Film and Cinema

Two feature length works, an art-poetry film The Animal Drums made with Joshua Alexander, and an experimental documentary Worm Wood made with Tereza Stehlikova, underpin my cinematic output. Both were premiered at Whitechapel Gallery in 2018 and 2020 respectively.

My work in film takes in directing, writing, acting, but is more amorphous. I wrote the screenplay for Lotje Sodderland’s 2020 film Limbo and have created, or been the subject of, short films by Noah Hutton, Edward Prosser, Emanuella Amichai, Weronika Lewandowska and Yasmin Fedda. My own film-poems have been commissioned by Forumstadtpark, Graz and Lyrik Kabinett, Munich, amongst others.

An interview with David Spittle, for the Light Glyphs series, focuses on my film and poetry work.

You can watch The Animal Drums for free on youtube with more information at http://www.stevenjfowler.com/animaldrums/

Film with Thomas Duggan at Montreal and Venice February 6, 2021

I had a glut of film work and collaborations in the latter half of 2020, due to obvious reasons. Trying to avoid the ubiquity and pseudo deadness of zoom teams skype, though it has its uses for chats, film is the best way to make work that can be shared at a remove. One of the films was made with my long-term collaborator Thomas Duggan, an artist, architect, designer based in Cornwall. He took a 16mm old camera up to the highlands and cut the footage into a poetic montage, this just at the time I was teaching tonnes of poetry film stuff, and so having pushed the more experimental potentials of the medium, I decided in this case, an separated exchange was the best route, where I write and record poetry to go with the images. When I teach I often mention this form as the standard for poetry films but its that for a reason.

The film is called HERE YOU WERE NEVER A CHILD. It has a soundtrack by The Dirty Three, which is remarkable, and a connection through Thomas. Happily, already, the film has been accepted for screening and competition at the Montreal Independent Film Festival and the Venice Short Film Festival.

Sabotage : a film for Audiatur, Norway - January 5, 2021

http://www.audiatur.no/festival/?lang=en I got commissioned by swedish poet ida borjel to make a new short film response to her brilliant collection of poetry about sabotage - entitled, in english, Miximum Ca' Canny the Sabotage Manuals - and made this film here, which was just published online by audiatur in norway, a festival and publisher which is releasing ida’s book.

the film was shot in kensal green cemetery, where i was once in residency, and was cinematographed and edited by david spittle with music by benedict taylor.

Writing on the film Limbo, by Lotje Sodderland June 6, 2020

A few years ago I was asked by the film-maker Lotje Sodderland, whom I met and worked with many years ago on our A World Without Words project, exploring the brain, neuroaesthetics and aphasia, to write a draft of a short film screenplay for an idea she had about the care of the elderly in London and the kind of people who do that work. I spent a summer toying with the work and learning a lot about the process, submitting lots of drafts, working with the producers and we were even shortlisted for a big BFI scheme. As ever with film, the process has been knotty and lengthy, but Lotje has perservered and the film has been shot and is close to being finished. In these stages some really world renowned filmmakers have been helping Lotje work on the last touches and I’ve spent some of my lockdown time doing rewrites, playing with ideas on the script with Lotje. Having seen snippets of the work, and given the affect of the recent plague on the very people this film celebrates, the isolated elderly in the city, its a powerful piece.

Worm Wood & at Whitechapel Gallery Cinema - January 2020

For more on WORM WOOD visit http://www.stevenjfowler.com/wormwood/

Part of the Worm Wood residency at Kensal Green Cemetery over the summer of 2017, the central output of my extended collaboration with Tereza Stehlikova is a film which fuses the industrial and reclusive landscapes of these areas of London with poetry, exploring the specific history of the cemetery and the part of London where it resides, as well as death and the culture of cemeteries specifically, and all the notions of geography and city that this entails. The project also explored London's painful development boom - perhaps most importantly and most accidentally - the film also documents the transformation of West London as the Old Oak Common Development begins its decade construction.

Published : ENTHUSIASM -a film (with Noah Hutton) November 18, 2019

Enormously generous of the brilliant Hotel Magazine to host, and premiere, my film made with Noah Hutton (Noah made the film, edited it, and I think conceived it. I wrote it, starred in it, and watched im work, to learn) https://partisanhotel.co.uk/Noah-Hutton-SJ-Fowler

A short film—a transatlantic cinematic collaboration produced as part of The Hub residency at Wellcome Trust—Enthusiasm draws on new techniques in analyzing internal monologues and self-consciousness used by contemporary neuroscientists. Utilising the possibilities of cinema to reveal the conflicts of inner and outer narrative, how our internal and external languages collide, the film features improvised and acted scenes alongside voiceover techniques, to juxtapose that which is said and that which is thought. The text featured below is the latter.

Misophonia, literally “hatred of sound,” is a rarely diagnosed disorder, commonly thought to be of neurological origin, in which negative emotions (anger, flight, hatred, disgust) are triggered by specific sounds. The sounds can be loud or soft. There are ex-votos, or acts of faith, all probably in intentional or symbolic order, with each scene occupying its hierarchical place, and what’s more, each subject, each human figure, rendered in a predetermined size and scale in accordance with some stray, subtle meaning. What is the meaning? That to correct ourselves we must be honest with ourselves. We must admit our desires in order to resist them. This might not seem possible at first. To admit to the harm we might want to do. Because everyone else seems so still. Of course, many are, frozen, fixed—never connected enough to gain motion or momentum. But so often, being too tired, or not methodological enough, we visitors hurry on, distracted, through the zoo. A touch of fingertips on an exposed forearm, a hand resting flat upon a back. Eyes, widely staring, invitational, being taken seriously. The underlying attraction to individuals who are brighter than us, more intelligent, but who are at the same time at a genetic disadvantage—utterly malleable through the lottery of genes. Once you’ve got them to touch you, your arm, your neck, your hair, then it tends to be chance has had its moment, and the endless search for control has found its mark. Can this kind of mechanism be as satisfying if it isn’t built on an assumption that everything is founded upon chance operation? Visions of perfect relations, spaces beyond words. A couple, you and the famous actress, neuroscientist, friend, lithograph, hologram. The last minute is her smiling, correcting the vocal fry register, and the whole abstinence movement of America. You can see, if you watch closely, the dying possibility of a deeper link.

The film being published / premiered / hosted by Hotel is the second of their very generous features on my collaborations to help share word of my selected collaborations NEMESES with Haverthorn press https://www.haverthorn.com/books/nemeses-selected-collaborations-of-sj-fowler-volume-2

Five Short Films with Noah Hutton, Ed Prosser, Emanuella Amichai, Yasmin Fedda, Weronika Lewandowska

The Animal Drums & at Whitechapel Gallery Cinema - December 13th 2018

A feature length art film exploring the sad, macabre, abstract threat of contemporary London undergoing constant development.

A city developer's life and mind begins to breakdown as he re-encounters the London he once tried to shape as an active adversary. The Animal Drums is a feature-length art-film exploring the sad, macabre, abstract threat of a contemporary London in the grips of constant and nefarious growth. The film charts the the particular, baffled and morbid character of English attitudes to mortality, along with the specific influence of place and conformity on the quintessentially English deferral of emotion and melodrama. It captures the ambiguous menace of an often accidentally humorous resolve, manner, apology and understatement so prevalent in the English character within a city that is proudly unEnglish.

'Manichean visions revive disputed and despoiled London ground. Poetry in light and stone' Iain Sinclair

The Animals Drums emerges from a four year collaboration between myself and Joshua Alexander that began in five experimental shorts about everything from disease, menial work and the remnants of the British Empire to a London in the grips of overcrowding.

The film called on the miserabalist traditions of post-war European avant garde theatre and poetry, leaning into the glossed over friendliness of a contemporary ‘happy’ urban landscape they invoke deliberate absurdity in their visuals as well as in their text. They are London shot, or in commuter towns.

The film spreads over the lands of London which seem to have inspired a re-understanding of the city's literary and psychological history, from Limehouse to Wapping, Rotherhithe to Ratcliff. Mutely nodding to this profound and now taken for granted reexamination of these once were slums, the film sets itself against the confident and touristic glean of that history, instead aligning itself with the suffering sediment of the actual past. Shot around Wellclose Sq and Hawksmoor's St Anne's, and hiding from the Thames, the film evokes Falk, Swedenborg, Linneaus in all their intelligent menace.

Moreover, the film is born out of a collaboration between two fellow and former employees of a major British Museum institution, and draws on shared experiences of the potential, and actual, vapidity of assumptions of improvement and beneficial pedagogy in such institutions, as well as shared negative experiences of a vast, global tourist deluge. In that sense, the films are born mutually, conceived by the two artists at the same time, and created without much dialogue yet with a certain sense of synchronicity.

The film also explores the particular, baffled and morbid character of English attitudes to mortality, along with the specific influence of place and conformity on the quintessentially English deferral of emotion and melodrama. The films aim to capture the ambiguous menace of an often accidentally humorous resolve, manner, apology and understatement so prevalent in the English character. 

Manners Maketh Man, filmpoem commission for Graz Forumstadtpark Glory Hole series

April 13, 2016 - So happy to have been commissioned by the amazing pioneering Forumstadtpark in Austria, curated by the equally groundbreaking Max Hofler, to produce a videotext work, part of their Glory Hole series. This series has been going for years and involves a video with text projected against the side of the Forumstadtpark itself, blown up like a bat signal, in the middle of a huge, beautiful park in the middle of the city. Loads of people see it, and for my work, which runs throughout April, this is true as its being screened while a film festival goes on. Really i had fun making it too, they promote my kind of work. You can see all the glory hole commissions here : https://vimeo.com/forumstadtparkgraz, some great ones, and my edition, the 31st, below

A note on : a small poetry-film for Klang Farben Text

February 24, 2020

Part of the wonderfully ambitious Klang Farben Text program is a temporary exhibition of new kinetic poem / cinepoems / poetry films by all 12 of the participating brit and german poets. Mine is a little engagement with some corporate powtoon

https://www.britishcouncil.de/en/klang-farben-text-visual-poetry-21st-century / https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/klangfarbentext

Meditations on Strong Tea - a film by Emanuella Amichai translating my poem

September 20, 2018

Emanuella is an amazing film maker and artist who I’ve had the pleasure to correspond with for years. She made a film of my poetic sequence - Meditations on Strong Tea - which was in my 2014 Rottweiler’s guide to the Down Owner book, and written for tom and val raworth. It’s a beautiful example of abstract intermedia translation, a removed but potent form of collaboration. Her work is wonderful, worth seeking her out.

A series of short films on poetry projects

The Soundings Films : made with Ed Prosser (Wellcome Library 2015 to 2016)

This collaboration with filmmaker Ed Prosser was an attempt to see how the means of film, most especially the editorial possibilities of the medium, might marry with Sound Poetry and Conceptual Performance - how it might create a kind of strange narrative potential. The films embodied a real range of ideas, from documentation to faux documentaries. These are short films masquerading as performances. For more details see www.stevenjfowler.com/soundings