“Film fixes reality in a sense of time—it’s a way of conserving time. No other art form can fix and stop time like this. Film is a mosaic made up of time.”
When director Andrei Tarkovsky put forth this notion, he was before a live audience of cinephiles at the Conference Cinema Thieves: International Intrigue, held at the Centro Palatino in Rome (1982). There, the event itself, was a breathing mosaic of beings captured in a moment with the director. The conference was being filmed, and so, this moment is documented and frozen in time as well. We can go back to this moment and hear the artist carefully describe how he arranges within his artform—as a composer would arrange notes on a scale.
What we think of a mosaic is a whole unit—a piece of art made up of pieces. When we look at each of the pieces—we can see the materials, the tangible elements of which they are made: ceramic, glass, wood, plastic, etc. The mosaic itself comprehensively represents an idea. The object is made of objects but the whole is a concept. The scenes of the movie themselves are a part of the greater, larger, mosaic. The artists and actors who make the film are pieces and parts of the film, the mosaic. The moments a director captures/records is the harnessing of time that Tarkovsky describes.
Short films, specifically poetry films (cinepoetry), can be viewed this way. Tiny pixels are the pieces or elements to make an electronic vignette, or, mosaic. Poems themselves are intangible and only represent (or do not represent) a concept or idea. A part of the whole. Poetry on film is not made of physical film, not made of anything but digital pixels, but is made of the arrangement of digital sequences. When you edit a film, there are scenes and transitions—and these are a part of the mosaic.
This month, we feature a cinepoem by Lina Ramona Vitkauskas (also the curator of this series). This is a cinepoem that captures a moment in time during the pandemic. It was recently featured in the Halifax-based poetry series, EVE OF POETRY. It illustrates how poets (who operate in already isolated, private spaces) have dipped further into isolation and insecurities during pandemic times. The original poem comes from her 2013 collection, Professional Poetry, available on Lulu.
