Soft Choreography — Jack Rowland

These first six weeks of Soft Choreography have been incredibly rewarding. I’ve really loved having the opportunity to push myself outside of my comfort zone and to experiment in new forms of making that aren’t what I usually engage in. I’ve enjoyed the freedom in being able to bring to the table whatever it is that I’m interested in that week, whatever it is about a reading that spoke to me and then being able to put it into practice and try things out.

I think it definitely took me a little while to give myself this license to experiment and try things out. You can see this reticence to do something outside of my comfort zone in my first film. The text, image and sound in that film all have very little to do with each other and I think it could’ve been much stronger with more thought put into it and if I had tried to go for something a bit bolder instead of playing it safe. That film has a sterility to it that I think is really noticeable and I don’t think that it suits the provided text.

The theoretical readings were very intimidating to me, but I enjoyed the process of making my way through them and picking out the elements those spoke to me or that I thought could be useful when it comes to my approach to making work. The Vannini reading on non-representational theory in particular was incredibly multifaceted and free and I really enjoyed having the opportunity not just to pick out work that I thought could fit broadly into that category, but to actually try and apply some of those principles to my own work. That film was definitely the most enjoyable to make, and I loved being able to experiment with randomisation/chance operations (which is actually something that I’ve used before in my music making, but had never applied to my own writing). On the visual side of things, I would love to pursue further in the future the kinds of images of light reflecting through glass that I played with in that film. I think the dreaminess (for want of a better word) of images like that, that are almost abstract enough that they’re not recognisable, is something that I really want to pursue further (in a way that isn’t just completely derivative of Brakhage of course).

In terms of the poem and essay films, I think I definitely have more of a proclivity for the latter. I love written poems and essays very much, but I think my writing is often straightforward in a way that lends itself more to the essay form. I think tapping into the free nature of the poem film is going to be a challenge for me (and has been a challenge for me in the two poem films that I’ve completed so far, neither of which I’m very proud of) but it’s something that I’m excited to explore further.

One of the things that stood out to me most about hearing about the essay film is how it reminded me of the essay’s great proclivity for discursiveness. This is probably the most exciting thing about reading essays for me—the unexpected avenues that a writer can lead you down and the ways that their thoughts drift off in different directions. I made an effort to approach this quality in my own essay film, where I made a loose connection between a group of disparate images. Exploring these tenuous connections was really rewarding for me and I’m really looking forward to doing more work like this in the future.

For now I’m pleased with the sketches that I’ve done for this class and the progress that I’ve made through the readings. I’m looking forward to the shift that my work is going to take in the coming weeks towards collaboration. I think that bringing all of our interests together is going to create some interesting and rich work. Between now and then I’m going to continue working my way through the readings and through some of the poem and essay films that have been listed in class.

Work Cited:

Vannini, P 2015, Non-Representational Methodologies: Re-Envisioning Research, Routledge, Abingdon, UK.

(I’m completing this task now because I was away in week four and didn’t have time to do the set exercise).

I chose the Ashbery poem The Black Prince to adapt for this task. I’ve read very little of his work but the few poems that I’ve read and the interviews that I’ve listened to have definitely intrigued me. The freedom in his work and the strangeness of the associations that he makes really stood out to me. Out of the four provided poems The Black Prince stood out to me almost entirely because of the strength of its last line: ‘It was only when the wind blew them apart that they didn’t matter, mattered only to some’. I thought that was such a beautiful, evocative image and I thought that I could do something interesting with it.

Because I really wanted to hone in on that final line, I only included the line directly preceding it which sets it up and gives it some context. The rest of the poem didn’t speak to me in the same way as that final line did, the humour in the opening seemed almost at odds with the solemnity I saw in those final lines.

If I’m being completely honest, this is definitely the exercise that I’m the least pleased with. I didn’t give myself anywhere near enough time to think deeply about the text, the associations that it brought up for me, and ways to approach translating it to screen. The finished product was mostly assembled improvisationally, from either footage I’d filmed before or footage that I’d filmed without much thought going into them.

The two nature shots were ones that I’d taken quite some time ago and had sitting on my SD card. I wanted to include them to have the natural world (and in particular the wind, which is obviously a part of the lines that I included) be a part of the film. I wanted its presence to bookend the film, the sound of the wind moving through leaves to be its only soundtrack (as opposed to letting music drive the film, which is something I’ve done in all the other films I’ve made for this class) and to provide a contrast with the interior footage of myself which is in the middle.

The shot of me playing the piano was something that I’d just shot with the thought that I could potentially use it in one of these films at some point. I included it because I wanted that to represent the ‘gestures’ that are spoken about in the poem.

The shot of me speaking into a microphone was shot when I had a slightly different idea of how I wanted to tackle the text. I thought that originally I could include a shot of me speaking the poem’s lines on camera, and upon speaking that final line and evoking the image of speech and gesture being blown apart by the wind that I could tamper with the audio somehow to make it abstract and impossible to understand. I toyed around with ways to do this like reversing an audio clip and putting it through a granular synthesiser, but the results weren’t completely pleasing and I thought that it could sound a bit too sudden against a relatively calm video.

So yes, here’s the finished film. I really think that it’s probably the weakest thing I’ve posted on here. I think it relates to the original poem in very minor and uninteresting ways and lacks a deep engagement with the text. I’m going to immerse myself more deeply in the examples of the poem film that we’ve been provided with and grow a greater understanding of the directions that I can take a poem.

In approaching this week’s making task I once again wanted to follow whatever associations arose within me—to follow those instincts and see where it landed me. The footage that we were given very quickly struck up a memory of the inscription on John Keats’ grave and I wanted to mention and explore that quote in my piece.

I think that the first time I was made aware of that quote was in a literature class in Year Twelve and it’s stuck with me ever since. I went through two Keats biographies that I have to read about his final days and to shed some light on how and why Keats came to the decision to choose that inscription. I incorporate some quotes from my reading in the piece.

When thinking more deeply about works of art that I associate with water, a few came to mind including the opening shot of Tarkovsky’s Solaris, and Ophelia’s drowning in Hamlet and its representations in later works of art including Rimbaud’s poem Ophelia and John Everett Millais’ painting of the same name (which hangs on my wall and briefly features in my non-representational theory film). I decided to just pursue the connections with the Hamlet scene and the Rimbaud poem as I felt these had a stronger connection to the Keats material.

In the end, all I wanted to do with my piece was to gesture towards the resonances that each of these things bring up in my head. I don’t think that there’s anything too prescriptive or conclusive about my piece, and I definitely wanted to keep the sense of openness that the essay form affords. My film highlights a very small linkage between several disparate things and this is a process that I want to try and explore further in my future essay films.

The soundtrack is a piece of music that I composed in my year twelve year, the same year that I first heard about what was written on Keats’ grave.

The only alteration I made to the footage itself was extending it slightly because my written text was longer than the provided footage. I put the opening moments of the footage directly after the end to extend it for a few seconds or so.

Works Cited:

Gittings, Robert. John Keats. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1979.

Motion, Andrew. Keats. London: Faber and Faber, 1998.

Rimbaud, Arthur. Complete Works. Trans. Paul Schmidt. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008.

Shakespeare, William. The Tragical History of Hamlet Prince of Denmark. New York: Penguin Books, 2016.

Tarkovsky, A 1972. Solaris (Solyaris, 1972, Tarkovsky) – Opening Sequence, Cinema Pravda, YouTube, viewed 24 August 2020, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2Paq_XhF7U>.

Quotations (in the film):

‘quiet music sent [him] to sleep, until the early morning voices of the passers-by woke him gently again’ (Gittings 1979, 610).

‘said that he could already feel the daisies growing over him as he gazed at the yellow and white flowers embossed on the ceiling of his room’ (Motion 1998, 564).

‘fantastic garlands… Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples…’ (Shakespeare 2016, 121).

‘The shivering willows weep upon her cheeks;/Upon her dreaming brows the rushes lean’ (Rimbaud 2008, 29).

For my class presentation on non-representational theory I decided to focus on the work of Stan Brakhage which I outlined in my previous post here. I focused on two of his works, a feature: The Text of Light (1974) & a short: Commingled Containers (1996). Each of these films are shot in-camera (as opposed to his works which are painted or etched directly onto film) and achieve some very abstract effects, especially The Text of Light which was shot entirely with an ashtray in front of the camera lens.

I centered on a small group of theoretical quotes. Like in my previous post, I linked Fred Camper’s description of Brakage’s work as ‘redirect[ing] attention away from objects and possessiveness and toward a state of nonacquisitive, almost immaterial flow’ (2003, pg. 25) to Vannini’s description of non-representational theory’s aims to ‘rupture, unsettle, animate, and reverberate rather than [to] report and represent’ (2015, pg. 5).

I also cited a quotation that shows up elsewhere in the Vannini article that discusses non-representational theory’s emphasis on relations, where it ‘zeros in on the crossroads between metaphysical and material’ (2015, pg. 8) and ‘“where many different things gather, not just deliberative humans, but a diverse range of actors and forces, some of which we know about, some not, and some of which may be just on the edge of awareness”’ (Anderson & Harrison, 2010, p. 10, emphasis mine). This emphasis on things that are just out of reach struck me as a key link between Brakhage’s work and non-representational theory.

When it came time to make my own film that in some way related to non-representational theory, I decided to use footage that I’d shot on my phone a good while earlier of light reflecting through the tree branches outside my window and landing on my wall. This is the first image that you see and the one that I return to throughout. I’ve always been fascinated by the way that light lands on surfaces and particularly what happens to it when it passes through glass, and I thought that it was an appropriately abstract image that felt in some way related to Brakhage’s sense of abstraction. I filmed the other shots on my phone as the cold winter light allowed me, but the first image that I used I thought was the strongest.

For the soundtrack I recorded a guitar loop and then using Chase Bliss Audio’s Blooper pedal (a guitar pedal for looping with some very elaborate effects built in) I added an effect to the loop where an algorithm removed random chunks of the loop. The effect intensifies as the video goes on if you listen carefully. This effect is in some way a tribute to the composer William Basinski whose Disintegration Loops capture the sound of a tape loop gradually degrading over time. I like the sound of this effect and I wanted to introduce an element of randomness or chance into the music to move it further away from the realm of more traditional compositions.

Finally, the text that I used was once again created using a randomising tool. I took a (bad) poem that I wrote a few years ago about the gloaming and cut up each of its lines. I then pasted the lines into an excel spreadsheet, putting each on a different row. I randomised the order of the rows and let the spreadsheet decide the order of the poem, in a sense creating a new poem and stripping away the associations that existed between the lines in the original work. The first stanza of the poem I included in the film was completely leftt up to the spreadsheet. For the second stanza, to give the poem more of an obvious shape, I cheated and rearranged the lines myself. I was originally going to use an even more drastic randomising technique where I would put every individual word on a separate line, but the results were far too rough for my taste.

With all of these techniques I was aiming to create a short film that was further away from my notions of traditional filmmaking and towards a process that was informed in some way by non-representational theory and the work of Stan Brakhage. You can watch it here:

Works Cited:

• Anderson, B., & Harrison, P, 2010, ‘The promise of non-representational theories’ in Taking place: Non-representational theories and geography, Farnham: Ashgate, pg. 10.
• Basinski, W 2003, dlp 3, YouTube, viewed 24 August 2020, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqOhJA0xVsk>.
• Brakhage, S 1974, The Text of Light, YouTube, viewed 04 August 2020, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2Paq_XhF7U>
• Brakhage, S 1996, Commingled Containers, YouTube, viewed 02 August 2020, <https://youtu.be/ap-v_Sk20Jg>.
• Camper, F 2003, ‘The Act of Seeing…’, in By Brakhage: An Anthology Volumes One and Two, The Criterion Collection, pp. 20-27.
• Vannini, P 2015, Non-Representational Methodologies: Re-Envisioning Research, Routledge, Abingdon, UK

A pair of artists came to mind in this week’s discussion of Non-Representational Theory and I’m going to speak about them here.

Tacita Dean is an artist who I discovered through Ali Smith’s novel Spring (2019) which is the third book in her seasonal quartet. In preparation for a review I’ve filed of the final installment in the quartet, I reread all of the preceding novels and as a result, Dean’s short film A Bag of Air (1995) quickly came to mind in class on Tuesday.

Dean’s film shows a trip she made in a hot air balloon to collect a plastic bag’s worth of air, which she tells us over voiceover is said to be ‘so intoxicated with the essence of spring, that when it is distilled and prepared it will produce an oil of gold remedy enough to heal all ailments’ (Dean 1995). It’s a playful and amusing premise for a short film. Smith describes A Bag of Air as ‘a piece of pure joke-vision’, but goes on to also highlight the film’s power:

…in it, breathing takes flight… Something dismissible and ridiculous – and magic if you’ll let it be – happens in front of your eyes.

Then the three minutes of black and white film are over and what’s left is the story of human beings and air, something we hardly ever notice or think about, something we can’t live without. (Smith 2013, p. 220)

The majority of the film’s shots are closeups of Deans hands holding the bag, opening it, letting it fill up with air and twirling it shut again. But maybe the film’s most stunning image of all is one that’s purely conjured up by Dean’s text: ‘And as you rise at dawn to the upper ether and lean out to catch the bag of air, they say you are trapping the ascending dew on its voyage from Earth to heaven’ (Dean 1995). Vannini (2015, pg. 6) argues that Non-Representational Theory strives to ‘make us feel something powerful, to give us a sense of the ephemeral, the fleeting, and the not-quite-graspable’ and I think that Dean’s film embodies this stunningly.

The other artist who came to mind in Tuesday’s class was Stan Brakhage. He was an incredibly versatile and prolific artist who made over 350 films in his lifetime (Brakhage 2010, pg. 6). I’ve only seen about 11 of these films and as a result I’m not going to attempt to take too much of his career into account here. The films of his that I’ve seen have remarkably free (some may say amateurish) camerawork, heavy use of multiple-exposures (superimposing one image on top of another) and incredibly quick edits that can make it difficult to clearly discern any particular image, or at the very least make it hard to dwell upon what you’ve just seen because of how quickly you’re presented with another image.

His 1993 short Stellar is an example of his love of painting directly onto celluloid film. His wife Marilyn Brakhage describes this technique as creating ‘”documents’ of optical experience’ (2010, pg. 9) and I think it’s an apt description. In Stellar the images are at first presented to us slowly before the edits rapidly accelerate and the images flash by so quickly that it’s hard to perceive them in the normal way that we perceive film images. The film’s title gives some suggestion of what the images are attempting to recreate, but ultimately the viewer is left to make up their own mind.

Finally, Brakhage’s film Commingled Containers (1996) is more meditative and contemplative. It focuses solely on images of water, but the (presumably in-camera) effects that are created are stunning and confounding in equal measure. Fred Camper (2003, pg. 25) describes Brakhage’s films as ‘redirect[ing] attention away from objects and possessiveness and toward a state of nonacquisitive, almost immaterial flow’. I think that this speaks very clearly to one of Non-Representational Theory’s aims: to ‘rupture, unsettle, animate, and reverberate rather than [to] report and represent’ (Vannini, 2015, pg. 5).

Works Cited:

Brakhage, S 1996, Commingled Containers, YouTube, viewed 02 August 2020, <https://youtu.be/ap-v_Sk20Jg>.

Brakhage, S 1993, Stellar, YouTube, viewed 02 August 2020, <https://youtu.be/L8r9t135_xY>.

Brakhage, M 2010, ‘Foreword’, in By Brakhage: An Anthology Volumes One and Two, The Criterion Collection, pp. 6-9.

Camper, F 2003, ‘The Act of Seeing…’, in By Brakhage: An Anthology Volumes One and Two, The Criterion Collection, pp. 20-27.

Dean, T 1995, A Bag of Air, YouTube, viewed 28 July 2020, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggFkslK-RXU>.

Smith, A 2016, Spring, Penguin Books Ltd.

Vannini, P 2015, Non-Representational Methodologies: Re-Envisioning Research, Routledge, Abingdon, UK.

First Sketch from Jack Rowland on Vimeo.

Here’s my first weekly sketch, based on the excerpt from David Whyte that we were given in class. The very first thing that came to mind when we were given that short excerpt was how it reminded me of another poem that I really love called Evening Poem by Alice Oswald. That poem’s final word is ‘falling’ and it’s placed by itself in its own stanza. The way that Whyte in his poem places ‘fall’ and ‘toward’ on their own lines reminded me of what Oswald did, the form in some way reflecting that downward motion of falling. I understand that this linkage is very loose, but I wanted to work in a slightly improvisational way, and so followed this first thought.

One of the first things that I did in terms of process was to look for a short snippet of my own music which could accompany the piece. I very quickly found the piano piece that I had originally created through putting some notes from a piano through granular synthesis, which gives the piece its floaty quality. I recorded this audio onto a homemade cassette tape loop which accounts for the noisy, slightly lo-fi sound. I used this format both because I appreciate its sound, but also because I thought that the imperfections it introduces into the sound, the ways that it rounds off and softens some of the frequencies, might hint at some idea of longing after the past, or at the very least a time other than your own.

The tape loop also introduces a rhythmic quality to the audio which I tried to reflect in the speed at which the poem’s text appears on screen, as well as the footage of the tape loop itself in which you can spot the tape itself steadily moving around the reels.

I decided to very simply juxtapose the two pieces of writing by having all the words of Whyte’s text disappear apart from ‘fall’ before cutting to the short excerpt from Oswald’s poem which ends with the word ‘falling’. I decided to have my reading of the excerpt be the only sound in this section, so that the excerpt from Oswald’s poem almost functions as a coda to the sketch. I also wanted to heighten this quality by having the image fade slowly to black as the text is read out.

Works Cited:

Oswald, A 2016, Evening Poem, The New Yorker, viewed 24 July 2020, <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/evening-poem-by-alice-oswald>.

Wikipedia 2020, Granular synthesis, Wikipedia, viewed 24 July 2020, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granular_synthesis>.

I chose Soft Choreography as my studio because I’ve loved film for as long as I can remember. It’s always been a big part of my life: going to the cinema was always my preferred weekend outing as a kid, and remains a very special experience regardless of what film I’m seeing. I’ve been fascinated with ‘art films’ since early high school and with filmmakers who push the medium in different directions and do something different with form. I’m hoping to explore those modes in this class.

I’m really excited to get the opportunity to work in direct collaboration with filmmakers in this class and to be able to write things especially for the form which I love so much. I’m looking forward to push my writing in new directions to accommodate the very particular medium that it will be transposed into. And I’m also looking forward to deepening and extending my knowledge of the poem and essay forms.

One of the things that I’m anticipating I’ll find most difficult is definitely understanding and interpreting the theoretical readings and then applying them to my own work. Having a preliminary look at the pieces made me apprehensive about their density, but I hope and trust that with repeated reading enriched by the class discussions that I’ll be able to come to an agreement with the theory.

In terms of strengths, I think that I bring dedication and a good work ethic to the tasks I undertake. I’m also a respectful group member/collaborator and I think that I’ll work well with my peers. I enjoy making music so could potentially bring those skills to the table, or at the very least will use my own music in the weekly sketches that we have to create. And I have a very basic grasp of filmmaking techniques and editing software which will come in handy.

One of my weaknesses is that my writing can very often be very formal, so I think that pushing it in more experimental directions could be a challenge, but a challenge that I’m really up for. I also think that my time management skills aren’t amazing and I can sometimes underestimate the amount of time that it takes to get something done well. I hope that I’ll be able to keep this under control in this class.

I’m really looking forward to everything the semester’s going to bring.