POETRY AND TRUTH
Saturday 30 October 2004, at 9pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

ENID’S IDYLL
Larry Jordan, USA, 2004, 16mm, b/w, sound, 17 min
I have used 46 engraved Doré illustrations to “Idylls of the King” as settings for his extravagantly romantic saga. As Enid, the protagonist, is seen in a vast array of scenes from deep forests to castle keeps, her champion is sometimes with her, sometimes away fighting archetypal foes. She dies and, through the magic of Gustav Mahler’s resurrection symphony, lives again. (Larry Jordan)

I BEGAN TO WISH
Julie Murray, USA, 2003, 16mm, colour, silent, 5 min
The sea sucks the seed back into the ocean, the flowers fold like umbrellas, shoots recoil into hiding, in seeds that shrink. The plants accelerate their tremble and wobble and glass unbreaks all around them. Strawberries blanch and tomatoes grow pale. The father, leering, holds forth a flower and suddenly his smile fades to awful seriousness. In an odd concentrated ritual the father and son carefully tip over all the flower pots, laying the plants to rest and it is in this end, around the time he figures the flowers are talking to him, that the son wishes his father had killed him. (Julie Murray)

THINGS WE WANT TO SEE
Rebecca Meyers, USA, 2004, 16mm, colour, sound, 7 min
A visit to a place they had seen many times, but wouldn’t again. Just before we left, the northern lights, which she tells me she had always wanted to see (waking in the early hours and waiting), hinted in the sky. Months after she was gone, I heard this recording for the first time. (Rebecca Meyers)

DICHTUNG UND WAHRHEIT
Peter Kubelka, Austria, 2003, 35mm, colour, silent, 13 min
Poetry and Truth was originally presented, albeit in a different format, during one of the “What Is Film” lectures at the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna, in this case on the subject of ‘acting and being’. In addition to screening a behind the scenes reel filmed on the set of The Misfits, Kubelka showed 13-minutes of footage shot by unidentified cameramen for a number of TV commercials made by an Austrian production company. Given that his one-minute masterpiece, Schwechater (1958), began life as a commission for a beer commercial, it would appear that his imagination had once again been aroused by the phantom world of advertising. While assembling the footage for demonstration purposes, the filmmaker succumbed to the impulse to also make the images speak with their own strange and beautiful logic. It would be misleading to call Poetry and Truth a ‘found’ film. Its footage has been gathered, selected, and edited together at very specific junctures to produce an archival, pedagogical, and yet weirdly electrifying collection of ethnographic camera ‘views’. But instead of recording an unknown tribe’s way of life in the wilderness, this ethnography bears witness to certain of our own Western rituals – namely “make believe,” “you should own,” and “go and buy.” Following his ‘metric’ and ‘metaphoric’ film phases, the latter exemplified by Unsere Afrikareise (1966), Kubelka now submits a new type of cinema for our consideration: the ‘metaphysical’ film. Metaphysical in the sense that, for the first time in his career, Kubelka allows the medium’s materiality (i.e., what film physically consists of) to recede, and instead foregrounds cinema’s magical capacity to locate and record anthropological rules, rituals, and myths in the unlikeliest of places. Poetry and Truth features twelve such ‘stories’; twelve sequences, each composed of one shot that is repeated in three, or five, or a dozen variations. Each take captures a movement from a stasis to motion and back again. For Kubelka, the repetition of physical movement – as in dance, as in film, as in life – is the fundamental law of the universe, from which even civilisation’s most complex systems derive. The act of conveying this principle via the ‘truth’ (the camera originals) of commercials is certainly a form of ‘poetry’ – but that’s not the source of the film’s title. At some point in each of these takes, the divine light of illusion falls upon people, dogs, buckets, and pasta. These simple truths’ are abruptly transformed into actors of ‘poetry’, and then, just as suddenly, fall back into their original non-poetic selves. As archaeologist and archivist, Kubelka is dutifully passing these telling artefacts on to the researchers of future generations. It’s easy to see why Kubelka doesn’t want Poetry and Truth to be thought of as a critique of advertising. He’s after something more essential and isn’t interested in using his work to express trivial opinions about some aspect of modern life. He’d rather champion the joy of rhythm, the joy of life, and affirm the cyclical nature of human endeavour – even if it means affirming and preserving the remnants of a trivial economy in the process. (Alexander Horwath, Film Comment)

( )
Morgan Fisher, USA, 2003, 16mm, colour, silent, 21 min
The origin of ( ) was my fascination with inserts. Inserts are a crucial kind of shot in the syntax of narrative films. Inserts show newspaper headlines, letters, and similar sorts of significant details that have to be included for the sake of clarity in telling the story. I have long been struck by a quality of inserts that can be called the alien, and as well the alienated. Narrative films depend on inserts (it’s a very rare film that has none), but at the same time they are utterly marginal. Inserts are far from the traffic in faces and bodies that are the heart of narrative films. Inserts have the power of the indispensable, but in the register of bathos. Inserts are above all instrumental. They have a job to do, and they do it; and they do little, if anything, else. Sometimes inserts are remarkably beautiful, but this beauty is usually hard to see because the only thing that registers is the news, the expository information, that the insert conveys. That’s the unhappy ideal of the insert: you see only what it does, and not what it is. This of course is no more than the ideal of all the instruments of narrative filmmaking and the rules that govern their use. A rule, or a method, underlies ( ), and I have obeyed it, even if the rule and my obedience to it are not visible. I needed the rule to make the film; it is not necessary for you to know what it is. A rule has the power of prediction, but only if you see it. To the extent that the rule remains invisible, the unfolding of the film is, for better or worse, difficult to foresee. The important thing is what the rule does. No two shots from the same film appear in succession. Every cut is a cut to another film. There is interweaving, but it is not the interweaving of dramatic construction, where intention and counter-intention are composed in relation to each other to produce friction that culminates in a climax. Instead it is an interweaving according to a rule that assigns the shots as I found them to their places in an order. In keeping with my wish to locate ( ) as far as possible from the usual conventions of cutting, whether those of montage or those of story films, the rule that puts the shots in the order has nothing to do with what is happening in them. I wanted to free the inserts from their stories, I wanted them to have as much autonomy as they could. I thought that discontinuity, cutting from one film to another, was the best way to do this. It is narrative that creates the need for an insert, assigns an insert to its place and keeps it there. The less the sense of narrative, the greater the freedom each insert would have. But of course any succession of shots, no matter how disparate, brings into play the principles of montage. That cannot be helped. Where there is juxtaposition we assume specific intention and so look for meaning. Even if there is no specific intention, and here there is none, we still look for meaning, some way of understanding the juxtapositions. At each cut I intended only discontinuity, cutting from one film to another, but beyond that nothing more. Indeed, beyond that simple device I could not intend any specific meaning, because whatever happens at each cut is the consequence of whatever two shots the rule put together, and the rule does not know what is in the shots. So what happens specifically at each cut is a matter of chance. (Morgan Fisher)

T:O:U:C:H:O:F:E:V:I:L
Ichiro Sueoka, Japan, 2003, video, colour, sound, 5 min
This is part of the “Requiem for Avant-Garde Film” series. (An example of minimal film for re-reading of Structural Films.) The concept of this work was combined with Paul Sharits’ film, T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1968) and the cliché of the Hollywood cinema, especially, crime suspense thrillers. And the title was extracted from Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1957). We could often see the depiction of a close-up hand in cinema, and we may find out that hand was a criminal’s hand. And a flicker was used to signify a crime. That is to say, in a cinema, a hand and flicker are the codes that make the representation of ‘evil’. (Ichiro Sueoka)

LUKE
Bruce Conner, USA, 2004, video, colour, sound, 22 min
Luke is a poetic film document created entirely by Bruce Conner in 1967 during one day of the production of Cool Hand Luke on location near Stockton, California on a country road. The main subject of the film is the Cool Hand Luke production apparatus and the people working behind the camera. The scene being photographed for their movie is a sequence with about 15 shirtless convicts working at the side of a hot black tar road with shovels. Sand is tossed on the road until it is covered. Then they move farther down the road. Shotgun carrying guards oversee their work at all times. The set itself has a representation of military and police officers as well as a highway motorcycle policeman. The actors (Paul Newman, Dennis Hopper, Harry Dean Stanton, George Kennedy etc.) are seen in front and behind the camera that is shooting the movie. The event becomes a stop and go parade since the entire crew and equipment must also be moved down the road to continue filming the continuity of dialogue and action. The final shot is a view of the actors moving their shovels as if they are tossing the sand on the road but the shovels are empty. The original running time for the regular 8mm film would be about 2.5 minutes. The final digital edit of the film to tape transfer in 2004 (with original music by Patrick Gleeson) is longer because each picture frame last one third of a second: there are 3 images per second. It has the character of both a motion picture and a series of still photos. The filming with the hand-held camera created immediate edits in the camera with regular 8mm speed (18 frames per second) as well as one frame at a time. (Bruce Conner)

Back to top