Einsenstein criticises Griffith for...having conceived of...unity in a completely extrinsic way as a unity of collection, the gathering together of juxtaposed parts, and not as a unity of production, a cell which produces its own parts by division, differentiation; for having interpreted opposition as an accident and not as the internal motive force by which the divided unity forms a new unity on another level....Eisenstein retains Griffith's idea of an organic composition or assemblage of movement-images: from the general situation [situation d'ensemble] to the transformed situation, through the development and transcendence of the oppositions. But it is true that Griffith did not see the dialectical nature of the organism and its composition. The organic is indeed a great spiral, but the spiral should be conceived of 'scientifically' and not empirically, in terms of a law of genesis, growth and development.

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1, The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (first published in France in 1983). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, pp.32-33.

In my exploration of the potential of video in the production of a visual moving-poem, I have surely relied on juxtaposition. The field of film is so vast I didn't know where to begin. I had to teach myself the editing software as I sought ways to present my poetry in an enhanced videopoetic form. With the little footage I shot, I created videopoetry montages of essentially juxtapositions - images, moving or slowed or stilled, layered over each other with various opacities, tracks of the reading of the poetry and sometimes the visual text itself, and music. I hoped that through intelligent juxtapositions I might arrive at a unity of form that disassembled even as it assembled a series of images and thoughts through its duration (meaning in the techniques of layering where there is a new unity that, because you can see the different layers, maintains a separation of the parts that constitute it).

I tried to keep my videopoems short. As I strived for simplicity and enough activity to keep the viewer watching, I perhaps forgot what Deleuze speaks of.

I constructed rather than composed. I layered juxtaposed images rather than creating from a vision that emanates its unity from within.

But this is modern art - collages of images, juxtapositions of ideas, thoughts, various forms of intersplicing the conversations of the culture. It's okay to allow oneself to swim in this field of rich imageries in diverse fields and to take from here and there as one constructs a piece.

When I write a poem, I begin with an image and then allow the images, ideas to develop of their own volition - I never know where the poem is going, or how it will get wherever it might. I do not live my life with teleologies (goals, ends in mind) and nor does my poetry proceed this way. This way of working is also how I compose videopoems. I don't storyboard, or have any preconceived ideas of what images or footage I might go out and videotape to express whatever it is that is emerging.

Rather, my videopoetique is closer to something created out of found art (even if I've shot all the video), or at least that's how I've approached it thus far.

In my profile at YouTube I wrote:

To me, the videopoem turns back the monstration of film, in which narrative develops visually without language. It attempts to marry word and image. The true videopoem, in my view, is not of pictorial scenes illustrating the narratorial sequences of poetry, but of unique and different partners who combine in a new art form. We move beyond the illustrator's art. We are not 'giving a visual' for 'a poetic line.' The two, visual and verbal, connect not as simile, like to like, or allegory, this represents that, but as metaphor, surprising leaps that unfold new possibilities.

And this I still emphatically mean. We are exploring a new art form.

But reading Deleuze's book -Deleuze, where I turn for ideas, for philosophical depth- has caused me to think of ways to express unities by considering opposites like these: construction and composition; found and built; accidental and planned; juxtaposition of found images and organic unity; and so on.



A small collection of my videopoems, beginning with the most recent.

A path of fallen, frozen red Maple leaves slowly slides and eddies before me like a stellar star cluster, while I remain still.

Like a La Scala, the old one in Milan, I spend a sleepless night reviewing repertoires, operas, songs, stories, but it's inconclusive.

-
A River
of Stones

A poetry of what we do in our ordinary hours. I find the process of film interesting, especially relationships between characters-those interconnections, in their imagined and real manifestations. Sometimes (when I make myself get out pen and paper) I pause a film and quickly sketch the characters. These sketches are not meant to depict the actual film or actors in any kind of realistic way, or even be recognizable. They are dramas, really, to which I add my own words. You can imagine what is happening. If anything, these simple pieces are meant to be evocative: springboards, synchedoches, inductive rather than deductive, they need you to finish their stories.

Poem Paintings

(I had thought to collect my artpieces with poems, words, where the visual and verbal combine, that I've uploaded to Picasa, but, ahh. So it's growing of its own accord. :-)

the thickest boughs, heavy with Titanium white spread with a fat brush - no paint falling out of the sky at the moment

'The Sun Falls Before Dark,' 17.8cmx 23.9cm, 7" x 9", India ink, pencil, archival paper.

...the sun falls before dark,
folds of grace.

(written in the bridge: 'walls, walls, walls, indecision, indecision'; in back of bridge, 'dirt, dirt'; on the grass, 'grass, grass.' etc.)


'The Sun Falls Before Dark,' the barebones sketch, 17.8cmx 23.9cm, 7" x 9", archival ink, archival paper.

I drew it in near-dark without proper reading glasses with a Micron 05 pen that I've not used before. (The finished one up top was drawn in with India ink, and coloured with Castelli-Faber watercolour pencils.)

Who are they? what is happening?

The train slices the Wedgewood blue and white,
a metal icicle.

Blowing snow dust glitters,
ghosts sweeping the windows.

My wandering thoughts crumble in the reflections of a mirror placed between the snow landscape and white sky.

-
A River
of Stones

My habit is to turn off the heat every night. After the power failure at dawn this morning, man it was frigid, I am reconsidering.

(I live on an upper floor in an apartment with electric heat. Très expensive! The heaters are controlled in each room by a thermostat. The lowest setting is 5˚C. A lot of heat travels upwards through the building. My daughter and I both have winter weight down duvets that are super warm. If the heat is on, she will open the window, even in the middle of winter! I have a heated blanket that I use to warm up my bed, though even on low it is usually too hot for the whole night. However, a 3 hour power failure in an already cold apartment was downright frigid. When the electricity came back on, I turned up *all* the thermostats to 20˚C for awhile, just because.)

At night I turn off the heat, crawl under a heated blanket. The room air is grey at dawn, the cat, dog and I, shivering, cold, a power failure.

-
A River
of Stones