Glance Flicks<\/em>: Blu Ray Henri 2010 (Amsterdam-Bruxelles-Paris)<\/p>\n Thingly<\/em><\/p>\n 1969, 9 mins, b&w, sound, triple-screen, super 8<\/p>\n Utilising his trademark pie-chart circular triptych screen for only the third time, Coppens\u2019 Thingly<\/em> focuses upon a series of objects \u2013 scissors, contraceptive device, spectacles, paperweight, etc \u2013 so that their banality is rendered strange by close-up, discoloration (accomplished by direct dyeing of the film stock), as well as by the disconcerting irregularity of shot length. Uses multiple exposures to imaginative effect. The soundtrack consists of the objects directly contacting the microphone with all the inherent distortion this creates.<\/p>\n Masks and Other Masks<\/em><\/p>\n 1972, 26 mins, colour, sound, 16 mm<\/p>\n The film that brought Coppens to the attention of the avant-garde film world. Occasional use of the circular screen was apposite for this episodic exploration of (generally round) masks in the ancient and modern world. Fusing elements of Noh theatre \u2013 particularly Kumasaka<\/em> \u2013 with African tribal ritual, as well as using the collection of masks owned by Tristan Tzara, and another belonging to an anonymous Amsterdam fetishist, the movie attempts to prove Coppens\u2019 point that \u2018All films are naked masks under western eyes,\u2019 the aphorism which appears throughout the film projected or painted on masks and walls. The final scene in which masked slanted slit eyes lift into the burning heavens is particularly memorable. The score consists of naked masks (musical sound and voice-masks) from Ivory Coast electronically manipulated by sound artist Theo Timperman, later of the band Fernando and the Heteronyms.<\/p>\n The Stylisation of Objects: Homage to Jan \u0160vankmajer<\/em><\/p>\n 1990, 30 secs, colour, sound, VHS<\/p>\n His first film since the 1970s, after Coppens\u2019 inconclusive career as a poet, which he discontinued abruptly. Lasting just 30 seconds \u2013 the exact length of \u0160vankmajer\u2019s own disturbing minimalist masterpiece Flora<\/em> \u2013 this short is as much a homage to \u0160vankmajer as \u0160vankmajer\u2019s was is to Arcimboldo (or the Quay Brothers was to \u0160vankmajer, of course). Potatoes engage in a rich rhizomatic ballet to a soundtrack of treated radio static and interference.<\/p>\n Violent Detachments<\/em><\/p>\n 1990, 48 mins, colour, sound, super 8\/VHS<\/p>\n Silent but for the amplified sound of a malfunctioning projector, the first Pixel-8 film made by Coppens, this feature embraced abstraction to an extraordinary degree. Made without camera directly onto film using blood, sperm, acid, ink, stencils, silk-screens, and writing implements, it is pure shape and texture, although the flash cartoon of what appears to be Tintin being buggered by a Gestapo officer injects a bitter representational \u2018glance flick\u2019 as he called such interruptions, into this relentless \u2018scratch cinema\u2019. In this technique film is variously \u2018speckled, stained. mottled, scratched, soaked and burnt; it is bleached, blanched, or blacked or blanked-out; it is buckled, crumpled, flattened; the image is torn, spotted, blotted out, streaked, reversed and even dislodged from its spool\u2019.<\/p>\n dot dot dot dot<\/em><\/p>\n 1998, 26 mins, colour (?), super 8\/VHS<\/p>\n A bleached screen throws the viewer into involuntary snow blindness. When images eventually appear they do so as shades of white, even the four black dots that trail across the screen in a parody of computer animation (one of Coppens\u2019 pet hates). Using his collection of 19th century images ancient figures emerge from this phenomenal blizzard \u2018as they might in frozen developing fluid\u2019 as the film maker explained once to a baffled and bedazzled audience in Berlin.<\/p>\n Brazilian Yellow<\/em><\/p>\n 2001, 45 mins, colour, sound, Digibeta<\/p>\n A riot of colour, or the colour of riot? Shades of yellow play against various blues. A montage sequence of holiday snapshots (Knokke beach 1967) and vacation videos (Brazilian carnival 1986) are subject to the sharp editing he calls \u2018glance flicks\u2019. These play against (or beneath) the gradual bleeding of the images, the seeping invasion of opposing colours making their own forms as they spill, a slo-mo form of \u2018scratch\u2019.<\/p>\n Background Pleasures<\/em><\/p>\n 2003\/4, 1hr 10 mins, colour, sound, triple screen, digital media<\/p>\n Screen one is dominated by a video diary of Coppens\u2019 wife and daughter haunting the Brussels streets (Anpachlaan for one) and dallying in caf\u00e9s with fictional names in fl\u00e2neurial insouciance. At one point, they conduct a vox pop with two imaginary translators about poet Ren\u00e9 Van Valckenborch. Screen two features pianist Veryan Weston performing solo at the Musical Instrument museum, Brussels, found stills from the internet of Kevin Ayres\u2019 down-at-heel gig in the industrial wasteland of Waloonia, and b&w images of what appears to be Jacques Brel but is actually Coppens himself singing \u2018My Death\u2019 at a Brel Karaoke. The third screen features loops of Marvin Gaye on Ostend beach taken from a contemporary documentary and vintage stills from the Themersons\u2019 lost pioneering Europa<\/em>. The soundtrack features overlapping music relating to the images, plus Theo Timperman\u2019s treatment \u2013 modesty deserts me \u2013 of Van Valckenborch\u2019s \u2018Revolutionary Song\u2019.<\/p>\n Glance Flicks<\/em><\/p>\n 2004\/5, 7 mins, colour, sound, 16 mm.<\/p>\n Coppens found it easier to return to 16 mm film to jump edit these images of the 2004 election, including indiscreet shots of playboy Prince Laurent lifted from the paparazzi. The simultaneous French and Dutch voice-over, reflecting the nation\u2019s regional and linguistic divisions, was considered trite when it was first shown in Leuven in 2005 but it reads as remarkably prescient (historically), although (formally) the clarity of image \u2013 however fleeting \u2013 seems most unlike Coppens\u2019 characteristic work. A cinematic \u2018version\u2019 of his \u2018glance poems\u2019 written in the 1970s.<\/p>\n Residues<\/em><\/p>\n 2006, 6 mins, colour, sound, triple screen, Digibeta<\/p>\n A return to fragmentary images of part objects: the milky rim of a bottle in close-up, a bared female nipple, a child\u2019s arm flapping, a DVD player flashing, all filmed in a wrecked domestic interior, contrasts with the second screen of exterior shots of junk shops and skips piled with \u2018useful rubbish\u2019 (a considerable number of Coppens\u2019 props are lifted from the dumps and skips of Amsterdam, where he lives). The third screen shows a pile of recording tape, the breast lactating in slow motion, a nearly collapsing chair with a fat male person (possibly Coppens himself) perched precariously upon it. The repeated shot (various speeds, various exposures, on various screens) of an ample woman on a bike leaning back at rest on tip toes is particularly arresting for the way the point of her saddle becomes a phallus emerging from her lycra (the actress was Coppens\u2019 second wife Madelaine). The overall effect is of revitalised sense of visual rhythm and a new meaning for the word rhyme in cimematological vocabulary.<\/p>\n ? (This should be a black isosceles triangle – ed. of Junction Box<\/em>)<\/p>\n 2008, 58 mins, colour, sound, digital media.<\/p>\n A return to abstraction or \u2018imploded cinema\u2019 as Coppens calls it, this time in order to reflect upon the potentialities of the medium itself. Coppens\u2019 statement that \u2018Commercial cinema uses only a narrow spectrum of the possibilities of the medium\u2019 is tested here (as it tests the viewer and listener to the extreme). To a sound track of screeching gulls (or grating nails on board miked close?) the viewer is overpowered by what appears to be old film stock burning as it\u2019s projected, images evaporating, and shots of out of date video and tape machines turning (or not), with DVD clips projected out of focus in the background. Rubber stamps of geometrical shapes block out graffiti on walls. Unpeopled, \u2018it\u2019s YouTube without the you,\u2019 the film maker explains with characteristic enigmaticalness.<\/p>\n Twistier<\/em> (released as Une Triste Po\u00e8te Au Bord de la Mer<\/em>)<\/p>\n 2009, 3 hours 34 minutes, colour, sound, digital media.<\/p>\n Coppens\u2019 lifetime obsession with Ovid (the metamorphoses of his cinema owe to this classic source as well as to Godard, Jeff Keen and \u0160vankmajer) resulted in this acknowledged masterpiece. His debt to Ovid is so obvious that he decided to engage with the least appealing of his favourite author\u2019s works, the apparent self-pitying Tristia<\/em>, written in exile in Tomis. Filmed with a sizeable budget in Constan?a (Ovid\u2019s Tomis) this film explores the nature of victimology in the modern world. Too easily the role of victim is accepted by the meek and weak and Coppens\u2019 unique brand of Nietzschean radicalism is brought to the fore, and even to the floor, in the famous weeping rug-sucking scene! Whenever drama and narrative threaten \u2013 he employed professional actors for only the second time in his career \u2013 interruption by technical means (jolts, handheld shudders, glance flicks and scratching) intervene. At other times a simple loose framing (the action moves to the margins, or even off screen, the film maker himself appears in a mirror in fictional space, a microphone bobs over Ovid in the midst of his most intense self-loathing raving) reminds the audience that these filmic events are as contrived as Ovid\u2019s rhetorical pleas for reinstatement as poet laureate of a murderous empire. As near to a commercial success as Coppens has yet achieved.<\/p>\n New Amores<\/em><\/p>\n 2010, 9 mins, colour, sound, digital media.<\/p>\n This short introverted film explores tenderness at the centre of the most violent of acts. Both the scratch cinema techniques (employed to fever pitch) and the final scene in which a symbolic rape and a temporary blinding are carried out \u2013 the actor is Coppens\u2019 daughter, Karina \u2013 caution against the power of visuality over our endangered conceptual acuity. Famously banned in Flanders after Karina\u2019s suicide, the unexpected fame of Twistier<\/em> was superseded by infamy; Coppens risked his own scapegoating as the limit case of Belgian permissiveness of content and tolerance of anti-resolutional form. The film\u2019s near silent soundtrack (other than the occasional distant but seemingly approaching gunfire) both intensifies the audience members\u2019 dis-ease at what they are witnessing and creates the mental space in which they may think<\/em>, unencumbered by dialogue, soundtracks and effects \u2013 or even image. Coppens\u2019 ultimate cinema \u2013 as he has made clear in numerous interviews \u2013 would be to switch the projector off and turn the lights down and say, do and show nothing.<\/p>\n Originally published in Walloon in Chosement <\/em>1 (2010): 46-9<\/p>\n Note on Ren\u00e9 Van Valckenborch<\/p>\n The \u2018whole\u2019 oeuvre<\/em> of Ren\u00e9 Van Valckenborch, including this essay, is surrounded by mystery, perhaps of his own making. Published in fugitive publications in places as far apart as Cape Town and Montreal over the last decade, the poems of this Belgian are composed in Flemish and Walloon, and the stylistic divide between the two sets seems to reflect the societal linguistic divide of his troubled nation (although he never refers to this fact). The two translators, Annemie Dupuis (who has supposedly translated the above from the Walloon) and Martin Krol, worked independently of one another at first. Their subsequent meeting, marriage and removal to Brussels form such an incredible tale that occasionally they have been accused of manufacturing the controversy of Mr Van Valckenborch\u2019s discovery, but a book-length study A Translated Man<\/em> by Robert Sheppard will make everything as clear as poetry.<\/p>\n See further online works at \u2018Early Steps: Rene Van Valckenborch\u2019s Poems\u2019 trans. Krol and Dupuis\u2019: Poems in The Adirondack Review<\/em> 10: www.adirondackreview.homestead.com<\/p>\n Spring 2010;<\/p>\n \u2018Van Valckenborch\u2019s Cube\u2019 at<\/p>\n http:\/\/ekleksographia.ahadadabooks.com\/issuethree\/authors\/robert_sheppard.html<\/a><\/p>\n his \u2018twitterodes\u2019 at www.twitter.VanValckenborch.com<\/a><\/p>\n and various pieces between November-December 2010 on Pages: www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com<\/a><\/p>\n Robert Sheppard has recently published two books from Shearsman simultaneously, a book of poems, <\/span>Berlin Bursts<\/span><\/em>, and a collection of essays on contemporary British poetry: <\/span>When Bad Times Made for Good Poetr<\/span><\/em>y. A book of sonnets, <\/span>Warrant Error<\/span><\/em>, is also published from Shearsman; and he has edited or written books on Lee Harwood and Iain Sinclair. His poetry appears in numerous anthologies, including the <\/span>Reality Street Book of Sonnets<\/span><\/em>. He is currently completing the works of the fictional Belgian poet Rene Van Valckenborch and is beginning to write critically on poetic form. He is co-editor of the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry with Scott Thurston and manages a blog(zine) on his own – Pages, at<\/span>: www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com<\/a><\/p>\n Two new books. Berlin Bursts (poems)<\/p>\n http:\/\/www.shearsman.com\/pages\/books\/catalog\/2011\/sheppardBB.html<\/a><\/p>\n When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry (criticism)<\/p>\n