As I've hinted in a few places on this blog I am currently in the process of making a film that is intended to capture some of the events of the revived Cowslip Sunday - but also to document the period of time between January 1st and May 6th (this year's 'Cowslip Sunday) showing a landscape and a community enduring Winter and preparing for Spring. The project is still evolving to a certain extent but here I want to outline how the idea came about.
As part of my Masters degree at Nottingham Trent University - a course entitled 'An exploration of poetry as a visual form' - I wanted to explore the way artists and poets had used poetic texts as forms of visual art. I also wanted to be involved in the creation of pieces of visual art that used poetic texts as sources of inspiration. Over the first year of my study I had come up with a few proposals for poetry-based arts projects (for example 'Byron in Nottingham' and 'Poetry in Motion' - both of which I will blog about later). But whilst I found that the ideas were being received enthusiastically, actually getting anyone interested enough to fund anything was proving to be a lot more difficult. We live in economically very uncertain times - with the arts being particularly badly hit - not the ideal time to be proposing new and 'untried' art projects.
At the same time - during the summer of 2011 - I was personally beginning to really feel the pinch financially. I work as a self-employed graphic designer and was finding work increasingly scarce. This meant that I had little or no expendable income - certainly not anything I could dedicate to producing samples of work to persuade people or organisations to fund some 'Poetry Seen' project.
Frustrated by these financial restrictions - and feeling under pressure to come up with a project that seemed appropriate to my Masters study - I decided that creating a film revolving around Cowslip Sunday could meet that criteria; by challenging me and allowing me to explore new skills.
It had always been my intention to document what I was doing on my course, either through photography or video. Before starting the course I had bought a camera (that had HD video capacity) specifically for that purpose. It seemed to me that circumstances now dictated this 'documenting' process might need to be the focus of my degree. As it has turned out, the award of a grant to produce an art installation as part of Cowslip Sunday has taken the pressure off me a little:
http://poetryseen-in-lambley.blogspot.com/2012/02/poetry-seen-at-cowslip-sunday.html
- but the film project has nevertheless become an important part of my Masters.
http://poetryseen-in-lambley.blogspot.com/2012/02/poetry-seen-at-cowslip-sunday.html
- but the film project has nevertheless become an important part of my Masters.
But I don't think the idea of actually making a film simply came out of nowhere. Sometime during 2011 I had watched the film 'sleep furiously' - without thinking that it might provide a source of inspiration. As it turned out, its understated portrayal of a small, remote farming community obviously struck a chord with me. Perhaps without realising, I was influenced by the way in which the film seemed at ease with the simple representation of a small community and its day-to-day activities - and displayed no anxiety that its subject matter was so seemingly down-to-earth.
You can read some of the (mostly positive) critical reception of 'sleep furiously', at http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/sleep_furiously/
It was also obvious to me that the title of the film was well chosen - and may have been an important part in the film's development. It takes its name from Noam Chomsky’s famous example of a sentence that’s grammatically correct but semantically nonsensical: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
I think this notion, that each element can give the impression of a coherent whole without necessarily having any unified and collective meaning, relieved the film-maker of any need to construct a linear narrative - freeing him to present a series of scenes, connected or not, and leave the viewer to make connections - or not.
Looking back it's clear that another distinct source of inspiration for making the film was one of the Generic Lectures for the Masters course. This was delivered by Christian Payne - otherwise known as 'Documentally'. Christian is a self-styled photographer, videographer, social technologist and mobile media maker and in his lecture he made the idea of single-handedly creating media content seem both viable and exciting, though I didn't at that time see this as relating directly to me or my Masters project.
Here's a link to a recent upload by Documentally - in which he responds to the question 'What makes online video different from ordinary TV?':
What came out of the 'Documentally' lecture at NTU was the way in which the increasing availability of technology - and the way in which much of that technology is evolving - meant that almost anyone was able to produce video and audio work of a high quality (assuming some level of competence and skill on behalf of the operator) and that this has created a kind of 'democratisation' of the media.
It was clear that the potential of this was exciting; it meant that traditional mainstream media - television and newspapers and such-like - owned as they are by a wealthy elite and historically happy to perpetuate the 'dominant discourse' that maintains the status quo of power - would no longer go unchallenged in their representation of 'truth'. And of course another technological development - the internet - is the perfect outlet for such material. No wonder the possibilities of the internet excites mainstream media - but at the same time slightly bewilders and terrifies it.
I'm not suggesting that I had any subversive aspirations for my film project; for my purposes the challenge was to use a piece of relatively cheap and easily available technology to attempt to create a piece of film of a reasonably high standard - of a subject and event that the mainstream media might be unaware of or not particularly interested in.
In my next blog I will give an outline of how I see the structure of the Cowslip Sunday film that I'm currently working on.
