Photo credit: Miguel Ruiz | Interview by Zoë Brigley
“I love her cinematic urgency, like a shape-shifting spotlight that never settles on its subject”
this is a 16-mm film of seven minutes in which no words are spoken No words, at least not in the viewer’s mind, which swivels on its invisible axis. The viewer cannot see well most of the time. She listens, yes. She prefers listening and breathing. The air is like any other – quietly cold and ensnared. The first frame is a portrait. We don’t want it to change from here. That’s what we hate about all film – how it shifts, while forcing us to sit for hours and wait, and watch. The portrait of a magpie in snow. The feathers have worms and holes from too much pruning. He wants to scream but he can’t turn. The sepia filter makes us shiver, as though it happened in our world too, years ago. Now the camera, which is hand-held, follows the bird who hops and dips back into the camera. The camera is another character in this piece. The magpie leads us down a long road into a wood. There are no birds or squirrels. The screen goes dark because inside the wood is Heaviness. We sense damp; droplets on the lens. The bird has left us. We don’t know what happened, whether the film has ended or even has an ending. Endings are impossible so we turn out the light, or the director does. And faraway a wispy tide and a long foamy shore because this film ends in a dark sea, both invisible and close, like a god breathed. Though the screen is dark we listen to the sounds of sea on rocks. No birds, no wind.
So I found this peculiarly gripping and eerie. It is, of course, a prose poem about which there is some controversy, but the prose poem does feel quite different to fiction or memoir to me. Who are your favourite prose poets or prose poems?
I’d just finished reading Robert Bly’s translation of Tomas Tranströmer’s ‘Further In’. Such a bizarre but also mind-blowing poem, beginning with a traffic jam and ending in a quasi-religious description of stones. I wonder if its translation from Swedish to English makes it even stranger. We don’t know who the speaker is or what they want. I was drawn to this poem’s incantatory form, as well as the voice – both familiar and strange. My poem is structurally very different to the Tranströmer, but the tone is similar. The title is actually taken from CD Wright’s poem ‘Treatment’, which begins with ‘This is a 16-mm film of seven minutes in which no words are spoken. But for a few hand-tinted elements – the girl’s dress, the sax, sky at church – the color is black and white.’ An amazing title. I love her cinematic urgency, like a shape-shifting spotlight that never settles on its subject.
I liked the feeling that each prose paragraphs is like a snatch of film, and the line breaks suggest perhaps a jump cut from one scene to another. It’s very effective. How intentional was that reflection of screen images in the techniques you used?
Yes, the film idea must come from CD Wright’s title, and her filmic poems. The intention to use frames or shots was most likely driven by Bly/Tranströmer/ Wright, and their freedom to cut a line whenever they please. But I also like how visual these poets all are. Their poems are more about the materiality of film, lens, language and silence than they are about anything else. I’ve always quite liked films that aren’t really going anywhere, like Jim Jarmusch’s ‘Mystery Train’, or poets who often write about nothing in particular, like Ron Pagett (whose poems are used in Jarmusch’s ‘Paterson’). The jump-cuts themselves are, again, a bit like lines of Tranströmer, where we go towards something and then turn back. But I think that’s what trauma does – it draws you in and rejects you in the same moment.
I respect the fact that you chose for the viewer to be a woman, and there are layers here. We take up the place of the woman looking at the magpie who we also follow, and finally we are left in a place of nothingness. Was this inspired by a particular film or a particular experience of looking?
I actually think it starts as a woman, then changes to a man, or even a bird, depending on how you look at it! It’s hard to tell. I’m writing from Ireland and coastal Dublin, which maybe explains the almost Beckett vibe at the end, and the nothingness. David Lynch must have played a part because I’d only recently seen Mulholland Drive for the first time.
