Cinema has always been an unusually derivative art form. It evolved first as an extension of the still photograph, and soon after as an extension of the magic show; and it was not until D. W. Griffith and others recognized that theater and prose fiction, and especially the novel, offered a model for extending narrative development that the feature film became a possibility.
Poetry and Film: Cinema as Publication
Scott MacDonald
Framework 47, No. 2, Fall 2006, pp. 37-58.
Copyright © Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309.
Background
Cinema has always been an unusually derivative art form. It evolved first as an extension of the still photograph, and soon after as an extension of the magic show; and it was not until D. W. Griffith and others recognized that theater and prose fiction, and especially the novel, offered a model for extending narrative development that the feature film became a possibility. Of course, commercial film has never really left these influences behind. Most screenplays are based on novels or parts of novels, and the screenplay itself is, as the word suggests, a derivation of the theatrical drama. But this dimension of cinema is not confined to the commercial feature. Even those forms of the motion picture that are generally understood as "critical” -that is, as offering critiques of the commercial feature and the audience that has developed for it-are comparably derivative, though the sources of these critical forms are different from the sources of the narrative feature.
The body of films most obviously critical of cinema's various histories is what is usually called "avant-garde" or "experimental" film.1 And from the outset, this history has been particularly dependent on two cultural sources: the fine arts, particularly music, painting, and collage; and the literary arts, particularly poetry. While much early cinema, including commercially oriented cinema, was experimental in rather obvious senses, it was not until the 1920s that something like an avant-garde film movement developed.2 What is usually considered the first film avant-garde-Hans Richter, Man Ray, Henri Chomette, Germaine Dulac, Viking Eggeling, Oskar Fischinger, Salvador Dali, Luis Buñuel, Fernand Léger, Dudley Murphy, Marcel Duchamp,
René Clair et. al-was a result of fine artists exploring cinema as a new artistic tool for creating Dada, abstract, and/or surrealist works. But the influence of poetry was also present from very early on. In Manhatta (US, 1921), often considered the first American avant-garde film, photographer/painter Charles Sheeler and photographer Paul Strand intercut between modernist cinematography of Manhattan and intertitles made up of excerpts from Walt Whitman's "A Broadway Pageant" (1860), "From Noon to Starry Night: Mannahatta" (I860), and "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" (1856).3
When an audience formed for critical forms of cinema, first during the 1920s and 1930s in Europe and the United Kingdom, as the ciné-club movement spread from nation to nation, and in the 1940s and 1950s in Canada and the United States, as film societies proliferated (often emulating Frank Stauffacher's Art in Cinema in San Francisco and Amos Vogel’s Cinema 16 in New York), poetry became as important for filmmakers as the visual arts.4 While there were relatively few instances where previously published poetry was incorporated into films or where films made visual use of poetically arranged words-exceptions include L'Etoile de mer/Starfish (FR, 1928), adapted by Man Ray from a poem of the same name by Robert Desnos, and Marcel Duchamp's Anemic Cinema (FR, 1926), which intercuts between spiral designs and spirally-arranged sentences full of puns and wordplay-there was an increasing sense that certain approaches to the visual image and to the organization of visual imagery within a film were "poetic." In the program announcement for the first Art in Cinema film series, for example, Stauf-facher and Richard Foster (his collaborator, early on) included as their ninth category, "Poetry in Cinema."5 The single presentation announced for this show was Jean Cocteau's Le Sang d'un poet/ Blood of a Poet (FR, 1930), which was widely seen and influential, in part because it represented to many what poet/filmmaker James Broughton would later describe as "an unforgettable example: a poet making a poetic film!"6
The meaning of "poetic" as used in this Art in Cinema program-the final program included Le Sang d'un poet’Jammin ' the Blues (Gjon Mili, US, 1944), Lot in Sodom (John S. Watson and Melville Webber, US, 1933), and Vormittagspuk / Ghosts Before Breakfast (Hans Richter, DE, 1928)-is quite general (the same is true of "poet" in the title of the Cocteau film for that matter), and typical of the 1940s and 1950s. It refers neither to the act of writing poetry nor to poetic texts, but to a human sensibility that can take a wide variety of forms. Judging from the program notes, what constitutes the "poetic" in Jammin' the Blues is the film's graphic qualities, particularly its use of close-ups and evocative chiaroscuro; in Lot in Sodom and Vormittagspuk it's the handling of symbolic details within a mythic tale and within a fantasy, respectively.
And in Le Sang d'un poet it's a combination of factors. Basically, there is a sense in the program notes that filmmaker poets, like literary poets, are creators of suggestive, complex visual images. What all these films have in common may be suggested by Luis Buñuel in "Cinema as an Instrument of Poetry," a talk delivered in Mexico in 1958: "it was agreed that the theme [of this event] would be 'cinema as artistic expression,' or more concretely, cinema as an instrument of poetry, with all that this latter word holds of a sense of liberation, subversion of reality, a passage into the marvelous world of the subconscious, and nonconformity to the restrictive society that surrounds.” 7
While "poetic" remained relatively amorphous when used in connection with cinema, by the 1940s there were films that revealed a more particular connection with poetry. Sometimes, these films combined the earlier, more general sense of the filmmaker as having a poetic sensibility or as a maker of poetic images with auditory readings of poems. Willard Maas's Geography of the Body (US, 1943), for example, is accompanied by the reading of a poem by British poet George Barker, and Ian Hugo's The Bells of Atlantis (US, 1953) was based on a prose poem from The House of Incest by Anais Nin, who narrates the film. This combination of poetic texts and imagery continued to be an option for filmmakers. James Broughton was both a prolific poet and an accomplished filmmaker. From Mother's Day (US, 1949) on, his films reveal what was understood in the 1940s and 1950s as a poetic sensibility, and by the 1970s Broughton's films regularly included poetic narrations, often using previously published poems he himself read.8 Examples include This Is It (1972), High Kukus (1973), The Water Circle (1975), and Erogeny (1975). High Kukus and The Water Circle are particularly effective; both use rather minimal visuals-a small pond reflecting sky and trees and birds, the surface of moving water, respectively-as an accompaniment to lovely, childlike, rather Blakeian verses recited by Broughton. Both films evoke haiku (indeed, "High Kukus" is a play on the word) in their attempt to create meaning from deceptively simple, unpretentious combinations of visual observation and poetic statement.
By the 1950s, the idea that poetry and avant-garde film were closely related had become so commonplace that Cinema 16, then the most success-ful film society in North America, felt the need to host a symposium on "Poetry and the Film" for its membership.9 On October 28, 1953, Amos Vogel was host to Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, Maya Deren, poet/filmmaker Willard Maas, and the critic Parker Tyler, who discussed the relationship between poetry and film. That those coming to the discussion from the world of avant-garde film understood there to be a clear relationship between film and poetry is obvious in Parker Tyler's opening directive to the participants: "On the one hand, there's the theory of poetry, its possibilities as such in the film medium, and on the other hand the practice of poetry, as concentrated in the avant-garde film." Tyler, Maas, Deren, and Vogel seem to have been sure that there was such a thing as a "poetic film" or a "film poem." However, Thomas and Miller, the two dignitaries brought in from outside the avant-garde film context, seem unclear as to how these two art forms are related, despite Deren's brilliant distinction between "horizontal" and "vertical" meaning in literature and in film; horizontal being the forms of meaning made clear through the developing narrative of a work, and vertical the multiple layers of meaning that accrue in forms of expression normally considered poetic.10
By the late 1960s and the early 1970s filmmakers were less likely to think of their work as film poems even though Broughton and some others-Jonas Mekas is a particularly noteworthy instance-continued to incorporate their poetry into their films.11 There are a number of reasons for this. One of the more obvious is that once "foreign film" (and to a lesser extent, avant-garde/experimental film) had demonstrated to a substantial portion of the educated filmgoing audience that film was an art form-rather than just a set of entertaining distractions-
the designations "filmmaker" or "film artist" developed enough cultural caché so that most filmmakers, and most apologists for avant-garde film, no longer felt the need to argue cinema's artistic importance by attaching it to more established and more respected cultural forms.
Nevertheless, a good many filmmakers have continued to see poetry, and specific poets, as crucial influences on their work.12 I learned during interviews with Nathaniel Dorsky, Abigail Child, and Phil Solomon that all three see the work of John Ashbery as inspirational, and moreover see some of their own films as closely related to Ashbery's poetry.13 And there continue to be instances where filmmakers use their own poetic texts as central visual dimensions of films. For Gently Down the Stream (US, 1981), Su Friedrich scratched a series of texts-edited versions of dreams recorded in a dream
diary-word by word into the film emulsion, so that the texts themselves
become the visual foreground and the photographed imagery the back-
ground of a psychodrama that expresses the filmmaker's internal struggle in
coming to terms with the conflict between her Roman Catholic background
and her lesbianism. Friedrich's texts are arranged within Gently Down the
Stream with considerable attention to their visual spacing and temporal
rhythm; it is difficult not to see the texts as a poem. And the experience of
watching Gently Down the Stream has something of the impact of a public reading, though in
this instance, we do the "listening" and the reading.
My particular focus in this essay, however, is a number of remarkable but
under-appreciated 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 (DE/LU/AT, 2000), by the German Matthias Müller,
make poems by recognized poets available to viewers in inventive and ethical ways:
specifically, Wallace Stevens' "A Clear Day and No Memories"
and Ernst Jandl's gedickte 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 Winnipeg
appeared first on a CD, then as a book, and finally as both a 35mm film and a
DVD. The idea of using cinema as a means of providing poetry with a new
form of public life seems unusual enough, and these recent films engaging
(and academically useful) enough, to deserve discussion.
Film as New Edition: 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.15 The Wallace Stevens poem that is the focus of
Waterworx is not well-known, and itis 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.
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.14
"A Clear Day and No Memories" is full of complexities that Hancox con-
firms and extends in his film; some of these might be useful to delineate
before exploring the film. 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 minďs 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, 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 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 reading 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), 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."16 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 part of Hancox's mission is to present "A Clear Day and No Memories."
The film begins with the poem's title, in computer generated text (it seems to
be the film's title), which fades in and out; it is followed by eighteen shots of
what appears to be a large waterworks near water, 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 overlook-
ing Lake Ontario, stops, and is still for several seconds); the other seventeen
are filmed with a camera moving through the waterworks in stable tracking
shots, presenting various views of the waterworks campus, accompanied by
the persistent whine of machinery behind the walls and the sound of wind.17
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 II, singing
"White Cliffs of Dover." Lynn was host of the BBC radio program, Sincerely
Your syimmensely popular with British overseas servicemen). The song
becomes audible as the camera begins to move, and is audible until the cam-
era moves toward a railing by a walk overlooking Lake Ontario and stops.
Immediately after the conclusion of the two-minute ten-second water-
works 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 firstline of the Stevens poem, scrolls
across the screen from left to right. The entire text is presented in capital
letters. 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 dis-
solve (just as 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 water-
works 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 film-
maker's activity in communicating his sense of the Stevens poem to us, and
our viewing of the finished film. It is 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 is 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 Aw thoughts.18
On one hand, the nebel project was unusual for Matthias Müller. Though
many of his films have evocative narrations and sometimes include bits of
text photographed from books, he had never made a film dedicated to presenting a poet's
work. But, in another sense, nebel is a typical Müller film; over the past twenty years Müller
has made a name for himself as one of the
cinema's premiere "recyclers": that is, many of his films are made by recycling material from
earlier works (his own films, films recorded off of television, old home movies . . . ) and
further, his films are unusually full of references to earlier films. Not only does nebel"
recycle"Jandl's gedickte an die Kindheit, but the visual imagery Müller uses to accompany the
Jandl poems is, in many cases, borrowed from diverse filmic sources: there are at least
two shots from The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, US, 1939), for example,
and a number of passages from home movies made by Müller's father when
Müller was a child.
Nebel came about when Müller agreed to contribute to what was planned
as a cinematic homage, "an episodic film about Jandl's work, containing different filmmakers'
contributions."19 While the larger homage fell through,
Müller finished nebel, which premiered at the Vienna Film Festival in 2000,
shortly afterJandl's death. OriginallyJandl was to read his poems in nebel, but
in the finished film the reading is by Ernst-August Schepmann. According to
Müller, while Jandl is a recognized figure in Europe, gedickte an die kindheit
was not known even to many of those who were familiar with Jandl's work.
Further, until nebel, gedickte an die kindheith&d not been translated into English
(Peter Waugh provided Müller with the translation he used in his subtitlés).
The Jandl poems, at least in translation (I do not read German), are
deceptively simple, easy to read but full of subtle humor, irony, and mystery.
The title poem for the series, or really, the second of two poems called "der
nebel" (these are the second and third poems in the series), gives a clear sense
ofjandl's method:
|
nebel (mist) is leben (life), if you start from the end. everyone wants to do that at times, everyone wants to do that at times, to become a child again, I'd like to, more and more, the older I get, and the closer and closer I get to my mother the earth, which might also mean: my mother under the earth |
der nebel ist das leben, wenn man es von hinten beginnt das möchte manchmal jeder, das möchte manchmal jeder, zu warden noch ein kind ich möchte e simmer mehr, je alter ich werde, und komme doch immer näher meiner mutter de erde was auch heißen kann; meiner mutter in der erde. |
What begins as a straightforward statement of our desire, from time to time,
o move against the flow of time, to become children again, takes on a some-
what macabre tone, even a humorously macabre tone, from the final lines.
While the adult might dream of returning to childhood and the security and
protection of the mother, the reality is that we are relentlessly moving forward
to our future in Mother Earth, and into the same earth as the mother we long
for is buried in. We will be reunited, but not in the sense we dream about-
though there is a kind of "security" in this reunification too. The reality of
what happens after death-whether, as Jandl dearly hopes in "the soul shep-
herd," the first poem in gedickte an die kindheit,, "we return at death to some-
where else/to this one great soul body, to this immortal joy"-is lost in the
mist. We will be reunited under the earth with our mothers, but whether any
further form of reunification will occur, we cannot know. Indeed, the closer to
the end we come, and the hungrier we may grow for some transcendent
reunification, the more "in the mist" we can feel: as Jandl suggests in the first
"der nebel," "over the distant things . . . [mist] lays itself down thickly./I can't
see them/and often don't know/if they're really there at all."
Mliller's approach to presenting Jandl's poetry is reasonably consistent
throughout nebel, and since there is no space for a thorough exploration of his
film, I'll use his version of the second "der nebel" to suggest the nature of this
approach. Of course, since my experience of nebel is with the English version
of the film, which translates the narrator's reading into visual text (there is
also a version without the visual text for German-speaking audiences), the
translated lines of Jandl’s poem are the visual foreground of the film, and the
imagery, the background-the cinematic interpretation of what is read. Of
course, even in the German version, the audience's attention would be primarily devoted to
hearing the reading of the poems, and the visual imagery
would be seen in relation to that reading. In the English version, the narrator's tone is
consistently a part of our understanding of what we read: Schepmann's reading is full of
humor and wit-in a sense, the opposite of Hancox's
presentation of the Stevens poem by means of the neutral, deadpan computer
text. And the imagery Müller uses to accompany the Jandl poems is far more
diverse and expressionistic than the imagery used in Waterworx: there are
many shots and the camera is generally hand-held in an informal manner.
The result is a very different film experience of a poetic text. Nevertheless,
Müller's method is as fully appropriate for gediehe an die Kindheit as Hancox's
imagery is for the Stevens poem.
The first visuals we see during "der nebel" are shots from an old regular-8mm color home
movie of a young boy and his mother playing ball at a
beach. These home-movie shots are followed by an image of a ball flying
through the air, across the film frame, back and forth, which we slowly realize
we are seeing first forward, as the ball flies from left to right, then in reverse as
it flies from right to left, then forward again, and reverse again. That we are
seeing alternating forward and reverse motion is confirmed by the sound-
track: the music, composed for nebel by Claus van Bebber, is played forward
and in reverse in time to the movement of the ball. When we get to the end of
the poem, and to the line "which might also mean: my mother under the
earth," the image darkens and we see a brown-tinted image of a ball lying on
the muddy ground among puddles, then a fade to black. The music fades out
just before the final line of the poem.
The visual imagery used for "der nebel" functions on several levels. Most
obviously, the use of home movies of a child and his mother suggests our
periodic hunger "to become a child again," and the increasingly frequent
desire to reverse the flow of time is imaged in the forward and reverse of the
ball and the sound. That is, Müller provides a clearly appropriate visual
accompaniment to the Jandl poem and a metaphor for the essential hunger it
expresses. More subtly, the fact that we are seeing what are clearly old home
movies-the color has faded and there are scratches in the emulsion; the sur-
face of the old movies has decayed-of early childhood is a way of combining
the new and the old, or more precisely, of creating a cinematic emblem of the
hopelessness of our desire to return to a past that is itself in a state of decay.
And the movement out of the nostalgia for a (decaying) past into the present-
imaged by the change in location from beach to muddy road-implicitly confirms the fear of
death that creates our nostalgia: as Jandl says in "ein grosser wünsch" ("a big wish"-the
twelfth poem in gedickte an die Kindheit), "I want to go back/till I'm three years old again.
Then I was fitas a fiddle/and afraid/only of every big dog." Now, the implication is, there is
more to fear, and (suggests the wry tone of the poem) in some sense less, since what we fear
is nothing more than the inevitable destination of everyone.
A third level of suggestion-one not self-evident within Müller's version
of "der nebel" from the words, imagery, and sound-is clear to those who
know Müller's other films, in the same way that Jandl’s rumination on child-
hood must be more fully evocative for anyone who is familiar with the evolution of his career.
The home movies we see in "der nebel," and throughout
nebel, were made by Müller's father, who died when Müller was a child. In
fact, Müller did not know that his father had made home movies, or at least
did not remember, until the 1980s, long after his father had passed on. And
then, he began to use them in his own work, to render the old new and
embed within the new, implications of what had already passed. The imagery
of the filmmaker and his mother, filmed (from outside the frame) by Müller's
father, can be read as a prescient metaphor for the mother's and son's subse-
quent lives together without the presence of the father. This relationship of
mother and son is the subject of what may be Müller's best known, and most
accomplished, film: Alpsee (DE, 1994)-the title refers to another home movie
made in 1964 by his father, also called "Alpsee" (after a lake in the Alps the
family was visiting). Müller's Alpsee, which ends with imagery of his mother
wading in the lake-dramatizes moments in the life of mother and son in a
manner that, in its visual design, evokes (consciously, says Müller) Douglas
Sirk's American films. The theme of Alpsee is the evolution of the boy's cre-
ative sensibility within the repression and boredom of a middle-class life. For
those of us familiar with Müller's ouevre, nebel suggests the evolution of a film-
maker from child to the person who can make the film we are seeing, and
who, like Jandl, can now wax nostalgic about the lost past, and be fearful
about what is to come.
But most of all, Müller-likejandl-has learned not only to find, but to create
consolation within his work. In the tenth (untitled) poem in gedichte an die kindheit Jandl
remembers how "dazzling and marvelous" Christmas was when he
was a child, and how "for more than forty years" he no longer "believed in any
of that." But now, he explains, "things are beginning to change":
everything can suddenly
dazzle me
namely each commonplace
thing
I hold
nothing in my hands
after such a long time.
but iťs not
as far to get there
as it used to be.
it becomes the whole
room
in which I'm imprisoned,
big and white and
dazzlingly marvelous.
The imagery Müller uses to accompany this particular poem, reflects the
older man's new awareness of everyday things (a new, albeit in some senses
imprisoned, awareness that in a sense returns Jandl to his childhood):
Müller's imagery of simple things-a box of Christmas tree ornaments, a light
bulb-is as visually gorgeous as Jandl's memories and new awareness seem to
be. Unlike the poet, however, Müller can actually present this gorgeousness
to us directly. Indeed, Müller's film is consistently exquisite and inventive,
and like many of his other films, much involved with cinema's ability to
model a more intense, appreciative perception of what is normally over-
looked (visual details of our everyday surround, poems not widely known) in
response to the inevitable pressures of mortality. The first film Müller now
lists on his filmography is Aus der ferne-The Memo Book (DE, 1989), which
focuses on his process of recovery from losing a partner to AIDS; and Pensão
Globo (DE, 1997) follows a young man, losing strength under the onslaught of
AIDS, as he revisits Lisbon and remembers (imagines?) earlier days. In the
wake of both earlier films, nebel suggests/demonstrates simultaneously the
spiritual effulgence within the everyday and the evolution within the film-
maker of a recognition that even our transcendent moments are fragile and
momentary-and do not truly, definitively, erase the macabre question of
mortality and our desperation to weather it.
Earlier, I called the Hancox and Müller films "ethical." One of the admirable dimensions of
both films is their obvious commitment to the original poetry they recycle into their films.
They don't simply use, however honorifically, the work of Stevens and Jandl; they take
considerable pains to deliver the poems to us so that we can discover and experience the
poets'
originality and skill. That is, the filmmakers' creativity is in service of the
poets' original contributions, and the (considerable) effectiveness of their
filmic manipulations of image and sound is a function of the degree to which
these manipulations complement and clarify the poetry. On the other hand,
both films are distinctive, effective works in their own right. Both makers
accepted the challenge of trying to turn poetry into film, and both met this
challenge while producing impressive cinema, without sacrificing the work of
others to their own. I would hope that their success can serve as a model for other filmmakers.
Feature Film as Poetry Reading: Trains of Winnipeg
In 2001, Clive Holden released (through Cyclops Press/Endearing Records)
an audio CD, Trains of Winnipeg (produced in collaboration with musicians
Christine Fellows and The Weakerthans [Jason Tait and John K. Samson]). A
book of thirty-eight poems, Trains of Winnipeg (Montreal: DC Books, 2002),
followed. And in 2004, a 35mm film, Trains of Winnipeg: 14 Film Poems (Clive
Holden, CA), was completed. Each is a separate project, and each is a part
of the larger "Trains of Winnipeg Project," which has its own website:
www.trainsofwinnipeg.com.20 Each part of "Trains of Winnipeg" includes a
somewhat different set of poems. The book includes far more poems than
either the CD (13) or the film, but does not include "Transience," "Grain
Train," and "Wind" from the CD, or "Hitler! (Revisited)" from the film.21
And in each medium the poems that are included are in an order that bears
no particular relationship to the order of the poems in the other media. All in
all, however, Trains of Winnipeg in its various forms provides a test case for
exploring the differences in impact and meaning when a particular poetic
sensibility, and specific poems, are presented in various media.
As a book of poetry, Trains of Winnipeg is not particularly unusual.
Holden is a capable poet, though as in any collection some poems are more
interesting than others. The CD records the poet reading his work, accompanied by music-less
common than a book of poetry, but not unusual either. The film, however, is unusual. Indeed,
I know no other instance in the history of film, including the wide world of avant-
garde/experimental film, where a poet has used a feature film to present a collection of
poems; or to be more particular, where a feature film has been seen as a means for doing a
poetry reading that includes imagery (sometimes as complex as the words) choreographed to
the reading itself, as well as sound effects, environmental sounds, and music.22 When I saw
Trains of Winnipeg at the 2004 Flaherty Film Seminar, it seemed
almost unique; and if there is some unevenness from film poem to film poem, the overall
accomplishment and impact of the larger work are considerable.
Like a good many books of poetry (and like Holden's CD), the film version
of Trains of Winnipeg combines individual poems in an order that, on one hand,
feels quirky, and on the other, more or less coherent-an autobiographical narrative (most of
the poems are narrated by Holden) that has something in common with Su Friedrich's Sink or
Swim (US, 1992) and Alan Berliner's Intimate Stranger (US, 1991).23 Each "film poem"
(Hancox's term for the film versions of the poems) has its own visual structure, and the
fourteen poems are arranged within the larger, formal structure of the film: each poem is
succeeded by a fade-out and a moment of looped imagery set within a tiny frame-within-a-
frame in the lower-right-hand corner of the image; the looping image continues until we hear
the sound of railroad cars coupling, and see the title of the next poem. The implicit parallel
between moving pictures and railroad travel, a commonplace since the invention of cinema, is
evoked and used not only to suggest a shared technological history, but an image of the
geography of Canada created and held together in Winnipeg, at the center of the Canadian
nation, by the railroad.24 The collection begins with "Love in the White City",
ends with "Trains of Winnipeg", and is punctuated by "Saigon Apartments"
and "Bus North to Thompson with Les at the Wheel" poems that relate to
Holden's life in Winnipeg, which becomes the implicit here and now from
which the poet flashes back to memories of his early life in the West, in and
around Victoria, British Columbia, and his student days at Concordia University in Montreal,
and to more recent visits with his British Columbian parents.
There is no space here to discuss all the film poems in Trains of Winnipeg,
but some comment on what for me is the most impressive of them-" 18,000
Dead in Gordon Head (A Found Film) "-might provide a sense of Holden's
approach and style. "18,000 Dead in Gordon Head" is the longest poem in
the Trains of Winnipeghook (the 4'/2-page prose poem is followed by eight stills
on four pages) and CD, and the second longest in the film.25 In all three cases
"18,000 Dead" is positioned near the beginning: it is the third track on the
CD, the second poem in the first section of the book, and the fifth film poem.
The printed version of the poem is divided into four sections. The first
explains how some film Holden had shot in 1985 was thrown into the
garbage by an angry, pregnant roommate; the long second section and the
brief fourth section focus on Holden's witnessing the murder of a thirteen-
year-old girl (he heard the shot and saw the girl fall as he was arriving at a
friend's house, and ran inside to call for an ambulance); and the third section
briefly recalls six violent events that Holden witnessed during the months
after the murder: walking along the street, he stepped in a pool of blood;
some time later he saw a woman being hit by a car; he witnessed a knife fight
between two teenage boys; saw a man jump in front of a subway train; came
upon the body of a man who had jumped from the upper level of a mall, lying
dead on the floor; and finally, witnessed a motorcycle accident that killed a
man. The first, second, and fourth sections of the text version of "18,000 Dead
in Gordon Head" are made up of relatively brief, page-wide paragraphs; the
fourth is organized so that the six brief stories are in two vertical columns.
In the CD and film versions this division into sections is less obvious,
though the tonality of the reading of the opening section, where Holden
explains how his film was thrown into the garbage, does distinguish it from
subsequent sections. Holden indicates that during the period he is talking
about he never got mad, even when his roommate, who was "a testertested
him: his concluding comment on this situation ("then-she-threw my film in
the garbage") is wryly amusing, despite the somewhat grim music on the
sound track. And it reveals that, whatever the narrator's pretences of self-
control, he was serious about his art. This opening provides background and
emotional contrast for the body of the film poem, and it marks a pivotal
moment in the evolution of Holden as an artist/filmmaker
Holden explains that while he was never able to finish that original film,
he had made a VHS record of the material for editing purposes, which he
found nearly twenty years later: it is what we are seeing as we listen to him.
Holden had attempted to create something like a memorial of the murder
and of his witnessing of it: he filmed "the split-levels, service stations, and the
air raid siren over the old Gordon Head store" (Gordon Head is a suburb just
to the north of Victoria, British Columbia), as well as his friend Andrew doing
oil pastels of the crime scene; "I even lay on my side on the road where she
died." As Holden tells the story of the murder and its aftermath, and ruminates on his struggle
during the days after the crime to know how to feel
about the girl's death in a world where any young person is a "witness" to
18,000 television murders by age sixteen, we see the video imagery of the
original footage, presented by means of continual looping: a second or two of
imagery will be looped so that we see it several times, sometimes at one
speed, then at an accelerated rate. The sound track (by Christine Fellows,
Jason Tait, and Emily Goodden) is also looped, so that we hear much the
same musical phrasing and sound effects over and over, though not in specific
synchronization, or even at the same rate, as the looping of the imagery.
Holden's use of looping throughout much of Trains of Winnipeghas a variety of effects within
different contexts, and several effects on the experience
of this particular film poem. According to Holden, looping seemed a way of
bringing something like rhythm and rhyme into the experience of film, and
in general the various rhythms created by the looped imagery work in subtle
syncopation with the rhythms of the poetic phrasing of the texts themselves
and of his reading of them.26 Each passage of looped imagery is something
like a line of poetry, a line defined by the observation of particular details and
textures and other formal qualities within which we see these details, and by
the specifics of the loop's intersections or lack of them with the music, sound,
and narrated poetry. In most cases, what we see, over and over, relates
directly to what we are hearing, though there are also instances where this
isn't true, at least so far as I can tell. Overall, the narrated text on the sound
track is the foreground, and the looping is, like the music, a form of accompaniment, though
the nature of the looped material does provide another
dimension, since it is something like an index of the original experience, or at
least of its emotional aftermath.
In "18,000 Dead in Gordon Head," the looping suggests both the intensity of the original
experience of witnessing death (an intensity that commercial films have
often suggested by slow motion) combined with the narrator's
obsession in returning to this moment in the following days and months, and,
presumably years later, in the poem we are hearing/seeing. The looped
imagery moves in and out of "synch" with particular moments in Holden's
reading of the text of the poem. This is evident, for example, when Holden
reads "then-she-threw my film in the garbage": at the sound of "then" the
image changes to a pulsing reminiscent of a heartbeat, and changes again at
she," and still again-in this case to a looped image of the end leader on a
Super-8mm filmstrip with its red stripe in the middle-at "threw my film in the
garbage." The timing of the visual changes provides a confirmation of the
emphasis in Holden's delivery, and the red stripe on the filmstrip not only
suggests that the narrator "sees red," but leads into the story of the murder,
which we begin to hear about as Holden cuts to a whited-out, scarlet-framed
abstract image. When the poet describes his lying on his side in the street to
film where the victim lay dying, we are seeing a side view of the same suburan street that we
saw earlier in the film, but now this location has a more particular and complex meaning: it is
where a death occurred and where the poet/filmmaker first tried to come to terms with this
death in his art. The
sound is also coordinated to the reading; during moments when the narrator
is recalling moments of especially powerful stress, the sound-it evokes saws
tearing through wood-becomes more abrasive.
This imagery is clearly several generations away from an original film
record of the murder. What we are seeing is a reworked videotape of a Super-
8mm film shot a year after the murder; the videotape was made crudely by
projecting the Super-8mm film onto the wall of Holden's apartment and
recording itwith an early camcorder. When Holden re-discovered the VHS
and realized its potential, he re-filmed the video, focusing especially on the
glitches in the original Super-8mm material created when the camera was
turned on and off,and digitally enhancing particular frames and moments.
The resulting film poem materializes the distance between now and then in a
way the textual version of the poem cannot. It provides evidence of the origi-
nal crime scene in all its banality-throughout the looped material, people are
walking into and out of the Gordon Head Store, and traffic is moving along
the streets-and of Holden's return to this location to make the film at a later
moment in his life, and of the decay of Holden's memory of the incident: the
faded color (much of the imagery evokes watercolor painting) the glitches
within the imagery, and the looping itself provide an analogy to the way
memory modifies what it retains.
"18,000 Dead in Gordon Head" embodies the development of Holden's
filmmaking over a period of years. This aesthetic evolution, which has
resulted in a film that externalizes, or at least expresses, the pain of the origi-
nal moment, also suggests a process of emotional maturation on Holden's
part. The original feelings of shock that followed the murder seemed at the
time unremarkable to the narrator; he felt "the same deadness I always felt,"
despite the fact that those around him can see that he has been traumatized.
Even later, around the time when the original footage was thrown away, we
know that the narrator was in the habit of suppressing his feelings: "I never
got mad back then. I was proud of it. I used to say I could always see the other
person's side of the story." But the slow, patient pace of the film poem, its success in returning
us to that horrific moment, and to the several grisly events he narrator witnessed in
subsequent months, reveals, once and for all, the depth of the trauma and confirms the
filmmaker's early need to simultaneously recognize the power of this extended moment of his
life and put it behind him, first, by taking the small positive action of putting a blanket over
a dead motorcyclist-in the description of the film poem on his website,
Holden calls this the "small, positive action" that "broke the spell" of this
period for him (in all the previous contacts with violence that occurred after
the murder of the young girl, Holden was either powerless to do anything or
was dealing with his own shock)-and then, years later, twenty years later, by
confining the incident of the murder and the violent incidents that followed it
within the aesthetic structures of a poem and then a film poem.
Also implicit within the gap between the original crime and Holden's
transformation of his memories of it into poetry, is his engagement with the
history of independent cinema, which seems to have, over time, revealed to
Holden possibilities for working cinematically with the particulars of his life.
At various moments, Trains of Winnipeg evokes particular films and filmmak-
ers. For example, the long montage of trains that concludes the film (it's the
title film poem of the collection) is a (conscious, according to Holden) allu-
sion to Bruce Baillie's Castro Street (US, 1966). And the looping that is so fun-
damental to the visual structure of "18,000 Dead in Gordon Head" and so
much of Trains of Winnipeg is reminiscent of the work of Vancouver-born
Canadian, David Rimmer, whose breakthrough films of the late sixties and
early seventies often used looping as a fundamental figure of style.
Trains of Winnipeg: Fourteen Film Poems takes viewers on a journey into
Canada and into Clive Holden's memory. like a conventional feature film, it
develops a story about an identifiable character and moves through a variety of
emotional states, from his exhilaration as a happy child ("Nanaimo Station") to
his respect for his parents' longevity and high spirits ("Condo" and "Unbreak-
able Bones"), though the experience is more various and less confined to narra-
tive than a commercial melodrama is. The structuring of Holden's story and
the particulars of its presentation reveal continual, often inventive intersections
of poetic convention and avant-garde film history, but the experience of the
film feels comparatively open. Like Waterworx (A Clear Day and No Memories)
and nebel, Trains of Winnipeg: Fourteen Film Poems demonstrates a new (or at least
refreshes an older) option for both poets and filmmakers-as well as for audiences interested in
exploring the full range of film experience.
Scott MacDonald published the fourth volume of A Critical Cinema: Interviews
with Independent Filmmakers (University of California Press) in 2005; A Critical Cinema 5
appeared in 2006. He is also author of The Garden in the
Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place (California, 2001)
and Cinema 16: Documents toward a History of the Film Society (Temple University Press, 2002). He teaches at Hamilton College.
Notes
Waterworx (A Clear Day and No Memories) is available in the United States from
Canyon Cinema (www.canyoncinema.com; 415-626-2255) and in Canada from
Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (www.cfmdc.com; 416-588-0725); nebele
from Matthias Müller (
Holden (www.trainsofwinnipeg.com).
1. Terminology for this major strand in the weave of film history has always been
confusing. "Avant- Garde" and "experimentar' are the most common terms,
though each is problematic (some don't like the military implications of "avant-
garde"; and in any case, "avant-garde" film cannot be said to be the avant-garde
of cinema, since even the basic technology used to make itis a result of trickle-
down from the commercial industry. Some filmmakers do think of themselves as
experimental artists, but others bridle at the implication that their films are
"experiments," rather than finished works of art). "Alternative cinema" is often
useful too, as is "critical cinema" since nearly all the films in this general category
provide alternatives, critical alternatives, to industrial cinema.
2. For a brief history of 1920s European avant-garde cinema, see David Bordwell,
and Kristin Thompson, Film History: An Introduction, 2nded (Boston: McGraw
Hill, 2003), 173-184.
3. For information about Manhatta, see Jan- Christopher Horak, Lovers of Cinema:
The First American Film Avant- Garde (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1995), 267-286.
4. For an overview of the history of the film society in Europe and in North America, see
Scott MacDonald, Cinema 16: Documents toward a History of the Film Society (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2002), 1-35.
5. The program notes for the first Art in Cinema series were published by the San
Francisco Museum of Art in 1947, as Art in Cinema, available as a facsimile in Scott
MacDonald, Art in Cinema: Documents toward a History of the Film Society
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).
6. James Broughton, "Frank Stauffacher: The Making of Mothers Day, SPIRAL 1
(1984): 29. Broughton was speaking specifically of Cocteau's Beauty and theBeast
(FR, 1946).
7. Luis Buñuel, An Unspeakable Betrayal: Selected Writingsof Luis Buñuel (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000), 136.
8. The early Broughton films were recognized as film poetry by other poets and
filmmakers. In the catalogue description for Four in the Afternoon (1951),
Broughton includes comments by both Willard Maas ("The best film poetry ever
made") and Dylan Thomas ("Lovely and delicious, true cinematic poetry"). See
Canyon Cinema, Canyon Cinema Film/Video Catalogue 2000' 89. Broughton's
poetry (including the poems recited in This Is It and The Water Circle) is available
in Broughton's Packing Up for Paradise: Selected Poems 1946-1996 (Santa Rosa:
Black Sparrow Press, 1977); "High Kukus" is available in Broughton, A Long
Undressing. Collected Poems: 1949-1969 (New York: Jargon Society, 1971).
9. The text of the first hall of the "Poetry and the Film" symposium is reprinted in
MacDonald, Cinema 16,202-212.
10. Deren's distinction between horizontal and vertical meaning: "what I called a
horizontal' development is more or less of a narrative development, such as
occurs in drama from action to action, and ... a Vertical' development such as
occurs in poetry, is a part of plunging down or a construction that is based on the
intent of the moment. . . ." (211); "in what is called a 'horizontal' development,
the logic is a logic of actions. In a 'vertical' development, itis a logic of a central
emotion or idea that attracts to itself even disparate images which contain that
central core, which they have in common. This, to me, is the structure of
poetry . . . "(208).
11. Mekas was an accomplished poet in his native Lithuania before immigrating to
the United States after World War II, and he continued to write poetry in this
country. He also found ways of including poetry in his films. In the final sections
of his Lost Lost Lost (US, 1975), Mekas' epic film about his arrival in the United
States and his discovery of an aesthetic homeland in the world of independent
cinema, he includes two sets of haiku: "Rabbit Shit Haikus" and "Fools Haikus,"
both of which combine words-in the form of visual text and of narration-with
imagery and sound in brief, numbered film poems. Not only are these filmic
haiku lovely and inventive in their own right, and fitting additions to a film that
is "poetic" in all the senses mentioned earlier, the two sets of haiku are also
emblematic of Mekas' rebirth into the new, creative life that, in the final third of
the film, replaces the longing for Lithuania he experiences in the firsttwo reels
of Lost Lost Lost (the Soviet Union made Lithuania offlimits for Americans and
for those who had leftthe country during World War II, soon after the surrender)
and concludes the dark night of the soul he experiences as he works to find a
place for himself in New York.
12. For example, Stan Brakhage, who yearned to be a poet, and became the most
prolific and influential of American avant-garde filmmakers, never ceased to see
his work in relation to modern poetry or to be aesthetically fed by his reading of
poetry.
13. See my A Critical Cinema 5: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 94, 208, 210-211. Child, in particular, has been
a practicing poet for years, and uses analogous strategies for organizing her
poems and her films. And she thinks of poets as a primary audience forher
work: "poets- they'vealways been an enthusiastic and comprehending audience-
people who are used to speed, density, complication, ambiguity." (MacDonald,
A Critical Cinema 4,221). Child's poetry collections include A Motive for Mayhem
(Hartford: Potes and Poets Press, 1989); Mob (Oakland: О Books, 1994), Scatter
Matrix (New York: Roof Books, 1996). See also her This Is Called Moving: A Criti-
cal Poetics ofFilm (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005).
14. "A Clear Day and No Memories" was originally published with three other
poems, as "Four Poems," Sewanee Review, vol. 63, No. 1(1955): 72-74. It was sub-
sequently included in several Stevens anthologies.
15. Hancox sees Waterworx his Landfall,and Beach Events 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 onscreen (the
onscreen 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.
16. I spoke with Hancox about Waterworx (A Clear Day and No Memories) in Septem-
ber 2004.
17. 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).
18. Hancox had originally planned to use the Stevens title as the title of his film,but
thought better of itlater 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 bv itsstronger metaphoric presence" (email to author, 10/8/04).
19. From an unpublished interview with Müller recorded during the spring of 2004.
20. Holden's work has been full of poetry/filmcross-over since before the Trains of
Winnipeg project. Just as some poems have become film poems, some text pieces
are conceived as prose films ("Hitler!" which concludes Holden's Fury: Fictions
and Films [Winnipeg: Cyclops Press, 1998], is subtitled a "filmpoem," and
includes texts arranged into poetic lines and patterns and still images of succes-
sive phases of actions). And there are poems about events that developed around
Holden's filmmaking ("Babette," on the CD and in the Trains of Winnipeg book,
focuses on an early Holden film about the homeless).
21. Holden himself is director of Cyclops Press, a micro-press specializing in multi-
media poetry.
22. In the film/DVD version of Trains of Winnipeg,only "Hitler! (Revisited)" is not
vocally narrated; as in Waterworx (A Clear Day and No Memories) the words are
presented entirely by means of visual text).
23. Ot the fourteen film poems in Irains ofWinnipeg, three do not have an auditory
narration by Holden. "Hitler (Revisited)" has a textual narration; and "F Movie"
and "Trains of Winnipeg" have no narration at all.
24. This connection was historicized and theorized by Wolfgang Schivelbusch in The
RailroadJourney: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the19thCentury (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1986); The connection between landmark
motion pictures and the locomotive is explored in Lynne Kirby, Parallel Tracks:
The Railroad and Silent Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).
25. "Hitler! (Revisited)" is nearly the same length; "Trains of Winnipeg," the final
section of the film,is just under seventeen minutes; the remaining eleven film
poems range from just over one minute ("F Movie") to seven minutes ("Love in
the White City"). The CD version of "18,000 Dead in Gordon Head" is listed as
thirteen minutes and seven seconds-that is, just slightly longer than the film ver-
sion.
26. I spoke with Holden by phone in September 2004.
FUENTE/
MacDonald, Scott. “Poetry and Film: Cinema as Publication.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 47, no. 2 (2006): 37–58.
