Introducing Marie Craven, film-maker

 It's a great pleasure for me to introduce you to the works of

Marie Craven

I'm sure some of you already know Marie and her works, but this post brings together some parts of her story which may not be well known.

Marie Craven is a film-maker in Queensland, Australia, who has been making short films since 1984 in widely eclectic styles. Over the decades her films have screened at many international festivals and events, gathering multiple awards. During the decade from 2007 she was also a vocalist with electronic musicians around the world, collaborating via the internet. Her main music project during this time was a prolific collaboration with Welsh music producer Paul Foster, together forming the duo Cwtch. Since 2014 her primary creative focus has been on videopoetry, making over 70 films in the genre, again involving many online and international collaborations with artists in a variety of media. Over the decades, she has also been a writer about film and a curator of programs, most recently touring the Poetry + Video program through Europe in 2019, and creating for it a permanent online exhibition. Currently she is co-editor of the Moving Poems website with US poet and film-maker Dave Bonta and UK film-maker Jane Glennie.

FILMS

Maidenhead (1995)

Maidenhead from Marie Craven on Vimeo

This 16-minute film was the biggest directing project of my life, financed by the Australian Film Commission and completed on 35mm celluloid. I wrote it from dreams, workshopped the script with actors, and completed it in 1995. A synopsis: Maidenhead is a series of chamber fictions inhabited by a young woman named Alice. Linked in a dream-like way, these short stories describe Alice's survival in a world of bizarre logic and strange emotions. It's a place where miracles unfold in the bathroom and desire appears on a bus, where menacing joggers roam the suburbs and there's something sinister about hats.

Rodeo Days (2019)

Rodeo Days from Marie Craven on Vimeo

Rodeo Days is about my Australian ancestry. Employing archival footage of 20th century rural life, it is a hybrid of experimental film, spoken word narration and music video. The music track is one of so many produced in collaboration with Welsh electronic music producer Paul Foster, and our music duo called Cwtch. My father and his brothers and sisters lived through a childhood of poverty in the Depression era of the 1930s. As the boys approached early adulthood, they took to the rodeo circuit, traveling wide distances between events, a life on the road. Talented horsemen, they became well-known as rodeo champions. The film brings together experiences from childhood, family accounts of those rodeo days, and impressions about the history of anglo-Australian society and my uneasy place within it.

The Sea (2018)

The Sea from Marie Craven on Vimeo

This project started with an online music collaboration with US electronic music-maker Sidney Irvine, for which I provided vocals. I adapted a poem by Canadian writer Juniper Roan to create the lyrics for a track we called The Sea. The idea for the video came a few years later. For this I animated and visually fragmented some superb images of sea and ocean from the royalty-free website Unsplash. Then I fragmented the images further by jump-cutting to the music beats. In this way, the overall piece became a downtempo music video, fused with videopoetry and abstract art.

Metamorphosis (2020)

Metamorphosis from Marie Craven on Vimeo

I stumbled upon the poem of Metamorphosis in my Facebook feed, where I regularly find new poems from international writers with whom I have online connections. Immediately I was drawn to this poem by UK writer and translator, Jean Morris. The piece was inspired by a famous woodcut print by M.C. Escher, Metamorphosis II (1939-40), and takes a mirror structure which felt apt as a reference to the geometries that appear in Escher's art. Jean's viewing of the art work suggested a vision of someone who might be similar to Escher himself, a character who the poet could relate to personally, as could I. In another part of the virtual globe, I had been in contact for several years with Spanish film director, Eduardo Yagüe. We had previously talked about a possible collaboration between us and this film became the one. Almost without words, Eduardo and I decided that he would create the camera footage, including direction of his chosen actor, Pedro Luis Menéndez. I was to edit and do all post-production for the film. Further discussions took place by group emails between Australia, Spain and UK. It was a fabulous online collaboration, with music by long-time collaborator Paul Foster in Wales.

Marie

LINKS

Homesite: mariecraven.net

Cwtch music duo: cwtch.bandcamp.com

Poetry + Video program: poetryplusvideo.com

Moving Poems website: movingpoems.com