Monday, April 21, 2008

Herring Song

How about a song to start the week? This is poet, Alexander Hutchison, caught on film by Frisian poet and film-maker, Elmar Kuiper, during the StAnza International Poetry Festival this March.

Kuiper made other short films at StAnza too, mainly using poetry, with:


Jim Carruth
Eleanor Livingstone
Brian Turner
Eddie Gibbons
Alexander Hutchison
Rab Wilson
Odveig Klyve

and here’s an experimental short he showed at the Leeuwarden Film Festival.

Future Primitive

5 comments:

Rob said...

Sandy Hutchison comments on the video:

"As to the Herring Song, Elmar is a great guy and I was happy to do it - but I had a virus, so look about ninety, and half way through thirty or forty Malaysians came through one of the lanes just in front of me and spilled around - you can detect my fleeting, half-amused, half-desperate reaction as it happened.

"The monologue to the plastic garden creatures Elmar created for 'No, No' also makes me wince - but amuses my teenage son."

Anonymous said...

A St Andrean writes:

They were probably Koreans - links between the Moonies and a local fundy church somehow means St Andrews has large amounts of Koreans turning up from time to time each year to be re-baptised in the waters where the saint's bones were apparently washed up..

Roddy

Rob said...

Sandy, I really like the video. It's very well filmed (the Eleanor Livingstone one, in particular, is also brilliant - it looks at first like it's in some S&M boudoir, and then you realise that it's at the Byre Theatre!), and the slightly chaotic side to it - the people in the background, the distractions, the wind - these things all add to it.

Roddy, they surely can't be Moonies. The Moonies have no relation to anyone outside themselves, and no church, however fundy, would have anything to do with the Moonies. It must be some fundamentalist sect - there are many in Korea (I lived there for a year, in Seoul). I know many Koreans study theology in St Andrews too - mostly from the Presbyterian Church of Korea, a mainstream Protestant church. I have a friend who teaches theology there - maybe he can shed some light on this phenomenon.

Anonymous said...

Thanks, Rob ... I think. Doubtless that remark about an S&M boudoir will attract some hits!

EL

Anonymous said...

Rob, I'm trying to remember the Pentecostal sect who brought all the Koreans to St A - they were based in the thin end of Market Street. The couple who ran it were fairly pernicious when I was a kid - the woman, who was Swedish and known as 'Holy Hannah' had apparently become mentally ill after a bereavement and used to stand outside the local primary schools every morning giving out 'hell and damnation' leaflets to small children. They did mass baptisms at the East Sands and Castle Sands in the 80s.

Roddy