium answered some questions surrounding the creation of videopoetry. It also made it clear that videopoetry operates on many different levels of consciousness. The event accomplished its mission, and if there might be an idea to improve upon the gatherings, it might be to increase the meeting to a full day, which would allow more time for Q&A as well as informal discussions. A dream would be to have a bi-annual videopoetry symposium.
From the art gallery to the library, this symposium managed to bridge two of the fundamental sites of videopoetry: visuals and words. The voices that we heard on that afternoon were the third element — a perfect poetic juxtaposition.
Seated left to right: Adeena Karasick, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Jim Andrews, Annie Frazier Henry, Jordan Strom Second row: Kurt Heintz, Sarah Tremlett, Heather Haley, Valerie LeBlanc, Daniel H. Dugas, Tom Konyves
A month ago, in June 2022, I attended ‘Poetry & Image: a symposium’ held at the Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) in Reading, UK. The event is a collaboration between the University of Reading and Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre with talks, poetry readings and discussions. It was jointly hosted by the equally welcoming Professor Steven Matthews (Reading) and Dr Niall Munro (Oxford Brookes). I attended because: a) it’s local for me, b) it’s free and c) who doesn’t still want to take every opportunity to do something in person again?
This event is coming very much from the point of view of poets and writers, so I wasn’t initially going to write anything about the event for Moving Poems. However, looking back over my notes a month later, I realised that there was one very interesting thing that I wanted to share. A common thread that ran through the presentations and discussions throughout the day was the extent to which writers are mystified by, or in awe of, images and artists. In the case of ekphrastic writing a big worry was how can a poet possibly do justice to the image/sculpture/artwork of an artist?
My response, in conversation with Niall Munro, was how all those thoughts happen the other way around as well. As a filmmaker I am thinking about how can I create something in images and am worrying about what the poet might make of what I’ve done and how dare I mess around with their work. I pass this on here because I imagine that it might help many filmmakers to realise that the poets are just as intimidated by us as image-makers as we might be by them as wordsmiths. Once we get past our fears, and in collaboration, we can create some very exciting things.
And lastly – I forget exactly how this poem was introduced on the day, but I encourage you to read ‘Why I am Not a Painter by Frank O’Hara’ As creatives we are different, but also so much the same.
As humans, we are driven to narrative. It is almost impossible for us to experience a sequence of events and not attempt to ascribe some kind of narrative arc to it. What just happened? What does it mean? How did it start? What will happen next?
There is a considerable literature on the theory and practice of creating narrative in different contexts: fiction or non-fiction; in print or on stage or screen; or via any other medium. Narrative can be language-based, as in a novel, or non-verbal, as in a choreographed dance, or a combination of both, as in a movie. But the basic structure of narrative mostly boils down to a few key points: there is a beginning, middle and an end; something changes along the way; it occurs in some kind of contextual framework. If any of these key elements is missing, we, the readers or viewers, inevitably will try to fill in the gaps.
Over the last 20 years, neuroscientists and cognitive scientists have made significant advances in understanding how – and to some degree, why – the brain creates narrative. Much of this new research complements well the ideas of theorists and practitioners concerning the role of narrative in literature, cinema, theatre and dance. Indeed, many authors have integrated data across the sciences and humanities to build new appreciations of how and why narrative works. Key foundation texts in this field include The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language and Understanding by Raymond W Gibbs, Jr (1994); On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction by Brian Boyd (2009); and How Literature Plays with the Brain: the Neuroscience of Reading and Art by Paul B Armstrong (2013).
From a cognitive point of view, we can consider the construction of a narrative as coming in different flavours: for example, we can describe a series of external events, that is, things that others can also describe from their own experiences of the same events; we can create a story from our own remembered experiences that is essentially private, since no one else can have those same memories; or we can create a fiction, a story that no one has ever actually experienced, even though such a narrative necessarily contains elements that are relatable to the external world.
Autobiography, memory and narrative
In order to create a narrative, we must access several different elements of memory. There is no single phenomenon called “memory”. Rather, there are many forms of memory, some of which are so fundamental to neural processing that we are not consciously aware of them. The duration of different types of memory can range from a few tenths of a second (eg the early steps of processing visual or auditory stimuli) to a lifetime (eg learning to walk or knowing what a flower is). Furthermore, many forms of memory lie outside easy verbal description, eg how to button up a shirt; how you solved a crossword puzzle; how you felt at lunch-time yesterday.
The components of a traditional first-person narrative (“I did this, and then I did that…”) rely on what is generally known as “autobiographical memory”. This is memory of what you have done in the past. It is fully private, in that only you can access it. Unless you have a very specific type of brain injury, it is updated continuously as you consciously experience the world. There are several remarkable features of this memory system:
It is initially encoded by the same part of the brain (the hippocampus) that also encodes and keeps track of our movements through space and time in our local environment.
This means that salient events are automatically linked to a time and place.
Some time after these events are first recorded into memory, they are transformed into long-term memory stores elsewhere in the brain where they are associated with other memories of varying degrees of relevance or significance: the nature of event itself, the weather beforehand,the person who wasn’t there, the name of the movie, the music playing at the bus-stop…
Each time these long-term autobiographical memories are actively retrieved they are remade: in effect, they are re-remembered.
The neural processes involved in imagining a future autobiographical event are almost the same as those remembering a past autobiographical event. People with a damaged hippocampus not only cannot remember what they did in the past, they cannot imagine themselves doing something in the future.
As a consequence, autobiographical memory, most of the time, is hopelessly unreliable (there are other factors contributing to this, but that’s another story).
And as a consequence of that, virtually all narrative is a construction of unreliable memories. In other words, I suggest, all narrative can be considered to be first-person fiction (and that is yet another story…)
For the reader or viewer of a narrative, we automatically feed the story (such as it might be) through our own autobiographical memory processor. We identify the temporal sequence, the salience of each component, the relationships between the components, assign meaning to elements we recognise and make a guess at the meanings of elements new to us. Even the most abstract, abstruse, uneventful “narrative” will have a beginning, middle and an end, a context in which it is viewed, an emotional and cultural framework within which we will evaluate it. And so we create our own narrative version of “the story”, almost certainly incomplete when compared with the narrator’s intent, perhaps remembered only fleetingly, but more likely, generating a new entry of our own autobiographical memory (“Let me tell you about the movie I saw last night…”).
Selling the story – you don’t need much…
This ability for the viewer to make narrative out of minimal clues has been well recognised for many years. A famous experiment by Heider and Simmel (1944) showed how moving abstract shapes are commonly read as behaving like people within a strong narrative arc.
Similarly, short form texts such haiku, one-sentence poems, even Tweets (!!) can be commanding in their narrative intensity. Advertisers have known all this for a long time. Successful television advertisements must tell a story in as few as 15 seconds (“Look at this! See, it’s amazing! That’s why you need it… Buy one now! Get it here!!”). Indeed, some television advertisements have been recognised as stand-out examples of short-form video narration, for example, highly-regarded productions for Budweiser and Google.
Most television advertising lacks such sophisticated production values, but even the most simple, hackneyed approaches can inspire a poetry video narrative. In my 42nds, the timing of the scenes and the amount of text per scene closely follows that of typical advertisements 15-45 seconds long. This video was commissioned for outdoor screening in a downtown shopping mall and has since been screened on other public locations mixed in with genuine advertisements.
I’ll finish with two examples of masterful, albeit unconventional, poetry videos, both of which have featured on Moving Poems previously, that incorporate many of the elements mentioned above. These episodic narratives subvert the tropes of commercial television whilst illustrating the highly mutable state of autobiographical memory: Profileby RW Perkins and Human Conditionby Rich Ferguson and Mark Wilkinson.
The success of these videos relies totally on our ability to:
recognise the contexts of what is happening in each episode;
hold the episodes in our short-term working memory long enough to understand the relationships between them;
synthesise the meaning of the full narrative in terms that make sense to us, thereby embedding the external narrative in our own autobiographical memory, ready to reappear, perhaps in a subsequent narrative of our own. Which is more or less what has happened in this essay…
A recent post about calls for work in festivals elicited a comment from filmmaker Adam E. Stone. We corresponded and this turned into a interview about the advice, ideas and strategies that Adam employs to get his work out into the world.
Jane: Apart from targeting the festivals known specifically for poetry films, how do you go about choosing which events to enter?
Adam: Well, budget is always a consideration, so I look first at the reasonableness of the submission fees. In addition to that, I look for festivals that are run by people who seem to be passionate about independent film, and who seem to be guided by an artistic, poetry-like aesthetic, even if they do not specifically have a category for poetry films. Onirica Film Festival in La Spezia, Italy is a good example. They have a very “dream-like” vibe, which to me is consistent with many, perhaps most, poetry films. Festival Fotogenia (which translates on FilmFreeway to Photogenic Festival) in Mexico City, Mexico is another one I discovered by searching for festivals with that kind of vibe. It did not have a separate poetry film category at the time I found it and had one of my poetry films accepted for screening there, but now it has added one, which is an exciting development for us all, and I hope to screen there again in the future.
Jane: What is your search strategy to find appropriate non-poetry film festivals?
Adam: I develop a list of non-poetry keywords that I believe characterize the film, then use the search function on FilmFreeway (found at the top of the “Browse Festivals” tab) to see what kind of festivals are out there that may be interested in the film. The results can be surprising. For example, there is a great little festival in Anglesey, Wales, UK called the SeeMor Films Festival that only screens films that have either a dialogue reference, or a visual reference (or both!), to the sea. Both of the poetry films I made in 2020–“an entombing(dis)entombing” and “Elegy for Unfinished Lives”–had such references, so I submitted both, and they both screened at the festival in 2020. Likewise, my 2021 one-minute poetry film “If Any” is partially filmed from a bicycle, and the narrator refers to riding a bicycle, so I did keyword searches for “bicycle,” bike,” and “biking,” and found quite a few festivals. Some are high-adrenaline, adventure-biking kinds of festivals, which I don’t think are good fits for the film, but I found a handful that seem to be more eclectic and have potential, so I will try them out.
I also think that sometimes you have to think outside of the box with your keywords, and really trust your instinct. “Elegy for Unfinished Lives”–which I describe as a ghost poem film–is such a strange and disjointed howl of angst against injustice and against mainstream pop-culture that its text, as well as its visual content, made me wonder if some of the more experimental horror film festivals might be interested. So I did a keyword search for “ghost,” found and submitted to a few horror festivals, and ended up with screenings at Delirium, Dreams, and Nightmares (Southsea, England, UK), as well as at Qosm Film Festival (formerly known as Vidi Space, and located in Reston, Virginia, USA), Canted Angle Film Festival (Harrison, Arkansas, USA), and Haunted Garage’s Horror Fest 2021 (St. Louis, Missouri, USA).
And finally, don’t neglect the more obvious choices: if your poetry film is a one-minute film, search for all of the festivals that specialize in one-minute films (and there are several of them!), because you definitely have a good shot at screening with some of them. Most poetry films are fairly short, so be sure to search for “micro-shorts,” which often includes films up to three minutes, or even up to six minutes, depending on the festival. The Haiku Amateur Little Film Festival (also known as the HALF Festival) is a festival in Palakkad in the Kerala state of India that doesn’t have anything to do with haiku in the poetry sense, but only screens films that are five minutes or less. It is run by a group of distinguished Indian filmmakers who love short film as an art form, so in my opinion it’s a great potential fit for poetry films, and in fact I have had both poetry films and dance films screen there in the past. Some years it is on FilmFreeway and some years it isn’t, but it is on there for submissions for its September 2022 event, so I’d encourage everyone to check it out and submit if you think it’s a good fit for you.
Jane: Do you search any sources other than FilmFreeway?
Adam: Yes, I check the “Calls for Work” section of the Moving Poems website once or twice a month. This year I made a feature-length poetic essay film called “Atmospheric Marginalia” that I wanted to submit to some big fests that are not on FilmFreeway because they use their own internal submission systems (like Cannes, Berlinale, Busan, and Telluride), so I had to research those individually and submit individually. That’s very time-intensive, but sometimes you have to do it. Overall, I’m grateful that so many festivals (including big ones like Sundance, Slamdance, and Raindance, to name but a few) are on FilmFreeway now. When I started using FilmFreeway in 2014, it was still an open question whether they would be able to compete with Withoutabox. Obviously, they out-competed them, and overall I think they have a very good system that is very user-friendly to independent filmmakers. When all else fails, you can always Google “poetry film festivals” or whatever term fits your film best and see what you get from the web at large.
Jane: Given a budget would you rather spread it more widely on cheaper entry fees or on a few more expensive festivals if they are more prestigious?
Adam: I try as much as possible to have the best of both worlds. A lot of festivals have lower entry fees if you submit early in their selection process, so I do that whenever I can. Keeping a running list of potential festivals, and monitoring it year round, is what works best for me. If I finish a film at a time when one of the festivals I want to submit to is near its final deadline, and therefore the submission fee is high, I’ll usually just wait for the next year and submit then, as long as they don’t have a strict completed-by date restriction. Overall, my goal has always been to try to get my films in front of audiences that will appreciate them, and although that sometimes means a bigger, more prestigious festival if it seems like a good fit, often it means a smaller, narrowly-focused festival, like a poetry film festival. Fortunately, most poetry film festivals have very reasonable submission fees, and several are free to enter.
Jane: How do you choose categories to enter (other than poetry film) if it’s open to interpretation? Short film, art film, experimental film, narrative film?
Adam: That can be tough, but I read their descriptions closely and try to find the best fit I can. Most festivals state in their rules that they will move your film to a different category if they think there’s a better fit for it, so I trust them to do that. As with everything else in the selection process, it is very subjective, with a lot of room for individual interpretation. If I really have a hard time deciding, and I’m using FilmFreeway, I might use their cover letter function to put in a brief note telling them I wasn’t sure which category to enter, and that I’m open to them putting it wherever they want to.
Jane: What do you think makes a film an experimental film?
Adam: That’s a great question, and I think if you asked 10 different festival directors and programmers, you would get 10 different answers. Personally, I love the fact that it’s a wide open concept. It’s a turn-off for me if a festival tries to give a rigid definition of what makes a film experimental – that’s a little too elitist and snobbish for my taste, because I think it can lead to an unhealthy hegemony of self-appointed gatekeepers. Often, the best art is wild art, and I think that attempts to nail it down or control it are unfortunate, especially among those who profess to love art. An art form can move forward–can grow and flourish–only when the most experimental of its artists push the boundaries. Certainly, if a festival wants to focus on traditional, classical types or genres of films, they have every right to do that, but I would hope that if a festival actively seeks experimental films, they would be open to diverse interpretations of what “experimental” means. To me, it can refer to form, content, or both, and is often about asking viewers to reconsider long-held and deeply-ingrained ideas about how the world works, structures of power, the nature of reality, etc.
Jane: What do you think festival directors think their categories mean?
Adam: In my experience, when festival directors or programmers have a strict or regimented idea of what each of their categories mean, they usually make that very clear in their descriptions, and if they do, it’s good to pay close attention to that, so you don’t waste your time and money on something that is not a good fit for your film. However, a lot of times they leave their categories pretty wide open, or specifically mention that they are open to all genres of shorts, or features, or whatever, or state that they reserve the right to move your film to a different category if they accept it. That tells me they recognize that many films are hard to categorize, and that they want the flexibility to place your film where it fits best with the other films they are programming. Personally, I prefer festivals that are very open and free with their categories, because in my experience they tend to be more open-minded about film in general, and to see film as a very subjective, exciting, and expansive mode of expression.
Jane: How many festivals did you enter last year?
Adam: I tend to have multiple films on the festival circuit at the same time, so it’s hard to say exactly, but I think that on average, I submit to approximately 100 festivals per year in total.
Jane: What would you estimate is your success rate for entries?
Adam: It is interesting to me how much this varies by film. I think it really shows that even among the most independent film programmers, there are certain films that connect with them more than others. My work tends to go very much against the mainstream, and definitely leans more toward the highly experimental and boundary-pushing, and I have found that the more offbeat the film is, the lower the acceptance rate generally will be. For example, my 2018 short poem film Gods Die Too is admittedly provocative in its rejection of mainstream, Western notions of “heroism.” Its festival acceptance rate was roughly 10%, although it screened at some great festivals, including the final presentation of the Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival, and at the 7th International Video Poetry Festival in Athens, Greece. On the other hand, my 2020 one-minute poem film an entombing(dis)entombing has a festival acceptance rate of 30% and is still going strong on the circuit. I actually consider it to be quite subversive and countercultural too, but maybe it’s just a little less in-your-face about it than Gods Die Too was. Or maybe it’s just a better film, who knows. If one of my films has an acceptance rate of 20% or higher, I consider that quite good, in light of how competitive the well-curated festivals are, and how subjective programming decisions are. But really, to me, if you are happy with your film, and you feel like it expresses what you set out to express, then you shouldn’t worry about the acceptance rate. Some films, by their nature, are going to have smaller audiences, or resonate with fewer people, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t important films, especially to the people with whom they do resonate.
Jane: Have you ever tried to modify what you create in order to try to fit into a festival?
Adam: No, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with doing that. If you feel like the modifications are small, and that they don’t negatively impact the overall integrity of your film, I would say go for it, because it may create an opportunity for a screening that otherwise would not exist. Likewise, I’ve never made a film specifically for a certain festival (such as, for example, making a film around a festival’s theme, or using their designated poem for a poetry film), but I think it’s great if a person can do that, and it’s another excellent way to get your work out there in front of an audience, and to get some name recognition among festival directors and programmers.
Jane: What makes a good festival to enter?
Adam: Just as independent musicians often find their most dedicated and appreciative fans in small, intimate performance venues, independent filmmakers sometimes can find the same in those small, labor-of-love film festivals that cater to people with an appetite for original, non-mainstream films that push the boundaries of the art form. Certainly that includes poetry film festivals, but many other types too. The tricky thing, as we’ve discussed, is finding them. It takes a lot of research time, but it’s worth it when you feel like your film has connected with an audience that appreciates it.
Jane: What makes you avoid a festival?
Adam: I avoid festivals that appear to be interested in presenting only mainstream, orthodox points of view, because I know my films won’t be a good fit for them, or vice versa. I also avoid festivals that are vague about when and/or where their screenings are going to be, or have generic descriptions of themselves and what kinds of films they seek, or that seem to exist only to collect submission fees. If I’m not sure about a festival, I go to their website to see if it looks like a real festival, and beyond that, I’ll often Google the festival to see if it has gotten coverage from legitimate media sources, like the local news outlet in that area, because authentic festivals, even if very small and grassroots, are going to be doing everything they can to engage their local communities, as well as wider independent film communities specifically related to their festival, to try to attract attendees, promote the films they have selected, and build a following for themselves for future festivals they plan to hold. Likewise, I search to see if they have used social media to promote their prior events, which is another indicator that it is a real festival that is trying to create excitement for its screenings. That said, I don’t avoid a festival just because it is new, or hasn’t yet attracted a big following. I recognize that takes time, and as long as the festival directors and programmers seem to be genuine lovers of independent film who are doing their best to create a unique and interesting festival, I’ll submit, because to me, in the end, it’s all about trying to get my films out there to people who might appreciate them, wherever in the world they may be, and no matter how large or small the screening may be. You never know when or how your film may make a positive impact on someone’s life, and to me, that’s a big part of what independent filmmaking is all about.
***
Bio:Adam E. Stone’s poetry films and other films have screened at many prominent festivals worldwide, and have won numerous awards. His latest film is the feature-length poetic essay film Atmospheric Marginalia (2022). He also is the writer, producer, and co-director of the feature-length fictional essay film Abstractly You Loved Me (2013), and is one of the co-producers of, and conducted many of the interviews for, the feature-length documentary Black Hawk Down: The Untold Story (DVD 2019). In 2012, he wrote and produced the spoken-word ballet A Life Unhappening, about the impact of one woman’s Alzheimer’s disease on three generations of her family. In 2010, he wrote, directed, and produced the DVD novel Cache Girl Saves the World: A Novel in Visions. He is also the author of three conventional print novels. He currently lives and works in the United States in Carbondale, Illinois.
I’ve always loved language and languages. I did Latin, French and German at school and I could easily have ended up studying linguistics in a slightly different universe. For me, poetry and experimental writing are fundamental ways to explore the limits of language: to try to describe what cannot be put into words, to find out what happens when language is stripped down to its essentials (whatever they are…), to discover how the visual, oral and aural aspects of language interact.
Combining video with poetry and experimental writing has been a revelation in this context. In a video, text can be dynamic, as it changes and morphs in multiple dimensions. Voices can be added, distorted, re-timed, presented in counter-point to each other and to on-screen text; they can even be made to articulate the literally unspeakable via increasingly sophisticated text-to-speech algorithms. And then there are all the possible interactions between the text of the video and its audio-visual content.
Over the last few years, I’ve been increasingly interested in how we deal with translation in poetry videos. I have had many videos screened in non-English speaking festivals and installations where there is usually a requirement for subtitles in either English or the native language. But sometimes, there is an absolute requirement for subtitles in the native language. I also have collaborated with non-English speaking poets which has required me become familiar with at least some aspects their native tongue. And I have even created a genuine bi-lingual video poem.
English and French as equal partners…
So how do we deal with multi-lingualism? How should the translations work? There is a large literature on the nature of translation, as well as the underlying neuroscience of bi- and multi-lingualism. But I have been strongly influenced by a couple of books in particular, both of which have been written by authors who have translated some of the most influential experimental poetry and writing :
Poetry videos offer a unique slant on translation that is not available for written text: videos give us the option to hear the original language, and, indeed, read the original written text itself as well as a translation. And we still have access to all the same audio-visual material and its interactions with the text. One corollary of this is that the translated text does not necessarily have to be as “poetic” as the original. It may not even need to be a complete translation, if the sound of the original and its accompanying imagery allow.
It is very common for translated poetry videos to have subtitles added in a similar way to any other video or film. However, conventional subtitles can clash with the visual aesthetic of the video. Nearly all my poetry videos have at least some of the text embedded in them, as part of the overall visual design. When adding translated text, I try to use the same fonts, layouts and designs as the original, so that the look of the video is not changed and the translation is seen as a natural component of the work. Another option is to use closed captions for a translated version. It does not look very elegant, but it allows the user to turn the translation on or off. A further advantage is that the text exists as a separate underlying time-stamped file (eg .srt format) that can be translated by a third party as required.
English and Spanish translation share a common design…
So now to the big question: how do we actually get the translation? Ideally, you are sufficiently knowledgeable in the appropriate languages to do it yourself. I can do that well enough for German or French, and I have made a genuine bilingual English-French video based on a poem of mine, Signature, originally published in the French journal Recours Au Poème. But although I have become familiar with some aspects of other languages, most notably Spanish, Italian, Greek and Swedish, I cannot translate from English into them. Instead, I rely on machine translation, good dictionaries and, when necessary, advice from a native speaker.
Machine translation…
My preferred machine translation system is DeepL which, when tested on languages I do know, performs better than Google Translate across the board, especially when the language becomes more idiomatic or figurative. The suggested translations can be checked and fine tuned in several ways. One is to simply back-translate the phrase to see if you get the same thing. Using a different system for the back-translation (such as Google Translate) can also be useful. Another good strategy is to replace some of the words in the original with synonyms or near-equivalents and compare how they get translated. If the translation offers options, I often look them up in the native language dictionary or thesaurus (eg Wiktionary) that shows how they understand the meaning of the word and how it should be used. And I always keep a grammar book at hand for the language in question to find out how it is structured and how things like tenses, cases, pronouns, adjectives, etc, actually function. These resources have been critical for most of my translations.
Sometimes, the translation simply will not work. An implied meaning in one language perhaps cannot be made in another, often because of the way the grammar rules operate. As is well known to translators, there are idioms and turns of phrase that do not cross languages or cultures. Experimental writing or visual poetry that relies on the intrinsic structure of words and their grammatical variations may be impossible to translate in any literal manner. What do we do then? We simply watch the video, listen to the ebbs and flows of words that even a native speaker may not understand, and revel in the uncertainty of it all.
“Hello World! or: How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise” by Jason Eppink (CC BY 2.0)
Video content is so pervasive on the web, it’s a bit surprising that so few literary magazines include it, though the pandemic has begun to change that, with a growing desire to fill the vacuum created by the nearly universal suspension of live readings. Still, there’s a whole world of poetry in video form that they’re missing out on. I’m actually a bit annoyed that Moving Poems has become such a dominant site for poetry videos; why the hell don’t we have more competition? Perhaps because the culture of video sharing on the web is a challenge to the way literary magazines tend to do business, to say nothing of the technical challenges of submitting, editing, hosting, etc. Many online magazine editors aren’t techies, and may believe that sharing videos is more complicated than it really is. And what to do if your journal is mainly print or PDF?
So I thought I’d be helpful and post some suggestions based on my nearly two decades of online publishing (including the pioneering online literary magazine qarrtsiluni). This is a work in progress, so if you have any additions or push-back, please let me know in the comments.
1. Consider adjusting rules on submission to allow previously published or screened films/videos, because otherwise you will get very few submissions. Any video that’s been uploaded to YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, etc. and made public has been published.
2. Submission by web link (public or private) is easiest for everyone.
3. At least 75% of the good poetry films out there have been made by someone other than the poet, and that person is likely to be much more motivated to send it out. Especially since the text may have already appeared elsewhere as a page-poem, so the poet has moved on. Therefore journals need to reach out to poetry filmmakers, by for example posting a call-out on FilmFreeway as well as Duotrope or Submittable. There are also Facebook groups that editors could join where poetry film/video makers hang out, such as Poetry Film Live, Agitate:21C, and Pool. And I’m always happy to share calls for work here.
4. Encourage readers to share and embed the work anywhere rather than expecting that everyone will come to your site to watch it. If you include a link to the website or issue archive at the end of the video, this makes every share a free advertisement for the journal.
5. Do not try to host videos yourself unless you have nearly infinite resources and very good tech support. Streaming videos so that they scale down or up depending on the user’s device and internet speed is not easy, and it uses a lot of server CPU. WordPress.com video hosting and Vimeo video hosting are two very affordable alternatives that aren’t all junked-up with ads. But YouTube is fine, too. And there are others.
6. While it’s OK to share videos from the author’s or filmmaker’s account on Vimeo or YouTube, consider uploading all videos to your own accounts(s) instead. This gives you more control over presentation and guarantees long-term archiving. On Vimeo you can create a showcase for each issue, or on YouTube a playlist. Also, it’s all too common for user-uploaded content to eventually disappear — accounts get deleted or videos get taken down for any number of reasons. Moving Poems takes this risk because we’re fundamentally still a blog, and therefore accept a certain degree of ephemerality. But part of the responsibility of publishing a proper journal, I think, is to preserve an archive. The Internet Archive may index every page on your site, but if the video content disappears, there’s nothing they can do about that.
7. Don’t worry about redundancy. The same video might be uploaded to Vimeo multiple times by various people involved in making it. You might decide to upload everything you post to your journal to several major, competing video hosting services, to take advantage of social and search functions unique to each. It’s all good, as long as you don’t get trapped into thinking that there should be one, canonical location. That said, every video hosting location you control, be it YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, or Facebook, should include in the accompanying description a link to the journal location.
8. A Vimeo Plus account ($75/year) gives you the ability to put a working link (e.g. to your website) at the end of the video, as well as to remove Vimeo branding and cross-publish to YouTube and Twitter. Another reliable, non ad-ridden alternative is the aforementioned Internet Archive’s own video hosting service.
9. Consider not hosting video on Facebook and Instagram. Their APIs are more restrictive, they assert more rights over content, and Facebook’s lying about the importance of video content helped bankrupt some great newspapers. In short, Facebook sucks. Its corporate priorities in many ways directly conflict with your own, since it aims to replace the open web on which we all depend with its own, privatized alternative. Ultimately it may not be worth the trouble to upload videos to Facebook, in particular, given the way new content will only be shown to fans of a page if the page owner pays for the privilege — kind of an extortion racket. You’ll get more engagement simply by encouraging poets and filmmakers to share their posts on whatever social media platforms they’re active in, which could well include ones in which a literary journal would have little presence otherwise, such as Reddit or Twitch.
10. Give each video in a magazine its own post or page. You want a link that people can share. There’s nothing more frustrating than trying to direct someone to a video on a page with a bunch of other videos on it. To say nothing of how such pages slow down your website. (Starting in May, Google search results will be penalizing pages that load too slowly.) Set up the video or multimedia section of the journal as a category of posts rather than a single page that is continually edited. For one thing, that means that those of us weirdos who still use feed readers will be alerted when you post new video content.
11. EMBED! Don’t make readers click through to somewhere else, for crying out loud. (If your website is built with WordPress, embedding is as simple as including a Vimeo or YouTube link on a line by itself.)
12. While embedded videos can usually be expanded by clicking on the lower right, regardless of the video host, not everyone knows how to do that, so it really helps to display videos at as great a width as possible on the laptop and desktop versions of your site, and make sure it goes full-width on the tablet and mobile versions. Resist the temptation to install a plugin that uses Javascript to pop out the video automatically when a user clicks on it. This would obscure any accompanying text, which if it includes the transcript is vital for accessibility.
13. Editing videos to add uniform branding at the beginning or end may be more trouble than it’s worth, and also obscures the true copyright situation in almost all cases. I tend to think that video/film branding should be organic and in keeping with over a century of film tradition. Incorporating the journal’s name into the video strongly implies that you helped produce it in some way — which is certainly an option (see below). Otherwise, hosting it from your own account provides all the branding that you realistically need.
14. Should you care if a video has already appeared elsewhere, in online or real-world festivals, or even in other journals? Remember that journals’ most valuable role in an age of content overload is curation, not uniqueness. Readers don’t have any expectation with other sorts of magazines that they will never reprint anything. A new music video may appear in dozens of competing magazines.
15. Accessibility: If you’re uploading videos to your own Vimeo or YouTube channel, think about adding closed captions. Also or instead, include the text of the poem alongside the video, both in the video description on the hosting platform you use, and in the post/page for the video in your journal.
16. If the poem previously appeared as text in another journal, be sure to link to it there — that’s just basic web etiquette.
17. Print or PDF journals can also include videopoetry! Include one or more stills, ideally in color, a short description of the film, a full transcript, a shortened URL, and a QR code linking directly to the video so that anyone with a mobile phone in their pocket can watch it right away. There are a number of free online services that will generate a QR code for any link.
19. If you have the resources, consider working with filmmakers to produce your own videos. This is certainly the best way to assert your primacy as a publisher, while still allowing the content you produce to be shared or embedded anywhere. Even a typically cash-strapped journal might be able to pull off something like this by forging an alliance with one or more teachers at film schools, where students could be supplied with texts from poets willing to let their work be put to transformative use.
20. Make sure a still from the video appears as the featured image for the post when it’s shared on social media or in email. (We use a WordPress plugin that does that automatically, as well as the Open Graph Protocol plugin.)
Whilst subjectivity often lies in the hands of the poet, the film-maker can double the affect. This can be through their narrative use of the lens in relation to the position of the protagonist, or narrator, particularly in response to unseen forces; placing the viewer or camera in interesting and even culpable positions. I have selected three pairs of films that utilize contrasting approaches to this technique. The first two generate comic pathos; the second two focus on man’s inhumanity to man; and the final pair on the difficult dramatic technique of intimating freedom from negative forces beyond the screen (this world which is not that world).
The Desktop Metaphor (2017), by British poet Caleb Parkin, with filmic interpretation by Dutch film-maker Helmie Stil, centres in content and form on the subtly humorous juxtaposition of the prosaic with the profound and mythical in relation to man’s position in a desktop universe. The light from a steadily repetitive photocopier plays central stage in this film, accenting the repetitions in the poem, where office products alongside Stil’s photocopied face are interwoven with concepts of the infinite – ‘The Great Stapler which attaches the night to us’.
On Loop (2013), one of the funniest films in recent years by British film-maker and animator Christine Hooper, also focuses on the impotence of man’s condition in order to create humour. However, in this case the viewer is given the point of view of the invisible protagonist, who is in bed and tossing and turning with insomnia. In a short space of time we get to know exactly who the protagonist is, without ever seeing her, since an imagination in overdrive lets slip the jumbled contents of her thoughts. These are married with a visually fractured room, and a hyper-alert voice-over (Susan Calman) that is so well chosen to dramatically accentuate, through the sharply rising and falling tones of the melodic accent, a disjointed, racing imagination. Placing the viewer in the physical and mental position of the protagonist is a clever device, the comic pathos doubled in affect.
Two contrasting filmic approaches to man’s inhumanity to man are found in Numbers (English and Piatek, 2016) and Hopscotch (Vilk and Aisha 2017). Numbers begins with the film-maker and the footage itself. Maciej Piatek asked Lucy English to write a poem to the footage centering broadly on someone trying to find their way in society. Lucy arrived at the refugee survivor’s narrative, which Maciej paired with a voice-over by a survivor herself.
The black-and-white footage is from a laboratory, and I quote Maciej: ‘showing each stage of death of a human white blood cell, revealing the dying cells apparently trying to alert their immune system allies that they are dying’. He says he ‘looped and delayed in time the same piece of found footage to make it look like a disease outbreak. At the end of the film one can see in the left top corner the cell is actually disappearing’.
This film rests on the visual absence of the survivors themselves. The screen and the cells as human experiment are a surface to reflect upon, in the way that a tombstone in a graveyard focuses our thoughts. We are entirely tuned to the voice and its wholly credible narrative. However, the voice slowly disappears and the liquid vibrating aspect of the cells delicately suggests the negative role of water and the ocean in the stories. Although the survivor’s voice lets us know she survived, the screen tells us a different story. The film intimates what is not shown.
The next film, Hopscotch (2017), also intimates an insidious negative force, highlighting targeted, everyday abuse, particularly against Black Asian Minority Ethnic (BAME) women in Scotland. It is based on a poem by Nadine Aisha, and is directed by leading film-maker Roxana Vilk, with executive production by AMINA – Muslim Women’s Resource Centre with support from Rape Crisis Edinburgh.
We are immediately drawn into the centre of the conflict. An invisible stalker hisses suggestive remarks to a girl who then retorts ‘he says to me’ placing us, the viewer, as her third-party confidante. At the same time the camera focuses on a girl strolling across the screen on a cold evening. Through this clever filmic device, we see from dual points of view – as both her friend and her assailant – creating dramatic tension.
We cut to daytime, on a bus, and she continues: ‘Sat on the bus with a stranger’s hot breath’ and we are there again, but from the point of view of the abuser sitting right behind her, just as Christine Hooper placed us in the mind and physical position of the insomniac. ‘I want you’ he hisses. We follow our prey through the streets, and the abuse continues ‘stuck up bitch’ ‘what’s wrong, can’t you take this’, ‘Slut, slag’.
Standing alone in a railway station as everyone else speeds past, we recognize the victim’s frozen isolation, and how such abuse robs us of an authentic, relaxed interaction in public places. She is left with the fallout of the words and an ensuing alienation: ‘clenched them tight in fists that now mark the imprint of nameless men trying to name me’. The film continues for nearly five minutes, exposing us, the viewer, to a sense of an unending and unpredictable persecution. Ultimately the stalking camera reaches a climax where the victim turns, takes the camera, and starts filming herself. For a moment she, as in everywoman, triumphs; but through the majority of the narrative Vilk has expertly drawn us in, to inhabit the obsessive mind of the perpetrator.
Roxana told me (email 11 December 2019):
One of the reasons I was drawn to the style I used was also about reflecting on the “male gaze” in cinema in the sense that it is often male directors behind the lens; and I wanted to parallel that to this harassment of women in public spaces. Then to give the poet/ protagonist the chance at the end to grab the camera and turn the lens on herself… so she could speak to the audience without the male gaze and take back ownership of the story.
Freedom from unseen forces beyond the screen provides the central tenet in the final two films. In Quarry (2019) with poem by American poet Melissa Stein and animated line drawing by British artist animator Josh Saunders, a dramatic narrative is placed squarely in front of us. With a delicate and charming line illustration, a girl and boy swim naked in a quarry. However, through the concise and well-placed choice of words which indicate brooding danger – for example ‘a girl is swimming naked in dark water’ – an undercurrent of impending loss of innocence emerges.
The narrative is told as if in the third person, but as it reaches the denouement the narrator enters the first person. It is at this point that we sense that the earlier controlled use of language might indicate a personal psychological burial, now being exhumed. Within the developing drama, Saunders’ figures swim with innocence and a fragile, vibratory naivety; dipping into and below the surface – at one with the water, the rocks and each other. As we realize this event actually happened to the author, so we adjust, and mentally include the invasive eye of an intruder. Achieving delicacy and innocence in a film is a difficult feat; however, with such restraint, both visual and verbal, the result is powerful and memorable, and shows how animation can add to narrative in dramatic ways beyond live footage.
Storm Song (2019) by young British artist (and Central St Martins graduate) Rebecca Hilton is also set in water, but underwater, accompanied by two poems. On the surface, it appears to be a lyric, moving abstract painting where mermaid-like figures (some fully clothed and with long trailing fabric) unwind and intertwine, being both the ink and the brush. However, this film contains an underlying tension, and, rather than making a loud political statement, uses space, language and embodied gesture to subtly deny the constricts on the surface of enforced identities and ideologies from the powers that be – ‘for all we understand is power’.
Alongside an enigmatic voice-over, the viewer’s gaze finds itself broken by frequent black ‘rests’ – a technique I haven’t seen except with intertitles. These black spaces, in a ‘ma’-like way, inspire reflection on what has just been said. And just over halfway through the two poems interweave with each other. The themes in ‘Ghost Ribbon’ (2019) explore return from failure, whilst ‘Cataclysmic Storm’ (2019) investigates the weight of authoritarian power and control ‘Suspended up up up until you breathe’.
Whilst in Quarry we are taken on a developing narrative that intimates in its dramatic unselfconscious innocence a dark denouement, in Storm Song, the darkness gradually filters through, as a continuous invisible, quiescent force.
An earlier version of this essay appeared on Liberated Words.
