My new video: https://vimeo.com/51858106
While making this piece thought about many things. Is there a point to making a cinematic poem? How do people engage with this form? The accidental. Finding the landscape through video-making. The electronic huddle of pixels shaped by light through bulbous eye-like, hill-like lenses making shapes from your own sense making.
Masculine and feminine elements in art emerging subconsciously - the feminine pushing forward into an abstract masculine. Walking as a metaphor a la Richard Long and Gary Snyder. The joining of disparate moments that is editing.
Thought too about Hitchcock's 'Vertigo' with it's dizzying looping movements around a fixed space telling of (male) nostalgia and desire. How this is echoed in the film with Anna walking around that fixed space - somehow a hint that we can stay fixed in space like that without a way out, unless, unless.
And of course Tarkovsky ( damn still haven't read the Geoff Dyer book) with reference to 'Stalker' (with my favourite scene from his films, or rather the one that has haunted me more than any other and fed me through the years) and 'Mirror' ( my personal favourite of his films).
Enjoyed too the subtle energies of the continuous shot (which is edited in the film) where Anna's face and hair and fingers visually touch the water and how this came about in calm and spontaneous ways using focus and exposure and coming close with the camera to give on reflection a sense of immersion - again a statement about art itself to my mind. And the last shot deliberately echoing Caspar David Friedrich, although on a less monumental scale.
Here is the poem too that happens in the middle of the film - spoken with a male voice ( my own) but overlaid with the images of a woman's hands - it is a text about forgetting and the burying deep essential parts of ourselves and how this leads to a kind of warfare. It's central metaphor began as a small wood, a forest so this is why I thought I would try juxtaposing it with the rest of the film:
It is only I
Restless leaves stroke away all clues,
They too it seems
Have something to hide.
I wonder if it is only I
Who perceives a single crime and
Only I who cannot see those who turn away.
Fearing my task is good impossible,
I take notes all of the time, but
These are removed at twilight - when the forest is noisier than any city.
Less & less:
The fallen white berries like full-stops, the tall building
In front of the old school-house,
yesterday's dream of immediate water.
My mind shrugs
And moves to a different bough, scored
With dark rain and heiroglyphs.
There are numerous crimes,
Fragments of bones and weapons
Half-buried.
I wait, and barely note I have stopped wanting not to,
This barbaric radiance
Is a mother to me now.
Instead, I ponder if their investigations led them
Elsewhere, or if they got scared
Of what I can only guess.
by Rick Goldsmith
Beautiful and charged, both visually and through words/audio.
ReplyDeleteI like the small details where you link images and the way the audio softens and then comes back in parts. It is interesting moving the camera away from the landscape and into a neutral space with the hands. I feel like that gives a sense of space in the film, internal to external reflecting how we might navigate the landscape both physically and in imagination. It creates a dialogue with the self. Almost a range of dialogues so when you are out in the space it is reactive to the visual qualities before your eyes and scents of the earth, sounds that surround you and then when you are in a more neutral space there is a reflection about the stories that unfold, there are more internal dialogues emerging.