FRIDAY FILM AND VIDEO POEM: 'outside my black hole' by Steven McCabe

direct link: outside my black hole by Steven McCabe

outside my black hole (2011) is a visual poetry film juxtaposing urban traffic, ink drawings, and dance. It features the poetry and drawings of Steven McCabe, who is a Canadian visual artist, poet, filmmaker and arts educator.

Steven works with a team to produce his superb film poems. However he manages this collaboration financially, hopefully with grants and backers, the results are nothing short of magnificent. Steven McCabe's film poems are among the best works in this genre being produced in Canada today.

If you would like to explore the film poetry of this multidisciplinary, multi-media Canadian artist and poet and director, check out his channel at YouTube; all his films are also listed at his website.

I would urge you to watch outside my black hole, the filmography is stunning, and then to play it again, but close your eyes and listen.

Steven McCabe is a poet at the height of his powers. This poem interweaves a lifetime of reflection, writing, feeling, and, listening to it, I think, it can't get any richer than this. Or more simple.

It is as if a mythopoeic poet has introduced the simplicity of Zen meditation into his oeuvre. The cascade of images that collide and separate, echo and reverberate, from prehistory through to the fast-paced, urban computer-literate world of hyper-speeds, terrorisms, and space travel is read without drama in an even voice paced to the accompanying visual images and is as mesmerizing as it is breath-taking.

In the film, the drive through the city at night where the lights take on the quality of dream images of inner light opens with translucent circles that feel like we are entering a tunnel. The mysterious dancer in red echoes the kinetic qualities of the poem's images. She is often partially presented, for instance she is dancing with her arms, or as the vivid red petals of a dancer who we don't see all of.

The most stunning aspect visually for me is the way Steven's drawings are presented. If you cut out an image in Photoshop and save it on a transparent background as a .psd file, you can layer that image into Final Cut Pro. Perhaps this was the technique used here.

The drawings appear and disappear like icons in a hallucinated reality, as if they have come directly out of the symbolic unconscious. They are presented exactly as they are, only cut from their pages, and collaged into the film. They appear as tribal totems, inscribed with hermeneutic symbols, the dense black India ink lines layered sometimes into cave-like forms where figures appear.

I've seen some of these images at sites where Steven has posted them and have been awed by their resonances with ancient Greek myth, Indigenous Native American myth and spirituality, the archetypes of Jung's depth psychology, Surrealism, and their impenetrable raw emotive power. The scenes they depict are ones of rupture, hope, connection. Despair, yes, but it transforms into the living moment of now.

Nothing remains as it is in McCabe's work, but is always transforming, as he uncovers layers, exploring the self as an archeology of personal and collective memories.

In outside my black hole, we find a central metaphor of seeing, in our rushed modern lives, caught in a black hole that sucks the promise of our ancestry into its high speed vortex also becomes the black pupil of our eyes, yours and mine, that crucial tunnel that enables us to see the world, and where the world enters us.

Our pupils, black holes, are enlarged at night, to let in more light, and we see this echoed in the nighttime shots, the glazes of hypnotic lights just on the edge of blur. We are immersed in a "poetry noir," as he writes in his notes, and see with our night vision.

And yet, as he quotes Eliot's The Hollow Men,

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars

In an email, Steven wrote, that, besides his Artist's Statement for the show at Propeller (reproduced below), "the video of course also deals with a rather grim assessment of where we are at in this time of history as a species."


outside my black hole was screened at Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts (Toronto) in Oct/Nov 2011 as the installation component of Steven McCabe's exhibition A Cathartic Document showing 66 new ink drawings created during 2010-2011.

Video editing & technical support @ A Cathartic Document by Konrad Skręta
Poetry/drawings/narration Steven McCabe
Dance Paula Skimin
Music composed and performed by William Beauvais & Barry Prophet
Director of Photography Eric Gerard
Editing Konrad Skręta
© 2011 Steven McCabe



from Propeller's website:

Steven McCabe

A Cathartic Document