SELFIE WITH MARILYN from sarahtremlett on Vimeo.
Selfie with Marilyn centres on an older Marilyn Monroe talking to her younger self – Norma Jeane, through the perceptive and evocative writing of poet Heidi Seaborn. In the poetry film Marilyn (and Norma Jeane) are played by non-binary artist Hatti Rees, who is known for creating numerous online personas and alien creatures. This poetry film was produced by The Visible Poetry Project, New York for the April 2020 poetry month project. Filmmakers are selected who then choose a poem and poet to work with, to create a poetry film. I am very grateful to the organizers for giving me the opportunity to make this film; to be able to link up Heidi's memorable writing in the poem “Snapping a Selfie” with Hatti's gift for taking on personas.
ALL Review had a chance to talk with filmmaker Sarah Tremlett about "Selfie with Marilyn," surprises, and video poetry in general.
You have literally written the book on video poetry—The Poetics of Poetry Film. Can you give our readers a bit of history about the form?
The video poem or poetry film is a short film with the moving image, poetry, either as voiceover and/or text- on-screen, and a soundscape. They are often three to five minutes long which is a time limit that has become defined by festival screenings, more than anything.
You will hear mentioned poetry films, video poems, videopoems and film poems.
The film poem is, as it was originally defined by avant-garde artists in Paris during the 1920s and the silent film era, a short film primarily without words which focuses on rhythms and light. In terms of including poetry in film: there are examples of short films containing written poetry as intertitles from the early days of cinema, the first one being The Night Before Xmas (1906) by the Edison film company and written by Clement Clarke Moore. These were like trial scripts for the major motion picture companies. However, the term “poetry film” officially became recognised when Herman Berlandt started his poetry film festival in San Francisco in the 1970s, when “film” actually meant film as the medium. He wanted to celebrate poetry in film rather than a poetically made film without words. Video poems came with the advent of video and are now, in the digital era, another term for a poetry film, especially in Spanish-speaking countries. The term “videopoem” as one word was created by Tom Konyves to mean one that does not illustrate a pre-written poem, but is the blending of text on screen with images and soundscape. Of course this is much more complex than I have just stated, and I go into much more detail on this subject in my book The Poetics of Poetry Film by Intellect Books, UK, and The University of Chicago Press, USA.
Tell us about your background.
Originally, I was a painter, a visual artist who also wrote about art and interviewed artists. I was always either writing, jotting notes, piecing together poems, and having ideas or sketching. I have an eclectic background: I have been a creative performer – other artist filmmakers asked me to be in their art films or for avant-garde photographic or fashion work in London. I also worked backstage at the theatre, designed dresses and textiles, and worked in publishing, mainly copy editing, whilst painting and writing. I lived in the USA (Philadelphia) for a couple of years where I wrote scripts and had one optioned for film, and another produced on stage. I also found America to be a really open and fertile ground for my art, as I exhibited my paintings all over the country; whereas in the UK it was a tightly ringfenced, much more parochial gallery system.
However, ultimately, I found I couldn’t say what I wanted to say through paint, and back in the UK I got into making short films. These were quite slow and laborious, with a team situation, and I gravitated towards video art. During this time, I completed a degree (Fine Art) and MA in Creative Writing. I also read a lot of language theory and philosophy and women’s writing on materiality. I wanted to explore the political position of women in society and made text-based videos, whilst my dissertation was entitled Woman Artists and Text. Just briefly, since the birth of Greek philosophy, Western social and philosophical structures have rested on the inherited binary hierarchies of male/female, mind/body, word/matter, culture and nature. I wanted to interrogate the materiality of the word in an aesthetic space; as a way to address these positions. Of course I was and still am influenced by Jenny Holzer [editor note: Madison-area residents might be familiar with her 2020 “Just Vote” bus] and her public projection of poetic texts with light, and Barbara Kruger’s photographs examining the role of women in culture and society, and direct address.
My short film "Blanks in Discourse: 03," now called "Mistaken Identity" (2005), centres on the attempt to locate individual identity, through examining a scrolling continuum of found soundbite text from women’s magazines (defining what and who we are). I inserted the words “I” and “Home” in red, with an error beep as the text scrolls up the screen. The beep creates a random musical patterning. When this was played in a large gallery space as it was in Klaipeda, Lithuania, in a solo show, the effect was like a melancholy, erratic, quiet voice, or rain drops after a shower. I think this is very much a sound poem, where the single sound reflects that sense of being out of step with social composition. I think that the soundscape has always been important in my work, and this is a very understated example of “voice or identity” coming through the beep.
I began a research project, which resulted in papers on what I termed Matternal philosophy, see “Matternal philosophy, female subjectivity and text in art,” in New Realities: Being Syncretic, by Springer Wein (Tremlett 2008). I also developed a project into audio-visual rhythms on screen in relation to page-based verse and the cyclical rhythms of turning on the page and metronomic (metre) patterning. So, I was basically looking at moving concrete or visual poetry and verse forms on the screen in tandem with soundscapes. I then went on to combine this with lyric poetry and make lyric poetry films whilst raising two children.
I started Liberated Words poetry film festival with Lucy English in 2012, at MIX conference, Bath Spa University, where we judged an open competition. I co-organised festivals in 2013–2016, and in 2014 I ran a three-day festival where I also was invited to lead a discussion on poetry film and form and give a screening (a completely full screening room) at Encounters Short Film and Animation Festival in Bristol, UK. I am editor of the online hub www.liberatedwords.com which is a source of commentary on poetry film, and we have a thriving Facebook group for those who are interested to join.
So, my real beginnings with video poetry were from the diverse contexts of: script writing, visual art, performance, reading academic theoretical texts on language and philosophy, whilst also copy editing and filmmaking. Phew – what a way to encapsulate a life journey!
You’ve noted elsewhere that “Selfie with Marilyn” examines the tension in a subjective gaze—charting the shifting agency from viewer to viewed, or perhaps more accurately, playing with those ever-shifting power dynamics. Do you feel video poetry is a mode particularly suited to exploring this topic?
There is a section on subjectivity in my book, but the performative figure within a poetry film or videopoem is not so common. Really, the poetry film afficionados all state never to recite directly to camera, like a poet on stage. Of course you can if, as protagonist, you are part of a cinematic narrative of some sort. So, I think maybe this has put people off. A lot of the eidetic films (what I would call a stereotypical poetry film) centre on landscape, slow, layered visuals, that are not about the human figure at all. However, you can tell with my background in performing to the camera, and valuing artists such as Barbara Kruger, that how women began taking charge of their own representation was, and still is, an important political step. Today, perhaps the focus is more on gender diversity or inclusion of LGBTQ identities, but all areas of representation of the subject are valid. So, I guess it is not the medium but myself who is reverting back to a very direct approach to deconstructing representation and re-examining the gaze through video poetry. And yes, I do think it is a very good medium for exploring this topic.
I would like to add that I didn’t set out with this idea at all. It came about totally accidentally. I entered the New York-based Visible Poetry Project initiative, where they link up poets and filmmakers for each day of poetry month – April. They ask selected filmmakers to choose a poet from their archives to work with, and I chose Heidi Seaborn and her seminal reading of Marilyn Monroe in discussion with her younger self – Norma Jeane. Incidentally Heidi is launched her prize-winning book An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe (PANK) on June 1, Marilyn’s birthday!
Hatti Rees (https://www.hattirees.com) is a young non-binary British artist with a strong following for performing different personas online, and I knew they could do Marilyn. It was my idea to have them just making up to camera and speeding that up, because they had done that for a UK magazine called Love for a Xmas special “The 12 Days of Christmas.” In this they made themselves up as different characters such as The Queen and Miss Piggy which were then fast edited to see an instant transformation.
Although "Selfie" is not about direct address (in terms of addressing the viewer) you can see that, at the root of the film also lies Barbara Kruger’s teaching: with images such as “Your gaze hits the side of my face” (1981) with a statue in profile for example, or “We Won’t Play Nature to Your Culture” (1983) with a woman lying down with leaves on her eyes. For Kruger the images have a voice and almost defy the viewer; but Selfie I feel, inverts Kruger. It is the very fact that we are not there, we are the mirror, the lens mirror, like Sylvia Plath’s mirror. We re-present the image back to the subject on screen as silent witness. I am interested in that you say power dynamics of viewer to viewed because I see it more as the dynamics of manufacture and reproduction, of a question of identity and the self: and actually, a self trapped firmly in the mirror.
This film also plays with the duality of the concept of the “selfie,” in that it is not just the method of filming at all, but Marilyn finding her real self, talking to Norma Jeane buried in all those years of representation. A reflexive address. At the same time Hatti goes the other way, leaving their everyday self behind and attempting to represent Marilyn. It is the cracks between that fascinate, and I suppose sets up a kind of conversation. Normally the poet on screen is not performing in this way. However, when you ask – “Is video poetry a good medium for exploring concepts?”, I would say it is ideal for exploring different time frames, or memories together and therefore ideal for changing identity.
I have actually made one other film—"Dance"—with my daughter Georgie, (2017) which combines two timeframes. As a teenager, she stares into the camera (putting on makeup again), and this overlays her at primary school age in a dance class also looking into the camera. It is about the camera as mirror on the one hand but primarily as a “maternal lens” – how a mother sees a daughter and all her ages at once. The camera for "Selfie" is a mirror and the absent maternal eye (actually true for Marilyn), but I think this also forces the pathos, and an empathy in the viewer as we watch the process of representation happening.
I don’t see a gendered gaze at all here, despite the subject matter. Perhaps others will disagree. Perhaps this is because of Hatti’s directness, their control of the lens never falters even when they falter in their representation, so that we are forced back on ourselves somewhat. Also, in a playful way, this film is about spectacle, and about transformation; our contemporary fascination with before and after. It is also about how a poem can be cut and rewritten as a revisioning through the filmic medium. You have to have a very generous poet to do this, though! And I have mentioned before how Leonard Cohen in the poetry film "Poen" (1967) repeated a poem a number of times with the errors in. I think I had channelled that in some way, and this creates a new type of poem.
The other thing about this film is that the absolutely beautiful poetry, the pathos of the dialogue of Marilyn recollecting memories as Norma Jeane, is undercut yet I feel reinforced by the fractured visuals (perhaps fractured and hazy memories?). I think the camera as mirror device helps to reflect (in both senses); and also the use of three Marilyns, extends the concept of repeating versions of the self over and over. So, here the video poem has enabled different ways of extending the written poem through alteration or reconfiguring of: the text, time, and space whilst enabling us to really study the transitions in transformation.
When Heidi wrote the poem I am sure she didn’t envisage this film – someone trying to learn her poem as Marilyn – but she was open to what we could do. And although the poem is absolutely compelling on the page (you might hear Marilyn’s voice and pathos in the reading), I feel it both holds its own and also becomes extended in this new translation.
You’ve mentioned that video poems “often surprise even the director.” Can you tell us more about how “Marilyn” surprised you? And do you have advice to poets and filmmakers on when and how to see surprises as opportunities rather than obstacles?
So, yes, it was full of surprises! Coming back to your last question, I really like it when I am given the raw footage without having been too involved in the production. As long as I knew that the basics were in place for Hatti, I knew they would come up with something. So I actually must like surprises! I think I am very happy when I am just winging it. I loved throwing my hat into the ring at Visible Poetry. I loved finding a poet I wanted to work with who I had never met before. Heidi’s writing is stunning and richly imagined. And, of course, there is the obvious anticipation of how the poem will meld with the visuals. This is probably one of the most motivating factors in choosing visuals for a poem.
Hatti had recently finished a long period of intense work, achieving their degree at St Martins School of Art in Fashion, and they were at a very busy but exhausted point when they made the film. This was one big surprise I hadn’t thought of: they seemed very slightly drained by the art of role playing, and it added veracity to the shoot.
They asked me which top to wear, and about certain props, etc. They just happened to have one of those heavy-duty bras from the 1960s which was perfect – another moment of chance. They just filmed themselves a few times and sent me the footage. We also set up that their sister would also film them filming themselves, and of course the Norma Jeane scenes. I had a huge amount of footage, all from their phones. Some of it was with a wonky wig, and other times the lipstick was smudged. Hatti was also drinking wine whilst doing it (now they are teetotal), which added a conviviality and relaxed approach. They do have a great facility for mimicking, so could mimic Marilyn fairly well, but what I found was that Hatti didn’t leave a space after memorising a line. So, we saw their eyes drop to the table where they were reading from. Later this drop of the eye has had all kinds of interpretations as it signals a break from representation, a space elsewhere, offscreen yet on.
I realised that, actually all these elements were perfect – that rather than simply present a successful piece of mimicry we could show the flaws and the funny moments between self and persona. Another opportunity! It also came to me that Marilyn may have felt the same; may have had moments when she couldn’t perform the public face of Marilyn; and also of lucidity where she saw the act for what it was.
Also, one of the other major factors was that the phone was positioned vertically and I wanted to produce a traditional horizontal image for video screenings. I would therefore need to fill the image and had thought about a triple screen but not in any detail. In the editing I then realised that we couldn’t have all three talking at once, so one alone had to recite the whole poem. It was then a matter of time before I realised the other two could play silently alongside the main image, giving us a visual performance of gestures and mannerisms. Then it was a question of using the progression to show different ‘takes’ of the poem: how the voice could be used to stop and start and show the flaws. Having triple images meant I could play with the filming process itself, of recording and reshooting. It also meant that wonderful accidents could happen between the triple images, the three Marilyns as they attempted the same pose, but slightly out of sync. What a wonderful moment when we realised that in the editing!
One other great surprise was how the Norma Jeane shots turned out. At first we were going to have video of Hatti as Norma Jeane throwing a beach ball, following the fresh-faced shots of Norma Jeane on a California beach by her photographer boyfriend Andre de Dienes. However, this was being shot in November, and in London! In fact, the Norma Jeane shots were filmed by Georgie, Hatti’s sister, on a tiny balcony in Greenwich, London, on a cold winter’s day, with a plastic blue-sky background! Another factor was that I couldn’t include any more video time-wise (the film with its long credit sequence is already just over five minutes long), so the Norma Jeane shots became old-fashioned photographic stills, which I think really work, and separate Norma Jeane and the memory from the action happening in the “present.”
The end credits reversing the speeded up making-up process from the beginning was another surprise! I hadn’t anticipated the end, until we were in editing. The idea to have Hatti unmaking up alongside the credits all just flowed.
Ultimately, Heidi was very generous in letting me do this to her poem, and you need that kind of poet who will allow experimentation beyond the original concept. I shared my original idea with her, and she saw what Hatti could do, and she trusted me to pull it together. She saw the finished result and was thrilled, fortunately, so I was happy. She was also happy because the film did gel with her original concept.
So, these are some of the original “surprises” – quite a lot actually! I would say I am someone who can approach footage without knowing exactly what will happen in the editing, but I always remain open to chance and trust my instinct in the moment. I love being open to ideas. I would suggest to anyone making a poetry film to be the same, and also to not be too careful with the poem. The film should not be an exact illustration; it should be full of metaphor, and extend and re-vision the poem ideally. Also, this is a film, and open to the filmmaking process. So many accidental things can happen in both gathering footage and the editing. Make lemonade from lemons; if something unexpected happens on a shoot – say it rains – then use that. Use your problems and turn them around. A poetry film may begin with a selected poem, and footage, but from there you almost certainly will find that other ideas develop that take the concept in a new and exciting direction.
You have spoken movingly about how Hatti “aimed at being both Marilyn and both Marilyn and Hatti and sometimes failed.” This seems particularly poignant given our ubiquitous struggle during the pandemic and even before to navigate that gap between our online selves and our actual lives and identities.
As I mentioned I think that it is exactly this sway between the “real” self and the persona; the attempt and the failure or error that creates the delight in the spectacle. Though they may have failed at times at directly mimicking Marilyn I think this made a richer, more meaningful result. I think, as I always do with anything – art, filmmaking, gardening etc. that it is the Wabi Sabi of life – the imperfection – that is correct. We are surrounded by a culture of “getting it right” in front of the lens. What does this mean, when you really look at it? I think being fallible and showing it exhibits confidence.
Hatti’s work is extreme and irreverent and they don’t even know Marilyn that well, nor have any idol worship there. For them it is a performative job. I think it is that humour in having a go and seeing what happens. I think some of the outcomes of the pandemic saw people online being more themselves, more unshaven, somehow disconnected yet willing to share who they are. I think the pandemic as a whole has slowed us all down, has got rid of the banter, of the idiots, of the irrelevance, and made us realize what really matters.
Hatti’s everyday life is very low key, but they are really committed as an artist and work really hard. They are currently creating a new album, and new virtual work, whilst constantly working on image creation, physically and through digital manipulation. If you see their online personas, they are constantly mining different—often alien—characters.
I have to say now something that I haven’t yet stated online or in interviews – Hatti is my daughter. Knowing them as an artist as well as a daughter, I felt it was important for me to treat them as a performer, an individual, letting them flow however they wanted (actually this is how I have always treated them!). This meant really being the hands-off director during the actual performance; in the editing I came into my own. There are also parallels in our career paths which were chance again; I certainly didn’t want them to follow me at all. They almost ended up in fashion by accident, through choosing not to do other things. We also went to the same art school, and also performed for the camera but I was not in control of many different personas. I do give them advice when they ask, but otherwise we have two totally separate practices. It was lockdown that brought us together. Of course I am really thrilled to see her in Marilyn. You can now re-read the section on the lens as a mirror and the absence of the mother in a new way!
Your book, The Poetics of Poetry Film, was recently publishedin the US and the UK. Tell us what motivated you to undertake the writing of the book and what you hope readers will take from it?
The Poetics of Poetry Film came out of my early projects, such as looking at rhythm and text onscreen, making my own video poems and running Liberated Words Poetry Film Festival, www.liberatedwords.com where I was a co-curator of the competitions we ran and discussions that were had. I would compile short booklets for each festival, and at that time, I knew a reference book was needed on the subject. It took over five years to produce, and actually much longer in the gathering of contextual material. The book has been described as “an industry bible” and “an encyclopedic reference work” and is around 400 pages long with 80 colour and black-and-white images.
The content defines poetry films, video poems, film poems and videopoems within a historical context, and centres on the formal aspects of poetry film, such as the voice, time, the soundscape, subjectivity, and the spatio-temporal surface. It covesr the history of the genre, and also foregrounds new thinking on different important theorists. There are lengthy and vital contributions from Thomas Zandegiacomo del Bel of ZEBRA poetry film festival, and poetry filmmaker Charles Olsen on Spanish and Portuguese video poets. It features leading poetry filmmakers from around the world discussing their own practices, in their own voices.
I hope that readers will realise that whilst being reminded that poetry filmmaking is certainly a craft, it is also true that we don’t need to have in-depth training to make one. In fact, with a simple camera phone, or some freely available video clips online, alongside soundscape, with a simple editing app you can combine your poetry with the moving image. Of course a little attention to embracing an artistic eye is always useful, and you will find that you progress and get better through practice. It is good to learn how to make use of dramatic lighting or textures to create mood for example; and playing with timing – perhaps slowing it down, with layered imagery, and atmospheric ambient soundscape. But the main thing is to enjoy experimenting.
I would also like readers to remember that poetry film, unlike other forms of short film, often has a strongly ethical or philosophical centre. Not only is it often a collaborative form, it is one that combines the historical oral lyric with written traditions; and also the tradition of poets and artists getting together socially, as in the early days of Poem Paintings in China.
As such, I hope that people see that poetry film is a way to have a voice, to share your particular subjectivity, or political or environmental position. You can collaborate across continents, and the festivals are also a way to circumvent “privileged” spaces of the galleries. Poetry film language is both a vein that is academically rich and also politically able to travel widely and send out strong activist messages via the Internet and social media. Ultimately, I would like everyone to try to make a poetry film!
Finally, what projects are you working on now?
I am giving presentations on The Poetics of Poetry Film, and these are set to last all year and beyond. What have I let myself in for! Some are already available online on Vimeo. I am also open to collaborating on new commissions, and will be experimenting with my own films, but also primarily continuing my family history poetry film project Tree. I began researching this subject over 20 years ago, as a search for belonging (developed in childhood), and as my ancestors were farmers, miners, and worked rivers (running paper mills for example), it focuses on the geopoetics of place. I have been lucky enough to visit and stay at some of the sites, gathering video diaries in situ as well as research from archives. The project will comprise around 10 chapters, with different eras for each chapter. I have made three films to date. As you can imagine it takes time to construct the different aspects of the work, and I have many files with footage and reference material and poems all waiting to see the light of day.
I have also identified “family history poetry films” as a genre, and I am collecting examples at Liberated Words as a large-scale project. I recently screened a selection at LYRA poetry festival, Bristol, on the theme of Reconnections, so if you would like to find out more on the subject or share one with me, please get in touch!
