Redell Olsen, Film Poems (Les Figues) Los Angeles, 2014.
Introduction by Drew Milne
Cover art by Alice Könitz
Book 4 of 5, TrenchArt Logistics Series
Poetry | $15.00
ISBN 13: 978-1-934254-51-6
Size: 9.25″ x 4.25″
Pages: 173
Binding: Softcover, Perfect
Published: May 20, 2014
In Film Poems, readers find themselves with author Redell Olsen on the cutting-room floor of discourse, weaving together a manifesto of conceptual poetry that demonstrates the skipping and scratch of language. Just as really “seeing” a film is to experience our own vision—the technology that is always mediating our sight—really “reading” (a particular form of seeing) is to experience our own language as a constantly shifting medium; meanings emerge through ceaseless splicings and cuts. Film Poems brings together Olsen’s “Film Poem” works written for performance and installation in relation to films made and appropriated by her between 2007-2011. The five sequences splice together a range of contextual references from London landmarks, lace manufacturing, synchronized swimming, and the history of camouflage. Words unfold on the page as a film unspools from a reel, with particular attention paid to etymologies and polyvalences, to the process and performance of meaning-making and its relationship to physical manufacturing. “Words are the film between what is said and seen,” writes Olsen, “and also the means of writing that something burning in the projector called language.”
Praise for Film Poems:
For Olsen, the everyday stuff is theatrical, metaphoric, and a mark upon the world, that can evanesce in a moment, that has no absolute but is always partial and constituent, like the film frame, part of the creation of reality, part of the gathering of energies and atmospheres, images and scenes through which we move.
Abigail Child
The quality that sets Redell Olsen’s Film Poems apart is what one might describe as their call for civilization in the widest sense—the sense in which anyone at all does not possess civilization, but creates it.
Erik Noonan