Trains of Winnipeg | Project Press + Critical Response
An integral part of the Trains of Winnipeg project has been to watch and see how its various parts intersect with the wider world, its travels back and forth between the worlds of cinema, media arts, contemporary art, literature, music, web culture, and the broader culture is reflected and recorded in the writings of arts journalists, academics and writers. In a way, these responses become part of the project, as Trains of Winnipeg itself is a response to many other sources of culture.
Clive Holden's pictorial essay Mind the Gap – An Artist’s Response to Completing a Film/Video Cycle is published in Poolside 2004, an annual publication of the Video Pool Media Arts Centre. The entire on-line version is available here: POOLSIDE (.pdf, 2.7 B – after downloading, go to page 11).
All known critical response to the project is included on this web page. Below are TRAINS OF WINNIPEG CD, film, book and project reviews, press and writings from Canada, the U.S.A., Australia, The Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, Italy, Spain and Greece, written between August, 2001, and the present.
film:
[Rob Howason, Globe & Mail, Vancouver, May 26, 2006]
film: ART HOUSE
TRAINS OF WINNIPEG ROLLS INTO TOWN
When writer-filmmaker Clive Holden was growing up in Victoria, he witnessed a girl shot by a sniper on a quiet suburban street. His first thought, as he watched the 13-year-old collapse on the gravel shoulder, was, "Why doesn't this feel more unusual?"
Twenty years later, in a short film about the incident, he theorized that his indifference was due to the massive amount of TV violence he had absorbed during childhood. Holden named his 12 minute treatise 18,000 Dead in Gordon Head, a reference to the infamous estimate of how many killings the average TV-raised kid witnesses before the age of 16. The brooding piece joins other experimental works done by the artist since 2001 in Trains of Winnipeg: 14 Film Poems. The compilation makes its first Terminal City whistle stop this week at Pacific Cinematheque.
Holden, who now lives in Toronto, weaves his little urban dystopias from found footage, home video and hand-painted celluloid. Shaky cameras record grainy footage that would make for an uncomfortable 89 minutes were it not for his strong lyrical touch with voice-overs and subtitles.
For example, Hitler! (Revisited) is a poignant study of the filmmaker's relationship with his schizophrenic brother, whose limited lexicon consists of these words: Hitler, hamburger, Yoko Ono and gift. We never hear the mental patient. The piece consists mainly of repeated shots of him leaning forward in slow motion as if about to tumble through space. But Holden describes his sibling's institutionalized life with such compassion, confessing his own fears of visiting him at Riverview Hospital, that the net effect is hypnotic -- as are most of the weighty cars on this impressive freight.
film:
[Jason Anderson, Eye Weekly, Toronto, December 29, 2005]
Top 10 Films of 2005 – Number 7: Trains of Winnipeg
film:
[Stephen Cole, CBC.ca Arts News, January, 2006]
TRAINED EYE
14 short films about Clive Holden
Clive Holden knew he’d figured out how to shoot his short film Trains of Winnipeg when a conductor climbed off a train and shooed him from the tracks.
“I lived in Winnipeg for the last eight years,” says the 45-year-old filmmaker, who recently moved to Toronto. “But that doesn’t mean I know trains. Everyone [in Winnipeg] said, ‘Oh, I had an uncle who worked on CP or CN.’ Winnipeg is a train city. But when I walked onto the yards, I realized trains are a wide-angle subject. I didn’t have the right camera.
“I had to find the sweet spots to capture what I wanted. I walked tracks. I wandered inside trains. I learned where to shoot. One time, I got too close and the driver got down and asked what I was doing. We had a good conversation. He understood. I knew I was finally close enough to make my film.”
The 17-minute short ended up taking two years to make, and illustrates Holden’s commitment to art. Last year, Holden released Trains of Winnipeg — 14 Film Poems, a collection of shorts that reflect various facets and stages of his own life. The 89-minute compilation enjoyed a lavishly praised run in art-house theatres internationally and has just been released on DVD.
All told, the 14 short films go back 40 years. The three-minute short Nanaimo Station is a looping collage of 8-mm footage from 1960 of Holden’s first steps as a child; the images are accompanied by a stately reminiscence of his Irish family’s idyllic early days in Nanaimo, B.C. Holden shot 18,000 Dead in Gordon Head (13 minutes), the story of a girl killed in a small B.C. town, on Super-8 film in 1982; it wasn’t until two decades later that he re-examined the footage to find the story. The 13-minute Hitler! (revisited) is Holden’s third attempt to tell the story of his brother Niall, a long-time mental patient.
Like Jonathan Caouette, the director of Tarnation, Holden returns to archival family footage to solve old mysteries and find the “sweet spots” in a story. Holden explains his appreciation of good storytelling by elaborating on his enthusiasm for American writer Raymond Carver. “I love it when he gets that sub-atomic flow of language pitched right,” Holden says. “When you encounter it on the page, your eyes just flow through it. But it takes years to develop what some call the gift of the gab.” In the following interview, Holden describes how he developed his own gift for what he calls “film poetry.”
Q: Trains of Winnipeg is such a singular, striking work. My first response was, “Wow, what apprenticeship might explain such an arresting collection?”
A: I grew up a few blocks from [the University of Victoria]. As a teenager, I hung out at the UVic library, where I discovered [Montreal poet] Louis Dudek. They had a cassette of him that made a big impression on me — a poet’s voice! Eventually, I took writing at UVic and discovered John Berger and Raymond Carver. I loved their language and the ideas below the surface of their work. I remember reading some paragraphs of Berger and being too excited to continue. I’d stop and let the words sink in.
Q: Were you interested in film?
A: I wanted to be a screenwriter. I moved to Montreal and studied at Concordia, where I was influenced by Bruce Bailey and [Toronto filmmaker] Phil Hoffman. But the big thing that happened to me at Concordia was picking up a camera. Something happened when I pulled the trigger of a camera. I wanted to be a filmmaker. But first I wrote. I spent the ’80s in small rooms, writing. I wrote pilots for a Montreal man who had ideas for films. I turned them into scripts. He gave me money. I don’t know what happened to the pilots. I moved from room to room, writing for 18 hours a day sometimes.
Q: Where were these “rooms”?
A: Montreal, at first, but then I moved to Whitehorse for a year, and to Watson Lake, a town of 800 people 500 miles south of Whitehorse.
Q: How did you support yourself?
A: I drove a Greyhound bus.
Q: Did seeing the world through a bus window influence your work?
A: I think a pre-existing Western Canadian trait of craving wide open spaces — and definitely a fascination with visual movement — has led me to driving, quite a bit of roaming, and to filmmaking as well.
Q: One of the films in the collection, Unbreakable Bones, features footage of plane travel through mountains.
A: At the time, I was living in Winnipeg and visiting my parents on the [west] coast every few months. When I flew through the mountains, I shot film. When I watched the footage, I found the poem. When I write and it’s going well, I hit a phrase or idea and relax, because I know I have a poem — it’s there somewhere. Sometimes, I see film and feel the same thing. What excites me about working in different disciplines is that you pick up energy and ideas crossing from one to the other.
Q: For me, the most riveting film in your collection is Hitler! (revisited), the story of your brother Niall.
A: Most of Hitler! I shot visiting my brother at the Riverview Mental Hospital in Victoria. I’ve never seen anyone stare so openly into a camera as Niall did that day.
Q: There are parts of Niall’s story that seem incredible.
A: Niall is a schizophrenic who suffered a stroke that restricts him to nine words, one of which is “Hitler.” He can also sing Beatles songs. Once, he heard a German-speaking person and asked, “Are you a Nazi?” Then he and this woman had a conversation for 20 minutes about the war — out of nowhere! Then he closed down again. It was astonishing. Actually, the Hitler! in Trains of Winnipeg is a remix of a film I made in 1996. Later, I deconstructed the film with another filmmaker, Sol Nagler.
Q: Deconstructed?
A: We rethought it, remade it, stripped it to individual shots. I literally stepped on footage. We played and handled it. Sol’s family is Jewish, from the Warsaw ghetto. He had questions. As we worked, we talked about Niall, Hitler, Germany, mental illness. I’m big on process and hands-on filmmaking. I believe that the physical labour of working on material brings the subconscious to play.
Q: I wonder if we’re on the verge of an era where artists can transform their own life experiences into films that everyone can see.
A: Trains of Winnipeg cost $60,000, and almost all the money went into film stock. Soon, we’ll be in the era of high-definition DVD. Everything will be digital — cheap! Kids in schools now learn to edit digitally, learn to make film like we learned to write stories. It’s thrilling to consider what they might do.
[Lil Richard, Discorder Magazine, August 18, 2001:]
awe-inspring. I give it an A
As you might have guessed from the title and co-conspirators (Jason and John of The Weakerthans), this is a CD about personal histories, regionalism and a sense of belonging. And trains. The CD is thirteen tracks (plus two bonus) of Clive Holden reciting his own poetry while Jason, Christine, and John set it all to music. Listening to this is awe-inspiring. The music on this album ranges from distorted guitar and drums, to sparse and melodic piano, to eerie tape loop compositions, all of which capture perfectly the mood of the different poems. The poems themselves are captivating in their storytelling delivery, and are all threaded together with themes of trains, death and setting. Together they are glitter and gold. Comparatively, this is somewhat reminiscent of Godspeed You Black Emperor when they put samples of people telling stories over top of their brooding music, only the words and music of Trains of Winnipeg are more symbiotic, and haunt you on a much more personal level. I give it an A. As an aside, this CD is also just part of a larger and quite impressive multimedia project that can be seen at www.trainsofwinnipeg.com.
film:
[Paul Matwychuk, Vue Weekly, Edmonton, 2006]
DO THE LOCOMOTION
Poet/filmmaker Clive Holden engineers a triumph with Trains of Winnipeg
Clive Holden’s Trains of Winnipeg is the kind of film that’s easy to make fun of if you haven’t seen it, but impossible to speak of with anything less than admiration if you have. It’s a collection of 14 “film poems”: most of them consist of Holden reading his poetry to the accompaniment of scratchy images on Super 8 film (some of which are portions of actual home movies, while others are simply shot to look that way) and a sparse musical score written and performed by Christine Fellows and the Weakerthans’ Jason Tait and John K. Samson.
It sounds pretty deadly, especially the segment that concludes the film and gives it its title—you don’t even hear Holden’s voice in this one; all you get are 17 minutes of trains pulling in and out of railway yards, interspersed with shots of pistons pumping and wheels trying to find traction as they start on down the track. And yet it’s absolutely sublime.
Still, Holden was probably pretty smart to wait and save that trainyard section for the film’s caboose slot. By that time, he’s softened you up with a series of poems that are by turns smart, funny, angry, sad and playfully abstract—poems that, like all the best poems, are at once deeply personal but which touch on universal emotions—so that by the time the “Trains of Winnipeg” segment rolls around, you’re completely immersed in his worldview and his cinematic style. You’re not staring blankly at a bunch of abstract images of trains wondering why the hell the filmmaker ever thought this would be interesting to watch; you’re attuned the way Holden is to the music of industry, the way the sound of a freight car door sliding open seems so full of strength and possibility, the way, if you listen closely enough, that the heavy clang of all that metal striking against metal has its own hidden sense of order, like the syllables of a poem written in a foreign language.
Holden’s poems deserve attentive ears as well. They’re always relatable, always rooted in the real world: in “18,000 Dead in Gordon Head,” Holden uses the sniper death of a 13-year-old Winnipeg girl as a launching-off point for exploring the casual prevalence of death in the modern world, and for his own capacity for violence; in “Unbreakable Bones,” he recalls his parents coming down with colds during a visit to his home, a trivial incident that nevertheless reminds him of his dread of their inevitable death; and in “Hitler! (Revisited),” he talks about his difficult relationship with his schizophrenic brother Niall, who has spent most of his life in a mental hospital and who, as the result of a stroke, is limited to a vocabulary of about nine words.
But the poems aren't all gloomy; “Nanaimo Station” is Holden’s joyful celebration of his birthplace, while “F-Movie” is a playful bit of abstract poetry that’s sort of like what might have happened if bp nichol had been hired to make a segment for Sesame Street. Holden’s film images manage to be evocative without distracting you from concentrating on the text: I especially like the shots of the family of dolls silently watching a toy car melt into flames that accompany “Burning Down the Suburbs” and the hypnotic, rhythmic images of walking legs, one in each corner of the screen, that go with “Love in the White City.” Like his poems, Holden’s film images have texture, and he’s in love with the dirt and grain of old film stock. I felt a little guilty watching this film on DVD since Holden is so patently fond of the way images look when they’re projected onto a screen—often he’ll take his footage, show it on a screen and then film it again.
Don’t let the “experimental” label scare you off; Trains of Winnipeg may not be a conventional moviegoing experience, but it’s surprisingly accessible and engrossing. All aboard!
[Jason Anderson, Eye Weekly, Toronto, March 3, 2005]
****1/2 (4.5 out of 5)
WHEATFIELD SOUL TRAIN
In the months since it opened, Atom Egoyan and Hussain Amarshi's Camera media bar near Queen and Ossington has attracted no shortage of photo spreads for its chic design. Now they face a trickier task than impressing the style mavens: establishing a consistent sensibility for the programming.
While some Camera selections have been appropriate to the vanguard nature of the space -- and its one major limitation, the lack of a 35mm projector -- others could have just as easily appeared at the Carlton or a rep theatre. Of course, those places tend to discourage viewers from slugging back vino, so Camera wins points there. But due to its unusual combination of functions (cinema, bar, gallery) and Egoyan's rep as both auteur and cinephile, Camera can also afford to be more adventurous than other venues and show work that defies the conventions not just of multiplex fare but the middlebrow titles that dominate the art-house circuit.
Opening this weekend for a seven-night run, Clive Holden's Trains of Winnipeg (****1/2) is exactly the sort of movie that belongs at Camera -- idiosyncratic, independent and supremely inventive. Holden's first feature-length work, it's part of a multidisciplinary project that has already yielded a book of poems, a spoken-word disc and a website, all with the same prosaic yet oddly endearing title. (Could anything be more Canadian?) Consisting of 14 "film poems," Trains of Winnipeg juxtaposes the poet and filmmaker's ruminations on landscape and memory with a wide array of visual strategies, including home movies, travel films and found footage, which are then goosed up with hand-processing effects and digital treatments. The richly detailed sound design incorporates eerie, loop-based music by Christine Fellows and the Weakerthans' Jason Tait and John K. Samson (Winnipeggers all).
As much as I love Holden's movie -- it's one of the finest non-narrative movies ever made in this country -- I can understand if you cringe at the phrase "film poems." I did too. I imagined a slow-motion shot of geese in flight and a wispy-voiced narrator murmuring about the ineffable sadness of a beach at twilight -- in other words, something too pretentious to work in either medium, let alone both at once. There's also the larger question of whether film and poetry really belong together. If the best poetry consists of words arranged to create the purest, most indelible form of linguistic expression, then film strives to speak entirely through images. The ultimate ambition of each form is to negate any need for the other.
Yet the film poem has existed for nearly as long as cinema. Sometimes cited as the first American avant-garde film, Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand's Manhatta (1921) used intertitles by Walt Whitman. Man Ray's L'Etoile de Mer (1928) is taken from a poem by Robert Desnos. The surrealists' flagrantly poetic school of filmmaking eventually yielded such works as Jean Cocteau's Blood of a Poet (1930) and Jean Vigo's marginally more narrative-based L'Atalante (1934). The exquisite collaborations between director Marcel Carné and poet Jacques Prévert in the '30s and '40s (most famously Children of Paradise) also bear traces of the French film-poem ideal. With Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), Maya Deren fused her interests in poetry, dance and cinema to establish a new mode of expression. The aphorism-filled essay films of Agnès Varda and Chris Marker established another, as did the wild and wordy fantasias of Derek Jarman. In Canada, the precise, haiku-like short films of Philip Hoffman have greatly influenced the experimental film scene.
Holden deploys many of these approaches in Trains of Winnipeg as he explores and subverts relationships between word and image. In the opening piece, "Love in the White City," Holden's wry examination of urban dread is accompanied by the sight of his legs walking in the four corners of the screen -- the repetitiveness of the image and the looping, crackly music enhance the effects of the poem's subtler rhythmic structure and sense of futile motion. In "Burning Down the Suburbs," a family of miniature figures watch a model car in flames, dramatizing a scene that is not described in the poem but still complements the ones that are. The grainy, distorted home-movie fragments in "Nanaimo Station" seem as degraded as the narrator's falsely idyllic memories of his family in a time when "the food was like magazines and the cars were all big." In "Hitler! (revisited)," a tribute to Holden's schizophrenic brother Niall, onscreen text replaces the voiceover, a stylistic tack that emphasizes the interiority of Niall's existence. In the title piece, the words disappear altogether, replaced by the amped-up visual poetry of the trains.
By the time the wheels stop moving, Holden has provided ample proof of the film poem's ability to engage and enlighten. Wry, wise and damn near sublime, Trains of Winnipeg makes you wish there were more movies just like it. Alas, the challenges of cine-poetry remain daunting, as they probably should -- when this stuff goes wrong, it can go eye-bleedingly, teeth-grindingly wrong. Even so, I hope Camera's run of Holden's mesmerizing work will inspire others to forego familiar tactics and try dreaming in verse.
[Mari Sasano, See Magazine, Edmonton, February 9, 2006]
TRAINS NOT IN VAIN
****1/2 (4.5 out of 5)
You can still see faint traces of Winnipeg’s boomtown days downtown in the Exchange District, where a concentration of old banks alludes to the city’s importance in Canada’s economy during the age of rail. As we know, highways and air travel changed all that, but the silver lining to this cloud is that Winnipeg’s relative lack of downtown real estate activity in the ’70s and ’80s has preserved many of the buildings there. It’s now a National Historic site, as well as a favourite Hollywood North location for films set at the turn of the century.
Former Winnipegger Clive Holden devotes a full 17 minutes to those trains in Trains of Winnipeg, which forms one chapter in a cycle of 14 beautiful short films that share the rhythm and movement of rail travel. Even the soundtrack (by Weakerthans’ John K. Samson and Jason Tait, singer/songwriter Christine Fellows and cellist Emily Goodden) is evocative of droning motors and the repetitive clicks and strums of passing over railway ties.
The film was shot in various formats over several years–for instance, one segment, "18,000 dead in Gordon Head," was originally filmed while he was a teenager, another is a version of his 1994 portrait of his brother Niall, who is schizophrenic and living in a psychiatric institution. Holden revels in the grain of the image, possibly intentionally dirtying the film to include specks and hairs, scratching and painting. He also resorts to superimpositions and looping of key moments and has a knack for producing lurid colours through hand-processing and other techniques.
Accompanying his lovely pictures is the director’s own voiceover, reciting anecdotes about his Irish parents and events his childhood, as well as poetry that deals with the themes of love and violence. Perhaps it’s the initial immigration of Holden’s family that spurs on the larger theme of movement and travel that is contained in his memory. His voice, calm and detached, acts as a kind of travelogue to his films, a guide to understanding them.
And though it’s been classified as an "experimental" film, Trains of Winnipeg is an art piece can be understood with neither artist commentary nor a great deal of theory. Holden has provided many entries into the Trains of Winnipeg–it’s extremely watchable in its entirety without being superficial.
[Peter Goddard, Visual Arts Critic, Toronto Star, March 4, 2005]
TRAINS OF WINNIPEG A REMARKABLE COLLECTION OF FILMED IMPRESSIONS
According to Winnipeg multimedia threat Clive Holden, Trains of Winnipeg got its start while he was sitting on a bench near where Assiniboine River meets the Red River, listening to passing traffic on the railway.
Fans of old-fashioned dramatic narrative should enjoy the moment. This is about as beginning-middle-and-end as its gets within the 14-part visual tone poem screening tonight at 9 p.m. at the Camera Bar & Cinema as a warmup to The Images Festival (although the festival itself doesn't officially begin until April 7.)
Trains of Winnipeg was shown at last year's Images fest, in fact. But the organizers now feel proprietary enough about the 89-minute autobiographical DVD to look for a wider audience by keeping at the Camera through next Thursday.
With its wonderfully slithery, illusive imagery, its ambient soundtrack that's Brian Eno one second, white noise the next, and Holden's take-no-prisoners poetic narrative, Trains isn't likely to show up at your local multiplex anytime soon.
Besides, Holden has become something of an art star over the past four years since the project began. The film-cycle itself has been making the rounds of alternative film events like the Rotterdam Film Festival.
And the filmmaker — who also has published poetry and fiction and a CD with Christine Fellows — has attracted different audiences for his 2001 Trains audio poem-plus-music CD (Cyclops Press) and the 2002 Trains poetry collection (on DC Books). And one shouldn't forget the Trains website, trainsofwinnipeg.com, which reportedly gets about 150,000 hits annually and boasts almost as many links as Google.
Anyone needing a further reference point might look to Toronto videomaker Mike Hoolboom's Imitations of Life (2003) cycle, although Holden is less bound up than Hoolboom in his own narrative and more directed to events around him.
At the very heart of the suite of shorts is the section called "18,000 Dead in Gordon Head," concerning the 1982 sniper death of a 13-year-old girl in Gordon Head, an old Winnipeg suburb. It's the collection's most powerful moment visually and poetically.
(The figure 18,000 refers to the number of death scenes the average North American media consumer sees on TV or in film by the age of 16.)
Visiting a friend at the time, Holden happened to be looking the girls' way when he "heard a crack," he says in the voiceover narrative. Shocked, he watched the girl collapse, wondering why she didn't put out her hands to break her fall.
As a poet, Holden likes to build his effects, often repeating words or entire phrases, playing with the rhythm. But with "18,000 dead" his choice of words is as spare as a great crime reporter's.
Using mostly found footage of the area — although at one point he shot a scene lying on his side, getting her vantage point — he forces the viewer to flutter in and out of the social landscape. He's terrific at delineating aspects of class, social structure and money with a single image or word.)
The result is one of the most memorable moments in recent Canadian filmmaking.
Holden's visual range — his material sources range from 8 mm home flicks to digital video — is as broad as the country he covers.
It's all about reflected light when he's on the water off the British Columbia coast. It's about enormous vertical chunks of rusted steel framed against horizontal strands of railway track. But his voice is never out of your ear. Trains keeps going this way and that, but it always comes back to him.
Trains of Winnipeg screens at Camera Bar & Cinema, 1028 Queen St. W, 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. until March 10.
[Alison Gillmour, Winnipeg Free Press, October 21, 2004]
FILMMAKER PLAYS WITH MEDIA TO CREATE POETRY
Experimental work resonates on emotional level
**** (four out of five)
A lot of experimental films are concerned only with themselves. Exploring the formal and technical frontiers of their medium, they are often admirable but rarely affecting.
Clive Holden's multimedia masterwork Trains of Winnipeg – which opens tonight and screens until October 23 at Cinematheque as part of the Send + Receive Festival – has loads of experimental style.
Holden plays with four-part screens, hand-treated film, cool abstraction, found footage and re-edited home movies. He dabbles in rudimentary animation (moulded Plasticine figures mourn their roasted SUV in Burning Down the Suburbs) and creates kinetic concrete poetry in F-movie, which looks like a hallucinogenic segment of Sesame Street.
But through all these formal explorations, the local writer/filmmaker conveys a sense of lived experience, using thematic links to build to a shattering emotional effect.
Holden has constructed a 90-minute experimental feature from 14 related short works – he calls them "film poems" – created in a range of film and video formats: Super 8, 16 and 35 mm, worked-over VHS tape, and new digital technology, including one piece done with a Pentax pocket camera.
Trains of Winnipeg comes out of a three-year multimedia project that includes a book and an audio CD. The cinematic component combines poetry – spoken in Holden's uninflected but somehow expressive voice – with visual images, as well as music and sound design from John K. Samson and Jason Tait of The Weakerthans and composers Christine Fellows and Emily Goodden.
Sometimes the words recede, sometimes the images. Always they're held together in an elastic but inevitable relationship by Holden's impeccable sense of rhythm.
Some of the works have been screened as stand-alones, including the unsettling 18,000 Dead in Gordon Head, and the angry Neighbours Walk Softly, in which Holden indicts "the war against the weak."
Hitler! (revisited) is an extension of Holden's 1994 portrait of his brother Niall, who has been institutionalized with severe schizophrenia and brain damage from a stroke for over 20 years. It's a moving investigation of the complexity of the mind and the mysteries of identity and kinship.
Though these cinematic poems aren't autobiographical in the conventional sense, they gradually build up a sense of place and personal history – from the equivocal gifts of a middle-class suburban childhood in British Columbia, to the self-destructiveness of adolescence, to issues of age and loss, and finally to a sense of home in the "white city" of Winnipeg.
With Trains of Winnipeg, Holden and his collaborators combine esthetic innovation with the old-fashioned heft of moral and emotional weight. The result is an experimental epic.
[Stephen Cole, Globe & Mail, Toronto, March 4, 2005]
TRAINS JOURNEY TO THE PAST
***1/2 (3.5 out of 4)
Written and directed by Clive Holden. Music by John K. Samson, Jason Tait and Christine Fellows
Poet-filmmaker Clive Holden was born to Irish parents in Victoria and now lives in Winnipeg. Those reckless thousand-mile leaps appear to haunt him. As does the life of his brother, Niall, a schizophrenic who suffered a stroke and so has been reduced to a half-dozen frayed words.
Trains of Winnipeg -- 14 Film Poems, which begins a week-long stay with the filmmaker in attendance this evening at the Camera Bar on Queen West, is Holden's deeply felt, ultimately joyous attempt to explore and hold forever the mysteries of his past life.
Holden is a shrewd, melancholic observer. In one piece he speaks of a party in Victoria where his parents' guests pretended interest in his life. "Like market surveyors," he reports, "they asked polite questions about what I liked and what my plans were for the future." Like American poet Richard Hugo, Holden's primary subjects are displacement and loss. Also like Hugo, his written voice is alive with a compassion and clowning wit that lend his work an admirable, almost heroic resolve.
Still, on evidence, Holden is a better filmmaker than writer. At the very least we can say that his cinematic style, which displays a soothing pleasure in movement and an obvious excitement in the rough handling of sound and colour, gives his narratives a hypnotic quality they would not otherwise achieve on the written page.
Hitler! (revisited), a prose investigation into his brother's stunted life, is told in a spare text -- no narration for once. The language and verbal imagery is purposely controlled to allow the film's visuals and music greater life. We see 16-mm home-movie close-ups of Niall's face moving at a cloud's speed across the screen. Every grimace and half-smile is coloured and distorted with chemicals. Frequently, Niall's image is interrupted by rivers of flowing detritus -- naked film passing through a projector. The soundtrack, so stately and musical elsewhere, is the white noise of unattended machinery.
Although Holden's work could fairly be considered an art movie, Trains of Winnipeg has been assembled with a performer's understanding of an audience's needs. The music, by John K. Samson, Jason Tait and Christine Fellows, is frequently lovely. And the filmmaker often chooses poems with repeated choruses, making it easier for us to "get" the film poems' first viewing.
The 14 films also come in a variety of lengths and moods and are all marked by a singular grace and imagination.
Don't be put off by the experimental-film tag. Clive Holden's home movies are more entertaining and accessible than most Keanu Reeves films.
film:
[Jason Buchanan, The New York Times, February, 2007]
Director Clive Holden uses various film gauges, a combination of digital formats, tortured cello strings, and natural sounds to craft a feature-length film cycle that poetically straddles the borders between visual art, literature, music, and cinema. Connected though the overarching metaphor of an extended railway journey, Trains of Winnipeg also bridges the gap between the analogue and digital ages in which similar outward appearances betray a sizable shift in technology. The Trains of Winnipeg is the result of a four-year art project that has also produced a book, an audio CD, and a website designed to explore the spaces between a variety of different artistic sub-cultures. A hybrid of multiple styles, materials, and artistic intentions, Holden's film attempts to transport viewers though a unique 21st Century landscape by presenting them with a wide array of contrasting visions that truly could not have existed together at any other point in time.
[CHUCK GRAHAM, Tucson Citizen, April 15, 2005]
Graham's Grade: A
Trains of Winnipeg will change the way you watch all movies
Listening to Canadian filmmaker Clive Holden talk about the power of poetry you start thinking about the power of atomic energy. It's in everything, but releasing it isn't easy. For the Arizona International Film Festival, Holden is bringing "Trains of Winnipeg - 14 Film Poems" that releases poetic power from unexpected places. The 89-minute film is a series of 14 unrelated film poems with different titles. Only one is titled "Trains of Winnipeg." It focuses on a string of grain cars rolling through an industrial setting. Feelings of rust and loneliness fill the screen. A compulsion for purposeful work fights the inertia.
"One objective I had with the film was to make poetry instead of writing poetry," said Holden, on his cell phone from across the border. "There are other forms for a poem besides writing. It doesn't matter whether you call them sound poems, tone poems such as in classical music, architectural forms as poems, video poems or film poems. The term 'film poem' isn't a substitute for the term 'experimental film.' "
While people have been writing poems for thousands of years, the ability to add recorded sound and manipulate moving images is relatively new. Although poetry that employs music, speech and human movement all at once is called theater, we don't have a word yet for the poetic effect Holden is after. "Film poem" sort of is it, but the emotional impact of "Trains of Winnipeg" needs something greater.
Because each of Holden's film poems feels a bit like a music video, that comparison is inevitable. But the depth of feeling in Holden's work is so much greater than anything on MTV. The hip-hop world of rap is another comparison where words, music and images are combined - but once again the result doesn't compare.
Those pop culture forms are all about selling something, pushing on emotional buttons of the lowest common denominator. Holden the idealistic artist wants to unleash the full power of poetry in the life around us. It's about re-focusing our own powers of observation to unleash the poetry Holden knows is locked up inside.
Watching "Trains of Winnipeg" will change the way you watch all movies. These 14 film poems aren't button-pushers so much as they are brain stimulators, massaging parts of the imagination you didn't know existed. Holden might begin with some strips of film, perhaps nothing more than home movies of kids playing in the back yard, and start messing with them.
By chopping up the natural narrative flow, repeating some frames over and over, flashing bright lights through others, adding splashes of random color, moving in and out of focus, blinking on and off, the emotional response of the audience changes. What was once a simple scene now fills with psychological undertones, ordinary relationships morph into something else. The darkness of the movie theater becomes a black frame around Holden's picture of art that never stops moving.
Basically, Holden wants us to watch cinema with the same intensity we look at paintings in art galleries. Instead of telling a story, like an ordinary movie does, Holden's art offers a poetic experience to be absorbed. Each person will absorb it a little differently.
"Screening this film all over the world has been such a learning experience for me," said Holden.
"People have a thirst for narrative, and will create narrative out of raw material," said Holden, sounding a bit amazed by this worldwide compulsion. "While I think of this film as being a series of separate poems, they often didn't."
Because the filmmaker reads his poems as a kind of voice-over narration to the sounds and images on the screen, a common audience response is that the 14 poems represent a chronology of events in the narrator's life. Holden calls this "a drive to personalize experience."
The filmmaker has come to see this "drive" as a part of the creative experience at each screening, making each screening unique. You could also discover uniqueness watching "Trains of Winnipeg" over and over, seeing a different movie each time, finding new truths lurking beneath more obvious ones.
This is not, however, the same thing as watching "Star Wars" 104 times. Not all compulsion leads to art.
film:
[Jason Anderson, Village Voice, December 27, 2004]
Best Undistributed Film of 2004.
[Wendy Banks, NOW Magazine, Toronto, March 3, 2005]
NNNN (4 out of 5) + Critics Pick
POETRY IN MOTION
Trains Of Winnipeg puts poems into a film form that meditates on memory.
This is essentially a book of poems in film form, an idea that seems so simple and intuitive, you wonder why everyone isn't doing it. Then you realize the scope of the deliberate, intricate work involved.
Holden sets 14 poems about place and displacement, memory and movement to prettily distorted images of figures and landscapes that stutter like a stuck memory. It's all accompanied by gorgeous, evocative sound design that teeters between sound effect and melody by Weakerthans John K. Samson and Jason Tait.
As his musings swing from love in Winnipeg to childhood in Nanaimo and violence in the suburbs, Holden achieves the kind of immersive subjectivity that is, if not universal, at least national. (March 4 to 10 at Camera)
[Scott MacDonald, author of the Critical Cinema series, Arizona Film Festival, April 10, 2005]
Trains of Winnipeg -14 Film Poems is a landmark of independent cinema and a considerable poetic accomplishment. Holden’s poems are presented vocally and textually in combination with visuals of considerable variety and dexterity, organized so as to complement and expand the implications of the poems. By the end of the film’s 88 minutes, viewers have experienced a lifetime of resonant personal experiences and emotions. Trains of Winnipeg is that rare experimental film that can command the 35mm screen and communicate with general audiences.
film:
[Geoffrey Macnab, Rotterdam Festival Daily Tiger, January 29, 2005]
Director Clive Holden talks about Trains Of Winnipeg
Trains Of Winnipeg started life as a multi-media project in 2001. First in the form of a book and audio-CD, followed by the experimental feature screening in Rotterdam, consisting of 14 ‘film poems.’
Winnipeg-based director Clive Holden is a polymath: poet, web-designer and publisher, as well as a filmmaker. All his various talents feed into Trains Of Winnipeg, which includes found footage, home movies and sequences shot on both film and video.
‘Straddling the worlds of cinema, video art, music and literature, the 14 linked works employ a wide variety of non-linear digital and filmic formal experiments to depict suburban and urban dystopias,’ Holden has written. Speaking in Rotterdam this week, the director explained that the 14 mini-movies each presented a different challenge. ‘They’re all unified but they all have their individual goals to try to achieve.’
Throughout, unifying the various images, we hear the deadpan voice of the artist as he recites his poems. Though he touches on what seems like painfully personal material, for instance his relationship with his severely schizophrenic brother or a murder he witnessed of a teenage girl in 1982, his narration doesn’t betray emotion. ‘The most unifying thing for a lot of the audience is the assumption that it is purely autobiographical. Therefore, they create a semi-fictional character called Clive Holden and they follow that character through the piece,’ Holden says, but adds he never intended the project to be ‘intensely personal’ or self-revelatory. ‘I think of the autobiographical content as raw material… for me, I’m outside of the process.’
The first episode in the series, Love in the white city, began as a commission from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. ‘They phoned me up one day and wanted me to write about love in Winnipeg.’ The film, shot with a tiny camera, shows Holden crossing the empty, snowbound city. As in Mike Figgis’s Timecode, the screen is split into four.
With Trains, Holden is seeking to ‘renew the discussion’ about the relationship between ‘dramatic narrative and less linear work, prose fiction and poetry.’ As he points out, more and more fine artists are beginning to work in film. Winnipeg is a sympathetic place for artists. ‘The artistic community is very strong, supportive and collaborative,’ Holden (who has lived in the city for eight years) says. He works as a web designer at an arts centre, but his employers give him plenty of time to devote to his own projects – and to come to festivals like Rotterdam.
film:
[Chris Gehman, POV Magazine, Winter 2004/05]
For the past several years, Winnipeg has been home to writer and filmmaker Clive Holden, the proprietor of Cyclops Press, and an intense observer of the urban emotional landscape. Holden's ambitious film cycle Trains of Winnipeg – 14 Film Poems premiered at Toronto's Images Festival this past spring, and has since played Victoria's Antimatter Festival, Winnipeg's own Send and Receive, the venerable Flaherty Seminar, and several prestigious venues in Spain. It's an auspicious debut for a hybrid work that could have had a hard time finding venues. Holden calls Trains a "multimedia art project" that exists independently as a book of poems and a CD. One of his purposes was to create a work that would "straddle the balkanized worlds of cinema, visual art, music and literature."
As the subtitle implies, Trains of Winnipeg comprises 14 distinct sections, most of them composed of spoken texts, music and images, interspersed with occasional short, wordless vignettes. The picture track was edited digitally and completed in 35mm, but the source material is disparate, ranging from 8mm home movies to 16mm film and digital video. Each "film poem" reflects on an aspect of Holden's unfolding experience, drawing on his relationship with his aging parents, his early life in suburban Victoria, moving around the country, witnessing a murder, trying to come to terms with the institutionalization of his schizophrenic brother,. Even when its subject matter is grim, or its tone critical, Holden's is a warm voice, lending the film an emotional accessibility uncommon in experimental film.
Recently, a number of experimental filmmakers have created feature-length works from a number of short, independent segments – Mike Hoolboom's recent Imitations of Life (2003) and Gustav Deutsch's Film Ist series (ongoing) come to mind – but Holden's cycle is unique in character and tone, and feels wholly unified by his generous, forthright poetic voice. With its emphasis on the social landscape, Trains of Winnipeg may relate more specifically to that strong Canadian tradition of films which plumb the mysterious character of particular places, among them Jack Chambers' Hart of London (1970), Joyce Wieland's Reason Over Passion (1968-69), Rick Hancox's Moose Jaw (There's a Future in Our Past) (1992) and David Rimmer's Local Knowledge (1992).
Many of the sections work within a single visual motif, much as a poet will employ a restrictive structure or rhyme scheme. In the opening piece, "Love in the White City," for example, the poem's mordent litany on love's poor chances in Winnipeg is echoed by the downcast gaze of the camera. The screen is divided into four quadrants, each tracking the shadow of filmmaker and camera as they traverse the streets and sidewalks of the "White City." In "The Jew and the Irishman," a huge moon floats at centre screen, superimposed on floor plans for suburban homes, while Holden recalls his father's courageous rebuke to a party guest's crass ethnic joke. The film's darkest passage is "18,000 Dead in Gordon Head," which has already been seen at many international festivals as a separate short film. Here, Holden talks about witnessing the arbitrary murder of a teenage girl by a suburban sniper, and his subsequent inability to really feel anything about this death. Perhaps, he suggests, the steady diet of simulated violence and death provided by the mass media have normalized murder, muting his – and our – capacity to respond to the real thing.
Winnipeg is the site of one of the world's biggest train yards, acres and acres of track occupying enormous expanses towards the city's northern and eastern edges, and creating a distinct division in the city's social landscape. It was these train yards that suggested the project's title. In the final reel of the film, after engaging us with his verbal eloquence, Holden confidently dispenses with words altogether, creating a lengthy, rhythmic montage of trains in motion in the yards and on the prairies. Trains of Winnipeg is a fine and unusual film, which not only deserves to be seen by an audience wider than provided by our alternative film venues – many films deserve more viewers than they get – but has a real potential to be embraced by members of that broader audience.
Trains of Winnipeg is distributed by the Winnipeg Film Group (winnipegfilmgroup.com). Extensive information and audio and video clips from the project's various incarnations are available online at trainsofwinnipeg.com.
[Jonathan Ball, Uptown Magazine, October 14, 2004]
TRAINSPOTTING - EPIC PROJECT IS BOTH COMPLEX AND ENGAGING
Rating: "A"
A collection of 14 related short films, Trains of Winnipeg is a feature-length experimental movie that reinterprets work from other sections of Clive Holden's Trains of Winnipeg project. Instead of a series of interrelated short narratives, the movie consists of a series of 'film poems'.
Sometimes these film poems are akin to music videos for tracks from the Trains of Winnipeg album; other times the films add visuals and music to words previously published in the Trains of Winnipeg book. One film, Hitler! (Revisited), uses an old Holden film from outside the project as the basis for a new work that finds a place in the Trains canon.
The final short, Trains of Winnipeg, is a separate work, and the only film devoid of Holden's voice-over poetry. (A poem of the same name in the book is set to music in the album.) This film consists entirely of footage of trains and machinery set to music and the sounds of the rail yard. Through careful editing, repetition and sound design, Holden builds what would otherwise seem like little more than stock footage into a symphonic coda that feels like a fitting end to such an epic project.
The book, CD, and 13 films find Holden exploring his own thoughts about trains, migration, movement and notions of selfhood - all of which are affected by geography and relationships with other people. In the final short, Holden's voice is absent and viewers must engage in a meditation on what personal meaning the Trains of Winnipeg project might have.
As a whole, the films are excellent. Holden combines various video and film formats to great visual effect, and the music and sound design is outstanding. Holden's voice, which narrates or reads poetry over 13 of the 14 films, maintains a consistent tone that prevents the poetic segments from moving too far into the foreground but without being so emotionless as to relegate the words to the status of soundtrack. Holden's cadence is slow and thoughtful without seeming detached, expressing melancholy without weighing down the film with a depressive drone.
The greatest strengths of the films are their rhythms. Taking the sounds of trains as his starting point, Holden edits the works to complement the poetry and music by looping and slowing segments to allow for reviewing and meditation. Though the films employ editing techniques commonly associated with experimental video and film art, the music and the poetry - and ultimately the films themselves - are much more accessible than might be expected.
Trains of Winnipeg is a perfect example of art that manages to be complex and cerebral without becoming pretentious, opaque and ultimately boring.
Too many experimental filmmakers sacrifice visceral appeal in favour of stuffy, overly academic notions. Such films have more in common with logic puzzles than personal, meaningful art. In an age where ambition is held up to ridicule in favour of postmodern posturing, it's refreshing to see an artist who isn't afraid to attempt art-making on an epic scale.
interview:
"Part of what's interesting about riding a train," says Clive Holden, "is that as you're travelling along there's no other element of the highway outside of the window, there are no other vehicles, you're not seeing cars and trucks driving along beside you in the other lane. It's just the countryside.
"The other element of that is, as you pass through a town or a city... you see the ragged backs of all these buildings. It's like getting a peak under a rug and seeing all the things that are officially swept under the rug."
Holden has a lot of ideas about trains. He's even got his own website, trainsofwinnipeg.com, He's also got a book, an album, and a movie, all called Trains of Winnipeg and all centring around the metaphor of the Canadian railyard giants as symbols of power, possibility, and self-exploration.
"I think that (trains) are a found metaphor that is understandable on a basic level by most people. I think it has to do with strength and grace on a large scale, and maybe also human potential.
"The train is a symbol of our own possibilities; we see this giant thing, moving so gracefully. And of course the sound - the sound is just filled with an incredible variety of wonderful rhythms. Sp they're these giant kinetic sculptures accompanied by a kind of music symphony."
Music is an important part of Holden's project. The poet teamed up with musicians Christine Fellows, Emily Goodden, Steve Bates and Weakerthans John K. Samson and Jason Tait to create music for both the CD and movie, both of which adapt work from Holden's book. This multidisciplinary approach - combining video, film and sound art with written and performed poetry - was something Holden felt was necessary to explore the project's full potential.
"I think that a lot of the most interesting art is found in the gaps between media and genres. You can only go so far specializing on one media or genre, though that's very worthwhile... but I often have concepts that I want to (develop) combining formal exploration with political ideas.
"It's traditionally something you're not supposed to do, but I like doing things I'm not supposed to do to see if I can get something (that's creative) out of the tension. If you're paying attention and you bring things together to create tension, that moment of tension can be a really interesting place to explore."
Though the movie Trains of Winnipeg may seem like the final instalment of the project, the finishing touches will be found on Holden's website, where he will be contemplating the project as a whole while travelling to film festivals and unwinding from involvement with the ambitious undertaking.
"I think of the website as being the hub of the project, what pulls it all together. I'm trying to document (online) my observations about the project now, at the end of four years... I'm trying to step back and get a bird's eye view of the whole thing."
film:
[GertJan Zuilhof, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Jan. 2005]
A visually opulent, almost hypnotic film, for which the word poetic really is justified for a change. This hybrid film is made up of fourteen film poems, each of which has the character of an individual short film, but in tone and approach they are all clearly related. Without a doubt, the film fits into the tradition of the experimental film, but it also has an epic quality rare within this genre. Within this tangible unity, the film uses a variety of kinds of images such as home movies, found footage and images processed during development, but also material from more recent visual developments in video and Internet art. The film comprises monumental, calmly recited poems. Poems that have their own autonomy within the film and hence are not literally illustrated by the images. Alongside images and text, music plays an important role. This role is so important that you could rightly call it a musical film. The film stops to look at landscapes and places that have a meaning to the director without any sign of autobiography or nostalgia. The mood and often mysterious and intriguing images unmistakably have a universal element. The film is part of an extensive multimedia project for which a CD, a book and a website have also been released.
film:
[Chris Kennedy, FilmCan, Issue 3, June 2005]
Clive Holden's Trains of Winnipeg – Fourteen Film Poems is one of the most notable feature length experimental films of the last few years. With a lush and lucid approach, Holden takes up the mantle of cine-poet, drawing from the transcendental traditions of both film and poetry that place identity within the landscape of experience and vision. By focusing on the railway as a carrier of this transient identity, Holden expands on a common theme for Canadian experimental film, updating nationally focussed work like Joyce Wieland's Reason Over Passion in his own personal way.
From the very beginning of the film, Holden lays claim to the primacy of his personal vision as a guide to his reminiscences and observations. In the first film poem, Love in the White City, the screen is divided up into four frames with each frame containing an image of Holden's shadow as he walks around his neighbourhood, cradling the small video camera in his arms. It is a classic annunciation of presence within artisanal filmmaking, but Holden recreates it anew, particularly because vision is tied so closely with voice in this film.
It is often his words that provide the main propulsion for Trains of Winnipeg. The film is a culmination of a multimedia project that included a book of poetry and a CD of readings, so it is natural that the film would absorb so many of his words. At times the poetry overwhelms the richly saturated imagery, but in poems like 18,000 Dead in Gordon Head, where he ruminates on the death of a girl, and in the closing pieces that reflect on his aging parents and their choice of a final living space, Holden's words reveal his attention to the fleetingness of vision and place.
It is as a viewing experience, where the poetry of Trains of Winnipeg really shines. Holden uses a rich, high contrast color palette, partly achieved by using a low-end consumer digital video camera and then blowing it up to 35mm. His visual choices are strong and lyrical, while his editing draws upon a well-hewn sense of rhythm and meter. Because his themes are familiar terrain within a Canadian lexicon, he respectfully borrows certain approaches from filmmakers like David Rimmer and Joyce Wieland, even while investing his images with narrative presence. It is as if he uses the tropes of structural film as hangers on which to overlay his emotions and words.
As a meditation on the Canadian experience, Holden reveals that migration is as important as immigration in a national identity. Each film speaks of specific places (Active Pass, Nanaimo Station, Bus north to Thompson with Les at the wheel) , but also the act of passing through. Holden, who carries with him a particularly Canadian sense of vision, speaks often about the attempts to identify with others on the road and see through their eyes. There's a stunning moment in 18,000 Dead in Gordon Head where he lies on his side with the camera, attempting to empathize with a young girl who bled to death on that very spot. With humility, he recognizes that in the end, "it's just hard concrete".
After all his travelling and experience, Holden's parents become the prime model for his experience of identity. They were Irish immigrants who moved through London to Canada in the fifties, living throughout Western Canada before finally retiring in Victoria. Holden's brother, a schizophrenic, was fractured by the migration and seems attached to the old world of Europe, while Holden absorbed the constant moving into a wanderlust that still seems placed in a firm sense of a regional home. It is fitting that his final text imagines Holden keeping his parents close by creating a pair of wings for them. They are only more near when given the freedom to fly.
The film ends with a long visual meditation in the rail yards of Winnipeg, placed to a soundtrack by Emily Goodden. The poems have moved back and forth across Western Canada, but have seldom lingered in Winnipeg. Instead, Winnipeg serves as the hub through which the trains and memories pass. Like Holden himself in the roll of narrator, this hub serves as a conduit of experience, where a fluid identity can have a momentary rest in a personalized place, resonating through words and images before moving on again.
film:
[Images Festival, April, 2004]
From the prairies comes Clive Holden's experimental feature, TRAINS OF WINNIPEG - 14 FILM POEMS. Holden explores his feelings of transience, loss and longing for a place to call home through a series of short films and spoken texts, scored by two members of The Weakerthans and composer Christine Fellows. He presents us with images of neighbourhoods and locations that are inherently Canadian, but his rhythmic and abstract approach shifts our focus, requiring us to re-examine what we thought was familiar. TRAINS OF WINNIPEG takes the form of an episodic journey shrouded in mystery that accumulates emotional impact with locomotive force.
This debut feature, Saturday, April 17 at 5 pm, heralds the appearance of a remarkable new filmmaking talent.
book:
[Steve Faguy, The Link – Concordia University, Montreal]
Childish repetitive nonsense finds a home in Trains of Winnipeg
Don't you hate poets who think they're artistic because their poems are repetitive? Don't you hate poets who think they're artistic because their poems are repetitive? Don't you hate poets who think they're artistic because their poems are repetitive?
The agony of reading the above paragraph will be multiplied ten-fold for anyone reading Clive Holden's book Trains of Winnipeg.
The collection of poems on everything from public transit to his parents seems lost in its focus, perhaps because it never had one to begin with.
The book's back cover would have us believe that Holden pays "attention to the importance of the image," but the poems themselves are anything but. Most simply spew random facts without any description, leaving the reader disconnected from any image Holden tries to put forward.
Poems like "Manitoba manifesto" exemplify this annoying repetition and lack of clarity, with verses like "the cage door is open now... but we're afraid of the change. the cage door is open now... but we're afraid of the change. the cage door is open now... but we're afraid of the change. the cage door is open now... but we're afraid of the change."
Thank you, but we got the point the first time.
Despite this, the book has a few gems inside. "Love in the white city" is an eyebrow-raiser, with verses like "love in the white city . is unlikely/ the mud is too deep/ and the snow tastes of dogs," while others show interesting ways of describing sexual situations using non-sexual words.
But while some of the poems in this book are worth reading, it's hard to shake that feeling that there's a half hour that could have been better spent watching The Simpsons.
Even for a public transit buff such as myself, the poems are disappointing at best.
film:
[James Digiovanna, Tucson Weekly, April 14, 2005]
Even more experimental was Trains of Winnipeg - 14 Film Poems, by Clive Holden, a series of 14 short films, many of them recitations of poems over stunning imagery. Holden is a master of the captivating visual, and a surprisingly good poet, though he really should have gotten someone else to read the poems, as his voice is increasingly unpleasant. Nonetheless, if you focus on sight and not sound, this is the kind of film that is so appealing it could, if given the chance, really expand the audience for non-narrative film.
film:
[Helen Westerik, www.filmgoddess.net, Feb. 8, 2005]
after seeing Trains of Winnipeg at the Rotterdam Film Festival 2005:
When you go to festivals, you try to see the films you can’t see in your local art cinema. Sometimes that means that you walk out after 10 minutes, knowing the film was not meant for you. This was the risk I took when seeing Trains of Winnipeg . Half expecting to be bored by a self-indulgent work of art, I chose a seat next to the exit, just in case. Finding that there was absolutely no need for that, I sat intrigued and mesmerized by this film. I considered watching it again.
Trains of Winnipeg consists of 14 individual but mutually congruent film poems that cover topics from politics (Neighbours Walk Softly , an anti-war poem) to very personal (Hitler, revisited, which explores the relationship with his schizophrenic brother and family in general). Although the filmmaker draws some of the poems from his own experience, sometimes even very personal and very painful ones, the abstract way of presenting it and the unemotional voice-over lifts it to a higher plan. The boundaries between the political, the personal and, by lack of a better word, the meta-personal, blur.
Holden paints 14 different pictures, or writes 14 different poems with film, video, and found footage. He uses loops, split screens, fragmentation to go with the beautiful soundtrack and the poems that he recites. The rhythm that he creates using sound and visuals, makes you want to embark on the journey with him, much like the rhythm of a train is half the joy of your trip. In coarse-grained images of legs, trains, sideways, mountains and condos, Holden meditates on life, love, death, longing and the feeling of displacement.
The Trains of Winnipeg film is part, or maybe, the conclusion of a larger project, including a website, a CD with the soundtrack and a book with the poetry. Holden has worked on the project since 2001. The time he took to finish the project definitely pays off in balance and aesthetics. This amazing work of art should be seen by everyone interested in visual culture.
[Adam McDowell, National Post, Toronto, March 05, 2005]
It might have one of the least promising titles you're likely to come across, but Trains of Winnipeg: 14 Film Poems has been hailed as the Ben-Hur of experimental cinema.
On the heels of succesful runs at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and Berlin's transmediale, director Clive Holden's epic is rolling into Toronto for a week-long screening. The film strings 14 shorts together through tone and metaphor to tell a story of travel and distance.
Holden says it's time people approached experimental film with an open mind.
"I would like people to approach avant-garde cinema in the same way they approach music. There are popular audiences for surprisingly esoteric types of music," he adds, citing contemporary jazz as an example.
Trains of Winnipeg is not just a film. Since 2001, Holden and a large team of collaborators have been exploring the themes of travel and boundaries in a book of poems, a Web site and a CD of poetry and music.
Holden admits the name of his project is potentially misleading -- most of it has only metaphorical links with trains or Winnipeg.
"Will a train buff be disappointed by parts of Trains of Winnipeg? Absolutely," he says.
film:
[George Godwin, Cinema Scope Magazine, Fall, 2004]
One of the most impressive recent releases [is] Clive Holden's experimental feature, Trains of Winnipeg (2004). Subtitled "14 Film Poems," this haunting assembly of short ruminations on death, love, loss, and some kind of redemption, makes use of hand-processing, an attention to the physical surface of the film, a combination of Super 8, 16mm, old home movies, and new footage made to look old and degraded. Holden's cyclical, repeating images and evocative soundtracks support readings of his poetry. Initially, Holden's flat, inexpressive voice is alienating, but the film gradually accumulates a visceral power and emotional force (18,000 Dead in Gordon Head is genuinely chilling in its description of the poet's affectless response to a murder). In fact, it gathers such force that when we get to the final textless segment, our minds fill the space provided with our own thoughts and emotions, waking us to feeling to which Holden has unexpectedly led us.
film:
[Jane McCullough, Fast Forward Weekly, Calgary, September 29, 2005]
Featuring 14 short films that collaborate with the poems that inspired them, this is an excellent chance to experience interesting visuals together with one of Canada’s unique voices. From the painterly image to the abstract turn of phrase, from stream of consciousness to sense of humour, Trains of Winnipeg is reverential in its references to Guy Maddin, Sergei Eisenstein and Georges Méliès without resorting to the contrived. With a glorious original score from John K. Samson and Jason Tait (Weakerthans), and Christine Fellows, this work is both patriotic and self-deprecating, like so many Canadians of a certain generation. Unlike going to see a random program of short films, you should prepare yourself for repetition and unity in voice and style – that of the director and poet, Clive Holden.
film/project:
[Rob Nay, The Uniter, October 14, 2004]
Trains of Winnipeg eschews artistic barriers, forming a riveting, wide expanse of work. Writer and filmmaker Clive Holden will be unveiling the latest addition, a series of film poems, to his multidisciplinary project as part of Send + Receive - a Festival of Sound.
The film poems add another layer to a richly textured work that includes a CD of music and spoken poetry released in 2001, a book published in 2002, and a website launched in 2001. For Trains of Winnipeg, Holden had a transparent intention to explore varied forms, challenging the divisions that sometimes solidify between artistic genres.
"You end up with gaps between these (art) worlds and in the gaps are a lot of the most interesting things because that's where things are least explored, outside of these walls and fences that are built," says Holden. "So I thought that if I designed a project that by definition had several feet in different worlds, then part of the result of the project would be seeing things in these spaces."
The film poems present a multitude of perspectives, fusing musical, visual and lyrical narratives into an absorbing whole. On Trains of Winnipeg, artists including Christine Fellows and The Weakerthans' Jason Tait provide the musical backdrop to Holden's images and words.
In creating the short films, Holden made use of a variety of visual formats such as 35mm, 16mm, Super 8, and video to fashion a collection of experimental images.
He lists two primary reasons for the range of forms. The first is "an interest in using all these different textures and colour palettes to create different effects throughout the piece," he says. "The other other main purpose is that I wanted to say something about this particular time in history when we're moving from film to digital, from analog media to digital media, from celluloid to video. A lot of the most interesting work is coming out of both worlds at once."
Although Trains of Winnipeg received its premiere earlier this year in Toronto and has toured other festivals since then, Holden looks forward to the film's Winnipeg debut at Send + Receive, an event he holds in high regard.
"I'm just a big follower of the festival. I've gone to every one and I think it's one of the best media arts festivals in the world for my money. It's an incredibly exciting event," says Holden.
Trains of Winnipeg will make its Winnipeg premiere at Cinematheque as part of Send + Receive on Thursday, October 21st.
[Lindsay Gibb, Take One Magazine, June - September 2004 issue]
One longer-form film [at Images Festival 2004] that did manage to maintain interest throughout was a compilation of 14 short films brought together to make a trance-inducing whole. Clive Holden's TRAINS OF WINNIPEG is a package of art forms that complement each other in captivating ways. Using poems, music and films to wrench a range of feelings from his audience––beginning with cynicism, moving to nostalgia, adding on discomfort and ending with yearning––TRAINS OF WINNIPEG runs the gamut of human emotions.
film:
[Jason Anderson, Eye Weekly, April 15, 2004]
damn near sublime
TRAINS OF WINNIPEG: Clive Holden's collection of 14 film poems is wry, wise and damn near sublime. A world premiere, TRAINS OF WINNIPEG juxtaposes the poet and filmmaker's ruminations on landscape and memory with a wide array of visual strategies (home movies, found footage, hand-processed film) and eerie music by Christine Fellows and the Weakerthans' John K. Samson and Jason Tait. With its great formal ingenuity and profound emotional richness, this rates as one of the finest experimental features ever made in Canada.
film:
[Dylan Ferguson, The Manitoban – U. of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Oct., 2004]
All aboard the Holden express
Experimental films run short on cinematic steam
Experimental film is a difficult genre to dabble in, even if your conductor is a veteran of fringe artistic ventures like city-based artist Clive Holden. Trains of Winnipeg, Holden’s latest genre-bending work, is an ambitious forward dive into the world of artistic cinema. A feature-length movie composed of 14 short “film poems,” the poetry is sharp, the overall feel is immersive and haunting, but the value of his cinema is questionable.
Few can question Clive Holden’s talent as a poet, and although it’s dry and unenthusiastic, his free-verse shows inspiration and austere meditation as it leaps back and forth between themes like humanity, small-town charm, psychology and social issues through effortless stream-of-consciousness gymnastics. Never one to confine his talent to a clearly defined genre, Holden reads his poetry aloud as a voice-over to experimental short films that are mostly altered stock of urban shots that pulsate and glow and loop, presumably to imitate the mindset of the poems’ author. Occasionally, the mood this creates is intoxicating and allows us to better consume his musing verse, most notably in the harrowing fifth vignette, 18,000 Dead in Gordon Head. It also works with both Love in the White City and Neighbour Walk Softly, which, with the help of a throbbing, electrically humming musical score, build a surreal visual atmosphere that forsakes reality to delve you into the shadowy areas of your inner mind.
Even though the poetry is necessary, my sneaking suspicion that the imagery would be more effective without Holden’s soft, laconic voice was confirmed by the most powerful work here, Hitler! (revisited): a previously released piece that is absolutely haunting and chilling, in no small part because all the words were written. The final film, Trains of Winnipeg, is pure visual poetry and absorbing in a simple, relaxed way.
Though the organization is strong, and the sensation created at film’s end is palpable, too few of the shorts were actually engaging. In fact, only three awed me, and too many (the miniaturized Death in the Suburbs, the flippant F-movie, the not-for-epileptics Condo) were either poorly-conceived or just too simple or gimmicky to be memorable. The problem is that Holden has little real cinematic talent and deprived of his cheap photographic effects he would have nothing to work with — and I think he knows it. That would certainly explain the saturation of strobe effects, superimposition, red and green dyed film stock, and the endless looping of every shot. In theory, I suppose, Holden is trying to channel the European masters of experimentalism, but in practice his cinematic ability is too limited, and only the inspiration that shines through his poetry wards off the boredom he courts with his simplistic visuals.
The thing about experimental film is that it is inherently less entertaining than narrative film out of a lack of obvious structure. A story provides easily recognizable interest upon which you can hang such wonderful frills as character, mood, style and themes. Experimental film lacks this solid spine and therefore must be absolutely enthralling or thought-provoking — which is a very hard thing to do — in order to maintain interest. Holden strains as an artist, but his ability is limited to creating a world of sensation without substance. And I understand that this may be part of the point, but it is nevertheless unfulfilling. If a traditional narrative film is a full-bodied meal, Trains feels like a bag of potato chips: momentarily enjoyable to consume but ultimately unsatisfying.
As an artistic venture, Trains of Winnipeg is likable, mostly because it is raw, personal and original. By the end, there is an established, unique style, and we have a definite feel for the author’s mind, and often you cannot ask for more than that in an artistic work. Its failure is only on a cinematic level. Though it never derails and does gain some momentum as it chugs along its pathos-laden path, Trains is fuelled by coals of a literary grade but ultimately runs out of steam just short of its destination: Cinema.
film:
[Winnipeg Cinematheque, September, 2004]
The premiere of film-maker and poet Clive Holden's epic new film [Trains of Winnipeg] is a cause for celebration. He has created a stunningly imaginative new experimental work, rich in imagery and a sense of wonder using a collage of film stocks and video formats from 1950's 8mm to super 8, 16mm, 35mm, and VHS found footage - to the latest in digital technology. The film has already played to great acclaim in Spain and the United States and now returns home.
Straddling the borders between the worlds of cinema, visual art, and literature, the fourteen films include a variety of filmic and digital experiments, essays exploring the politics of form and form of personal politics as well as audiovisual poems celebrating the raw joy of moving pictures, sound, colour and light.
Featuring a beautiful ambient score by two members of The Weakerthans - John K. Samson and Jason Tait, Christine Fellows, Steve Bates and Emily Goodden.
film:
[Frank Moens, www.kutsite.com, Brussels]
In deze experimentele film worden 14 gedichten van Amerikaanse schrijvers voorgelezen op, meestal korrelige, beelden, vaak eerder visuals. Als je de gedichten goed vindt, dienen de beelden ter ondersteuning, het verbaast dan ook niet echt als je weet dat deze film deel uitmaakt van een multimedia project waar ook de CD, het boek en de website een deel van uitmaken.
film:
[Jesse Wente, CBC Radio Metro Morning, Toronto, March 4, 2005]:
For folks looking for something a little more cutting edge, there's a screening at Camera - the new cinema and bar on Queen West.
March 4th and 5th you can see a very interesting experimental film called Trains of Winnipeg - 14 Film Poems, directed by Clive Holden.
As you might imagine from the title, its a collection of 14 short films, which mix methods and styles - each is a poem - both verbal and visual, using old home movies, manipulated stock, and new footage, with split screens, and overlaying images, along with music into a rhythmic experience.
You'll like some of the films better than others, but taken as a whole, the film explores themes of home and longing - often the films involve moving - walking, riding a bike, driving - giving it a transient atmosphere.
This is the type of movie that you'll pretty much never get to see, unless you head to the Camera cinema (1028 Queen St. W.) March 4th and 5th. At tonight's screening, artist Clive holden will be there to discuss Trains of Winnipeg.
film:
[LIFT Newsletter, April, 2004]
2004 IMAGES HIGHLIGHTS INCLUDE: prairie wunderkind Clive Holden premiering the hauntingly exquisite Trains Of Winnipeg.
cd:
[Jon Paul Fiorentino, Matrix Magazine, Spring, 2002]
Clive Holden's Trains of Winnipeg is a CD of poems and music featuring gorgeous, retro cover art, music by Christine Fellows, members of Winnipeg's The Weakerthans and Holden's hauntingly powerful lyric voice. The poems range from the nostalgic "Nanaimo Station" in which the poetic voice romanticizes the town of his birth and anticipates the future: "I was born in Nanaimo, two blocks from the station." The station serves as a symbol of departure toward the primary subject matter that makes up "Trains of Winnipeg": the poetic voice is the train finally settling into home after a restless wanderlust.
In "Transcona" Holden achieves simple, effective imagery: "Transcona is where the trains go to settle and clean in the middle of our country / . . . I sat in a ditch by a field of chalk yellow." Here, Holden manages to capture the beauty of a region without succumbing to the trappings of regionalism. The poetic voice makes the region accessible and as universal as words will allow. The most stunning track/poem on this CD is "Condo" which contains the line: "My parents' condo is where they've moved to die." Here we find a startling truth delivered in a chilling, terse manner. Another chilling track/poem is "18,000 Dead in Gordon Head" in which the poetic voice recounts the various voyeuristic encounters he has had with death. These encounters grow out of a formative encounter with a thirteen year old gunshot victim in the small town of Gordon Head. This poem contains the most morbid subject matter of this collection and this is amplified by the poetic voice's desire to record it all, not only through poetry but also on film. This is prose poetry at its finest.
The poems that make up Trains of Winnipeg are enhanced by the resonant musical contributions by Christine Fellows, John K. Samson and Jason Tait. As well, Holden's delivery of the poems is seamless; his is a voice that calms even as it disturbs. However, these poems stand on their own–not simply as song lyrics but as lyric or narrative verse. This is literature: an economy of language, an attention to the importance of the image, and a sophisticated application of rhetoric make Trains of Winnipeg an outstanding and unique poetic debut. It is stunning to hear a spoken word CD of such quality; it is equally frustrating to have to wait for the full length book that is to follow. Thankfully, Trains of Winnipeg has grown from a spoken word CD into a multimedia art project. The entire text of the Trains of Winnipeg CD is available at www.trainsofwinnipeg.com or www.cyclopspress.com along with an impressive book-length manuscript and experimental films (the film that accompanies "18,000 Dead in Gordon Head" should not be missed).
[Sean Michaels, TangMonkey, Montreal]
The Best Music of 2001: #1. Clive Holden - Trains of Winnipeg.
I love this album. A strange collaboration between the Winnipeg poet Clive Holden and two members of folk-punk outfit the Weakerthans, Trains of Winnipeg evokes wonder, sadness, rest and regret through a series of poems read to music. Holden's voice bends with the music, but also maintains the integrity of the words: he is not singing, but his delivery dances with the melody, the one enriching the other. Holden tells stories or paints pictures. The musicians erect Mogwai-esque guitar landscapes, rumbling train soundtracks or creepy, ambient noise to match each piece. Even if you don't normally enjoy spoken word, this album is a masterpiece - like an older brother to Gord Downie's Coke Machine Glow - and it was my favourite album of 2001.
cd:
[Joey Sweeney, Philadelphia Weekly]
Top 5 of the Moment
Clive Holden is a poet from British Columbia, and on Trains of Winnipeg , he's backed up by some of Canada's great post-emo hopes: singer/songwriter Christine Fellows and two members of The Weakerthans. With a musical backing that splits the difference between that sort of Godspeed You Black Emperor pensiveness and a more propulsive indie inspiration, Holden's poems are laid out in a great old fogy/young man voice that'll go down especially well with fans of the blowing plastic bag scene in American Beauty. Trains of Winnipeg is that kind of party.
[David Rozniatowski, Prairie Fire Review of Books]
Although a complete literary entity in itself, Trains of Winnipeg is actually just one component of a multi-media two year art project of the same name, undertaken by Clive Holden and "several comrades." In addition to the poems, the project includes a website, a collection of experimental film poems and art videos, and a CD. The project was to continue as an ongoing work in progress throughout 2003.
If the poems are representative of the work as a whole, the complete Trains of Winnipeg project must be an experience of impressive emotional intensity. Trains are a central but not pervasive image in the collection of poems, although the train association can be read into several of the works where it is not so immediately obvious. Many of life's situations and emotions--movement, separation, relocation, restlessness, anticipation, apprehension--can be expressed in the metaphor of a train journey. Even when the train motif is not in evidence, Holden's profuse and rapidly shifting imagery evokes the experience of looking out of the window of a fast moving train -each changing scene is a quickly glimpsed moment in time, framed briefly in the window of experience to invite immediate reaction and comment, or to be photographed and stored in the archive of memory for future consideration.
The Trains of Winnipeg collection of poems is even a multi-media experience in itself, encompassing poems, prose passages (which, however, have a marked poetic diction of their own), concrete poems which transmute the printed word into a medium for the construction of visual art, and stills from film footage. The last mentioned items are probably the least successful, because even although they are directly related to two printed works, the prose poem, "18,000 dead in gordon head" (a found film) and the poem, "neighbours walk softly," the out-of-context and out-of-focus visuals do little to enhance the literary work, simply because they are stills. The pictorial element would be much more effective seen as moving images in juxtaposition with the dynamism of the texts.
The poems are wonderfully clever and inventive, while maintaining a sensitivity of feeling that prevents them from turning into mere virtuoso word play. "rhyming method" (26) is a skillfully wrought meditation on themes of reproduction, existence, and what makes each of us a unique individual. It really has to be read aloud to appreciate the consonance and assonance of all the words beginning with "r" followed by different vowels and vowel sounds, even including examples from Italian and Latin--"ottava and terza rima" and "procreate ad rem."
Similarly, hands of "henry moore" (35) plays on words beginning with "m," and toys with the name, "Moore" in much the same way that Alexander Pope played with the name, Hannah More, almost three hundred years ago. The quasi-mantric chant at the beginning of each stanza, "moore/mammal/mammalian," where the omission of the letter "l" in the second word would yield the word "mamma," provides a perfect segue into a brief but fond allusion to Moore's ineffably beautiful mother and child sculptures, and passes on to make an oblique but certainly identifiable reference to a great tragedy of maternal love in the lines, "i want the sun . . . i want the sun," the terrifying words of Oswald in the shattering final scene of Ibsen's Ghosts , when Mrs. Alving realizes that her son has gone mad.
The tone of the poems is sombre and pessimistic. There is plenty of jeu d'esprit , but little that is humorous in the sense of evoking laughter. "manitoba manifesto:" is a superbly crafted poem, with its repeated phrases giving a clickety-click rhythm to the metre that suggests the sound of a train rolling along the tracks, but its dark mood threatens and throbs in phrases like "we're dying here, there's not enough food and YOU don't care" and "i'm tired, nobody loves me and i want to go home." The poem "trains of winnipeg" (from which the collection takes its name) is a tough yet tender ballad that implicitly reminds us that trains carry freight as well as passengers, and that we are simultaneously passengers in the train of life experience, and trains ourselves, pulling our accumulated knowledge and experience behind us. The Trains of Winnipeg collection takes us on a journey on which the landscape is occasionally austere and forbidding, and sometimes we go through dark tunnels, but what we gain from the experience makes the journey unquestionably worthwhile.
cd:
[Indieville, Toronto]
This is a collaborative album between spoken word artist/poet Clive Holden, Jason Tait (the Weakerthans' percussionist), John K. Samson (the Weakerthans' guitarist), and Christine Fellows. Many of the pieces are serene and calm, far from the signature Weakerthans sound. Other pieces are dark and comprised of spoken word elements against a sound effect-based backing. The poetry itself is often sad and spooky. Holden speaks of many things: death, his own birthplace, the wind, and lots more. Some parts of this album are just overwhelming, some parts are shocking, and some parts are lighter and more like ballads. A large element of the greatness of this release is the excellent quality of Holden's actual poetry. The words and his voice merge perfectly, his speeches are detached and awkward, yet also seem to fit perfectly. Even when they are used in conjunction with the song-like parts if this album, they seem to work perfectly, without any conflict between the voice and the instruments. Of course, it takes a bit of time to get used to this type of stuff at first, but after you've gotten used to it, this can be a real pleasure to listen to. Recommended.
film:
[Gimli Film Festival 2003]
Neighbours Walk Softly (Canada, 4 minutes. Director: Clive Holden ) is a visually stunning piece of protest poetry from Wolesly-area wordsmith Clive Holden . Featuring music by Jason Tait.
film:
[Melbourne International Film Festival 2003]
18,000 Dead in Gordon Head, director: Clive Holden, country: Canada, fact: the average American youth has experienced 18,000 television murders by the age of 16. Using a relentless draining array of repeating imagery as backdrop, Holden recounts, in macho beat mode, his disturbing encounters with dead bodies on the streets of suburbia
project:
[CV2 Magazine]
An interview with Clive Holden (excerpt).
CV2: You are obviously a writer who works in diverse forms—including fiction, poetry, film and music—as well as the primary artistic force behind Cyclops Press which seems to mirror these interests in its range of publishing projects. What, for you, is the creative vision behind your multimedia approach to poetry? When combining music and poetry, what do you hope to achieve, first in your personal work as a poet, and then as a publisher who has brought together other poets and musicians to create spoken word recordings to music?
Clive Holden: My approach to poetry is that a poem can be formed out of almost any raw materials: words on a page, speech, songs, sounds, silences, photographs, moving images, buildings, found objects, world events, etc. If a poet points to a man and says, "He's a poem," then he becomes a poem in that moment. It's the framing by a poet that transforms the subject into a poem.
To paraphrase Jorge Luis Borges: "I know exactly what a poem is, until the moment someone asks me to define a poem." I've participated in three film festivals that specialize in the "film poem," and as you can imagine there was a fair bit of debate as to what this phrase meant. I've always thought that it was simply a good replacement for the phrase "experimental film." You could argue that they each use non linear structures, metaphor and symbolism, they're usually shorter works, and they blur the line between concepts in prose such as "fiction" and non-fiction," they're sometimes lyrical, or confessional, or conceptual, they're as hard to define, as poetry itself.
I do "write" poems in the traditional sense of the word, with both formal and sometimes avant garde strategies, but in practice I think of all the art I make as poetry. I'm talking about the process of art making here, which is what interests me as an artist, and not so much about where the art will be shelved or exhibited, which is for other people to decide.
Whether I'm making a film, a sound work, or seeing if I can write a really good sonnet, or country and western song, it's all the same process for me. If I write a poem with a set meter, it focuses my creative energy into that frame (and I have the added, crucial, challenge of trying to somehow make it new). This process has a "so old it's new" quality for me.
Or, I might decide with a new film that I'm only going to use footage shot in a particular neighbourhood, within a 24-hour period, all from a low angle, with straight cuts only, no shots lasting less than three seconds, with a different white dog in every shot. I'll make the best film I can within those parameters, and it's largely the same effect, the frame creates the focus. I might even make a series of films with these same parameters.
As for Cyclops Press, the original vision for it was to become a publisher of many, many forms of art making, from finely made books of lyrical poetry, to spoken word or sound art on CD, and eventually to film poems on DVD, and on the web, and whatever comes next. I don't know where it's going to go. The whole thing's an experiment from top to bottom.
As for my combining music and poetry, this is a very traditional activity, pre-dating books, of course, so on the one hand I'm just doing what comes naturally for a poet. But in this case, I was also craving artistic collaboration when I made my CD. I'd been working alone in a room for years, so it was thrilling for me to work with other artists, and especially with such talented ones.
CV2: How did you become interested in working with poetry and music? The music of jazz has had a long relationship with spoken text as verse, as well as the voice as an improvisational instrument. Has this kind of innovation had an influence upon your work? Who have been some of your influences in this work? By mentors I mean artists, types of music, technology?
Clive Holden: I actually first became interested in working with spoken word, and by extension combining it with music and sound, when I was studying James Joyce and his many successors, and realized that it would be ideal if these works could be heard. Reading many of the works in this tradition requires an "extra literacy," often even more so than poetry. However, in oral performance, either live or recorded, I think thes