About the Film

This filmpoem documentary, Terra Incognita: Mapping the Filmpoem, took centre stage on 15 May 2015, when poet Tony Williams and I travelled to the University of Bristol to present it at Topographies: Places to Find Something, a one-day conference exploring how place, imagination and creative practice intersect across literature, art and film.

Our contribution was a film paper, an experimental format combining film and live discussion. In Terra Incognita, Tony and I captured an extended conversation as we tried to navigate the fascinating but often ambiguous world of the filmpoem, a form that feels both familiar and undefined, a hybrid of film and poetry multiplying rapidly online thanks to affordable digital cameras and platforms like YouTube. Despite this growing presence, it remains a largely uncharted artistic landscape.

“It’s like uncharted territory, and our job might be to start to sketch a map.” Tony Williams

Where Filmpoems Come From

Many filmpoems traditionally begin with a poet’s text, with film created as an accompaniment, as in Tony Harrison’s V or the work of filmmakers such as Alastair Cook. In Terra Incognita, we discussed newer approaches too, where poets and filmmakers collaborate from the start, or where the poem responds to the film rather than preceding it.

More Than Illustration

A recurring question throughout our discussion was what makes a filmpoem more than simply a poem read over pretty visuals. We were critical of filmpoems that become purely illustrative, beautiful imagery layered under voiceover, without either medium truly transforming the other. What interested us instead was how film and poetry might create a genuine dialogue, opening up new narrative possibilities, rhythm and the creative tension between sound and image.

We also explored how film and poetry share tools like the cut, which can act as punctuation or a dramatic shift in either medium. Whether through visual edits or line breaks, both art forms manipulate rhythm and surprise to hold an audience’s attention. Films like Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark, shot in a single continuous take, and the gliding camera movements in Tarkovsky’s Mirror and I Am Cuba offered useful reference points for how a filmpoem might build narrative momentum and visual interest.

Cinematic Style and Accessibility

One theme that ran through the conversation was the idea of a cinematic style. Audiences often expect a certain visual richness from a filmpoem documentary, even though most modern work is made digitally rather than on celluloid. That tension, between a sense of high art and genuine accessibility, was something Tony and I were keenly aware of as we shaped Terra Incognita.

A Live Conversation With the Audience

Presenting Terra Incognita as a film paper felt like the right format. It let us not just talk about filmpoems but show them in action, creating a live dialogue between the film, our discussion and the audience. The conference audience at Bristol was engaged, and it sparked genuinely lively conversation about how filmpoems might evolve as both creative works and research methods in their own right.

A Map in Progress

For both Tony and me, Terra Incognita remains a kind of map in progress, a playful but serious attempt to chart the shifting territory where film and poetry meet. It sits alongside Roam to Write, the film I later made with Tony in Northumberland, as part of an ongoing conversation between the two of us about how landscape, language and image can work together rather than simply illustrate one another.