Two Experimental Films

                 John Kinsella

I have been working on poems responding to experimental films since I first started publishing poetry over forty years ago (many of which appear in the third and final volume of my collected poems, Spirals, due out in February 2024), and I have long planned to make a longer experimental film. I have been accumulating video fragments for this film over recent years as well as accruing other 'materials' related to my 'life-work' Graphology cycle (particularly the poem-photo and poem-drawing works) which will be part of the imagined whole. In the interim, here are two very short films relating to some of the focuses of my poetry work at present. As with the planned longer work, one of their prime and obvious concerns is the irony (and paradox) of using 'the technology' itself to create anti-consumer and anti-industrial texts of 'witness'. They are inevitably documents of culpability.

The two films are set in the 'new' botanical gardens in Tübingen and are concerned with issues of collecting, intrusion, 'artifice' re/per/vs. 'nature', containment, ecological vulnerability and manipulation, power stations or, ironically, power plants (there's one next to the gardens and they dot the city). The spoken texts are poems written as part of an ongoing sequence, but also specifically for the films. Their iterations differ (mainly in terms of repetitions, verbal sound interventions etc) from their typographical versions. If they are 'hard to decipher', that's okay as far as the film itself is concerned. 

In fact, the first 'botanical' film is one of two versions: one (the one included here) has a morphed sound track so the words are lost in the processes of the film itself, while a second has clearer words, phrasing etc... i.e. you can decipher the speech patterns (and that can be viewed here). 

I see this making (to use a favourite Karl Wiebke term) as an act of collaboration with broader discourses around gardens, colonialism, collecting, environmentalism, industrialism, the propaganda and propagation of 'science' and 'discovery', 'leisure' and capitalism. And yes, there are touches of Lynch, Brakhage and numerous other film-makers, but with very different emphasis and maybe very different textual politics (and different use of scare quotes, or not!). I see these films as poems.

Power Plant Botanical Reflux

Glasshouses Only Have Exteriors

Last week, poet and critic Rod Mengham was my guest here in Tübingen, and he presented half-a-dozen collaborative films that he's created with artist and film-maker Marc Atkins over the years (Rod makes and speaks the texts, Marc makes the visuals). They are all unique and incredible in their own ways, and Where Suns Lie, which is 'about' two British nuclear power plants and their impositions in the sea/natural world, is one of the most intense and haunting anti-nuclear documents I have seen. It is a mesmeric and uncanny documentation of a brutal architecture and behaviour that literally erode the psyche. Rod's delivery of the text is as addictive and flattening as many of the filmic images — the lap of the sea, the shifting of shingle, the erosion of the biosphere. Rod talked about how there was a literal emergency at one of the plants while they were making the film. 

Each Atkins-Mengham film is a piece of art that also critiques the processes of making art — full of echoes that reconstitute collective and personal memory, filling instances with lost or missing instances, and transfusing a literal place with what could be or was there, what is absent, and what might be. They are poem-films of embodied and transmogrified metaphor-chains.