Comment Thread on Tangled Garden

direct link: Tangled Garden

Tangled Garden is a triptych of nature poems (by me):

-A Floral Opera (2011)
-In the Hands of the Garden Gods (1979)
-Slipstream, the Tangled Garden (2006)

(with impromptu speaking between the poems, which each end with ~~~ in the subtitle track.)

Beautiful singing by the musician, Catherine Corelli from her album, Seraphic Tears (2010) (with her permission).

Note: This video is subtitled. Click on the CC on the play bar to activate or de-activate the subtitles. YouTube will also automatically translate the subtitles into 25 languages if English is not your main language and you would like to get the gist of the poetry.

Swoon (who is a brilliant filmmaker who makes video/filmpoems of other people's poetry [only once his own writing that I know of]. Click on the link to explore his ever-expanding repertoire.)

Brenda,
This is ambitious. Brave. I find it too long to digest is one take, but in smaller doses (altough maybe you didn't intent it to be taken in like that) I find it by times mesmerising. The colours and the shifting movements and all those layers do work. They take the piece to another level. I do see what 'body of work' (and hours) must have gone in this. That itself is something to bow for. That said, personally I find the piece as a whole leaning too much on the same techniques. That works for me, as said earlier, in smaller portions. But please don't notice these remarks, because in doing it like this you made a highly original piece, that, when drawn into it can take someone to another place intirely. But when not drawn into it, it feels like staring into some psychedelic lightfeature without the trip... In the end, I guess, it's about opening oneself up to it. That works, for me, only sometimes. But when it works...boy, it is a magnificent journey.
Best, M.

A torrent was unleashed in my response:

I thought poets and painters would have less trouble with this video than filmmakers. The single, long cut over 22 minutes would be anathema to a filmmaker.

Yet, and you well know I can create videos with many different cuts and visual action, why did I choose to produce a videopoem of one long cut?

This is a central question.

In my own answer, I find a rebellion against the fast, clippy, zappy commercial, though I do recognize that commercials are created by great filmmakers all over the world. But they are promoting products and need to be 'busy' to grab the viewers attention.

I have no such needs. I can make something that satisfies my deep inner needs. If you, or anyone else, finds it long and dull, that's not my problem. The video is exactly the way I want it to be. I am content.

As a long time meditator, focusing on one thing for great lengths of time is not an issue for me. A single clip slowed to 22 minutes is reaching into the meditative mind, the deep undercurrent of our consciousness.

You want to be busy, busy and run, run, and can't. You can turn the video off, or watch in palatable bites. But it won't speed up or become visually active. Tangled Garden is the opposite of a pinball machine. It is intentionally diametrically opposed to the bustling, busy life.

One can either take the sustained meditation, or they can't. I have added a few extras, the figure that appears and disappears in the second and third poems, the unmasking at the end. So there is movement, some pinball motion.

The main focus, and where there is movement is the vegetation of the background. This is the star of the film.

The earth.

All three poems are about the earth. Yes, I am a woman, as a woman I approach out of my own subjectivity. The earth is imaged as a strange mother. The earth gives us life and recycles us back into new life when we die. Nature is one huge mass of copulating organisms and plants, full of a sexual, creative energy I call the "green fire."

My muse the earth, the great earth mother, is imaged as a vegetative women, that figure is almost horrific, death become life, mulch of leaves and grasses and floral colours rising from the forest floor. A slow dance. Have you seen the Alexander McQueen dresses made of twigs, brome, leaves, flowers? I saw them after I had made this film and was delighted, amazed. I'll dig them up and show you on Facebook.

While McQueen's vision of an earth goddess is more like a Shakespearean sonnet, mine is more chthonic.

While it was entirely unconscious, with the paper mache mask I had made and the dance in High Park with my daughter nearby offering protection to the space I was moving and unlayering in a psychic sense to, and the editing, a process of pure magic, editing is always this, I was shocked to realize that the figure in Tangled Garden is the same figure that emerged in a dream (which the second poem is about) that I had 30 years ago!

These ruminations and thoughts and explorations of Nature that are expressed through the three long surreal poems in Tangled Garden have been with my all my life.

I lived in an African jungle until I was nearly 7, in Zambia in what was then the largest game park in Africa, beside the Zambesi River, 200 miles from the nearest town. We had a compound of mud huts.

So the jungle is very deep in me, and the video, despite being made in Canada in a city, contains the richness of the tangled gardens of my whole life.

It is a strange, surreal world that seems to be evoking intensities in people. Some seem to really love it and it has been called a 'magnum opus' - and it is, for me it is. And others, like you, have difficulty with it.

Yet the reasons you give, dear Swoon, and I do appreciate your struggling with this long art film, are ones I knew would be problemmatic to some while I was working on it, and yet, the meditative mind won out.

When you meditate long enough, the tangle of thoughts eventually stills and then you can hear the singing of the garden of the earth.

Thanks for your long and detailed comment - I think my work must strike a special key because when you respond it's with a mixture of yes and no, a complexity of diagonals and opposites that I appreciate.

Look at what I've written in response! You're evoking a response that is certainly of more depth than normal.

You are my teacher, and I continue to learn through our discussions.


Swoon

Brenda, Thanks for this explanation. And yes, as said before, it's good you did this exactly the way you felt it needed to be done. That is what makes it great (even if some, like me, find it hard to take in) I think that's what good art must be...a personal statement regardless of what 'others' might think about it.

So thanks. Thanks for sharing this. This work, these thoughts and this personal addendum.

Just keep exploring and doing exactly what and how you want to...

Best M.


This comment thread occurred February 8 - 10th, 2012, at Vimeo. Swoon's comments posted with his permission.

These are the Alexander McQueen dresses I was referring to in this comment thread.... aren't they beautiful. The flowers and foliage are real, and were apparently quite something to see since they were wilting, drying out, in the process of decay, and hence quite a fashion statement on the ephemerality of beauty...