The Poetry-Film: Rick Hancox by Scott MacDonald

(originally published in Afterimage March 1986)

During the past few years the term poetry-film has been used by several commentators to identify films that, to quote Herman Berlandt, director of the Poetry Film Workshop in San Francisco, "incorporate a verbal poetic statement in narrated or captioned form."³⁰ This very general definition could refer, as Berlandt no doubt assumes it will, to a wide variety of film forms. several of which have already been discussed here. One particular type of poetry-film, however, has not been mentioned. It can be exemplified by a series of recent films by Canadians Rick Hancox and Bruce Elder, in which the filmmakers combine visual imagery (and music, sound effects) with passages from previously published poems, or other literary or philosophical texts, in an attempt to create a new, composite form. Hancox has made three short poetryfilms: Waterworx (A Clear Day and No Memories) (1982, 6

min.), LANDFALL (1983, 11 min.), and Beach Events (1984, 81/2 min.); Elder has just finished an ambitious trilogy which includes 1857. Fool's Gold (1981, 35 min.), Illuminated Texts (1982, 3 hrs.), and Lamentations (1985), an 8-hour film I've seen only a small part of.

Of the Hancox films, I like Waterworx best. First. Hancox present us with 18 shots of a large waterworks, filmed in a manner reminiscent of some of James Benning's early films (8 X 11, 11 X 14) and of 1930s realist painting and photography. It is edited so that, while we move around the buildings of the waterworks complex, we don't feel we're moving consistently in a particular direction. On the sound track, we hear the wind blowing, bits of what sounds like a nostalgic radio show, and the sound of the waterworks operating. Then we see the same 18 shots a second time, still with the sounds of the wind and the radio, but now without the sound of the waterworks. In addition, we read. line by line, Wallace Stevens's "A Clear Day and No Memories":

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.

Today the air is clear of everything.

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."

The text of the poem was generated on a VAX 11780 computer and filmed directly off the terminal. What I find most impressive about Waterworx is Hancox's ability to fuse Stevens's lovely poem and his own imagery and sound not only without doing damage to the poem, but so that the film provides an effective "reading' of it. Because we see all the waterworks imagery once before we begin to read the poem, we are able to concentrate on Stevens's words. In addition, the repetition of the waterworks imagery creates an appropriate context for the complex mood suggested in the first section of the poem. The poet indicates that this day is different, that the mind is not part of the weather the way it presumably has been in other instances, and yet in explaining what he is not thinking of, the poet does in fact "remember" people. "Young and living in a live air/Young and walking in the sunshine." Things are different but in a way that is still tied to the past.

Similarly, the film is different during the second section (no waterworks sound, the presence of the text), though the differences are only apparent because of the repetition of the rest of the visual images j and sound. The clear, empty vistas of the film (empty of action, of people) reflect those of the poem, and yet both film and poem are haunted by the presence of the poetic mind in its process of forming what we are experiencing. The air may flow over 'us' as if 'none of us had ever been here before. And are not here now,' but, in fact, "we" are here (the poet has been in this same mood before; we have seen the same imagery before). And where are we, specifically? 'In this shallow spectacle/This invisible activity, this sense"-a conclusion that, in the poem, refers to the process of writing/reading the poet's 'sense' (the words are 2-dimensional, i.e., "shallow' spectacle) and in the film refers to the fused experience of reading the poem and seeing the film, another 2-D spectacle. As we read 'this sense,' Hancox provides a slow dissolve to his computer terminal, which has transmitted Stevens's 'sense' to us.

According to Hancox, the film was well underway before he decided to use a poetic text with it, a decision made in large part because he wanted something 'to block penetration into the image,' to keep the viewer outside of a conventional film illusion. And yet, once the Stevens poem became part of Hancox's work, it asserted itself so fully that I see the film as a kind of modem illuminated manuscript: the Stevens poem doesn't merely add to Hancox's film, it is the film's center and, ironically, the 'justification' for Hancox's originally personal imagery (the waterworks were, Hancox explains, 'the source of an eidetic-like image from my childhood'³³) If Hancox's original intention was to create a work in which all parts (visual imagery, sound, text) functioned equally to create a filmic-poetic form in which each element was subsumed into a larger, organic. personal unity (the use of Waterworx, rather than Waterworks, as the title suggests this is the case: the x is presumable a personalizing reference to Hancox), his failure was Waterworx's success. But an effective unity of this sort was subsequently achieved in Beach Events.

SCOTT MACDONALD teaches at Utica College, Utica. NY. and has written for such publications as Film Ouartefy and The Independent.