By way of beginning his brief survey of Canadian experimental film, David Clanfield suggests that: "If bibliographic categories like fiction and non-fiction can be used for drama and documentary film, then perhaps poetry is the literary correlate of experimental film" (121). It could be argued that certain forms of experimental cinema approximate certain styles of poetry, displaying a number of corresponding traits which may include the oblique use of language (filmic or literary), intense personal expressiveness, or rigorous formal austerity, for example. But the most salient feature shared by these two arts is, perhaps, their consistent foregrounding, investigation, and expansion of the form and language of their respective media. Both are inherently more free of the conventionalized imperatives to either clearly report (as in documentary film and non-fiction writing) or engagingly tell a story (as in narrative film and literary fiction). Some experimental films and poems may document real events, or tell an entertaining tale, but this "content" is not usually presented as the primary raison d’etre of the work, and an adequate understanding of this content will not suffice for the audience or reader to fully understand the purpose or meaning of the work as a whole.
Given the kinship between these two art forms, it is not surprising that they have been coupled with enough frequency to elicit the creation of a critical sub-category of experimental cinema called the poetry-film (Wees 107-110). William C. Wees stipulates that in order to be deemed a poetry-film (rather than an ordinary film which happens to have a poem in it), the relationship between the film's images and the words of the poem must be more than merely illustrative or descriptive (108-110). The ideal relationship would be synergistic, in which the finished film's meaning becomes, greater than (or at least different from) the sum of the images and the poetry in isolation:
In effect, it [the poetry-film] does two seemingly contrary things at once. It expands upon the specific denotations of words and the limited iconic references of images to produce a much broader range of connotations, associations, metaphors. At the same time, it puts limits on the potentially limitless possibilities of meaning in words and images, and directs our responses toward some concretely communicable experience. (Wees 109)
Rick Hancox's 1983 film LANDFALL' is a poetry-film in this tradition, as identified by Wees (110). LANDFALL uses "I Thought There Were Limits,"2 by Quebec poet D.G. Jones, to accompany footage Hancox had shot in 1974 at a beach on Prince Edward Island. The relationship between the poem as it is read in voiceover and the images it accompanies is already a complex one, as- I shall discuss below; but since Hancox also introduces fragments of the poem's text as an additional visual element, this relationship becomes extremely multi-layered and thus warrants some extended examination.
Since the poem was selected after the original footage of LANDFALL had been shot and the first part of the film had been edited (Wees 110), it would be ridiculous to accuse the images of being simply "illustrative" of the poem, or, conversely, to suggest that the poem is merely "descriptive" of the images, since the mental images evoked by the poem do not figure in Hancox's visuals. Nonetheless, there are several points of correspondence where the images seem to reflect the content, action, or tone of the poem as it unfolds, largely due to Hancox's strategic editing. For example, as the word "limitless" is spoken on the sound-track, the dynamic action of Hancox's camera is momentarily frozen to a still image of the blue sky, which serves not as an exact illustration, but as a rather apt metaphor for the concept "limitless." A moment later, as the man reading the poem says, "Relax," the movement through the frame of this image of the sky is allowed to resume, as though it had been held still while awaiting the command which would allow it to 'relax' back into motion.
Like these correspondences between the oral presentation of the poem and the image's response, the visually presented text also seems to reflect the poem's thematic impulses. For example, after the poem has been read in its entirety on the sound-track, Hancox cuts to a black screen, out of which the written line, "ex nihito fecit" gradually emerges, first as a white blur and then pulled into sharp focus. "Created" from the "nothingness" of the black frame, the graphic properties of this text and the way it is introduced in relation to the image (blackness, nothingness) behind it, reflects its own denotative meaning—its own linguistic content ("made from nothing")—in a symbolically illustrative way.
The graphic properties, appearance, disappearance and movement of the written text through the frame function in a similar fashion to the example cited above, oftentimes illustrating the content or thematic concerns of the poem itself. The dynamic spinning, floating or falling movement of words over the swirling images of the beach reinforces the poem's thematic emphasis, evident in phrases such as "Newtonian Laws," "falling away, "emptiness," "never hit the ground," "no sure foundation," "drifts, or simply dissolves," "limitless," "float," et cetera. But while this movement of the text supports the imagery of the poem, it also reflects and supports the movement in Hancox's shots. For example, LANDFALL opens with several circular swish pans which initially move clockwise, but then abruptly stop and spin back counter-clockwise. Over these images (when they are repeated at the end of the film), the text "I thought there were limits" appears upside down in the frame and begins spinning clockwise until it is right side up, continues to rotate past horizontal, then spins counter-clockwise back through the upside down position, and all the way around until it is again righted, before it fades off screen.
While any type of gravity-defying movement would support the denotative content of the poem's language, this specific circular movement with its change in direction is used to visually echo the spinning images of the beach scene. Hancox explains:
Well, the image was spinning around and perhaps I thought the words should too. But it also has to do with the meaning of the poem...: I thought there were limits, but in fact there were not only no limits to the emotions Doug Jones was feeling when he wrote the poem, but there are also no limits to the way that language can be used and represented in a film. Why not have it upside down? In fact, when you're talking about gravity in the same poem, it becomes an open invitation to play around with the vertical orientation of the words. It's reminiscent of concrete poetry. (Hancox in Wilkie 16)
It is Hancox's ability, not only to use language (to represent something else concretely), but more unusually, to represent language itself as a concrete element in the film which complicates discussion of LANDFALL as an ordinary poetry-film, and which raises fundamental questions about the cinema and representational practices in general. This representation of language in LANDFALL is certainly manifested in the dynamic visual properties of the written fragments of the poem, as discussed above. But on another level, language is more radically represented in the reflexive and "self-reflective" (as I shall call them) aspects of the film. The reflexive (or self-referential) elements I shall discuss are those which reveal or gesturally comment on the intrinsic properties of the cinematic medium, including its established conventions of representation. I shall use the term "self-reflective" (or simply "reflective') on the other hand, to designate those elements of the film which reflect or comment upon the specifics of this particular film's structure or its process of unfolding before the viewer.
As is the case with many experimental films, LANDFALL is continually invoking and then thwarting the viewers' expectations, insofar as they have been constructed in dominant (narrative or documentary) cinema's codes of spectatorship. The film opens with a symmetrically arranged title, presumably providing information about the images we will see:
Kinlock
Prince Edward Island
1974
This sort of title, specifying place and time period, is frequently used with establishing shots in documentary and narrative fiction films alike, to locate the viewer in a position of coherence and visual mastery in relation to the spectacle as it unfolds. Such titles usually function to orient the spectator initially, or to provide a sense of continuity when settings change. But the images which follow this title in LANDFALL are disorienting and discontinuous, thus thwarting our expectations. Hancox pans by any visually striking elements of the scene so quickly that we see only a blur. We never really see a coherent long shot of anything for long enough to understand its shape, or gain a sense of the spatial relations between the objects which flit across, around, up, down (sometimes upside down) and out of the frame. While this disorienting movement is used to reflect the dynamic, poetic imagery of "I Thought There Were Limits" and its theme of a loss of solid foundation and the certain perspective provided by Newtonian Laws, it also encourages the viewer to compare this experience with the naturalized coherence of dominant cinema's language. In this way, Hancox represents the language of cinema as a system of ordering (or refusing to order) images in accordance with codes of visual plenitude and logical coherence.
Similarly, the appearance of a human shadow on
the ground,
and sections of a human form (glimpsed briefly as the camera
moves around) hold out the promise of a "character" or a "human subject" (of a documentary) with whom the spectator will be encouraged to identify. But this "character" is not developed or depicted with sufficient visual plenitude to allow this type of identification, and once again, the gap between the viewers' expectations and the spectacle they are ultimately offered points up the arbitrary nature of conventional cinematic language and. how such conventions of representation can be effectively transgressed. Because this human figure/shadow is deductively identifiable as the filmmaker (we see the shadow's arm outstretched, holding the camera), it also functions to reflexively represent Hancox's authorial presence, visually inscribing his role as creator—a role which is conventionally effaced in narrative cinema. This authorial presence and Hancox's subject position as owner of the film's language are underlined through the use of the first poetic text we see—"i"—and the first poetic voice-over we hear: "I thought there were limits..."3
This lower-case, wavering "i" appears, drifts slightly, disappears, and then reappears over the fourth still image of the film. Hancox whirls the camera around in circular pans capturing the terrain, periodically veering off toward the sky or toward the ground, and occasionally interrupting this constant movement with freeze frames. The first of these momentarily frozen images is a blurred shot of the ground. The second freezes on the image of Hancox's shadow stretched out behind him (he is partially visible at the upper right corner of the frame). The motion resumes until the pan comes back around to the shadow again, this time stretched along the ground toward a fence in the frame. After another period of motion, Hancox freezes the frame on a very similar shot of the shadow, seen from a somewhat lower angle, and the "i" appears, punctuated by a brief strain of music. The use of stills demonstrates the illusory nature of a single, continuous thread of time in constant forward motion, and exposes the process behind the construction of this illusion. These freeze frames, and the seven or eight others which follow later in the film, function to break the beautiful, hypnotic flow of Hancox's camera work and force a moment in contemplation: of the text or spoken poetry, which are often coordinated with these suspensions of motion; of the frozen images themselves, and their relationship to the poetry elements; and, most reflexively, of the nature of the cinematic image itself.
The freeze frames function to call attention to both the real stillness of the photographic image, which is the constituent element of cinema, and the illusory nature of the "motion" created by the rapid succession these images. By holding a stilled image through time, Hancox is, in appearance at least, forcing a photograph to acquire the temporal element of duration which it normally lacks, a duration which is unique to the cinema as a plastic visual art. Of course, in reality, this "stillness" is even more illusory than the motion it has interrupted, as a freeze frame is not a single still photograph, but equally the product of a rapid succession of images (the same image repeated, in this case). During these interruptions, then, Hancox's dynamic visuals momentarily acknowledge the still, photographic constituents which create the illusion of motion, while these freeze frames recall the real movement of these multiple. frames through the projector, which creates the illusion of stillness.
The use of titles and printed poetic text also functions reflexively to comment
on the photographic basis of cinematic representation. William C. Wees notes
that, "The poetry-film ...offers a particularly apt form for the exploration
of words as images, not just words with images" (112). The mimetic plenitude
of cinematic images (life-like colour, sound,4 movement, et cetera) makes it
easy for viewers to suspend disbelief and relate to images as objects rather
than representations. Hancox has described his reasons for using overlaid poetry
in Waterworx (1982) as follows:
Something was needed to block penetration into the image something flat across the screen, to draw attention instead to a kind of transparent partition, made apparent through the use of superimposed text, preferably contrary in style to the background image (99-100).
The appearance and disappearance of words and phrases—and the implied intervention of a transpositional consciousness capable of creating representations (linguistic or photographic)—calls attention to the constructed nature of the visual material on the screen. As Bruce Elder points out, "photographic images are indexical signs-that is, signifiers which are causally related to that which they signify .... Because a photograph's existence is connected to that which it signifies, a photograph can only come into being in the presence of its referent" (248). This is not the case with written language, which is only arbitrarily related to what it signifies. The printed words are presented as a part of the image—as representations without any likeness to a real world referent—and thus problematize the mimetic identity of LANDFALL's cinematic images with their source objects: the real water, sky, trees, and sand that these images represent. While the movement of the text (as described earlier in this paper) may suggest a dynamic integration with the moving beach images, the text nevertheless exists on a plane surface over the beach footage, and reflexively emphasizes the plane surface of projection onto a screen, and the inherent two dimensional flatness of the cinematic image.
Hancox also experiments with apparent depth cues in the movement of the text: on the eighth freeze frame, the word "were" enters in large type at frame left, and diminishes in size as it moves across and offscreen at frame right, cuing the spectator to conclude it has receded into the distance, into the image's depth. But because of the high degree of acknowledged artificiality of the poetic fragments (they do not look like any naturalized object; we know they are constructed images without any photographic likeness to the real world; i.e. they are linguistic representations written with light) these depth cues do not create an integrated illusion of three-dimensional space, but instead shatter that illusion of deep space created by Hancox's hand-held camera movements and the strong sense of offscreen space which would normally accompany such movement. At a later point in the film, the partial phrase "I thought there were limits" fills the screen edge to edge, similarly calling attention to the fact that while the real PEI beach existed in depth and was continuous beyond the edge of Hancox's view-finder, the filmed representation of it is spatially limited to its framed field as it is projected onto the movie screen. In this way, Hancox establishes the illusory nature of cinematic depth cues and indications of offscreen space by foregrounding the inherently flat, narrowly delineated scope of cinematic representations.
Hancox's reflexive inquiry into the film medium (through his inscription of an authorial presence, the use of freeze frames, and the presentation of text as image) is balanced by an equally exhaustive reflection on the structural unfolding of LANDFALL itself. This type of self-reflection is a gesture toward auto-mimesis, the representation of one's own representational practice within a given work. The use of poetry in the film, for example, creates an ongoing, overlapping commentary on what has been, is being, and will be represented in the film. The first two words of the poem—"I thought"—appear separately, as text, before any voice-over is heard. When the voice reads, "I thought there were limits, Newtonian Laws of emotion—," we can then speculate and (correctly) anticipate that the next word of text to appear will be "there." More lines of the poem are read with pauses and freeze frames, until the poem has been fully recited once, and the individual words of the first line have appeared as text. This first section of the film ends with a decisive break from the moving and temporarily stilled beach scenes. From the last of these images—a freeze frame close-up of a snowy patch of ground, so formless as to appear almost abstract-Hancox cuts to black: "ex nihilo fecit" appears and is pulled into focus as described earlier. The second section of the film begins with the snowy patch of ground overlaid by its own mirror image, "made from two optical prints of the original footage" (Hancox 103)—a representation of its own status as a representation. The images of the beach area, sky, et cetera that we have seen in the first section are shown again (a re-presentation) in inverse order, last to first, each with the superimposition of itself mirroring its dynamic beauty. While many of the original images seemed almost abstract in their fragmentary, blurred, fleeting representation of objects, the additional layer of superimposed images in the second half pushes the abstraction even further as the shifting picture planes and inverted attitude of the images cross each other and further renounce an immediately recognizable mimetic referent. As further phrases from the poem are introduced as text over these double images, the written words recall the entirety of the poem as heard in the first section, reflecting on particular snatches again, while the images similarly reflect what we have seen before. This complementary reflection of image and text also support the subjective, inward-looking, reflective tone of the poem itself: "I thought.."; "I was wrong"; "Wrong again"; "I now suspect..."; "an ache, an absence"; "a dream." And of course, the repetition of certain phrases in the poem (and Hancox's emphasis of certain phrases of text) equally complement the repetition of similar images in the first section (the shadow stills; shots of the sky, water, and rocks) and the subsequent doubled repetition of the first section's visuals in the second section. Hancox has cogently summarized this complex process of re-presenting representations as follows:
the second half of the film [LANDFALL] is a reflected
repeat—spatially, in terms of the picture's mirror-image superimposed on itself; temporally, in terms of the film's reversing direction at this point, creating a kind of overall palindrome; and intellectually, in terms of a mental reflection (via selected superimposed text) on the poetry read in the first half. This text is given movement of various kinds on the screen to bring out its implied dynamism and comment back on the meaning, with the effect of exposing the limitation of words as spoken signifiers, while using them as a visual cinematic element as concrete as any other" (102-103).
In this way, Hancox's film reflects its own. structure, commenting on its past stages and overall pattern of development (spatial, temporal and intellectual) through what Elder calls (in relation to Michael Snow's work), "reflexive acts of consciousness: away from presence toward absence" (255). Hancox himself suggests that this matrix of presence, absence and desire, which Elder discusses in relation to representation (particularly photographic representation), motivated his use of poetry in LANDFALL;
Poetry became a necessity in LANDFALL in order to help direct the viewer away from the luring yet limited world of image-identification/orientation—i.e. in this case, 'Which end is up?', and to again force the image through thought, through consciousness. The poem ... was used to encourage the viewer to reject Newtonian notions limiting space and time, and to conceptualize the interplay between absence, desire, and presence ...(Hancox 101-102).
Hancox refuses to coherently frame "best views" or dwell on objects of compelling visual interest. He refuses to supply an illusionistic sense of unity with the represented object by only fleetingly and fragmentedly photographing it, and then denaturalizing its visual immediacy through stills, textual overlay, repetition, et cetera. These self-reflective and reflexive techniques (as discussed above) are used to foreground the status of the image as a representation, and to insist upon the actual absence of what is superficially given up to the viewer as mimetically present.
All representational practices include this paradox of presence and absence: representation depends upon the absence of that which it depicts (in order for it to be artifice rather than reality), and the presence of the material art form which depicts it. Bruce Elder explains how this "double-sided nature of the concept of representation" elicits a perpetually unsated desire:
the fact that the presence of the original is suggested by and artistic representation even while its absence is demanded—that explains the peculiar desire a representational image or any other form of representation—evokes. This desire projects itself toward' the Other the image represents. Yet nothing can retain its Otherness when it is actually present; this desire is impossible to sate, because inherent in the very concept of Otherness is the idea of absence (253).
In a seminal article which first established the Imaginary nature (or necessary absence).of the cinematic signifier, Christian Metz points out that in the cinema (unlike representational practices in
general), the absence of the real object of desire and its replacement with an image constitutes:
... an extra reduplication, a supplementary and specific turn of the screw bolting desire to the lack.... Not only am I at a distance from the object, as in the theatre, but .what remains in that distance is now no longer the object itself, it is a delegate it has sent me while itself withdrawing. A double withdrawal (Metz 262).
It is an acknowledgement of this interplay between presence, absence and desire (most often expressed as a sense of longing or loss) that informs Hancox's coupling of word and image throughout the film, as I suggested earlier. Elder notes that a special case arises in relation to poetry-films such as LANDFALL, through the tension created between conflicting activities such as reading and viewing (261), and between:
images which are actually presented and images which are presented
only by the imagination. This sort of conflict takes place when the text describes something (a person or location) that is not presented by the image ... The contrast between the image actually presented and the image produced by the imagination emphasizes the "imaginariness" of the latter... "[T]he only-imagined" image... is frequently called forth to act as a sign for what is absent. Thus, this form of construction conveys the notion that the relationship of a word to the image it evokes is the same as the relation of presence to absence in a photographic image. (Elder 262)
In this way, a poetry-film such as LANDFALL contains a "triple
withdrawal" of its signifier, to extend Metz's and Elder's reasoning. In the "double withdrawal" of the cinematic signifier described by Metz, the image (no matter how "illusory" or "imaginary" it is deemed to be) is nonetheless present. But in LANDFALL, the signifier of images such as the drifting cat, or falling apples are never present even as illusory cinematic images. Rather, they are evoked by an even more absented signifier, bearing less mimetic identity or unity with the absent, desired object than even cinematic images do: written or spoken text.
It is thus the images conjured to the imagination by the poetic text of LANDFALL which most powerfully signify this absence and desire for the lost object of representation. And Hancox could not have chosen a more appropriate poem to concretely thematize this sense of loss and desire:
Conclude: desire is but an ache,
An absence. It creates
A dream of limits
And grows in gravity as that takes shape.
(D.G. Jones 27)
Notes
1. LANDFALL is generally considered as part of a trilogy of poetry films made by Hancox in the early eighties. Waterworx (A Clear Day and No Memories) (1982), which uses the poetry of Wallace Stevens and Beach Events (1984), for which Hancox wrote his own text, are the other two films in this group. All three films centre on a particular location as a point of visual organization or thematic focus. The title LANDFALL is thematically appropriate to the poem used as well as the film's visuals, but it is also the name of the place where Hancox's parents make their home (Wilkie 9). This attention to location as a subject or source of inspiration is also characteristic of D.G. Jones' poetry (Blodgett 7-10). See Bart Testa. A Spirit in the Landscape. (Toronto: AGO, 1989), p. 1416 for a discussion of Waterworx as a landscape film in the tradition of Canadian avant-garde landscape art.
2. D.G. Jones. Phrases From Orpheus (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 26. The poem reads as follows:
I THOUGHT THERE WERE LIMITS
I thought there were limits, Newtonian
Laws of emotion-
I thought there were limits to this failing away,
This emptiness. I was wrong.
The apples, falling, never hit the ground.
So much for grass, and animals-
Nothing remains,
No sure foundation on the rock. The cat
Drifts, or simply dissolves.
L'homme moyen sensuel*
Had better look out: complete
Deprivation brings
Dreams, hallucinations which reveal
The sound and fury of machines
Working on nothing—which explains
God's creation: ex nihilo fecit.**
Wrong again. I now suspect
The limit is the sea itself,
The limitless.
So, neither swim nor float. Relax.
The void is not so bleak.
Conclude: desire is but an ache,
An absence. It creates
A dream of limits
And grows in gravity as that takes shape.
*the average nonintellectual man
** made from nothing
3. Admittedly, it is not actually Hancox reading the poem in voiceover, but this is not apparent (to those who would not recognize his voice) until the end credits of the film.
4. LANDFALL does not have synchronous diegetic sound. Instead it uses a stylized "wind" sound-effect, overlaid with faint cries of birds as its background sound. While not entirely naturalistic, then, it nonetheless represents a plausible sound-track for the location.
WORKS CITED
Blodgett, E.D. "Preface." A Throw of Particles. D.G. Jones. Toronto: General Publishing, 1983.
Clanfield, David. Canadian Film. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987. Elder, Bruce. "Image: Representation and Object( The Photographic Image in
Canadian Avant-Garde Film." Take Two. Ed. Seth Feldman. Toronto:
Irwin Publishing, 1984.
Hancox, Richard. "Engaging Poetry with Film: A Personal Statement." Words and Moving Images: Essays on Verbal and Visual Expression in Film and Television. Eds. William C. Wees and Michael Dorland. Montreal: Mediatexte Publications Inc., 1984.
Jones, D.G. Phrases From Orpheus. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967. Metz, Christian. "The Imaginary Signifier (excerpts]." Narrative, Apparatus,
Ideology. Ed. Philip Rosen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Testa, Bart. Spirit in the Landscape. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1989. Wees, William C. "Words and Images in the Poetry-Film." Words and Moving
Images: Essays on Verbal and Visual Expression in Film and Television.
Eds. William C. Wees and Michael Dorland. Montreal: Mediatexte
Publications Inc., 1984.
Wilkie, Bob. "The Visual Poetry of Rick Hancox." Cinema Canada, no. 154 (July/August 1988): 9-16.