poetry film at bury text festival

Although the Text Festival proper doesn't start until tomorrow tonight's pre-festival event was in interesting and bold curtain-raiser. It's just a shame that it was so poorly attended. Including Tony Trehy the festival director, the artist who co-curated the programme of films Tom Konyves, the co-host Lisa Stansbie and the two American guests Ron Silliman and Geof Huth there can't have been more than about 20-30 people in the room at Bury Met where the films were shown.

There were quite a few highlights in the 24 short films (I think) that were shown. I had a few misgivings also but I'll raise those as I go along.

The first few films had soundtracks that I felt really could have been anything - the particular music appeared to be irrelevant and was used more for texture and mood. In rather fewer cases the visuals were the vague ambience that didn't contribute much to the experience.

In the case of the first film that really set me thinking and writing on my palm in the dark - Sarah Tremlett's Blanks in Discourse - both the visuals and the soundtrack felt as though they could have been anything. Text scrolled through an overlaid pattern while someone breathed in and exhaled over the soundtrack. But the text itself was interesting. It was apparently generated by typing randomly and then highlighting small sections in a different colour. This was bound to catch my attention being a process I discovered for myself a few years back with my piece title to go here - where a set amount of text was generated by typing randomly and then all words over three letters generated in the process were highlighted by making them bold. And yet seeing the text generated for this film - in blue with sections highlighted in red - added something to the result that I hadn't thought of before. It drew to my attention the way that computers and the internet - especially URLs but even beyond that - seem to be changing the limits of what's readable. Or perhaps more accurately what's writeable. These and other musings on technology came up quite a lot and I hope to return to them in future posts. 

Nico Vassilakis' Toward was better, and was the first film that I could have sat and watched as a film. The soundtrack felt a little tacked on, there were some edits that I didn't really like and a couple of times I felt it was too slow to move on but I did actually enjoy it a lot and would watch it again. I especially liked the ambiguity of some of the forms where it wasn't clear if you were looking at a letter form, the space around or within letters, or a distorted letter form. Most immediately striking though were the images that made text appear to be some kind of bacterial growth.

Geof Huth's Out of Character was very different and had the first really purposeful soundtrack - of Geof performing what might have been another language or combination of languages, a carefully structured set of phonemes designed to suggest language, glossolalia, or some combination of all the above. The image of interlinked letter forms and parts of letter forms was interesting in itself as well as the simple and strongly contrasting white and black image being quite different from what we'd been seen previously. My only criticism was that the movement of the camera around the image wasn't doing anything quite as interesting as the form itself or Geof's performance. But for me this was the first film to come close to getting a reasonable balance between the three competing elements of sound image and text.

It's worth stopping here for a moment to think about the wide range of skills that you need or need to be able to co-ordinate to make a successful poetry film. One of the problems with trying to import poetry into other places - such as song - is that poetry requires a lot of concentration. This can mean either the artist or the intended audience neglecting the other elements to concentrate on the language. I suppose I should look this up but it's possible that when watching a poetry film you have very separate parts of your brain decoding image and language.

If I could there were around four pieces I would have taken home with me to watch again. I'll call them my favourite favourites. The first favourite favourite was John M Bennett & Nicolas Carras' 4 Short Pieces. The image was a shot - at times shaky - of a flat roof with rain falling and reflections in the water in obviously fairly dull light. The soundtrack was a recording with some slight noise of John M Bennett reading 'words' that sometimes came close to sense but then veered away. The text displayed on screen as subtitles was either the text he was reading or a phonetic transcript of it. This added to the experience as you began to wonder whether he might be speaking recognisable words in a peculiar way, and that you might be being misled by the peculiar visual iteration of the words.

W. Mark Sutherland's Capitalist Mantra was well executed for what was a single idea that I've seen executed elsewhere in other contexts. It was certainly a lot better than Xavier Sabater's Incoherencia which I disliked on a number of levels and never for me managed to justify using the images selected. Part of the problem was that the sentiment was pretty banal. Banal and unconvincing ideas dressed in conventionally shocking imagery remain banal and unconvincing.

Joel Baird's pair of films Magic and Voice of God were better than their titles might suggest. They were among the few films not to have subtitles or text on screen, and used what I presume are 'found' clips of film to accompany the readings. I liked the tension in their suggestion that a narrative might unfold in either the text or in the film, or perhaps in the intersection between the two, which somehow never emerged. If the footage was 'found' from existing choices then it was well chosen. 

W. Mark Sutherland's Poem in Memory of Jack Donovan Foley was another single idea well executed but again probably not worth the repetition and best kept short.

Door, Feather Door by Tamarin Norwood was my second favourite favourite. In this case perhaps more because of the visual element - although I was reminded later that the subtitled translations and the spoken words (in French I think) were doing quite different things. The images were spectral, barely present films of lighted windows shot from some distance - often with the camera wavering a little. A voice read a poem in French while a simultaneous mistranslation appeared in subtitles. Each element interacted with the others in interesting ways and for me at least getting any kind of literal sense fell to one side. The sense that you were able to construct for yourself out of these glimpses of places, glimpses of words, and glimpses of meaning was the important thing.

A couple of pieces later was the third favourite favourite of the night - Hubert Sielecki's Phonetic Poem. This consisted of a voice uttering phonemes initially at longish intervals. With each utterance an image of branches brightly lit from one side flashed on screen. Initially there appeared to be a correlation between each phoneme and the alignment of the image displayed but this appeared to break down as the piece progressed and more complex and faster combinations of phonemes were uttered. Again part of the attraction here was in the images. At first the brief flashes of image might equally well have been veins on the surface of an internal organ, or part of lung. A sense of embodiment, of breath, of the physicality of poetry that was missing from just about everything else was very present in this piece.

Ralf Schmerberg's pieces Belief and Confession, and I cannot give you the world had striking aspects to them. In the first it was the voiceover that first seemed to arise from the images - apparently candid film of a wedding and reception - then to perhaps run counter to them and ultimately to divorce itself from them entirely. It was one of only a couple of pieces to utilise the durational aspect of film very strongly. Here it was in the suspense of not knowing whether your initial response to find the text funny might turn out to be horribly misplaced. The second film had perhaps intentionally banal language with striking imagery - at least I think this was the film that seemed to be set in either a wedding dress shop or costume museum where dummies and clothes set alight one by one until the room was full of fire.

Sadly Patricia Smith's Undertaker was another banal and unconvincing poem with banal and unconvincing visuals that had taken dozens of people to bring to the screen. I was reminded of a time I performed a poem for a digital station back in Cardiff where they had no interest in the poem or the poet. They had a standard format where I performed some of the poem coming out of a house and closing a door - then walking into the camera - and finally walking away from the camera.

Mile End Purgatorio by Guy Sherwin and Martin Doyle was an interesting act of translation but the images were a bit too literal and didn't really do much to enhance the piece beyond a jokey sense of 'don't be afraid it's only poetry'.

Nick Carbo's Can You Lower Your Trope, Please? was really good. I liked the scratching of words directly on to the film. I liked the found images on which the words were scratched being on their side as the film is viewed. I liked the fact that the text unfolded so slowly that it became almost impossible to hold the sense, or even parts of the sentence in your mind - this was the other film to use duration really well. If anything though it was a little too long and the movement of the film wasn't quite jerky enough for it to look deliberate, although I believe it was.

As he'd clearly worked hard bringing the programme together I wish I'd liked Tom Konyves piece Beware of Dog more. Sadly it felt a little under-realised and as though there was rather too much talking over the top.

• Finally and much to my surprise Lisa Stansbie's The Emperor of the Moon is my last take-home favourite favourite. The voice synthesis programme speaking the text was reminiscent of Joy As Tiresome Vandalism's Dubbit Rack. Combined with the deliberately bland and uneventful image, and the text that might have been found, fictionalised, or drawn from a variety of sources, it somehow kept promising that something would unfold while deliberately defeating that promise.

Although I'm sure I could probably say as much of some of the films I liked less, one of the commonalities in the films that were my favourite favourites was that they didn't explain anything, and that their different elements generally had no obvious relationship to one another.

I will find myself returning to a lot of the ideas sparked tonight - and inevitably trying to track down some of the films online. I'm very grateful to Tony and Tom for providing an interesting primer into an area of poetry I really know nothing about. The few things I've seen before tonight combining these elements - including multimedia performances and flash poetry - have mainly been gimmicky and uninteresting. I'd even forgotten that when I hoped to get on the MA at Manchester Metropolitan I'd wanted to use the Transmission project to explore the possibilities of poetry on film. It's possible this is an area I'll return to at some point but not immediately. Anyway, if you missed this event you've only yourself to blame - I've been trailing the festival for ages and posted a bunch of tweets earlier today on the subject. Hopefully better attendance tomorrow and over the weekend.