Abstract
This chapter looks at Susan Kemp’s documentary Nort Atlantik Drift: A Portrait of Robert Alan Jamieson and Roseanne Watt’s filmpoem Quoys, and examines how the recording, filming and transenunciation of certain designated space ambiences contribute to shifting the artwork from site to non-site and from the experience of space—here, Shetland—to that of spatiality by relying on a variety of materials, processes and media including text, image and sound.
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Notes
- 1.
Steve McCaffery’s 1998 essay titled ‘Voice in Extremis’: ‘The twentieth century presents two distinct scenarios for the voice in poetry. One is a primal identity, culturally empowered to define the property of person. This is a phenomenological voice that serves in its self-evidence as the unquestionable guarantee of presence—when heard and understood through its communication of intelligible sounds this voice is named conscience. The other scenario—renegade and heterological—requires the voice’s primary drive to be persistently away from presence. This second is a thanatic voice triply destined to lines of flight and escape, to the expenditure of pulsional intensities, and to its dispersal in sounds between body and language’ (McCaffery 1998, p. 163).
- 2.
The notes section of the book mentions an audio-visual counterpart to the collection, which features recordings ‘RAJ’ made of the poems in 2006 ‘synchronized’ with a selection of photographs and available for download from a website that appears to have been offline for years. Jamieson, Robert Alan (2007) Nort Atlantik Drift (Edinburgh: Luath Press).
- 3.
See Italo Calvino’s much quoted excerpt from Six Memos: ‘We may distinguish between two types of imaginative process: the one that starts with the word and arrives at the visual image, and the one that starts with the visual image and arrives at its verbal expression’ (Calvino 1988, p. 83).
- 4.
Fil Ieropoulos (2010) The Film Poem, PhD Thesis, University of the Creative Arts, Kent. Available online: https://www.academia.edu/20849128/The_Film_Poem. Accessed 9 January 2019. See also Alan Riach’s ‘On film and film poetry’, The National, 31 March 2017.
- 5.
As argued by Wees, ‘the poetry-film expands upon the specific denotations of words and the limited iconic references of images to produce a much broader range of connotations, associations, metaphors. At the same time, it puts limits on the potentially limitless possibilities of meaning in words and images, and directs our responses toward some concretely communicable experience’ (Wees 1984, p. 109). Wees then proceeds with early examples from avant-garde poetry-films by Man Ray (L’Etoile de Mer, 1928), Marcel Duchamp (Anemic Cinema, 1926), Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand (Manhatta, 1921), Hugh Parker Guiler (Bells of Atlantis, 1952) and so on.
- 6.
Alastair Cook (2010): ‘The combination of film and poetry is an attractive one. For the poet, perhaps a hope that the filmmaker will bring something to the poem: a new audience, a visual attraction, the laying of way markers; for the filmmaker, a fixed parameter to respond to, the power of a text sparking the imagination with visual connections and metaphor. […] The filming of poetry […] cannot merely be a juxtaposing of the two but an organised symbiosis, a series of gentle signposts, an undercurrent of narrative embellishing the poet’s intentions’. http://filmpoem.com/about/. Accessed 9 January 2019. All following quotes by Alastair Cook come from the same source.
- 7.
See Gilles Deleuze on ‘the components of the image’ and on the ‘noiselessless’ of the silent film: ‘The silent image is composed from the seen image, and the intertitle which is read (second function of the eye). The intertile includes, among other elements, speech-acts […]. Whilst the seen image kept and developed something natural, took on the natural aspect of things and beings’ (Deleuze 1985, p. 225).
- 8.
On the production of acousmatic and electronic soundscapes, see also Tom Merilion’s short film titled 48 Hours in Shetland, produced in 2016.
- 9.
While I choose to use spatial terminology, Fil Ieropoulos prefers more literary terms such as ‘visual syntax’ and ‘visual phrasing’ (Ieropoulos 2010, p. 2).
- 10.
‘In short, pure optical and sound situations can have two poles—objective and subjective, real and imaginary, physical and mental. But they give rise to opsigns and sonsigns, which bring the poles into continual contact, and which, in one direction or the other, guarantee passages and conversions, tending towards a point of indiscernibility (and not of confusion)’ (Deleuze 1985, p. 6; 9).
- 11.
‘Movement in space expresses a whole which changes, rather as the migration of birds expresses a seasonal variation. Everywhere that a movement is established between things and persons, a variation or a change is established in time, that is, in an open whole which includes them and into which they plunge. […] the movement-image is necessarily the expression of a whole; it forms in this sense an indirect representation of time. This is the very reason that the movement-image has two out-of-fields: the one relative, according to which movement concerning the set of an image is pursued or can be pursued in a larger set of the same nature; the other absolute, according to which movement, whatever the set which it is taken as part of, refers to a changing whole which it expresses’ (Deleuze 1985, pp. 237–8).
- 12.
Doontöm: a downpour of rain, from John Graham’s Shetland Dictionary.
- 13.
On the subject of Roy Lichtenstein’s verbovisual pop art, Liliane Louvel writes: ‘Lichtenstein’s goal is to reposition color within its proper role and to make it also an essential component of painting, what gives it its flesh, in contrast with drawing, which represents its skeleton or framework. In the interval between color and voice is to be found rhythm, a spatio-temporal syncopation, that of the body caught between the interiority of the voice that comes out of it and the exteriority of the color that penetrates it. We are still in Escoubas’s rhythmic interval, the “spatio-rhythmic sharp”. When color becomes rhythm and line, drawing, and even writing (as in Kandinsky or Klee), synthesis is close to being achieved’ (Louvel 2011, p. 181).
- 14.
In Deleuze’s words again, when the image shifts from the ‘organic’ to the ‘crystalline regime’: ‘Two regimes of the image can be contrasted point by point; an organic regime and a crystalline regime, or more generally a kinetic regime and a chronic regime. The first point concerns descriptions. A description which assumes the independence of its objects will be called “organic”. It is not a matter of knowing if the object is really independent, it is not a matter of knowing if these are exteriors or scenery. What counts is that, whether these are scenery or exteriors, the setting described is presented as independent of the description which the camera gives of it, and stands for a supposedly pre-existing reality. In contrast, what we will call a crystalline description stands for its object, replaces it, both creates and erases it […] and constantly gives way to other descriptions which contradict, displace, or modify the preceding ones’ (Deleuze 1985, p. 126).
- 15.
See the 13-minute dual interview of Kemp and Jamieson that was shot for Writerstories.tv at the first Shetland showing of the film in Sandness on Friday 29 August 2014: https://vimeo.com/105014783. Accessed 9 January 2019.
References
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Deleuze, Gilles. [1985] 1989. Cinema 2. The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Ieropoulos, Fil. 2010. The Film Poem. PhD Thesis, University of the Creative Arts, Kent. https://www.academia.edu/20849128/The_Film_Poem. Accessed 16 Mar 2019.
Jamieson, Robert Alan. 2007. Nort Atlantik Drift. Poyims Ati’ Shaetlin. Edinburgh: Luath.
Kemp, Susan. 2014. Nort Atlantik Drift: A Portrait of Robert Alan Jamieson. https://nortatlantikdrift.com/. Accessed 9 Jan 2019.
Louvel, Liliane. 2011. Poetics of the Iconotext. Trans. Laurence Petit. Farnham: Ashgate.
Lowndes, Sarah. 2014. All Art is Political. Writings on Performative Art. Edinburgh: Luath.
McCaffery, Steve. 1998. Voice in Extremis. In Close Listening. Poetry and the Performed Word, ed. Charles Bernstein, 162–177. New York: Oxford University Press.
Riach, Alan. 2017. On Film and Film Poetry. The National, March 31.
Watt, Roseanne. 2015. Quoys, Unst (Filmpoem). https://vimeo.com/151152119. Accessed 16 Mar 2019.
Wees, William. 1984. The Poetry Film. In Words and Moving Image: Essays on Verbal and Visual Expression in Film and Television, eds. William Wees and Michael Dorland, 105–113. Montréal: Médiatexte Publications.
Websites
Cook, Alastair. http://filmpoem.com/. Accessed 16 Mar 2019.
Kemp, Susan. Nort Atlantik Drift. https://nortatlantikdrift.com/ Accessed 16 Mar 2019.
Watt, Roseanne. http://kishiewife.tumblr.com/, https://vimeo.com/roseannewatt. Accessed 16 Mar 2019.
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Manfredi, C. (2019). Filming Space: Transenunciation as Re-production. Susan Kemp’s Nort Atlantik Drift: A Portrait of Robert Alan Jamieson and Roseanne Watt’s Quoys. In: Nature and Space in Contemporary Scottish Writing and Art. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18760-6_8
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