Questions of Travel

A filmpoem commissioned by University of Sheffield for the Festival of the Arts and Humanities, Sheffield 2015.

The American poet Elizabeth Bishop arrived in Brazil in November 1951 on a travelling fellowship. She was to live there for the next fifteen years. In her poem ‘Questions of Travel’ Bishop asks: ‘Is it a lack of imagination that makes us come/ to imagined places, not just stay at home.’

In this unique collaboration, artist Charlotte Hodes and poet Deryn Rees-Jones respond to Bishop's poem by creating a new poemfilm that experiments with the differences between image, text and voice to think more generally about the poetic process, and the parallels that might be drawn between actual journeys and the poetic and artistic journeys of reading, drawing, thinking and writing.

This animated version of Elizabeth Bishop's poem 'Questions of Travel' (1956) is the second in a series of commissioned collaborations by artist Hodes and poet and critic Rees-Jones using the poemfilm both as artistic practice and vehicle for critical interpretation. Our project uses work by women writers, set at historical intervals, to open debates about female creativity. It forms part of an ongoing research project, ‘Reimaging the Muse’.

In the film we follow Bishop’s poem in deconstructing the binaries of ‘here’ and ‘there’ to develop the idea of travel as a metaphor for creative practice: reading, drawing, thinking and imagining. Bishop’s phrase ‘must we dream our dreams and have them too?’ is made central to our exploration of anxieties about empirical thinking and the workings of the imagination, anxieties also intrinsic to the poemfilm as an emerging genre. Hodes’ ongoing work, which uses analogue and equivalent digital actions such as repeat, scale change, colour change, fragment, cut, paste (collage) and layering, enacts Bishop’s engagement with modernist techniques which sought to disrupt linear time into an act of what Bergson calls ‘continuous creation’. Rees-Jones’ underpinning research on Bishop draws on Bishop’s early writing and her desire for what she calls ‘experience-time’; playing with screen, stage, frame, ‘binocular’ and ‘monocular’ visions we ally this notion with Bishop’s use of the term ‘stereoscopic’ to dramatise her particular poetics of looking. Cutting and collage allow us to engage directly in a visualisation of Bishop’s own aesthetic, which foregrounds what many have argued to be film’s intrinsic relationship (through cutting) to libidinal attachment and loss. Ongoing collaborative processes are used to simultaneously work through our own individual artistic practice, exploring wider visual and poetic preoccupations with constructions of a female self, and our relation to the female body.

'Questions of Travel' was selected for the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Research in Film Awards, November 2015.

The full length version of 'Questions of Travel' has been restricted due to the inclusion of material copyrighted to a third party. Please contact UAL Research Online for further details of the license.