Video: Metamorphosis

Inspired by a woodcut print by M.C. Escher, Metamorphosis is from a poem by UK writer, Jean Morris. The film was co-directed with Eduardo Yagüe in Spain. This is the first time I have collaborated with another film-maker to co-create a poetry video. As with the majority of my collaborative creative work since 2007, the film was made via the internet between Australia, where I live, and artists in other parts of the globe.

Full credits
Read poem (in English and Spanish translation)
Watch with Spanish subtitles

NOTES FROM THE DIRECTORS AND WRITER

Marie Craven (direction, editing):

I was immediately drawn to the poem of Metamorphosis when it came up on one of my social media news-feeds, where I regularly read contemporary poetry from around the world. UK writer and translator, Jean Morris, was its author. The piece was inspired by a famous woodcut print by M.C. Escher, Metamorphosis II (1939-40). Jean's viewing of the art work seemed to have suggested in her a vision of someone who might be similar to Escher himself, a character who perhaps the poet could relate to personally, as could I. The piece sketches a solitary character fascinated by life's multiple and varying repetitions, of shapes and spaces, movement and time. It has a mirror structure, which I felt apt as a reference to the highly distinctive geometries that appear in Escher's art.

In another part of the virtual globe, I had been in contact for several years with Spanish film director, Eduardo Yagüe. We had previously talked about a possible collaboration between us. So in 2019 I contacted Eduardo with Jean's poem and asked if he might be interested in co-directing a film of it. We then contacted Jean, who agreed to a film of her poem. I suggested Rachel Rawlins as a possible voice artist and we were all pleased when she said yes to joining the project as well.

Almost without words, Eduardo and I decided that he would create the camera footage, including direction of his chosen actor, Pedro Luis Menéndez. I was to edit and do the post-production for the film. Along the way, of course, we discussed many aspects of each other's part in the process. After I made a first draft of the film, I received valuable feedback from collaborators, including a Skype meeting with Eduardo - the first time we had really met other than by the written word.

I became unexpectedly drawn into other work in the last part of 2019, returning to Metamorphosis in January 2020, when I completed a very different second draft based on the earlier feedback. This included a new music track by DXIII, with whom I've been collaborating musically over the internet since 2007. In February I sent this second draft film to collaborators. I made a few final changes and we agreed it was complete. It's been a marvelous collaboration with all involved, and I am very pleased with the film we've made of Metamorphosis.

Jean Morris (writer):

I’ve always been a loner and not so great at working with others, so having my words become part of this rich collaborative work is a new and rewarding experience. An earlier version of my “mirror poem”, which tried to reflect the morphing mirror structure of Escher’s artwork, appeared on the Via Negativa poetry blog, long established as a beacon of the Creative Commons ethos, which I support, so I was happy to say yes to Marie’s proposal and keen to leave it to her and to Eduardo to make of the poem whatever they wanted. I’d long admired both their, very different, work in poetry film and trusted they’d make something beautiful, technically sophisticated and interesting. It also made me happy that the actor, Pedro, was someone I knew as a poet and the voice, Rachel’s, one long known in real life here in London. What a lovely, complex, international thing in sad and claustrophobic times.

Eduardo Yagüe (direction, videography):

When I was thinking on locations for filming, nothing seemed to me more ‘escherian’ than the Colegio de la Inmaculada in Gijón, my hometown in Northern Spain and where I am currently living. Belonging to the Jesuits, the building owns a long history including some dramatic episodes during the Spanish Civil War. I studied there from age 6 to 18.

Then, when I was thinking for potential actors for the video, I decided, looking at Escher’s portrait, that Pedro Luis Menéndez would be a perfect choice. Pedro was my Literature teacher and my first theater director when I was a teenager student at the Colegio, and now he's become one of my favorite Spanish poets. One year before recording Metamorphosis I made a video called La vida menguante (Waning Life) based on several of the poems from Pedro’s book of the same title. I also recorded some footage of the streets and buildings of Gijón, a city sometimes aesthetically annoying but very ‘escherian’ too.

Working with Marie Craven was an honor. I have been admiring her films from the time of The Poetry Storehouse and I was looking forward to collaborating with her. It was magical how she used the material for producing a fantastic compendium of the artistic style of both of us, mixing in a natural way our different conceptions of poetry film-making for telling the poem with simplicity but also brilliantly.

The poem of Jean Morris is beautifully playful. Jean is a friend who has been helping me for years, making the translation of my videos into English. She is a delicate and a very sensitive writer from whom I am impatiently awaiting a book of her poems. The amazing music of DXIII and the so well modulated voice of Rachel Rawlins completed this collaboration, which I consider one of the best videopoems I’ve been involved with.

My experience teaches me that in this kind of collaborations one must let the intuition flow and always trust with joy in our talented partners.

Videos: A Glimpse from the Gutter, The Love of the Sun, The Ants

Almost a year has passed since my last update here on creative projects. Here are three poetry films I have completed since then...

A Glimpse from the Gutter

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Read the poem

In early January, Dave Bonta invited me to participate in his Poetry Without Borders program at the REELPoetry Festival in Houston, USA. The challenge was to make a remix of his 2016 video, A Glimpse from the Gutter (una mirada desde la alcantarilla ), from three poems by Argentinian poet, Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972). Having previously made a number of films with Dave’s poetry, and being involved in some of his wider projects, I was keen to get on board, and to make this my first film of 2020.

I speak only English. Nonetheless, this is the sixth film I’ve made involving different languages. Despite being in my late 50s, I retain a child-like wonderment that our single human species communicates in so many richly varied ways. In addition, my film-making over 35 years has been largely directed towards international audiences, via the film festival circuit, and now also the web, where poetry film has its greatest reach. As an Australian, I have a desire to transcend racism and xenophobia, and know that we are all related on the face of this Earth. I also simply love the expressive sounds of different languages as a kind of music.

Dave translated Pizarnik’s poems with advice and in discussion with Jean Morris, a poet and translator. Jean voiced the poems in Spanish, while Dave spoke them in English. For my film, I kept only the text and voices, which I re-arranged and mixed with new music and images. I have remained true to Dave’s impulse in his earlier piece to make a truly bilingual film, spoken in both Spanish and English, and therefore without the need for subtitles.

As in a number of my films, the raw images were sourced from a subscription website with a vast library of short, random clips from videographers in many different countries. The collection of shots I selected were transformed in editing via changes to speed, light, framing and colour, and the addition of long dissolves that blend and juxtapose the images via superimposition.

Some of the images touch on the literal meanings in the trio of Pizarnik's brief poems. These direct connections of image to text are sometimes seen at moments other than when they are spoken. The film also contains a number of shots that bear no direct relation to the words. My overall impulse was to create a series of moving images that might form a kind of visual poem in themselves, while remaining connected to the resonances I found in the text and in the qualities of the voices. The final visual element is a faintly-flickering overlay containing animated x-rays of human anatomy.

The music is an ambient piece by Lee Rosevere, who for several years has generously released much of his music on creative commons remix licenses, enabling film-makers and other artists to create new works incorporating his sounds. I chose this track for its slow pace, beatlessness and meditative quality, that left room for the voices to take by far the greatest prominence.


The Love of the Sun

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This is the final film version of The Love of the Sun, from five poems out of Matt Hetherington's poetry collection of the same name. The video had its first presentation as a live audiovisual performance at the Ó Bhéal Winter Warmer Poetry Festival in Cork, Ireland in late November 2019. Thanks to festival director, Paul Casey, and the Arts Council of Ireland, I was able to be there in person. I traveled from Australia with Adelaide actor, Claudia La Rose-Bell, also a guest of the festival. Claudia gave a live reading of three of Matt's poems in rhythm with the images on the screen, and with a pre-recorded music soundtrack by Steve Kelly (aka Douglas Deep, Manfred Hamil). This included Matt's voice speaking two of his poems. After the brilliant festival in Cork, Claudia and I then traveled to other places in Europe. We presented The Love of the Sun live again, at the video poetry festival in Athens. Directing live audiovisual performance was a first for me. Happily, it went smoothly and was well received.

The Ants

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The Ants was made for the poetry film competition of the Leipzig Poetry Society in Germany. The challenge was to make a film based on any poem by Joachim Ringelnatz (1883-1934), a cabaret poet and absurd humorist. Most of the Ringelnatz poems I have read are strange and funny, and very short. I chose Die Ameisen/The Ants for its whimsy, and partly because it includes a reference to Australia, where I live. It's a coincidence too that ants have been a funny and instructive presence in my life. The film is bilingual, in German first and then English. It was a fun film to make, with music created for it by my long-time collaborator, Adrian Carter, and collage art by Kollage Kid. Both of them are in the UK.


So much happened to take me out of my usual slow routines in 2019. It was one of the biggest years of my creative life. The height of it was travelling Europe for 28 days during November and December, presenting projects at three poetry and film festivals and events, in Ireland, Croatia and Greece. In between I met collaborators in other countries. Memories for a lifetime.

In the second half of 2019, I re-made a number of earlier films, often quite substantially, and raised their technical quality to my current standards and skills. There are now new versions of: Rodeo Days, The Meeting Ran Long, native land remix, Transmission, and I Drove to the River.

Festivals and events that have selected, awarded and/or exhibited my videos since last update include: New York City Poetry Festival, USA; Ó Bhéal Poetry Film Competition in Cork, Ireland, and later at Ó Bhéal's Winter Warmer Poetry Festival; the 17 Days Video Series, which exhibits online and at galleries in the USA; the In Absentia Embassy (Italy) and the Loss Pavilion (Australia), as part of the global digital arts biennale, The Wrong; North Bellarine Film Festival, Australia; Kino Klub Split, Croatia; Athens International Video Poetry Festival, Greece; ReelPoetry Festival, USA; and the launch of the new Poetry Portal in Melbourne, Australia. The Poetry + Video program of shorts I curated at the start of last year has now been part of ten festivals and events world-wide.

I am also pleased to have received two awards in 2019. In the poetry video competition of the Leipzig Poetry Society in Germany, The Ants was given first place. In the UK, Half Measures was awarded second in the Oxford-Brookes poetry film competition.

Finally, I have become involved in contributing and editing the Moving Poems website, working with its founder, publisher and editor, Dave Bonta, an honour to be contributing to this brilliant project that has been going for ten years.

Marie

Poetry + Video Project Update

The world premiere screening event for the Poetry + Video Project took place in Murwillumbah, Australia on 4 May. The event happened at The Garden Gallery, booking out a few days before the show. The live poets on the night, Matt Hetherington and Bronwen Manger, were marvellous. It was especially rewarding that they have both been involved in video poetry projects themselves, and were able to comment on this in the Q & A. The audience that arrived for the event was open, curious and engaged about a form that almost none had encountered before. We couldn't have asked for better. Here is a mini-doco we made of the event:

In other news, a Kathmandu screening will now be happening later in the year, with the exact date to be decided. Meanwhile, I have sent the program and promotional materials by USB to Ball State University in Indiana, for a screening there on 13 November. Starting 1 November, the program will also be exhibiting online as part of the huge global biennale of digital art and culture, The Wrong.

Other possible screening venues are in the process of discussion. Thanks to Maria Vella, Caroline Rumley and Fiona Lam for sending through leads on possible further venues. In other pleasing news, Jane Glennie has agreed to take on the role of UK Manager for the tour, and has very nearly secured an outstanding venue there.

The brochure for venues now includes information on how the tour logistically works. All the videos, stills and promotional materials are ready to be sent by USB stick anywhere in the world, at a moment's notice. Screening fees are entirely negotiable, and will be shared between the contributing artists. For independent groups with little or no budget, fees are waived. The main aim is to share widely the fabulous films in the program, and to expand awareness of the poetry video genre.

Please contact poetryvideoproject (at) gmail (dot) com to express interest in bringing the hour-long program to your location.

This is a revision of the article that appeared in Moving Poems Magazine, July 29, 2019.

Videos: Half Measures, I Don't Own Anxiety, Poetry + Video, Rodeo Days

Several months have gone by since my last update here. 2019 has so far been the biggest year of my long creative life. Writing about what I have been doing has taken a low priority, but I'm glad to have now found some space and time to be back in the blogosphere with notes about the four videos released so far this year.

Half Measures

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Read the poem

Patrick James Errington's beautifully written, moving poem, Half Measures, was the script for this film. The project began life as a response to a call for entries to the Oxford Brookes Poetry Film Competition in the UK. The competition offered film-makers five poems to consider for adaptation. I chose Half Measures for its spare and direct writing style, along with a subject that had personal resonance from my experiences in childhood. The film took about a month from start to finish, working approximately full-time. My first consideration was a voice to speak the words. Happily, my good friend and collaborator, Matt Hetherington, agreed to do this. Matt lives about a half-hour's drive from my place, in the same general region of Australia. As well as having a great voice for poetry, he is a marvellous poet himself. We recorded a few takes on my home computer set-up, with him reading the poem in his deep, rich voice, and the film was off and running. The next step was to find a piece of music to accompany the voice, and the overall tone of the film. I began by listening to the recent album, The World of 'If', by my long-time music collaborator in Wales, Paul Foster, aka The Night Programme. On hearing the last track on the album, Barrel Organ, not listed as an official part of the release, but included as a hidden bonus to those who downloaded it, I felt I'd found my piece. To my amazement, when Paul's music file was laid out in my editing software along with Matt's recordings, there was a near-perfect fit of timings and beats, as well as harmonies between the notes of Matt's voice and the key of the music. The soundtrack was decided. For the moving images in the film, I went to the subscription-site, Videoblocks, that has a vast library of high quality, royalty-free footage for inclusion in film projects, each clip around 15 seconds long. Some film-makers have a distaste for 'stock footage'. I have no problem with it at all. For me, it is just one option among many that I employ to make poetry films, embracing the spirit of copyleft and creative commons, sometimes sourcing work in the public domain, as well as continuing many collaborations, mostly over the internet, with poets, musicians, makers of moving and still images, and voice artists from around the world. In fact, I find it a more difficult and interesting challenge to invent ways to bring together disparate elements from various sources in a way that feels coherent and organic, than working to plan with each element executed as envisioned in advance. Thankfully, Videoblocks is now giving the usernames and locations of contributing videographers. Shots in this film are from: Vadim Key (Belarus), bafan4u (Slovenia), Sergey Gribanov (Russia), barselona dreams (Russia), dapoopta (USA), Justin Tierney (USA), Kamila P (Poland), Oles Ishchuk (Ukraine), Pohodzhayproduction (Ukraine), Stock Media (Germany), and WeAre (Ukraine). Several long, happily-obsessive editing sessions later, the film was complete. The results of the competition were announced a week after the cutoff date for entries, a miraculously short waiting time compared to all other film events I've ever encountered. At this point I was over the moon to learn that my film had been awarded second place, with fellow film-makers, Gabrielle Turner (UK), taking first place, and Jane Glennie (UK) taking third place. Congratulations to them both.

I Don't Own Anxiety

Full credits
Read the poem

In 2017, I followed a series of videos appearing during the month of April, also known as National Poetry Month in the USA, a celebration that is global in various forms as well. These interesting pieces were being published daily by the Visible Poetry Project, based in New York. In mid-2018, I happened to see a call for film-maker submissions for the 2019 VPP series. I sent my application that same night. A few months later, I was delighted to have been selected as one of 30 film-makers from around the world to participate in this year's series. The process firstly involved reading a series of poems from 60 writers, and returning a shortlist of three poets I might like to work with. VPP soon announced that I was to collaborate with my top choice, the well-known US poet, Kelli Russell Agodon. Kelli and I then started communicating directly, and she sent me a larger collection of poems, three of which I felt drawn to adapt to the screen. I vacillated between two of them for a little while, until Kelli suggested I 'go with my gut'. At this point I knew the poem of choice would be I Don't Own Anxiety, But I Borrow it Regularly (eventually shortened to I Don't Own Anxiety for the film adaptation). I straight-away knew who I would most like to ask to voice the poem, and so I contacted poet and film-maker, Cindy St. Onge, with whom I've been fortunate to have prior collaborations. Cindy's readings of the poem were recorded by Eric Sorenson, both of them in Portland, Oregon. Eric had quickly responded to my call-out on social media for a technician in that city to assist with recording Cindy's voice. As always, Cindy's readings of the poem were sensitive, articulate and well-modulated - a joy to receive and work with them. VPP allocated a producer to our project, Alina Sodano, who monitored progress through a series of rolling deadlines leading towards the film's release date in April 2019. Alina was instrumental in securing the music I most wished for our film, a piece entitled Blames and Revelations, by Matt Howes & Dan Slatter, licensed for our project via Premium Beat. Footage for the film was sourced from royalty-free subscription site, Videoblocks, including work from their contributors, Vadim Key (Belarus), WeAre (Ukraine), ProStock (Slovenia), Oles Ishchuk (Ukraine), glowonconcept (Thailand), and Sergey Gribanov (Russia). Editing is my primary area of interest and pleasure in film-making, which accounts in large measure for my easy embrace of 'found media', such as may be sourced on licences like royalty-free, creative commons, copyleft, and public domain. Sourcing media in this way gives me legal permission to adapt, remix and re-create it in my non-commercial videos, each fragment given new life in the new contexts I create. As with Half Measures, written up earlier in this blog piece, the editing challenge for I Don't Own Anxiety was bringing together the diverse written, vocal, musical and visual elements, to create a film that, in its final form, felt organic and whole. Our film was released on 28 April and will continue to be distributed now with the other films in the 2019 series by the Visible Poetry Project.

Poetry + Video Premiere

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This is a mini-documentary shot by Nigel Wells, and edited by me, to record the world premiere event of the Poetry + Video project, at The Garden Gallery, Murwillumbah, Australia on 4 May. In addition to screening the video program itself, the event included two marvellous live poets, Matt Hetherington and Bronwen Manger, and an interesting end-of-night Q & A. The boutique venue booked-out a few days before the event, and we couldn't have hoped for a better audience: open, engaged and curious about this hybrid form of video and poetry that most who were there would never before have seen. Poetry + Video has been my major project this year. It is a touring program I have curated of 25 video poems from around the world, surveying diverse contemporary expressions of the form. A wide range of approaches includes: screen adaptations of page poetry, prose poetry, poetry from found text and media, animations, poetic cinema, text-on-screen, and spoken word. Next stop in the tour is Kathmandu in July, with more screenings to follow into 2020. The program is easily accessible to almost any location in the world via USB stick. No screening fees are involved for independent operators with little or no budget, and completely negotiable to those with funds. The primary purpose of the project is to expand awareness of video poetry, screening diverse and high quality work in as many places as possible. Any proceeds from screenings will be shared among the contributing artists, in a spirit of co-operation and collectivism. Read and download the brochure for venues here, or simply send us an email, and feel free to pass it on.

Rodeo Days

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Rodeo Days is about my Australian ancestry and identity, employing archival footage of 20th century rural life, given vibrant expression in a hybrid of experimental film, spoken word and music video. It is one of many internet collaborations over more than a decade with electronic music producer, Paul Foster, aka Dementio13 (among other monikers), in Wales. My father and his brothers and sisters lived through desperate poverty during a childhood in the Depression era of the 1930s. Their father abandoned the family, leaving their mother to take care of all six children alone and without work. As the four boys approached early adulthood, they took to the rodeo circuit, travelling wide distances between events, a life on the road. Talented horsemen, they became well-known as rodeo champions. Rodeo was powerfully enticing to poor country men, for its promise of status they were sorely lacking, and because of the money on offer. Prizes at rodeo events were sometimes 20 times the average wage for a rural worker. In the 1930s, crowds at these events could number up to 65,000 people. Newspaper reports record the many broken bones sustained by those rough riders, and worse. An oft-repeated family story recalls my uncle riding buckjumpers with a broken arm in plaster. The heroism of these men who were otherwise in the lowest strata of workers in society, was sometimes accompanied by alcoholism and family violence. Rodeo Days brings together my experiences of family life in my childhood, my father's memories of his rodeo days, and impressions about the history of anglo-Australian society and my place in it. The original video was made in 2011. In 2019, I have completely re-made it, with the benefit of another eight, highly productive years of video editing experience, and more advanced technology. It is a piece I feel particularly close to, for its personal content, as well as my own voice and words forming part of the soundtrack. The release of this video is in the lead-up to the final album release from Paul Foster and I as the music duo, Cwtch, a ten year collaboration via the internet between Wales (Paul) and Australia (me). Entitled Ten from Ten, the album will become free to listen and download from our Bandcamp and Soundcloud sites on 24 July, the day we both celebrate our birthday.

So far this year, there have been six screenings of my videos at international festivals and events. Multimedia Poetry Festival, London School of Economics, UK, screened Anatomy. Experimental Program, North Bellarine Film Festival, Australia, had a reprise session at Deakin University, screening The Sea. Newlyn Film Festival, UK, screened Misery. Cadence Video Poetry Festival, USA, screened Dictionary Illustrations, Misery, and Poem for Rent. Uprooted Poetry Films Program, Bristol Poetry Festival, UK, screened The Last Days. Poetry + Video touring program, Australia, screened Misery. Online publications so far this year have included: a piece I wrote in Moving Poems Magazine, USA, about judging the first Atticus Review Videopoem Contest; a piece by Guido Naschert about my video, Dictionary Illustrations, in Poetryfilmkanal magazine, Germany; publication of the video, 7 March, in ooteoote, Netherlands; publication of the video, The Last Days, in Rochford Street Review, Australia; and my review of Dave Bonta's Winter Trees videohaiku series, in Poetry Film Live, UK.

Until next time,
Marie

End of year 2018: Shadow Lullaby, Endless wall to wall carpet, The Love of the Sun

I came to videopoetry by pure chance in the middle of 2014, after making short experimental and narrative films on and off for about 30 years. Since that time, this unique genre has completely rejuvinated my film-making, returned my love of it to me at a time I felt it was all close to expiry. In the past four-and-a-half years, I have made over 60 short videos, more than the sum of my film-making over all previous decades. I am so grateful to have been welcomed by the international community of film-makers, poets, curators, editors and audiences that, like me, have come to love this specialised area of film-making. Grateful too for the captivating videos and poems by other artists that have inspired and influenced me over recent years.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I completed judging the first Atticus Review Videopoem Contest, an event that will now be added to the international videopoetry calendar for future years. Atticus is an online poetry journal coming out of the USA with a large and wide readership. It is one of the few poetry publications worldwide to feature videopoetry as an ongoing feature. It was an honour to be invited by the editors (David Olimpio and Matt Mullins), to be part of kicking off this first year of the contest. I found great pleasure in watching, and sometimes re-watching, the 115 videos sent in to us. The quality was high. In fact, as a film-maker myself, the rich creativity of my peers was humbling, in a good way. And so it was a challenge to select only four awarded videos. These were my final choices: Things I Found in the Hedge (first prize), Qué Es El Amor (What Is Love) (second prize), The Whole Speaks (third prize), The Cleanest Hands (honourable mention). I hope you appreciate them as well.

In 2018 I have completed and/or publicly released 11 videos, along with a few others that, for various reasons, are currently only available for private viewing. Here are the latest three releases I have not yet discussed on the blog...

Shadow Lullaby


Full credits
Read notes on the overall 'Wild Whispers' project
Read our Australian poem version and further notes
Read Verandah magazine article

This video forms part of a larger, international film poetry project called 'Wild Whispers'. It started with a poem, 'Frog on Water', by UK writer, Chaucer Cameron, who is also the overall project producer. This poem was first made into a film by Helen Dewbery, also in the UK. That poem and film led to 15 different poems, in 12 languages, giving rise to 12 poetry films from around the world. The process of making the films involved passing the poem from one country to another, with each film-maker receiving it untranslated from the previous language, without being allowed to read the original piece. I was invited to be film-maker for the Australian film in the series. The first step was receiving Chaucer's poem translated into the Urdu language. As I had no opportunity to read the poem in English, my first task was to find a translator in Australia. I had difficulty finding someone who had skills in both Urdu and English, as well as a feeling for poetry. So, in discussion with Chaucer, I elected to go with a technical translation of the Urdu text into English via a professional translation agency. After that I invited Candida Baker, with whom I'd previously made two videopoems, to become involved in re-interpreting this literal, very unpoetic and partly incomprehensible English translation, into a new written form and meaning. This led to our film, which we titled 'Shadow Lullaby'. The inspiration for the title came partly from the musical piece included in the film, a pre-existing track by Gurdonark entitled 'Post-Industrial Lullaby'. The title of the music has a coincidental relevance to the meaning we arrived at for our version of the poem and the film. After two years in the making, the overall 'Wild Whispers' project is now complete. I have since had the pleasure of watching all films in the order of their production, and to follow the poem through its fascinating journey of mutation through languages and diverse filmic/poetic sensibilities. I highly recommend this viewing experience from film to film, that takes us through a unique landscape of cross-cultural exchange.

Endless wall to wall carpet


Full credits
Poem in German (find the link on that page for the English translation)

This piece was made for the Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Germany. In each of its biennial editions, the festival calls for film-makers internationally to respond to a 'festival poem', which is made available along with a voice recording and English translation. This year's poem was 'Endless wall-to-wall carpet (of the VIP foyer)' by Ann Cotten. The original language of the poem is German and Ann's voice performance in my video is in German too, with English subtitles. The poem seemed to me to be very unusual, describing a microscopic view of carpet as a metaphor for wider societal observations. I found humour in this, as well as deeper commentary and even an expression of personal sadness in the face of the world. The voice performance was fast, almost breathless. I often work with much slower readings and elongate them further in the process of editing voice with music. These immediate impressions I had of poem and voice led me to adopt a playful, experimental approach to adapting the poem to the screen. As with many of my videos, I started with the music and voice. The process of searching for an existing music track to work with led me to Gurdonark's 'Insect Love'. Like all of his music, this was generously published on a Creative Commons remix licence, allowing me the legal freedom to adapt it for the video and to distribute once completed. Once I had cut the music and voice together, I turned attention to the image track. Here I sourced still images from a range of different photographers on Flickr. These were also all licensed under Creative Commons. I edited them tightly with the rhythms of the soundtrack, which contains sharp and unusual variations. I had already slowed down Ann's reading by separating the spoken phrases and placing them within the discrete musical parts, creating short aural spaces in between that contained only music and no vocals. This created enough duration to express the poem visually, while still maintaining Ann's sense of urgency in the reading. Even with the extended time in the reading, the video only comes in at 1 minute 50 seconds. It is a fast piece. This is the third time I have specifically made videos for festivals. Each of them has involved working in a language I do not speak. In each case, I have approached this with a combination of close phonetic listening, and comparisons of the original text and its translation. Each video has required subtitles back into English, which I constructed using a similar method. My video of 'Endless wall to wall carpet', was selected for screening as a finalist in this otherwise non-competitive section of the overall Zebra festival program. It is the first time I have had work selected for this event, the largest poetry film festival in the world. It was a delight to be part of it.

The Love of the Sun


Full credits
Find the book

Matt Hetherington is a poet in Murwillumbah, New South Wales, a town about an hour by car or bus from where I live on the Gold Coast, Australia. Over about the past eighteen months, we have collaborated on three videopoems. Almost all my videos over the past several years have involved internet collaboration rather than meeting in person, and the majority have been from poems by writers in other countries. The main exceptions to this are three videos made with Candida Baker (who lives in the same rural region as Matt), and those with Matt himself. This has been a very welcome development for me. Not only have I created more work based around local Australian poetry, but in the process I've made friends I can physically see (and occasionally hug). This latest video with Matt represents a new direction in my film-making and a return to shooting my own camera footage. In all other videos over the past four to five years, I have worked with pre-existing moving and still images that I've accessed via Public Domain, royalty-free and Creative Commons licences, or by direct permission of artist-collaborators, again mostly via the net. So when Matt started staging book launches in various Australian locations for his latest collection, 'The Love of the Sun' (Recent Work Press 2018), I became keen to pick up a camera again to document his live performance at one of these events. The opportunity to do this arose in late November at the Murwillumbah launch. Nigel Wells, who I live with, had just purchased a new 4K video camera, and made the mistake (he now says) of telling me I was free to use it whenever I wish. It wasn't long before I took up his offer! For this first attempt at documenting live poetry, I chose to approach things simply, putting the camera on a tripod and filming in a single static framing. As it's turned out, I find this to be a satisfying way of capturing spoken word performance, as I think it invites stillness in the viewer and a deeper appreciation of the poems and live presentation. The video contains six of Matt's poems from his new collection, each discretely presented as individual performances, with title breaks in between. There is no music, only Matt's rich voice and presence, the response of the live audience, and some street noise on the day that at times made the small country town seem like a metropolis (the launch took place on the balcony of The Regent Cinema, overlooking a road). This latter required significant work on the soundtrack to minimise intrusive noise. There are still some traces of this but Matt assures me that background sound like this adds to the live ambience of these kinds of videos. Matt's poems and performances are much more interesting than what I did with the video of them, which in a way seems as it should be for this kind of piece. I hope you will give the poems their well-deserved attention, and also support him to write more if you can, by buying his finely written book.

This year 17 international festivals and events screened 18 of my videopoems. Another seven short films I made between 1984 and 2002 were part of a retrospective of my film-making over the decades at Artist Film Workshop in Melbourne. The program was curated by Chris Luscri, and was a highlight of my year. One of these films ('Maidenhead', 1995) was then invited to screen in a much larger venue, with the feature film, 'Desperately Seeking Susan'. This was part of an exhibition series staged by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI). There were a number of online publications featuring my work: Moving Poems, Atticus Review, Gnarled Oak, Bareknuckle Poet, Verandah, Via Negativa, Pure Shit, ooteoote. In an attempt to give some new life to the ghost town that has been my YouTube account, I also added about 30 videopoems there for anyone who prefers viewing on that site (Vimeo is my own site of choice as a film-making base).

It's been a good year for film-making. Huge thanks to collaborators, contributors, festivals, curators, editors, and those interested in viewing or reading about what I've been up to. Thanks to fellow film-makers who have filled my eyes and ears, mind and heart, with inspiring films/videos, and to the poets whose work has given rise to them. Happy new year to all. See you again in 2019.

Videos: Misery, The Sea, Nightlight Ghazal

Working process notes on the three latest videos completed...

Misery


Full credits

Sarah Sloat creates hand-made visual art pieces that are also poems. She does this by using various techniques to 'erase' most of the words from pages of Stephen King's novel, 'Misery'. Her 'erasures' leave only scattered words around the page, forming small poems. To these, she adds found images, related to the poems in associative ways that might recall surrealism. With Sarah's permission and ongoing feedback, I have here selected a number of the visual poetry pieces and adapted them. The video of 'Misery' attempts to construct a fragmented narrative, or new poem, from the juxtaposition of the selected visual poetry pieces. It focuses strongly on the image components of Sarah's 'Misery' pages and creates a new form in motion with them. Not a strict 'presentation' of Sarah's visual poetry, the video is my response to their inspiration. Music is by Gurdonark, whose Creative Commons music I have been following for about eight years. Other videos I have made from Sarah Sloat's poetry are Dictionary Illustrations and Nightlight Ghazal.


The Sea


Full Credits

Sidney Irvine and I met on the web as fellow musicians in about 2008. Eventually we decided to form a 'cyber-duo', which we called PIXSID. I provided vocals for the music. Sid wrapped his experimental hip-hop sounds around them, and finalised the music production. Via email, we produced two albums, 'Atoms Apart' and 'Deliria Tang'. The music track for this video is 'The Sea', one of my favourites from 'Atoms Apart'. It is based on a poem by Juniper Roan, with their permission. For the image track, I animated and visually fragmented some superb images of sea and ocean from the royalty-free site, Unsplash. The full list of photographers is here. Then I fragmented the images further by jump-cutting to the music beats. In this way, the overall piece became a downtempo music video, fused with videopoetry and abstract art.


Nightlight Ghazal


Full credits

After making 'Dictionary Illustrations' some time ago, I was interested in further collaboration with poet and artist, Sarah Sloat. Through web searches I found her poem 'Nightlight Ghazal'. The piece struck a chord in me. I appreciated the wit, articulation and soul of the poem, and related to its subject. I contacted Sarah to ask permission to make a video of her poem, to which she agreed. For the vocal track, I approached videopoet, Cindy St. Onge. We had worked together previously when I put together a video for her poem, 'St. Umbilicus'. I appreciate the expressivity, intimacy and intelligence of her readings. After reading Sarah's poem, Cindy agreed to take part and sent me voice files to work with. For images, I turned to Carol Blyberg, whose wonderful photographs are published on Creative Commons licence at Flickr. Music is by Sidney Irvine (aka Dj Sid), an acid-jazz track called 'Paper Hearts'. Visually, I split the screen to lend a sense of disorientation in internal spaces, which is how I imagine the woman in the poem. I otherwise treated the still images simply, giving subtle motion via delicate zooms and dissolves. The intent was to evoke a kind of phantom woman, whose voice inhabits these interior spaces.

In festivals and events recently, my 1995 short, 'Maidenhead', was screened on original 35mm with the feature film, 'Desperately Seeking Susan', at the Australian Centre for Moving Image (ACMI), in Melbourne's 'Federation Square'. The films screened together twice as part of ACMI's 'Wonderland' exhibition, exploring various incarnations of the famous novel, 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'. This was a particularly exciting screening. It also coincided with several of my earlier short films on celluloid, including 'Maidenhead', being accepted into the ACMI archive. Among other things, this will mean I can finally upload some of my earlier shorts to the web in due course, once all archival processes are completed and I receive high quality digital files. This should happen sometime later in the year. Roughly at the same time as the ACMI screenings, film-maker, David King, included 'Orphanage' as part of an independently organised screening of shorts at 'Longplay', also in Melbourne.

Videos: 1000 Rubies, Human Resources, St. Umbilicus

In the past couple of months, three collaborative poetry videos have been completed...

1000 Rubies


Full credits

'1000 Rubies' is based on a music and poetry piece by Adrian Carter (Sheffield, UK), for which I provided spoken and sung vocals. The music was first released in 2008, on an EP of the same name, still available at the Internet Archive. This track has had a special place in my heart over these years and, revisiting it recently, I found myself beginning to make this video with it. In its final form, the piece is a hybrid of music video and poetry film. The images are from Unsplash, a website for highly creative photography from around the world, all made available for re-use on public domain licence. I selected and juxtaposed the images for their associative resonances with the words, and arranged them in an order to tell a kind of abstract, gestural narrative. I built up a visual motif in this video around the colour red, relating to the rubies of the title. In editing I added movement to the stills through zooms, reversal of framing, and jump cuts on the beats, like heart beats with the music. The one moving image sequence is from royalty-free site, Videoblocks. This was quite a time intensive project to make, mainly because I worked with each of the large number of stills individually. The video forms part of a group with my own sung and/or spoken voice on the soundtrack, including One Dream Opening Into Many, Poem for Rent, 7 March and I Drove to the River.


Human Resources


Full Credits

'Human Resources' is based on an erasure poem of the same name by Dave Bonta in the USA. Erasure poetry is the process of creating poems by selecting words from pre-existing texts. The original text here is sections of a CIA document from the 1980s, concerning mind control techniques. Dave's piece, original excerpts and erasures both, first appeared in 'The Other Bunny' journal online in March 2018. The video is made up substantially of this text on screen, overlaid on a delirious blend of movie images from the Prelinger Archives. I chose to 'mash up' two different films for this background. The first, and most visually recognisable, is 'Duck and Cover', a famous documentary film from the 1950s containing advice on how to take cover in the event of a nuclear blast. The second film is 'Destination Earth', an anti-communist animation also produced in the 1950s. Both films were 'doubled up', making four superimposed layers, sped up considerably, with some parts appearing in forward motion, others in reverse, and some images rotating so that they appear at odd angles throughout the piece. The rapid melee of images is designed to express the hallucinatory effect of mental confusion engendered by mind control. The music is a psychedelic piece by The Night Programme (aka Dementio13 and aka Paul Foster), another artist I've collaborated musically over the net for about a decade (he's in Wales, I'm in Australia). The track is entitled 'Cxxx2', from his album, 'Backup 010318'. The poem and video seem timely in this era of rampant fake news and unabashed propaganda.


St. Umbilicus


Full credits

'St. Umbilicus' is from a poem by Cindy St. Onge, and is one of my shorter video pieces. As well as a poet, Cindy is a maker of videopoems I admire. She also gave her voice to the soundtrack of this video. This is the second video I've made from Cindy's poetry. The first was 'Double Life'. The collaboration was closer on 'St. Umbilicus' and grew out of personal chats we had recently on Facebook and via email. These led to me expressing an interest in collaborating further, to which Cindy agreed. The poem is about the navel and its bodily reminder of our connection to our mother. To express this, I chose a very close, still image of a navel to be a 'frame' for a series of central images featuring mothers and children. The still image, which rotates slightly throughout the piece, was found on creative commons licence at Flickr. The artist is Linnéa Sjögren. The moving images contained within it are from 'Scenes at the Beach Club', a 1927 home movie from the Prelinger Archives. I selected historic images here to emphasise the timelessness of the theme. Music is by Chris Zabriskie, his 'Prelude No. 12' from the 'Preludes' album.

The videos continue to travel to festivals and events, and to find space in online journals. Since my last blog entry, 'Poem for Rent' screened at the Newlyn Film Festival in the UK. 'Solar Therapy' appeared in the final issue of 'Gnarled Oak' journal. Dave Bonta wrote a piece on 'Human Resources' that appeared on his site, 'Via Negativa'. Brisbane-based 'Bareknuckle Poet' journal featured 'Orphanage'. 'Atticus Review' featured three videopoems: 'Poem for Rent', 'Everything sleeps but the night' and 'First Grade Activist'. Very grateful for the interest here in Australia, and internationally.

Videos: Light Ghazal, The Retreat, Peace-Prayer

Notes on the making of recent videos, and other happenings....

Light Ghazal


Full credits

'Light Ghazal' is a third video collaboration with poet, Matt Hetherington. From across the world, Dave Bonta put us in email contact for the first of these, 'Orphanage'. Since then Matt, who lives not far from me here in Australia, has been coming up this way to meet and collaborate in person. This process resulted in the second piece, 'Everything sleeps but the night', and now this latest. It's kind of radical for me to collaborate in the flesh these days, as most of my collaborations for the past decade, video and music alike, have been net-based. I welcome this recent development. For the soundtrack I selected 'Inna Sky' from the 'Sutol' album by Fremantle-based Masonik, whose sounds I have also worked with before in my poetry videos. The source footage for the image track is from Mono No Aware in New York, whose films are available on Creative Commons licence at Vimeo. I selected the sections of footage most fitting for this new video and created two layers on top of each other. This was so I could add dimensionality and fx to bring out the hand-processed film textures, as well as bring into sharper presence the ghostly, underlying images on the original film. I love hand-processed film. It seems to emphasise the direct chemical expression of light hitting celluloid and focus us on the materiality of that process. Thus the footage seemed especially relevant to the poem here, which is all about light.


The Retreat


Full credits

'The Retreat' is a third collaboration with another poet who also performs her own work. Made in collaboration with Lucy English in the UK, this piece forms part of her larger project, 'The Book of Hours'. Lucy's project involves many film and video makers internationally, such as Marc Neys, Helen Dewbery, Eduardo Yague, Jutta Pryor, Matt Mullins and many others. Music in my video here is by Adrian Carter with sung vocals by Anne Garner. The musical piece was originally titled 'Your Name', one of Anne's own vocal music tracks. Adi then remixed and edited the track. After this remix was completed, I found it on Soundcloud and contacted Adi. He incorporated Lucy's spoken voice into the mix, making some changes to the musical piece to better suit our new project. I then further edited the overall track to suit the video (Adi, Anne and I have collaborated musically in a way similar to this once before for the video, 'To Lou Andre-Salome'). The images are from Flickr, all on Creative Commons remix licences. The complete list of photographers is here. The one moving image shot in the video is from Pixabay. The piece is structured in two halves, representing a kind of 'Sliding Doors' concept in the poem: what would it be like if we'd chosen a different path for our lives? In the first section, I loosely animated the stills in time with the music. In the second I gave the images a treatment familiar to those who have watched Ken Burns' films, with added dissolves, and a moving image overlay, to emphasise daydreaming.


Peace-Prayer


Full Credits

'Peace-Prayer' is a fourth collaboration with US poet, Laura M Kaminski. The earlier pieces were 'Joining the Lotus Eaters', 'Lilies of the Field', and 'Security'. I asked Laura by email some time ago if she had any new poems she might like to see in video form. After some time, she sent over some poems. This one stood out to me, as I too long for peace. The images are from royalty-free footage site, Videoblocks. I selected images that seemed to express the scope of address of Laura's poem, while visually free-associating on the phrases. There was some careful work with the dissolves between images and an effect on the text, that appears in print on the screen, without voiceover. Music is by Benjamin Dauer and Specta Ciera (Devin Underwood in Boston). The track is called 'Shadows Emerging' and is licensed Creative Commons.

Since my last blog update towards the end of 2017, a fair bit has been happening with exhibition of my films and videos. Most recently I was in Melbourne for a retrospective screening of my work as a maker of shorts since 1984. The event was curated by Chris Luscri for Artist Film Workshop. Chris also interviewed me while I was in town. This appears in the first issue of Bill Mousoulis' new web project about Australian independent cinema, 'Pure Shit' (named after Bert Deling's notorious film of 1975). My interview can be found here. Long time friend and experimental film-maker, Dirk de Bruyn, also made a silent timelapse video of the whole event here.

In January, three videos screened at the International Video Poetry Festival in Athens, Greece. These were Anatomy, One Dream Opening Into Many and Poem for Rent. The latter has also been selected to screen at the Newlyn Film Festival in the UK in April. There have also been some recent web features of work, including at Moving Poems and Gnarled Oak.

Finally I'd like to make special mention of Frank Lovece, a friend and collaborator from decades past, who passed away recently. Marcus Bergner, also part of the sound-poetry group Arf Arf, compiled a selection of writings from various people that knew and appreciated Frank's eclectic life's work. Published by Melbourne's Experimenta journal, it is a collective tribute to an artist whose unique presence in the world is much missed.

End of Year 2017: Quiet Sounds, To Lou Andre-Salomé, Haiku for the Lost

Notes on the making of recent videos, and a wrap up of this year's creative projects and happenings...

Quiet Sounds



Full credits and poem

'Quiet Sounds' is my second video collaboration with the marvellous UK poet and performer, Lucy English. Both have been made as part of her great, multi-artist project, 'The Book of Hours'. The earlier video, 'The Last Days', started with images. This one started with the poem and sound. The soundscape is comprised entirely of Lucy's voice and small noises in the environment. I wanted the 'bed' of the soundscape to be quietly musical and constructed it from a collection of sounds recorded by various artists, and found on Creative Commons licences at Freesound. The central element is the metronomic sound of a clock ticking. I edited Lucy's voice in loose rhythm with the clock, elongating the pace of her reading and leaving spaces for the various other sounds to have their 'solo' moments: a pheasant and a wood pigeon, a sheep, a cow, an old fridge, air traffic. I carefully built up the soundtrack piece by piece until I had a complete first draft. Then I looked for images that might add further to the audiovisual experience of the poem. The poem describes a moment of solitude, a hush when a woman becomes aware of the little sounds in her environment. It is implied she is inside a domestic space at the time. In my net wanderings, I found a marvellous series of interior shots by Carol Blyberg (aka Smilla4 on Flickr), also available on a Creative Commons licence. I worked with the images using zooms and slow dissolves that changed in rhythm with Lucy's voice. For such an apparently simple piece, it was time-intensive to make, especially in the refining process that saw both sound and image go through many drafts. I gave a lot of attention to subtle details, in a meditative way. Maureen Doallas has since featured 'Quiet Sounds' on her wonderful blog, Writing Without Paper.


To Lou Andre-Salomé



Full credits
Poem in German
Poem in English

Late last year, the Poetry Film Festival Vienna called for entries to its international competition for 2017. The conditions of entry were: to make a film especially for the festival, based on a poem they nominated. This year's poem was 'To Lou Andre-Salomé' by Rainer Maria Rilke. The festival provided text versions of the poem in German and English, as well as a great voice recording in German by Christian Reiner. I started the process at my end by first doing some research on the relationship between Rainer and Lou, especially sourcing the book, 'Rilke and Andreas-Salomé' (translated by Snow and Winkler), a collection of their correspondence. Once I had a deeper feeling for the relationship the poem describes, I started on a soundtrack. Adrian Carter and I worked via email to adapt his pre-existing music piece, 'Night Runner' (with sung vocals by Anne Garner), to suit the structure of the poem. We also incorporated Christian Reiner's performance into the music mix, with Adrian doing the final edit and sound mix. I then spent some considerable time at the Prelinger Archives and located old home movie footage I felt might be evocative of the events, emotions and ideas of the poem. I edited this to the rhythm of the music. Central to the screen is a frame containing the main visual narrative. I adopted this device to evoke old photographs, also to compensate for the low resolution of the home movie footage. I ran a layer of images behind this at full screen size, but blurred, in the way that we now see personal phone footage blurred, so that the periphery becomes almost pure shape and colour. The voice recording is in German, but I do not speak German. I did my best with a combination of close, phonetic listening, and comparisons of the text-translation. The video also required subtitles back into English. Again, I did my best, and then sought feedback on my handling of the language via email from Marguerite de Mosa, a German-speaking artist, collaborator and friend. Marguerite helped with some back and forth advice. And then the video was completed. The poem is constructed in three parts and my video too has three 'acts', each different in mood. I hope the anachronistic mixing of periods is interesting to viewers: a poem written in 1911, images of real life love relationships from two later periods in the 20th century, with 21st century electronic music. It was a rewarding challenge to make this piece and I love that some poetry film festivals stage these participatory projects. I kept the video private all year and just released it recently, simultaneous with the Vienna festival screening, where it was a finalist in the competition.


Haiku for the Lost



Full Credits

'Haiku for the Lost' is from a poem by Ann Thompson in the USA. I've made two previous videos with Ann's poetry, 'Death Meditation' and 'Unavoidable Alchemy'. The images in this new video are of a special part of Currumbin Creek, within easy driving distance of where I live. They were shot by Nigel Wells (who I live with), on a cheap home movie camera. He takes it with him in his pocket when he regularly goes out that way into the hinterland for locally grown food from the farms. This is some footage he has already used in his own videos, which he kindly gave me permission to remix for this video. The music is from Alastair Brown, aka Northcape, in the UK, who has collaborated musically with both Nigel and I in the past. We first met as fellow musicians on the net in about 2007. I am delighted Alastair agreed to allow his music to be included in this video piece. The track is entitled 'Mackerel Sky'. My only addition to it was an edited version of Nigel's sound recordings of the water in various places along the creek on the day of shooting, with audio dissolves. I opted for a simple assembly of the music, sound, images and poem, giving their eloquence centre stage.

Since my last update, 'Anatomy' was screened at the Festival Silêncio in Portugal, a finalist in their international competition. Dave Bonta put together a selection of videos for the LiKE Festival in Slovakia, including 'And God...' in the program. 'The Last Days' and 'Poem for Rent' were screened as finalists at this year's Ó Bhéal international competition at IndieCork Film Festival in Ireland. 'Lilies of the Field' screened at Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival in the USA. 'The Last Days' was screened at the FilmPoem Festival in the UK. 'To Lou Andre-Salome' screened as a finalist in the international competition at the Poetry Film Festival Vienna. In December, 'One Dream Opening Into Many', 'Poem for Rent' and 'Anatomy' will screen at the Athens Video Poetry Festival in Greece. By the end of the year, videos will have travelled to twelve festivals and events during 2017. In addition, there has been the Ó Bhéal Touring Program from last year travelling to other festivals and venues in 2017, with 'Dictionary Illustrations', 'One Dream Opening Into Many' and 'Joining the Lotus Eaters' as part of the lineup.

Big thanks to Moving Poems, Gnarled Oak, Poetry Film Live, Writing Without Paper, Melbourne Independent Film-Makers, Verandah and Vox Populi for also featuring my videos on the web throughout the year.

I'll end with remembering where the year started: with a music release from Cwtch - Chasing Headlights. Cwtch (a Welsh word meaning hug, or safe place), is Paul Foster on music and production, with me on vocals. Over the past ten years we've made vocal-electronic music together over the net between Cardiff and Australia, without ever meeting. As some already know, we also share a birthday. The music of this EP was inspired by 'Highway Sky', a collection of poems by James Brush. I'll also make mention here of James as the editor of the online journal, 'Gnarled Oak', where my videos have been part of every issue since the first was published at the end of 2014. I've admired the eclectic voice of 'Gnarled Oak', one of the few literary journals I know that also publishes video poetry. 'Gnarled Oak' is coming to an end early next year; there are two more issues to go. On the one hand I'm sad to see such a wonderful project end. On the other I know it's because James will then have more time for his poetry and general creativity, which makes it all seem just fine. So instead I'll simply be grateful for this fine project. It's been a delight. Back issues are available here. The current issue is in progress here.

That's it for these updates until next year. Happy silly season to all!

Videos: Everything sleeps..., Orphanage, Don't Talk About It

Since my last update here a few months ago, I've put together two new videopoems and a music video. Some notes on the making of them...

Everything sleeps but the night



Full credits

Recently I've started going to a monthly poetry night, 'Alternator Poetry'. It's held at Currumbin on the Gold Coast, Australia, within driving distance of home. Through our mutual interest in this event, I've come to meet poet and musician, Matt Hetherington, and to collaborate. This is the second video I've put together incorporating his poetry. I'm writing about it first, because it was the closer collaboration between us. To get the ball rolling on this one, Matt sent me over a selection of audio via email. I was immediately drawn to the poem, 'Everything sleeps but the night', and Matt's vocal performance of it. It also came with an ace musical soundscape, composed by Melbourne producer, Miles du Heaume, and Zaziz (Matt himself in another guise). After more initial discussion by email, I set to work on an image track, first sourcing stock footage from the royalty-free site, Videoblocks. I went for night-time shots and interiors, layering different shots together like collage. A few of the image components were stills sourced on Creative Commons licenses from Flickr. One key shot was from mskrzyp via the Mazwai Creative Commons video site. I selected the images for associative resonances with the poem. I put them together in editing and added fx, aiming for an abstracted narrative, in sympathy with my perceptions of the poem's content. After I'd completed a first draft video, I sent it to Matt. He gave helpful feedback and I continued into further drafts of the video, refining the visual metaphors and the way they melted together into a flowing and complete piece. I sent the video back to Matt and, after a few more suggested changes, it was complete.


Orphanage



Full credits
Read the poem

Jumping back now to the first video I made with Matt Hetherington's poetry. I saw him perform for the first time at 'Alternator Poetry' and, afterwards, went searching on the net for more of his writing. Up came an arresting voice recording and poem, 'Orphanage', published at 'Qarrtsiluni'. At this time I'd not personally met or had contact with Matt, aside from seeing him perform the one time. As I've sometimes done before, I decided to put together a video with the poem 'on spec', ready to keep the project just between us if Matt didn't like it. I found footage from a 1954 marriage guidance film called 'Who's Right?', at The Prelinger Archives. I cut this together with Matt's voice and poem, along with a music track ('Massive Ambient Face') from Steve Kelly aka SK123 in the UK (by permission). The cutting together of music and voice came first in the process, followed by the cutting of the visual narrative. With the images, I selected only those parts of shots where the characters were not speaking. I refined this to moments when there were minimal gestures happening (eg. the turning of a head, standing up from a chair, spilling the contents of a glass, entering or exiting a room). I tried to construct an abstract narrative with these fragments, and paid a lot of attention too to the visual rhythms of these gestures, cutting visual movements, to movements in the sound, and to words and phrases in the poem. I chose to use a split screen, partly to maximise resolution on the low-res images, and partly because I felt it suited the 'he said/she said' narrative structure I was working with. Once I had satisfied myself with the editing, Dave Bonta (editor of Qarrtsiluni for the time it operated), was able to put me in email contact with Matt. I then sent Matt the video. He made some comments and I made a couple of minor changes. Then the piece was complete. During this communication we agreed to collaborate more closely on a new video, which became the one mentioned above, 'Everything sleeps but the night'.


Don't Talk About It



Credits

Steve Kelly, who I've already mentioned above for the music in 'Orphanage', has a number of musical identities on the net. One of them is Douglas Deep. For his latest album release under this moniker, 'Cytokinesis', Steve asked me via email to put together a music video for one of the tracks, basically giving me free rein to select as I pleased, and an open book on what to do with the images. I tried first of all with the title track of the album, but all my efforts led to a creative dead end there. It sometimes happens with videos. I have quite a number uncompleted. I look on them as practise for the better pieces. After that, I took a long break and tried again with this, the first track on the album, 'Don't Talk About It'. It's a great electronic dance track, one that I can happily hear over and over, as happens with video editing. I went to Videoblocks and sourced multiple versions of vintage and contemporary film/video 'countdown leaders'. I shuffled the shots around, slowing some down, speeding up others, to fit with the bars of the music. Then I started building up some image superimpositions. I played around for quite some time with this process, adding some fx to make the words and numbers that appeared in the shots more abstract. This relates to the theme of the spoken word fragments in the track, which are about listening, not talking. This is the video that finally emerged. I sent it to Steve for any suggestions. He liked it in its current form, and here it is. The whole 'Cytokinesis' album is available to hear and download at douglasdeep.bandcamp.com.

There have also been a number of videos at festivals and events over the past few months. 'Anatomy' screened at the Juteback Poetry Film Festival in the US, and at the MiX conference at Bath Spa University in the UK. 'Sometimes the Water' also screened at the Juteback festival. Both will be screened again at a Juteback encore screening on 7 October. 'Dictionary Illustrations', 'One Dream Opening Into Many' and 'Joining the Lotus Eaters' were screened again as part of the Ó Bhéal touring program at the Clare Island Film Festival in Ireland. On the net, my bio-filmography has been updated at the Melbourne Independent Filmmakers site. Candida Baker profiled me for Verandah magazine. Moving Poems featured 'Everything sleeps but the night'. Gnarled Oak featured 'In the Temple' and 'Death Meditation'. Writing Without Paper featured 'The Last Days'.

There's been exciting news about selections for forthcoming exhibitions too. I'll save that news for next time. Thanks to all involved in these projects!