PoetryFilm introduction by Zata Kitowski and a reading of the poem “Qualia” on Saturday 7 June and a reading of the poem “Blind Spot” on Sunday 8 June.
A film celebrating the life of Kurt Schwitters the Dadaist, Surrealist and scrap paper collector.
The film interprets Hart Crane’s “Proem to Brooklyn Bridge” (published in 1930) using a direct animated stencil technique reflecting graphic styles of the period, the evocative voice of Tennessee Williams and original sound design underpinned by study of Hart Crane’s creative process and use of metaphor.
You Be Mother uses stop-frame animation to disrupt the traditional orders of animate and inanimate, and of the fluid and the solid. A hallucinatory space is set up when a frozen image of the artist’s face is projected onto weighty pieces of crockery atop a table. Ears, eyes, nose and mouth all become spatially dislocated as a determined hand begins to reposition, decant and mix. Events unfold to the amplified sounds of grinding, pouring and stirring.
Geoffrey Grigson reads his poem “About Owls”, originally published in “Collected Poems” by Geoffrey Grigson, Phoenix House 1963, read and recorded at Broad Town, Wiltshire, 4 March 1968. Geoffrey Grigson was the editor of the avant-garde poetry magazine “New Verse” from 1933-38 and was an early publisher of Dylan Thomas.
An Oulipo poem employing anagrams and numerology is turned into a triptych cut-up. Each segment contains the same 166 words jigsawed in a different order. The film explores perceptions of meaning through seeing and hearing: in the first section, the words are both seen and heard; in the second section the words are heard and not seen; in the third section, the words are seen and not heard.
“The Analysis of Beauty” is a film of an oscilloscope installation, exhibited by the art project Disinformation, which explores the aesthetics of the sinusoidal, or, as the artist William Hogarth put it, “serpentine” line, which formed the central focus of “The Analysis of Beauty” book that Hogarth wrote and published in 1753. In addition to exploring sensuous qualities of serpentine lines, the installation creates vivid and spontaneously self-contradicting illusions of three-dimensional form – without any of the perspective, object precedence, parallax, and stereoscopic information conventionally thought to enable human perception of visual space. As such, the installation demonstrates the role that knowledge plays in the active formation of perceived experience. None of the changes that viewers experience when watching this film take place on-screen; they all take place, instead, inside viewers’ own minds.
“Just Midnight” is a poem by Robert Lax describing a temporal and spacial situation through minimal means. For Robert Lax the composition of the letters and words on the paper was very important, so one of his vertical typefaces has been adapted to become a three-dimensional typography.