Poetry & Movies

February is an active month for Tropic Pictures! A festival screening of THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE GRACKLES, a poetry reading by yours truly at Margo Jones Theatre, and a new movie titled A SPIRAL WAY shoots several days this month.

On Friday, February 13, at 7:30PM the Tropic Pictures short movie THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE GRACKLES plays as part of The Dallas Medianale Festival. The screening is at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary (The MAC) and this is a free event. There is a terrific line-up of films and videos involved, including work by Ben Russell, Harun Farocki, Mike Stoltz, and many others  For more info, please see The Dallas Medianale website.  The MAC is located at 3120 McKinney Ave., Dallas, 75204

On Monday, February 16, I will be reading new poems at The Margo Jones Theatre in Fair Park as part of the Pandora's Box Poetry Showcase. The reading is at 8:00PM and this, too, is a free event. Although they do appreciate a donation, and suggest $10.00. The Margo Jones Theatre is located at 1121 First Ave. Dallas, 75210

For your first look at the new movie A SPIRAL WAY, click here: A Spiral Way

As always, for more information check out www.TropicPictures.com and find Tropic Pictures on Facebook.

Photography Review

My review of the Mike Osborne exhibition "Monopoly" recently appeared in Glasstire.

First Look: "A Spiral Way"

Here is your first look at the latest Tropic Pictures short film! The title is "A Spiral Way." To be completed in Spring, 2015. More details soon!

First Look at "A Spiral Way"

https://vimeo.com/115124341

"The Disappearance of the Grackles" Discussed, Plus Poetry

It is an honor that the new Tropic Pictures short film "The Disappearance of the Grackles" will play at CentralTrak Gallery in Dallas on December 4 and will also be part of the Dallas Medianale in January, 2015.

In this clip from a screening and poetry reading at Malvern Books in Austin, I discuss the film before reading a few poems.

Film discussion plus poetry

Film Review: "1972"

My article on the Sarah Morris film 1972 has been published at Glasstire. http://glasstire.com/2014/11/07/sarah-morris-1972/

Collaboration: Or Fruitful Misunderstandings

I'm excited about the completion of a new short film titled THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE GRACKLES. It is the result of a writing collaboration between Jason Crow and me, a visual collaboration between Jason, Miles Ryan, and me, and a musical collaboration between Brian Tomerlin and Andrew Chapman. Here's the kicker: not once were we all in the same room together. The closest we came was a discussion over coffee between Jason, Miles and me -- which was rather brief.

Collaboration is difficult. I think the tension and misunderstandings that occur in a collaborative work are necessary for the betterment of that work. Collaboration is not group-think, but rather the collective input of individuals acting as individuals. Individuality in art is one engine that gives art its strength. 

There is something in every art object that resists being made. The conversion of feeling into meaning requires physical shaping -- some cutting and pounding. A chief role of the director is to cut and pound. The tension with collaborators comes from turning the idealized form in the minds of individuals into the sensible, serviceable form that exists to serve the narrative. The narrative ought to maintain each separate spark of inspiration that brought the collaborating individuals together in the first place. But the thing with movies -- or the thing with my understanding of movies -- is that they are for public consumption. The constructed narrative -- the thing shaped by cutting and pounding -- trumps the private spark of the individual. I think it's true of any art that's shared: service to the public spirit overrides service to the individual artist or individual artists working in collaboration.  

Here is a bit of information about how we worked together. Jason Crow (producer / co-Writer) is capable, from a flat-footed position, of launching into a far-reaching dissertation about Grackles as a species. His intense interest in the natural world is contagious. He was moved to document what he knew about Grackles in the spirit of altering typical perceptions -- a species so common as to be overlooked, or the species as a nuisance bird. I proposed this scenario: what would happen if all the Grackles disappeared? And the project left the dissertation realm for the story realm. It is now a short film in three parts: a dream sequence, followed by a story about absence -- the strange disappearance of all the Grackles in the world, followed by the story of their unexplained return, which describes the moment when a feeling of awe begins to fade from an awe-inspiring event, and people go back to their routines. I have a pronounced interest in moments after some catastrophe or joyous occurrence has broken through the status quo and seems to have upset the flow of time, when, soon after, those heightened feelings settle down again and somehow people find their way back into routines. Wonder, perseverance, and routine are fascinating aspects of human nature.

Miles Ryan (Producer / co-Editor) sorted through a large amount of Grackle footage shot by Jason, who is interested in following the birds and documenting their wondrous flight patterns, and assembled a dynamic and fascinating sequence. That sequence stands as the opening dream sequence of the finished film. Jason delivers the voice over narration. He works in an impromptu manner. He makes notes, but speaks largely from invention. He and Miles worked hard culling down Jason's numerous thoughts on record into the manageable narration we hear in part one. 

For my part, nothing exists in a movie before it is text. I write everything down, in screenplay format, employing poetic language. It is from the text that I get ideas about images, transitions, and shot duration. I wrote narration for parts two and three and had Jason over to my house to record it. I shot images from my small screenplay independently, and yet was always cognizant of what Miles had assembled. Miles, like Jason, is an improvisational thinker; he recapitulates images and existing footage by instinct. Whereas I am a method man.  

I mentioned tension is necessary in collaboration. But by "tension," I don't mean animosity or even argument. Differences keep things from getting too smooth, from resembling something made from group-think. Jason, Miles, and I have different processes. We didn't make the film we each had in mind as individuals. We made a film that describes our thinking as individuals in collaboration, and the result, I feel, is something special. The narrative has become its own thing, and is now available for public consumption.

The music is a very important part of the narrative. Music for the dream sequence was composed and performed by Brian Tomerlin. I love this music because it isn't the etherial type music one usually hears when watching a dream sequence. It is highly mechanical, which serves the broader narrative in a special way. For Part two and three, I employed Andrew Chapman, who scored and performed for two films I made that have gone to festival. I love the way Andrew works. What follows is text from an email I sent to him in the early stages of his compositional work. We wanted to preserve the aptness of Brian's work, but also create something new -- music to invite a certain system of emotions specific to story developments in parts two and three. 

"The movie is a down is up, up is down sort of scenario. It is about a moment soon after a miracle, when the awe effect has faded and people start to go back to their routines. Here, the miracle is grackles disappearing, then returning. All in all, sort of a strange thing to rate a miracle, and yet no explanation for the occurrence.

A miracle or awesome event, if you've experienced one, breaks into your life and throws over the status quo. An up is down, down is up sort of perception. As a way to explore this, the movie has topsy turvy elements.

The dream sequence shows cityscapes, industry, and employs highly mechanized music, complete with whirs and thrums you might hear on a factory floor - - stuff your wouldn't ordinarily associate with sleep or dream activity.  The next sequence, an awake sequence titled "Absence," seems quite dreamy in comparison. There is space and light and a variety of growing things and natural colors. One would expect more visual hints of bleakness and blight for the situation of a species falling off the earth, but nature goes on, intrepid. There are no animals of any kind, but somehow the world seems entirely like itself, no real differences for the absence. The last sequence is "Return". But has no fanfare, no rainbows or other marvel signs. Just commuters going to work, grackles in the parking lot - - not what you would expect from a miracle, just normalcy. 

The dream music has a quality of "otherness" about it, but it frustrates ideas about sleep and dreaming. The absence segment may suggest an elegiac tone, but should also be subversive and frustrate that tone - - spin against the way it drives, so to speak. The return segment might suggest triumph, but should also act subversively against such a tone. What has happened is one mystery among countless mysteries in time that only moves one way. As beautiful as life is, and as dangerous and curious, we are all stumbling forward, mounting prominences just as we suffer jags and drop offs, somehow leveling off into routine, until a time when all our routines come to an end. And that is what the final line is about. How to stress the importance of life without overemphasizing or turning life into a purely mental activity, over-thinking the amazing situation of life to the point of abstraction, reducing it to strips of images and ambitions in the mind."

Is Andrew's music the aural equivalent of theses ideas? No -- thank goodness!! Andrew, acting as an individual, made his own informed and inspired choices about the music, just as Brian had done.   

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE GRACKLES is, in my mind, a small triumph of collaboration. A sum greater, and somehow much different, than its parts. I'm glad to report viewers can make up their own minds about this soon enough.  On December 4th, The film will play in a program that features theses excellent filmmakers and media artists: Paul Bryan, Colette Copeland, and Michael A. Morris. The program is part of a series called Next Topic at CentralTrak gallery, Dallas, TX.  

A Short Film is NOT a Calling Card

I reject the idea put by certain indie gurus and distribution strategists that one ought to think of one's short films as calling cards for feature films, or the more likely alternative, a creative or technical position in advertising. 

I think of my short films as complete works. I submit them as works of art. That is to say, the skillful remnants of psychological and spiritual processes -- my own and those of my collaborators. Beyond the ranging subject matter of each film I've made, each one stands as an allegory for the drive to make subversive contact with the world. By saying "subversive" I don't mean aggressively troublesome. I mean it like a situation of working underground. It is exploring the status quo from underneath, searching some oddity or hasty patch job to push against and upset things on the surface, if only for a brief moment. The goal is that the viewer will experience a spell of unsettledness in his our her routine, a thrilling sort of disturbance, and will glimpse some crack in the fabric, an interruption through which new information shines.

I say with much emphasis that the "something new" isn't the film itself.  I'm committed to this notion that, in addition to the images, stories, and poems that make up the subjects of these films,  each film is an allegory for more ambitious drives. The "something new" is arrived at when the audience is hospitable to these drives and reads the film not only for its content but the stuff outside its content -- messages traveling outside the form, alerting the viewer's regulation instincts that something is pushing, pulling, trying to distort the status quo. And the effect of this displacing interruption is, if one is open to the experience, an interesting ride. Best result is when the trip arrives at delight, even though the passage might first pass through gritty places and haunted ones.  

Is this big talk, or tough talk? I don't think so. Any literary or visual artist, no matter his or her level of skill, will cop to sending messages about the psychological, spiritual, and physical processes that travel on a layer just above the matter of the thing he or she has created. The inner drives of the individual or individuals working in collaboration are somehow present and interacting with the object, and this interaction is the messaging stuff that converts the object into art.       

And so why are filmmakers judged on matters of distribution and revenue? It is a situation prolonged by many festivals, as often as not festivals that call for "truly independent" or "maverick" filmmakers. Too many short film programmers are wearing a coat of two colors -- clashing ones. The programmer shows one side of the coat to micro budget filmmakers (those truly independent types) to lure entry. More specifically, the entry fee. The second color is flashed once the program is set; it is a lure to audiences. The business of "truly independent" and "maverick" falls away in favor of shorts that model the filmmaker's feature-length film or advertising ambitions. The "unteachable" stuff of the artist, that is the way of examining foundational moods and drives with surprising images  rather than all too familiar ones, unusual articulation, shot duration that doesn't fall in pace with established patterns -- all this gets overlooked for filmmakers rich enough to afford the vogue tools, such as the sepia or tobacco-toned filters employed on EVERY interior, not matter the mood, high contrast treatments added to any action sequence, even if it is just throwing a softball, and tri-toned coloring effects that can invest any film with the over-calculated quirkiness of a bank card commercial. Doesn't matter the banal storytelling, so long as it looks like something that might play for the bank ad or at the multiplex, and you're in.

I should immediately add that I participate in festivals and have done so for years. Many festivals do serve a civic purpose, and I identify with the ones that rate visionary aspects of motion pictures over commercial ones. Too often the trouble is that festivals want to expand. More venues, more sponsors, that sort of thing. I don't understand why growth of a festival is explicitly linked to the overly familiar interactions, editing beats, and "cinematic" looks of TV commercials. Why this idea that anyone making a short film aspires to an aesthetic status quo? 

Someone looking for fresh ideas in movies is right in one's decision to survey short films. We've hardly come to the end of the line in ways to convert feelings into meanings though motion pictures. You'll probably see a more focused look at contemporary values and rigorous experimenting in a program of shorts than one of feature films. And the best place once can find this sort of thoughtfulness on display is at smaller festivals, or curated events at galleries or museums. Beware those large institutions that boast "truly independent" or "maverick" ambitions; more often than not the short films in those programs trot out the emotion levels and imagery out of commercials you by pass with DVR.     

I realize I've been speaking in blanket terms and in a general way. But thanks to digital distribution and video-sharing sites, the reader may easily compare the latest short film winners at the institutional festivals with the inspired achievements of outsiders. I think the chief difference is that recent winners at institutional festivals work from a drive of earnestness, a feeling of wanting to belong - - and to be seen in that belonging. There is no strangeness in the vision, no play.

To play is the thing (If I may rework the phrase). Thomas Aquinas remarks that there are two kinds of act which have no ends outside themselves: contemplation and play. Most of us will agree that contemplation is essential but not gratifyingly cinematic. But play IS gratifyingly cinematic. I'm bored with the earnestness that gets laurels at festivals and want to see more play in shorts programming. The value of play doesn't depend on established traditions or even futurity. The sort of play I'm talking about here is intellectual play. Serious play. A sense of wonder that  has a subversive relationship with customs and traditions. Again, I am not speaking of an aggressively troublesome temperament. Rather, a temperament that presses against exclusivity to make a hole. An interruption that lets more light in.       

My rating for a good short film is one that stands fine on its own, not a feeling of a highlights reel. One that, like play, is its own sort of act. It is a complete work and not simply a calling card.

Anyone wanting to learn more about my projects, please visit the Tropic Pictures web site. Or find Tropic Pictures on Facebook.