"Water is meaningless without ships and that bespeaks harbours to haven them, and men and cargoes. What I have written does not pretend to poetry. It only says what it seemed could be said. … "
- Denis Glover, 'Wellington Harbour', 1974
"the sound component to this film includes a re-reading of the poem Le Tempestaire, written in 2010 while I was living in Wellington, where I had a habit of walking along the waterfront. The title of the poem references Jean Epstein’s cinema, the title of the film the once-removed echo of that waterfront, which New Zealand writer Denis Glover also looked out onto, from his room in the hillside suburb of Mt. Victoria, while writing the 1974 book of poems, Wellington Harbour.
Le Tempestaire’s
formal structure includes snatches of songs in between lines, like a
song half-heard while walking past a café, which ghosts through memory
but doesn’t stick around long enough to embed itself as a refrain,
functioning more like a radio going off-frequency, the poem a porosity
of listening-to-language which folds more recognisable texts into its
universe.
water is meaningless without ships repeats this process again, with the (de-sequenced) poem itself acting as a ghost of a refrain within the transmitted sound. this sound also plays with the idea of natural sound within the cinematic space, both by literalising a disjuncture found within the radiophonic medium between voice and presence, and also by responding to the visual space's depiction of a field-trip to the national park near the town of Kinglake, north-east of Melbourne. This roadtrip had originally been intended as a foray to gather field recordings, but became a confrontation with silence upon the stark realisation of how extensively the whole area had been burnt out by the Black Saturday bushfires of 2009."
- Sally Ann McIntyre, 2014
---
"I was partly conceiving the work as an internal conversation
around how cinema both responds to and generates both memory and
narrative. Cinema always builds a kind of narrative, no matter whether
it's chosen or avoided as a strategy, and I've always been more
interested in how cinema's relationship to the recording apparatus meant
films could be divided into two tracks in terms of narrative: The
closed and the open, or the single meaning as opposed to the multiple.
The
dominant forms are always assidiously concerned with providing only a
single possible reading, and become readily obsessive about that
precision – for instance in the way that scriptwriting for Hollywood has
been captured for a long time by the post Syd Field et al camp that
dictates which minute of a film certain structural devices should occur.
This is a necrotising process, that kills the expressive possibilities
of the form, and replaces it with both a failed attempt at the
artificiality of forms that are not specifically linked to the
ontologies of the form (literature, theatre), and a commodity that can
be more readily exploited and controlled by its funders.
Of
course – as Robert Bresson or Jean Eustache will testify in their very
different ways – the form is more robust and more complicated than that.
Indeed part of the problem with cinema is that even the most cynical
operation of the industrialised form cannot completely dampen the
extra-narrative qualities of cinema, so even work that does attempt to
squash the life from the form will often fail to do so, as long as some
recording element remains. (Whether this is something that occurs with
purely digitally generated work is still a moot point, for this argument
I'm talking about cinema within the context of the cinematic apparatus
of camera, sound recording device and editing device).
However
the more interesting films and the more interesting process for me has
always been in terms of the cinematic open text. Because an audience
viewing cinema will always relate to it as a potential narrative, this
means there is less need to construct a narrative, unless your approach
is to dictate what response you will get. I've never wanted to do that,
it seems much more interesting to create work to whom every audience
member can have a different response than when where you impose their
response upon them. (Obviously there's a politics to this perspective
too). So part of the idea is to understand cinema as being a system for
building work of essentially infinite potential meaning, because every
audience member will have their own response.
So
the idea of this kind of work is not to dictate in advance what the
meaning is, but to allow the space for the meaning to permeate through
the juxtapositions in the work. In this case, my images of travelling to
the silence of a dead forest a couple of hours out of Melbourne gently
settle into a kind of stability next to Sally's field recordings and
reworkings of poetry through the Radio Cegeste station transmitter."
- Campbell Walker, 2014
---
Campbell Walker: field images and found drama
Sally Ann McIntyre: poetic text, voice, Mini-FM radio transmission, field recordings, 78rpm records, music boxes, vintage bakelite vacuum tube radio, theremin
collaboratively made in Melbourne, June 2011
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Campbell Walker: field images and found drama
Sally Ann McIntyre: poetic text, voice, Mini-FM radio transmission, field recordings, 78rpm records, music boxes, vintage bakelite vacuum tube radio, theremin
collaboratively made in Melbourne, June 2011
first screened as a live expanded cinema piece at KIPL gallery, West Melbourne, June 22, 2011.
other screenings:
'for a few leaves more', The Threave Cinematheque, Dunedin, November 29, 2012.
KIPL: Postmortemism #003, Westspace, Melbourne, February 14, 2013.
Dunedin Film Society, Dunedin, August 28, 2013.
