FRIDAY FILM AND VIDEO POEM: 'Ground' by Ginnetta Correli

direct link: Ground

Written & Narrated: Alastair Cook
Directed & Edited: Ginnetta Correli
Soundtrack: Pierrepoint’s Epitaph by Dirk Drieson

Ground has an impenetrable quality. The film imagery, poem and reading approach each other without quite meeting. In that circle of visual and verbal imagery and the emotion of the voice of the reader, we witness a flame dancing without knowing who lit it, who blows on it, or why it goes out, if it does.

Something profound happens. But what? Is the poem notes on death and what resurrects us through life? Or the dream of a life?

At the end, the man... but you must watch to see this.

I am reminded of Médem's Lucía y el sexo, where the island rests on a cacophony of unmappable caves that constitute its base and that are not attached to the seabed, but float, and where one of the characters disappears forever into.

As in dream, the images in Ground are vivid, strong, and reveal something important if elusive. The images of the poem and the film are are strewn in a landscape of inner symbolism. A motorcycle. An empty road. The shadow of a figure, perhaps the filmmaker filming the scene. A small white snake lying in the road. A man holding onto the lip of rock in a cave hole. A gloved hand picking up the poisonous snake and placing it carefully on the shoulder of the road. An abandoned hut where the outside seems inside, empty save for the crumpled paper of the poet, a bed of rocks and light.

This is a surreal filmpoem; it has a European art film feel to it. Like when watching an Almodóvar, forget logic, for a rational approach to understanding won't reveal anything. As you seek to embrace the meaning of the film, you find mindfulness here like a Zen koan.

You can't quite put it together. Rather, feel the deep angst the film produces. That's where the film is unfolding in your consciousness as a message, a predicament, a riddler of the paradoxes of life.

Or the immanence of death.

Ground is hauntingly beautiful, in a disturbing way. In the embracing mindfulness, a poetry of poison, death, loss, and beauty, all of which is natural, found in the natural world, amidst a surreality. We feel cross-currents, disambiguations, and yet the over-arching journey metaphor of Cook's minimalist poetry, and the bond of love he speaks of, yes, living is like this. Simply a superb film.

Do watch. The two minutes and 35 seconds will become a dream you are having.

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Ginnetta Correli's blog: beatie's journal.

The poem is composed of haiku written by Alastair; his blog, written in my hand is well worth exploring too.

                              

PL: P(ink) L(ady)

direct link: PL: P(ink) L(ady)

PL: P(ink) L(ady)

once, the sakura tree
blossoming cloud 
of pink

blood,
like split cherries

a pulp of wounds

I, fleshy stone fruit
soft under his fists

brazen, the road
where I walk

brazen, my ripe cherry
nectar

-



A creative treatment on the theme of violence against women. The ending is meant to be positive - she's no longer hiding, is defiantly living from her source of nectar.

Shot with an iPhone4, and edited in FCE. The text had a lot of treatment, and took as long to create as the film itself. Normally I don't like text in videopoems, unless the text is a pictorial element in the composition.

The track, Chinese Sunrise, by bjarneo on SoundCloud: http://soundcloud.com/bjarneo/bjarne-o-chinese-sunrise

                              

FRIDAY FILM AND VIDEO POEM: 'immersion /2' by Sheila Packa and Kathy McTavish

direct link: immersion /2

This week an immersive video experience for you. A collaborative music video poem by Sheila Packa and Kathy McTavish. The poem, Immersion, is Sheila's, and the voiceover is Sheila's reading; the cello is played by Kathy. While both Sheila and Kathy chose the images for the video, Kathy composed it.

The film and the cello work marvelously together. Kathy, to quote from her website, is "a composer/free-style cellist. she uses chance and generative/organic forms to create everything from sparse, minimalist spaces to dense, orchestral landscapes." immersion /2 manages to be both sparse and minimalist, while maintaining a density of a natural orchestral landscape in the background. My sense of the music is similar to the visual images, the way they are composed, layered with a sparse simplicity on the surface and yet we find representations of the elements densely underlaid - wind, water, light, bird, earth, fields in bloom.

Sheila's reading is liquid and silky and flows with the stark and sonorous sounds of the cello and the shifting lights and colours of the video itself. Nature and natural processes are everywhere in her writing and in her reading. We enter a Tao of living through water that is water. With our inner ears, we can hear the flowing tides and the birds in a profoundly open landscape. Sheila and Kathy live on Lake Superior, a lake I found deeply mystical when I travelled around it some years ago. Her poem is from her collection, Undertow. I quote from her poetry blog:

"(immersion)

water resists
breaks without breaking
flows along invisible scores
courses between continuous
ends, begins

doesn't resist
touches, touches, turns
over the same skin...."

While I could rhapsodize on this music video poem all day, let me close with mention of Kathy's video technique, which is likely an original interpretation of the Bokeh style.

Kathy has explored Bokeh photography techniques, and puts her knowledge of this Japanese art form to amazing results in her videos. She uses stop motion, and to my eye, layers photograph tracks so that they emerge and recede with the flow of the music. She likely has used a cut-out shape over the camera lense to make that bird/wave shape which permutates and shifts in changing light patterns throughout the video and is perfect for Sheila's poem; but I couldn't guess how she composed the weave of slow motion of brilliant colours towards the end. Unlike traditional Bokeh, there is no foreground subject. Rather we are immersed in an ever-shifting slow-moving background. It is as if she composes abstract expressionist artwork before our eyes, painting with light and colour. As Sheila writes in her blog:

The still motion images are created by the use of DSLR camera, a Canon EO5. Kathy has been exploring Bokeh effects. It is an artistic technique initially used by some Japanese photographers who enjoyed the aesthetics of blur. She comes to this work by way of music; in fact the images are created in the same way that she creates music in her studio. Her echo pedal and harmonics perhaps are a musical expression of blur. She likes the 'infinite between.' She began using images in her search for techniques of writing scores. The images evoke meaning; to her, they create a synesthesia and seem to have their own sounds.

Sheila Packa and Kathy McTavish are two brilliant, creative women making, in my estimation, collaborative masterpieces.
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I have a Videopoetry group at Vimeo - if you are a videopoet, and are on Vimeo, please join. Love to see your work there. Also I feed all videos posted through to Facebook, and will to Google+  as soon as that feature is added: http://vimeo.com/groups/videopoetry.