'What are the challenges of adapting an original text for screen?' was the provocation for the panel presentations and discussion, which I was invited to take part in, at the Liberated Words Poetry Film Festival at Bristol's Arnolfini, marking national poetry day, and organised by Lucy English and Sarah Tremlett of the Creative Writing school at Bath Spa.
The panel began with Professor Philip Gross' account of his experience working with film-maker Wyn Mason on a series of short poetry films created about the River Taff and soon to become an interactive website Flow and Frame.
The idea of a filmic equivalent of haiku is interesting, and evident in the two short films Philip showed during his presentation. Also his account of the 'surface tension' that occurs when two people, experienced in their own art-forms, come to work together - reaching for something becoming of both and neither forms - and of how working with another, 'the critic', helped them to move beyond those surface tensions, as did the input of the performance artist glimpsed in the films. Philip spoke about the result as letting go of control of pace and speed - for both himself and the filmmaker, that the resulting works have room for serendipity, hence the interactivity of the website with 13 variations of poetry and image.
Philip concluded with what seemed a new way result - the resulting work being 'owned and not owned' by 'quite a lot of us'. It seems to me, listening, that the frame and flow of camera and written words have also become a methodology of frame and flow in practice and collaboration. To frame the roles and yet for what is framed within to flow out into the bigger picture of the project as a whole.
As suggested during the Q&A, the poetry film pieces could easily lend themselves to an immersive interactive video installation.
*More to follow about the other presentations... *
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