About the National Centre for Video Poetry
Hidden Histories: Film, Story, Sound
The Boy Who Struggled to Breathe grew from a single overheard fragment: an uncle mentioning a grandfather’s severe asthma, and the fear, at his birth, that he might not survive. The filmmaker never met him. What could not be asked had to be imagined instead, through breath: what happens around a family when one person’s body is fighting simply to continue, and what might pass unspoken through the generations that follow. He lived. He built a large family and rose to prominence. Decades later, he died still fighting for breath. The film does not explain this history. It breathes it.
The National Centre for Video Poetry brings together voice, moving image, sound and story.
We use video poetry as a broad term. A work might start with a poem. It may be inspired by film. Or it might originate in a saying, a story, music, a photograph, three angry sentences in a text message, a family myth, an emotion, or the impulse to shout something you have never quite managed to say.
For us, video poetry is not something that belongs primarily on the page. It is communicated through voice and rhythm, cadence and silence, image, music, sound and invocation. It tells stories we want others to hear, but can also give form to things that have been difficult to tell.
This is what we mean by Hidden Histories: Film, Story, Sound.
Before the Printed Page
Shadow of My Shadow began with a phone pointed at light moving behind a blind one night. The source of the light is never shown. The poem is spoken in whispers, hesitations and long silences; at times the voice stammers. Very little happens on screen. Yet image, voice and sound together make fear physical.
Poetry did not begin on the page.
Long before the printing press, people sang, told stories, remembered histories, persuaded, entertained, mourned and passed knowledge from one generation to another through the human voice. Lullabies and songs, fairy stories and myths, speeches, prayers, rituals and oral storytelling all belong to this history. There were, and are, griots. Contemporary forms such as rap and spoken word belong to this much longer tradition too.
Oral traditions have carried knowledge in cultures where writing was not the principal means of transmission, and among people excluded from formal education, publishing and other cultural institutions. They have also provided important spaces for women's voices and histories.
Nor is the Western canon simply a history of words silently encountered on a page. Homeric poetry emerged from oral tradition; medieval poetry was spoken, sung and performed; Shakespeare wrote language to be embodied and heard.
That history matters to the NCVP.
When we talk about poetry, we don't only mean words written on a page and then read aloud. We mean what the voice itself can do: repetition, rhythm, call and response, persuasion, story, emotion, silence, music and sound. The screen gives these traditions another place to live.
For a work created for a feminist exhibition, a musician and writer began with an original artwork and a handful of points she wanted to narrate. Then came the music, composed and recomposed around the words until neither quite belonged in the background. Sometimes the words punctuate the music; sometimes the music takes over.
Symbol, Abstraction, & the Mobile Phone
A video poem can say something directly. It can also hide something in plain sight.
Symbol, metaphor and abstraction allow us to approach experiences without necessarily explaining or identifying them. A filmmaker can speak about a family without naming the family; about violence without representing the violent event; about loss through an object, a landscape, a sound or a movement.
This is not necessarily a retreat from the subject. Sometimes abstraction allows us to go further into it.
A person may need to protect themselves, or somebody else. They may simply not want private experience turned into public information. The literal story can remain concealed while the emotional, symbolic or political meaning of the work is communicated with great force. The referent can remain concealed. The inquiry does not.
This is one of video poetry's important connections with experimental film. Image and text do not have to illustrate one another. Juxtaposition, extreme close-up, repetition, fragmentation, abstraction and sound can create associations that neither element contains alone.
Audiences participate in that process too. Put an image beside a sentence and we begin looking for a relationship between them. Change the image and the words themselves may seem to change. And none of this requires a film crew. The same exploration can begin with the camera in your phone.
Still Life began with an experience the filmmaker wanted to examine without describing literally. Its imagery arrived later and unexpectedly: the surface of a pond, slowly covered by algae. What appeared to be a protective covering was also depriving the life beneath it of air. The originating experience remains private; the film's exploration of protection, suffocation, and the uncertain boundary between the two does not.
Integration
Making something can change our relationship to an experience.
An event, memory or encounter becomes material. We write it, record it, find an image for it, alter the sequence, add sound, remove sound, make choices.
And making takes time.
During that time, we can remain in contact with an experience while doing something active with it. We are no longer only experiencing or remembering. We are selecting, shaping and creating.
For some people, this process can support self-regulation and integration. Something that felt separate, stuck or difficult to approach can be revisited and given form. It can be placed within a larger story, transformed, or eventually shared.
The work does not have to be shown publicly for this to matter.
Sometimes the act of making is the important part.
Following a devastating personal loss and a false accusation from her family, one artist made a piece using physical remnants of what she had lost: ashes, a letter, a small tag reproduced in wax. At first, the materials were unbearable to use. Working with them directly, over time, made the emotion more bearable in a way that avoiding them had not. The work marked a turning point: not resolution, but the beginning of being able to carry what had happened.
Interpretation & Witness
A work changes when somebody else encounters it.
We bring our own histories and associations to what we see and hear. An audience member may notice something the maker did not consciously intend. An artist, musician, therapist, academic or other practitioner may encounter the same work differently.
Sometimes another person's interpretation allows the maker to see a pattern in their own work for the first time.
This is why the NCVP is interested in bringing makers, interpreters and witnesses together.
Interpretation is not about establishing the single correct meaning of a work. It creates another way of looking. A symbol may recur. Two apparently unrelated films may turn out to share the same visual language. Something the maker thought belonged to one story may connect unexpectedly with another.
In two films, Endless and They Already Know, the filmmaker believed she was working with different experiences. It was only when somebody else noticed the same pattern of slatted light appearing in both that she recognised a connection between them. The films had made an association before the filmmaker consciously had.
And sometimes what matters is simpler - somebody else has seen it.
Witness can happen between a few chosen people in a room, at a workshop or screening, through an installation or festival, or through a website to an audience the maker may never meet. A work can be spoken almost as a ritual to six people. Another may travel to sixty thousand. The size of the audience is less important than the encounter.
Honoured offers heartfelt thanks for the act of witnessing, of listening, and of seeking to understand.
Make Something with us
The NCVP runs workshops, training, screenings, events and collaborative projects for people with all levels of experience.
You do not need previous filmmaking or writing experience. You don't have to arrive carrying an artwork, as long as you arrive carrying attention. And you don't need expensive equipment. A phone is enough to begin.
Join our mailing list to hear about forthcoming training, workshops, events, festivals and opportunities to make work with us.
One filmmaker built an entire piece from found footage of an iron lung: nothing was shot with her own camera. Another work began with a single leaf found on a doorstep, its brilliant surface being eaten through from within. A work can begin almost anywhere.
You do not have to begin by thinking of yourself as a poet, filmmaker or artist.
Sometimes you simply need a way in.
A rotting leaf. Tree bark. A sentence. A family story. A piece of music. Something you noticed on the way home and stopped to film.
One thing begins to speak to another. An image suggests words. Words need sound. Something you thought was only an observation turns out to contain a story.