Engaging
Poetry with Film: A Personal Statement by Rick Hancox
(Originally
published in Words and Moving Images by William C. Wees
and Michael Dorland, eds. (
Before I
became involved with film in 1968, my background was in photography, music and
literature—especially poetry. I became interested in the possibilities of
combining these through the medium of film so I could explore some of the more
complex and universal themes around time and memory, which had been my concern then,
as it is now.
Once
I began making films however, I adopted an esthetic which held that words of any kind were an unimaginative
crutch that violated the "purity" of cinema, and I temporarily abandoned poetry in favour
of the poetic. Some examples of this were Rooftops (1971), Next to Me (1971), and House Movie (1972). Even Tall Dark Stranger (1970), a dramatic narrative, while it has a dubbed effects track,
had the actors simply gesturing, since they weren't speaking the same
language—figuratively, at least.
In Wild Sync (1973),
words
finally emanate from the characters' lips, but not necessarily in
sync. Then in Zum Differ (1979), words—this time in
sync with the performer, artist Allan. MacKay, become the main focus of
attention, particularly the name of the 18th century composer, Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf.
Around the time I made Zum Differ my interest in
poetry and film was rekindled at the McGill Conference on Poetry and
Film, organized by William Wees. I began to feel that
the
image was not ipso facto worth 'a
thousand words'—perhaps not even worth one word—which didn't necessarily take
anything away from the image. Instead 1 began to think how words could be used
for more than image—redundant signification. Finally I began working with the
medium that had led me to film in the first place poetry—but it wasn't until my films Waterworx and LANDFALL were well in progress that I decided to engage
poetry with the images that would
appear on the screen.
Waterworx (A
Clear Day and No Memories), to state its full title, was edited to a fine cut; however, the film was stalled. The nostalgic
imagery was simply available too readily to the senses; the viewer was lured into consuming the image, lured into an
illusionary sense of possession,
although the interruptive editing style (a style common to most of my work) did
not permit this satisfaction to be sustained. Everything was present: 'This
shallow spectacle, this sense,"
as Wallace Stevens calls it in the poem. But since what I perceived was past and future contained within the 'present
of the waterworks, (the source of an eidetic—like
image from my early childhood,) nothing should have been, to use Bruce Elder's expression, "merely present." 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.
Computerized text was eventually chosen, generated
on a VAX 1.1/780, and filmed directly off the terminal which appears at the
end of the film. The idea of using the artificial memory of a computer to
generate poetry about the absence of memory, is
consistent with the kind of complex imagery central to Wallace Stevens' poem,
"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.
I have long
been attracted to the enigmatic irony so prevalent in Stevens' poetry, and consider
his balance of reason and the imagination, and his notion of poetry as the ultimate form
of philosophy, a personal model now for my own work in film. So it was natural that I
would look to Stevens for text in this situation, and in particular, "A
Clear Day and No Memories," since it conceptualized a particular relation
between time and memory I had been wrestling with in the film. Consequently,
some understanding of the poem is important to an understanding of, the film,
and it will probably take several viewings to get used to how the
two "flesh out" each other, to use Herman Berlandt's
phrase. The film is short enough to permit this (6 min.), so I would
encourage multiple screenings of this, or for that matter, any poetry—film.
In the poem,
the weather specifically, the air itself—is the protagonist, and this is picked up in
the gusts of wind on the soundtrack mixed with sort of left—over radio 'air
waves, and visually, in the Precisionist clarity of the image —'Today the air
is clear of everything," says the poem. The structure of the film is modeled on
human memory processing, with the first half, which has no text, permitting the
viewer to record a strong, eidetic—like image directly, via the senses; the
second half is actually a repeat of the first, emulating recollection, with
the soundtrack attenuated and the image cluttered now by the superimposed
poetic text, forcing its way through the intellect. It's a strategy which
follows my belief that the medium itself must, in a sense, practice what it
preaches.