The following text is the transcript of an interview that took place on Short Fuse (Channel 57, NYC) on July 31, 1998. Hamilton Metcalfe’s 1997 piece If Spring, Then Hope, And Also Winter was shown in its entirety at the end of the interview and excerpts from other works were shown throughout.
Peter Rinaldi: Hello. Welcome to Short Fuse. I’m Peter Rinaldi. This week on the program is the accomplished video artist, Rohesia Hamilton Metcalfe. Her video work has been all around the world. And finally she has come here to Short Fuse. We’re going to see her newest video, If Spring, Then Hope, And Also Winter a little bit later on. But first, let’s meet her.
Rohesia, talk about your beginnings—why you got into video and how. And start from there.
RHM:I got into film first. I grew up in New Zealand seeing only Hollywood-style films, not knowing that the kinds of films I now find interesting even existed. But when I went to University and joined the Film Society I began to see films that you'd be likely to see on festival-circuits. I remember the films of Miklos Jansco—the Hungarian structuralist filmmaker—inspired me incredibly. And that’s what made me think that film could be something other than what I [then] knew it was. And I went off and made Keep Moving—which was my kind of “take” on structural film.
[excerpt from Keep Moving]
Rinaldi: [And what brought you to video?]
RHM: A friend in Sydney was making his own image-processing equipment and he showed me some things that he’d done—and I just loved it. Even in film, I had found that what I really liked to do was process the images, layering and texturizing them. And then I saw what you could do electronically and Veneo Video Viceo came out of that.
[excerpt from Veneo Video Viceo]
Rinaldi: Did you intend it to be that length?
RHM: Actually, yes, I did.
Rinaldi: You did?
RHM: When I started it was going to be an installation with film and video—it incorporates both film and video. But that changed a whole lot. I wanted to make it so that it would never go on television because I hate television—so I was going to make a piece which could never be a single channel work. That was the idea. But for various reasons I couldn’t finish it that way and I decided to make a single channel work—and then I decided to make it a television length piece.
Rinaldi: Talk about the main thing that you use—it seems to be your calling card—the written word, the scrolling of the written word. How did that come about? Why do you put that in? You keep using it.
RHM: I guess I was liking work that used texts. I know there was Gary Hill’s Why Does Everything Get in a Muddle? (Come on Petunia) where there are scrolling texts. I saw that years ago and I liked it, the way the texts scroll. Also around the time (mid-80s) I was beginning to think of using scrolling texts in my videos, I was seeing a lot of the work of Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer—and this was probably a major influence.
But I am tired of it now. I’m just about to finish up another piece and I’m dithering because I’ve gone in a different direction, getting away from articulating ideas this way. I’m almost a little wary of being too far away and I’m thinking of having a little bit of text in there. I have enjoyed it—but I am tired of it now.
People have asked me why I don’t have, in La Blanchisseuse, the texts spoken by poets rather than having the texts on screen. I think it was to get away from voiceovers. I’m not really that fond of voiceovers (though for all that, I’m thinking of doing a piece with voices that I would choose for the voice quality).
Rinaldi: But you’re using, in Queen of the Mist, a voiceover-type thing. That’s the poet? She [Joan Murray] wrote that piece?
RHM: Yes.
Rinaldi: Who.. did she contact you?
RHM: Joan had seen La Blanchisseuse, which is a piece that uses other people’s poetry, and she liked what I had done. [excerpt from La Blanchisseuse] And she was interested in having somebody work with this great epic poem that she had written—a whole book of poems, I think it’s fantastic. So she asked me if I’d be interested.
Rinaldi: Now, did you know that you’d be making something close to a narrative? Something close to a documentary?
RHM: Well, she gave me the book of poems to read and, while narrative isn’t something I’m usually very drawn to...
Rinaldi: At what point did you start to feel a narrative...
RHM: Well Joan had already written these poems and they were a narrative—it’s a fantastic story. And I just happened to like the story so much—and I love her poetry, I think she’s a fantastic poet—that I just said “OK”.
And then I started to think about how I’d do it and I ended up pulling out a barebones story out of the larger story. Joan hadn’t thought that would be how I would do it. She had thought maybe I would pick a few poems and have her read them onscreen. But for some reason that’s how I decided to do it—and out came a narrative.
Rinaldi: It’s very accessible to most people—as opposed to your other work which might not be accessible to many people. It’s really beautiful—I had no idea that a woman went over Niagara Falls in a barrel.
RHM: I think it was because I was working with someone else—and I needed to accommodate Joan’s needs. It gave me a bit of a stretch.
Rinaldi: Right.
[excerpt from Queen of the Mist]
Rinaldi: So let’s talk about If Spring, Then Hope and Also Winter—we’re going to see it in its entirety. This was inspired by another poem—is that right? Or was it just the music? In the credits it says something about “inspired by”
RHM: The sound is very much inspired by Alvin Lucier’s piece, I am Sitting in a Room—where he sat in a room and he spoke about what he was doing and then he re-recorded that piece over and over until the ambient sound of the room kind of broke down the sound into this abstract ringing.
Rinaldi: So you were inspired by that technically?
RHM: Yes.
Rinaldi: It had nothing to do with the text.
RHM: No.
Rinaldi: So how did that text come about? This is a sad, somber sort of thing.
RHM: Well, it’s because I have children and it seems to me that the thing I would find the hardest to cope with would be to lose a child. It does happen to people and I can’t imagine how one would ever get over it. You put so much into protecting them and bringing them up and you expect to die before they do. But some children die before their parents—for whatever reason.
Everyone, to some extent, has some sort of belief thing and... Well, I would like to think that whatever happens in your life, it’s OK—one way or another you can deal with it, you can go through it. And yet to imagine that you could lose a child and then say “Well, I’ll go forward now”—seems to me such a hard thing that it’s my idea of the worst thing. It came out of that.
Rinaldi: And what about the singing during the beginning? Where did that come from? Did you write that? It’s so haunting—I mean it’s really like the voices of the people involved, it seems, throughout the entire piece, it seems like they’re still there. In a number of scenes—that happens [even] after the voices are gone. How did that come about? Did you write that?
RHM: Yes, I wrote it.
Rinaldi:Because it’s only four lines, isn’t it?
RHM: After the very first piece, it’s four lines and that’s the bit that’s repeated over and over, yes.
Rinaldi: I was struck by the simplicity of those lines
RHM: It’s kind of the two sides—you know, the two sides of accepting a death and not being able to accept a death. And a little bit of the masculine/feminine whatever—to give it a different angle.
Rinaldi: Talk about...there’s basically no movement other than the flickering lights in the entire piece. And is that something you set out to do? Did you think that that does enough to convey what you wanted to?
RHM: Well, at one point, this was going to be part of a bigger piece about loss in general and I’ve chopped it up into three different pieces now. So this is just the piece about loss of young life—there are the trees at the beginning too. So I just simplified it and brought it down to one thing. I just put in—out of all the material I had been collecting—what seemed to work in a simple way for this. I quite like the still images because you’re dealing with death anyway.
Rinaldi: [So let’s take a look at If Spring, Then Hope, And Also Winter.]