Saltwater (2011) from Glenn-emlyn Richards on Vimeo.
A collaboration with poet Eleanor Rees. Reading by Lindsay Rodden.
You will watch this, fascinated. And you will return to the film poem and watch again, and it will seem new, as if you had not seen all of it before. Each time you do this, it will be as if you had not seen it before. Did I watch this? Yes, of course. And yet it is provoking new insights, more marvel. How does a film do that?
Between the reader, the poet, and the filmmaker artist, magic occurs. She is like Botticelli's Venus, is that why we are so transfixed? But she is an India ink figure, and not a fine Renaissance painting. The film work, the editing, brings her alive. How does her hair flow with the waves of the saltwater sea? Is it the call of the ocean itself?
Glenn-emlyn Richards had created a one of the finest film poems. I treated a group to a series of video/film poems, only a few, because they tired very quickly - poetry is demanding enough on the page, let alone strung at you in a video where you can't slow down, re-read, consider before moving on - but someone said, the one with the woman, the drawing, the ocean, that one was my favourite. In unison, they all agreed.
The animated images of the video travel like an imaginary documentary with images of the poem, but not with a photorealism. Rather we are in a world of the imagination of our world in both the poem and the film. Art on art. The way we cohere and collect our experiences in the artifice of our art presented without guile, simply.
The simplicity unravels us. We fall in love with the film poem. That one we want to keep, starred, bookmarked. But it passes away, as all things must.
And so I collect it here for you, so you may come back and journey again on the sea of Saltwater.
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Glenn-emylin Richards, is a graphic designer, English television director, independent film-maker and musician. His films have been shown at many poetry film festivals. He currently lives in Normandy, France: wodum.co.uk/.
Eleanor Rees is an award-winning British poet and teacher of creative writing living in Liverpool. Lindsay Rodden is an Irish actress, playwright and author.
