Your film is an evocation of the life and work of the poet Lorine Niedecker. She is an important yet not so well known modernist American poet. What drew your attention to her? In which desire or necessity does your film find its origin?
I have a close relationship to poetry – perhaps because I’m originally from St. Petersburg where poetry has an integral place in the Russian psyche. But having grown up in the US, sometimes my experience with English-language poems is really charged. I came to Niedecker’s work after many years of engaging with poetry (I also write.). The minimalist language expressed a profound mind. As I read, I saw her affinities in the foreground. Sometimes we focus on place not as a complexity of meanings and realities – some of which are no longer visible – but on recent events that over-code the past. I think Lorine had a vision of place and time that was fused and alive.
Very far from any common documentary or fiction form, your film invents its proper sensitive language through the collaboration with the choreographer and performer Elise Cowin. Can you comment on this choice? How did you work with her to conceive her action in the film?
Yes, we were not interested in “telling” a story about Lorine’s life but in working through the poems, their ethos, their intentions, their exquisite form. Different collaborations require various levels of input, guidance and direction. Elise and I knew each other from a community of artists in Chicago, and while filming a project inside a freezing car garage one winter, someone we both admire mentioned Lorine’s poems. Being sensitive to and loving poetics, especially the ways in which modernism and postmodernism experimented with wildly different aspects of it – the conversation felt like the beginning of something.
Lorine’s poems are special among other modernist contemporaries– they have a lightness that’s only achieved through long periods of condensation of thought. She was not a fast writer. The poems also made me think a little of an Agnes Martin painting: an experience of immediacy stretched out to infinity. I think I like slowness in cinema because it feels like depth.
So, we talked about the poems and a little about what the film might be like, its potential relationship to language and to temporal signatures; about place: Lorine’s cabin, the public library where she worked, and through a steady encounter with the objects in the archive. Finally, we realized we can’t honor the poem without going to Lake Superior, in honor of the poem and her trip to circumnavigate the lake in the 1960s. We were retracing her footsteps knowing the environment must have changed since those days. But ultimately, I asked Elise to do what she does best – respond to place and time through movement – and I was just there to capture it.
Another central element in the film is the place: the small city of Fort Atkinson, where Lorine Niedecker spent her whole life. Not only the place, but its topology, its history, its climatic specificities… To the point that the film about the poet almost includes an essay on her living environment. Why is this geographical-historical dimension so important, how did you approach and conceive it?
Place is illusive to cinema because images are placeless. To respond to this question of placelessness: it was notable that Lorine lived a great deal of her life in one place on Black Hawk Island in Fort Atkinson. The cabin she lived in had no plumbing or electricity. Prone to flooding, the land on the banks of the Rock River was also a battle site relating to the story of the Black Hawk, a celebrated Sauk warrior who desperately tried and failed to return his people to their homelands in the 1830s. This was another layer of that local history. To add to these elements, this section of Wisconsin still contains intact Native American mounds that date back to 1000 years ago. Much of this American landscape has been transformed by agriculture. So the film becomes an excavation of these various historical layers connected through place.
Very few words are spoken apart from those from Niedecker’s poems. Yet you deliver access to this poetry mostly in a very singular manner: through a “performance” of Elise Cowin turning the pages and reading only parts of some poems. It creates a very special relation between seeing and listening, reading and hearing the words and verses. Why this fragmented approach?
One of the first things I understood when I turned on the camera in the archive in the public library was that I was interested in the interaction of Elise’s hands with the pages, many of which were written out by Lorine’s own hands. Of course, the poems have meaning, but not perhaps more so than the pages on which they’re written. (I love Susan Howe’s idea that any mark on a page– even a line or a period — has an acoustic signature.)
Also, the archive is a space of a certain kind of performance, and what drew me in was the movement of Elise’s hands in an encounter with the books as objects. There is always fragmentation and omission in an archive, so we decided early on that the goal was neither transparency nor obfuscation. It was to somehow manage to have this encounter in the present.
There is an exception to this approach: the recitation, in voice over, of one poem, on images not made in Fort Atkinson but on the shores of Lake Superior? Can you explain why this choice, why this place?
Lake Superior is Niedecker’s late masterpiece, a culmination of years of practice of condensing experience and thought into short lines. She also makes a radical decision to include direct citations from the historical texts she collected and studied in the approach to the trip to circumnavigate the lake. She kept pages and pages of notes as she worked on the poem, which in the end is only 395 words.
The poem tells the story of the greater area through the personages, histories and events that shaped its various eras. Its perspective evades an oversimplified relationship to national identity in favor of a complex, textually layered, and multivocal perspective.
The lake itself has a special power: it contains more water than the other four Great Lakes combined. It also has a special geologic record, an expression of deep time that becomes metaphysical in the poem.
Silence is a key component of the film: the silence of Elise’s choreography inside the cabin, the silence of the diorama and the stuffed animals in the museum, the silence of Elise not reading the poems. Can you comment on that?
I don’t really think of the film as silent. It’s filled with the sound of air moving through HVAC systems, something films try to avoid in order to record clear dialogue. But I felt like in the archive, these air systems were the truer experience. Likewise, in the museum dioramas, there’s the sound of the air, too, but also the sound of the recorded animals which certainly don’t fool anyone. Dioramas are catastrophic failure of resemblance. They express more the ideologies of the makers than their subjects – not to mention that the craftsmanship doesn’t seem to be the point either. They are constructed and artificial and fail to reproduce reality. These failures are sometimes problematic and sometimes full of pathos. They certainly complicate my feelings rather than resolve their subject matter.
The film shares a very strong feeling of intimacy, delicacy: can you tell us about the production and making process?
Yes, it is a film that comes from allowing each of us a space necessary for our individual methodologies to come together. Elise has such a specific and powerful presence. She doesn’t impose; she is light. And at the same time, there is precision, decision and articulation of ideas in real time. I felt strongly that I needed to meet her in that space where I could be as responsive to her as she was to the spaces we entered to commune with the past by somehow trying to dedicate ourselves to it.
Interview by Cyril Neyrat
