(excerpt from an unpublished essay by Scott MacDonald)
My particular
focus in this essay, however, is a number of under-appreciated, relatively recent films
that have used filmmaking as a means of publishing
poetry.
Waterworx (A Clear Day and No Memories) (1982) by the
Canadian Rick Hancox and nebel (2000) by the German Matthias
Muller make available to viewers, in inventive and ethical ways, poems by
recognized poets: specifically, Wallace Stevens' "A Clear Day and No
Memories" and Ernst Jandl's Nebel: Gedichte an
die Kindheit ("Poems
to Childhood"). And Canadian Clive Holden, unconsciously following the
lead of James Broughton, has provided a useful test case whereby we can
compare the effectiveness of different media in delivering poetic
texts. Holden's Trains of
2. Film as Re-Publication:
Waterworx
(A Clear Day and No Memories) and nebel
Between
1969 and 1994 Hancox made
fifteen films (or at least made fifteen films currently in distribution at
the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre in Toronto); Waterworx [A Clear Day
and No Memories] is the eleventh of these films, several of which explore the cinematic
possibilities of poetry and other forms of visual text.18 The Wallace
Stevens poem that is the focus of Waterworx is
not well-known, and it is brief enough to reprint here:
No soldiers in
the scenery,
No thoughts of
people now dead, As
they were fifty years ago, Young and living
in a live air, Young and walking in
the sunshine, Bending in blue
dresses to touch something,
Today the mind is not part of the
weather. It has no knowledge except of nothingness And it flows
over us without meanings, As if none of us had ever been here before And are not now:
in this shallow spectacle, This invisible activity, this sense.
"A Clear Day and No Memories"
is full of paradox and complexity. The narrator's list of the memories he
is not having—soldiers in the scenery; people now dead, as they were fifty
years ago; and young women in blue dresses bending to touch something-is, of course,
a list of memories: he cannot name these people and moments without
remembering them, and without in fact creating in us a memory of them. And yet,
there is another sense in which his statement may be true, for
even if he is having thoughts
about these past moments, he seems not to be in pain about them, or at least
not in a depth and immediacy of pain that we might assume has been an
inevitable part of these (seemingly wartime) memories, at least until this
"clear day." Whatever the narrator has lost and has felt the
loss of, "Today the mind is not part of the weather": that is, he seems to be
able to be conscious of the weather, of being alive in a particular moment,
without the mind's projection of painful memories into the moment.
"Today the air is clear of
everything. It has no knowledge except of nothingness" adds a further
dimension to our sense of the narrator's experience. Stevens' use of
"nothingness" recalls the pun on "nothing" in
Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place": in the air there is, on
one hand, nothing of the
narrator's projected awareness, or the narrator's previous pain; but the air is full of an existential nothingness, a
realization that nothing any longer makes sense, or at least that nothing
makes the kind of sense it may have seemed to make before the loss. It is as if the very idea of recovering from the losses implicit in the narrator's
memories, his no longer openly feeling the pain of these losses, renders life
meaningless and this clear day, a "shallow spectacle." The particular "invisible activity" of
thinking about what is no longer or what is, for the moment, for this unusual moment unusual enough to be the subject of this reverie—no longer causing pain is a "sense" of things that is on
one hand sensible (it is usually
sensible to move past the pain of
loss) and at the same time, senseless, since forgetting what one has lost, and the concomitant surrender to meaninglessness and
nothingness, seems to create a psychic state where
Today the air
is clear of everything.
nothing is as it seems and everything is empty.
Stevens' use of "us"
suggests further complexities. The air "today" flows over
"us" without meanings, "as if
none of us had ever been here before," revealing that the
narrator is not "here" alone
(wherever he is). But whoever we assume is with him, the use of "us"
also includes the reader: even if we have not been wherever the narrator
is, we are
here now, "today," here mreading
Stevens' poem (and this narrator's psyche) once again, and over and over again,
remembering how we understood it before and coming to a new
understanding now.
Obviously,
Wallace Stevens does not need Rick Hancox to re-present his poem: "A Clear
Day and No Memories" is engaging, complex (obviously I have only begun to
unpack the poem), complete, and even powerful in its own right. And yet,
Hancox's presentation of the Stevens poem not only brings a relatively
obscure poem to a new audience, but also visualizes it in a, manner that
both confirms its complex implications, and includes it within a
cinematic work that has its own integrity and power. Indeed, Hancox's
project did not begin with the poem, but with the imagery. The water filtration
plant we see in the film, the Harris Water Filtration Plant on Queen Street
East in Toronto overlooking Lake Ontario, was a landmark in the neighborhood where Hancox
was born and where he continued to visit his grandmother once the family moved
west: "As a child, I was always told, `Don't go down there by yourself!' My mother had wheeled me
around there in the pram when I was a baby; she was a war bride who had
emigrated from England, and I guess she looked out over this vast lake and
imagined she was looking back
home. She was very lonely. So it's a place that goes back to
my infancy." 19 Hancox knew he wanted to balance the evocative images with a text, as a way of adding
reason into the mix (He had read Stevens' essay, "The Noble Writer
and the Sound of Words," which argues that poetry is the best medium for bringing reason and the imagination together),
and in time was drawn to this
particular Stevens poem.
The structure of Waterworx
[A Clear Day and No Memories] creates a suspense that delivers us to the poem; the film is half over
before we even know that Hancox's mission is to present "A Clear Day and No Memories." The film begins with
the poem's title, in computer generated
text (throughout the film, the text is all in capitals), which fades out; it is
followed by eighteen shots of what
appears to be a large waterworks near a river, accompanied by what seems to be the sound of machinery operating behind the
waterworks walls. The first of these
shots, of the corner of a building
with the grounds visible to the right of the building, is a twenty-one second
still shot, the only one of the eighteen (during the eighteenth shot, the
camera moves to a railing overlooking Lake Ontario, stops, and is still for
several seconds); the other seventeen are filmed with a camera moving horizontally or forward in stable tracking
shots, presenting various views of the waterworks installation, accompanied by
the persistent whine of machinery behind the walls and the sound of wind.20 The pacing of the shots and the waterworks itself
are quite serene. No one is visible, and nothing is moving except apparently
the wind. We also hear, first, with the opening image of the waterworks, some
children playing in the distance (an evocation perhaps of Hancox's childhood
experiences), and then, during the remainder of the waterworks shots, a radio
playing in the distance; we hear, through static, bits of a romantic song sung
by a woman, a nostalgic song the words of which are for the most part
inaudible: we can decipher the phrases,
"it's only the moon again" and "I'll never forget" (in
fact, we are hearing Vera Lynn, "England's sweetheart" during World
War 2, singing "White Cliffs of Dover"; Lynn was host the BBC radio program, Sincerely Yours, immensely
popular with British overseas servicemen.). V The song becomes audible as the camera begins to move, and is audible
until the camera moves toward a
railing by a walk overlooking Lake Ontario and, in the final shot, stops.
Immediately
after the conclusion of the two-minute ten second waterworks sequence, it is repeated: we see
the exact same series of shots, accompanied by the whine of machinery and the radio static
and song, heard exactly as before (this time we do not hear the sound of the
children playing during the first shot and the wind), as the poem is presented,
one line at a time, in a computer text that, after the first line of the Stevens
poem, scrolls across the screen from left to right. After each line is
presented, it fades out. The visual arrangement of the lines of Stevens poem is
altered-lines 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, and 12 are presented as two lines-though the
overall timing of Hancox's presentation approximates the experience of reading the
poem. At the conclusion of the repetition of the waterworks sequence, there
is a dissolve (just after we read "THIS INVISIBLE ACTIVITY") to
a computer terminal. There is a momentary refocusing of the camera, and
we can see, in this final, still shot, the reflection of the camera and the
filmmaker in the monitor, along with "THIS SENSE."
On the most
obvious level, the film's structure evokes dimensions of the poem. As we read "A
Clear Day and No Memories," line by line, we are re-seeing, remembering, the images of the waterworks
and the song; and of course, there is again, nothing in this scenery-certainly
no soldiers-and the day is, as in the poem, clear. There seems no obvious
meaning in the waterworks imagery, beyond perhaps a metaphor for repressed
energy. The “spectacle” of the film, in other words, is shallow-nothing
happens and seeing the waterworks sequence the second time adds nothing except our
awareness that we are remembering, and remembering nothing much, certainly
nothing that causes us pain-though the combination of image and sound does evoke a
feeling of emptiness. The intersection of the experiences of poem and film is
particularly emphatic at the line, "As if none of us had ever been here
before," since the viewer can hardly fail to realize that
"we" have been here-at the railing of the walk overlooking Lake Ontario-before,
regardless of who the "us" in Stevens' poem refers to.
The dissolve to
the computer screen and the reflection of filmmaker and camera doubles the
implications of this shallow
spectacle, this invisible activity, this sense-since "this" now refers
simultaneously to the narrator's remembering/non-remembering, the poet's
representation of it, the filmmaker's activity in communicating his sense of
the Stevens poem to us, and our viewing of the finished film. It also
significant that we are looking at a computer screen (and throughout the
second half of the film a computer generated text, typed presumably on the computer we
see), which in 1982 was not yet a conventional film image. "This
sense" seems at first to refer specifically to the new technology as confirming the
distance between the present and the past. Of course, the "sense" of the
computer screen is no more an answer to the complexity of passion and of loss,
of pain, of memory than does the narrator's reverie or the poet's
representation of it.
I read the
film's use of still, then moving, then once again still (but refocusing)
camera, specifically in conjunction with the nostalgic music, as a dramatization of
the way in which memory moves-the way it can move
us, the way it changes through time- and as a way of confirming the paradoxical
dimensions of memory evident in Stevens' poem. When we are powerfully moved
by traumatic past events, they are still alive in us and we are still alive in them. As we
move beyond the power of these memories, as we re-focus, we are simultaneously freed from a
position of stasis, of "living in the past," and faced with a new stasis, a new emptiness into
which new passion, in time, may flow.
The
revelation of the filmmaker's name in the final credits-it ends in x, just as
does the unusual spelling of "Waterworx" in the title (though the
film's full title is nowhere indicated in the film proper)—suggests Rick
Hancox's empathy with the particular emotion revealed in the poem as well as
his detachment from it as creator/film poet, just as Stevens's writing "A
Clear Day and No Memories" suggests a control and a detachment from the
narrator's engagement with his thoughts.21
Footnotes
18. Hancox sees his Landfall (1983) and Beach Events (1984) as a trilogy "of landscape/poetry films," each of which has an autobiographical
dimension: Waterworx (A Clear Day and No Memories)
was shot near his grandmother's
home, and the other two films, at his family home on Prince Edward Island. Landfall combines the
poetry of D. G. Jones, which we hear read and see phrases of on-screen (the on-screen words and phrases are presented
without regard to the usual formality accorded screen text; the typeface is
formal but the words/phrases move in and out of the frame and around the
screen like animated characters), superimposed over images of landscape. Beach Events combines
Hancox's own poem with imagery recorded on a beach-feet making footprints, a crab, mussel beds...-in a more formal way:
poetic lines are presented, in a cursive
typeface, at the bottom center of the frame.
While
Waterworx (A Clear Day and No Memories) is easily the
most interesting of the three films, the other two are capably filmed and
edited, and with Waterworx do chart a
range of the possibilities of visual text, particularly poetic text, within the
film image. The particular success of Waterworks, in my view, is
Hancox's decision to use his filmmaking to deliver the Stevens poem to
us as directly as possible, rather than to use film as a way of
interacting with the text of the poem, as he does in the other two
instances.
19 I spoke with Hancox about Waterworx
(A Clear Day and No Memories) on September 2, 2004.
20 Hancox shot
his dolly shots in slight slow motion, thirty-two frames per second, from an automobile (he
had let twenty pounds of air out of each tire to ensure smoothness).
21 Hancox had originally planned to use the
Stevens title as the title of his film, but thought better of it later on
and decided on Waterworx. He explained
his unusual spelling of "waterworks" this way: "In my own mind,
while the film is in fact shot at a waterworks, the reason for the
`X' is to signify how its original purpose seems crossed out by its stronger metaphoric
presence" (email to author, 10/8/04).