Marie Craven & Matt Hetherington Orphanage ✭ a video-poetry collaboration ✭
Orphanage is one of three video-poetry collaborations (to date) between film-maker Marie Craven (Gold Coast), and poet and spoken-word artist, Matt Hetherington (Northern NSW). The footage in this video is from a 1954 marriage guidance film, in the public domain at The Prelinger Archives. Only those parts of shots where the characters are not speaking are included in this visual remix. These are refined to moments when there are minimal gestures occurring: the turning of a head; standing up from a chair; spilling the contents of a glass; entering or exiting a room. An abstract narrative is created from these fragments, and allows the spoken poetry to fill the interior spaces with its own meanings.
Music is by SK123 in the UK.
The poem is dedicated to Ian McBryde, especially drawing inspiration from his collection, ‘Slivers’.
Matt Hetherington has published over 300 poems during the last 20 years throughout Australia, Europe, and America. He has a number of collections, and has performed his work at festivals around the country, including: Melbourne Writers Festival, Queensland Poetry Festival, Adelaide Fringe Festival, Woodford Folk Festival, Tasmanian Poetry Festival and the International Festival of Literature, Ideas, and Translation. Some inspirations are electric-period Miles Davis, his daughter, and plain old sunshine. ⇲ www.matthetheringtonwriter.wordpress.com/biography
Marie Craven assembles short videos from poetry, music, voice, stills and moving images by various artists around the world. Often created via the internet, the pieces remain collaborative in essence. Since 2014, Marie has completed over 50 video poems. Her work has screened widely at poetry film festivals around the world, and featured in various online poetry and film publications. Her earliest involvement in media was in the mid-1980s with experimental film-making in Melbourne.
⇲ vimeo.com/mariecraven
The poem ‘Orphanage’ was originally published in Qarrtsiluni (qarrtsiluni.com/2012/06/06/orphanage). There is an earlier video of the poem by Belgian artist, Marc Neys (vimeo.com/44234505).
