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Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

‘Water Stone Words’

July 14, 2021 by Jan Herman

This short new movie evokes the rich heritage of humankind’s creative responses to the natural environment over millennia. The creators of “water stone words” — filmmaker Ed O’Donnelly, sculptor Kenny Munro, and writer/poet Malcolm Ritchie — made the movie over a period of six days.

In an accompanying statement, the filmmakers note that “water stone words” explores

an early human understanding of, and relationship to, the environment in the region of Argyll on Scotland’s West Coast, at the time of the making of cup and ring marks, and later in stone [that was] quarried for carving. It illustrates how the forms and patterns inspired directly by energies of the natural world later evolved into traditional art forms of knotwork, incorporating stylised depictions of flora and fauna, along with images of craft tools, boats and weapons, moving finally to the fine-cut lettered stone commemorations of those who carried these crafts on into later centuries. And it describes through sound the evolutionary development of tools, from the use of hard stone in the marking of softer stone, to the much later working of iron on stone. Stone thus offers a more permanent testament, outliving both human and vegetal existence into our present time.

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Filed Under: Art, Literature, main, Media, Movies, Music, News, political culture

Comments

  1. Richard Kostelanetz says

    July 14, 2021 at 5:08 pm

    NOT for this City Boy, tho I forwarded to a sometime Scottish partner.

    • Jan Herman says

      July 14, 2021 at 5:55 pm

      Here’s another that you probably won’t like:
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTwRJ8kTUlk
      It talks about wandering monks and poetry. The protagonist says: “The kind of poetry that really interests me is the poetry that arises out of pre-cognitive perception of something and is then retrospectively recovered and written down, that moment before thought arises and a state of dualism or a dichotomy between the poet or event occurs. That is particularly true, I think, of the highest form of haiku …”

Jan Herman

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