Billy
MacKinnon has written or produced four internationally successful feature
films, and script edited many more, including Jane Campion’s Oscar-winning ‘The
Piano’. Among his clients are BBC films, Australian Film Commission, Joint
Venture Zurich, Gaumont Paris, Scottish screen, and Jan Chapman productions,
Sydney. He has garnered numerous international writing awards including best
European film (Rotterdam Tiger) and best British film (Edinburgh). He has
served as an academic editor in social anthropology for the Max Planck
Institute and Humboldt University Berlin, and traveled and worked extensively
in Australia, Europe, Africa, and Central Asia. His most recent feature film
‘Dawn’ , based on the novel by Nobel Laureate Elie Weisel, was shot in Tel Aviv
and Cologne, completed in 2014, and premiered at Geneva, Washington, and
Houston film festivals. In addition, he has worked as poet/songwriter for
numerous performance art/dance groups in Zurich, Berlin, and Seoul. His present
feature film is set in Cameroon and planned for production 2017, funded from
Bern/Geneva.
Thursday, May 19, 2016
Wednesday, May 18, 2016
Tuesday, May 17, 2016
Monday, May 16, 2016
Sunday, May 15, 2016
Saturday, May 14, 2016
Friday, May 13, 2016
NEO-KOOL AFRO-SUPREMATISM
“Suprematism – The supremacy of sensibility over
form”
Kasimir Malevich
Q: So What is this NK-AS all about? What is it?
A: Story is, I was in Cameroon, working with a
semi-nomadic, pastoralist group, the Mbororo. They do transhumance, dry season
the mountaintop, rainy season the valley. I was struck by the design and
colours of their hut exteriors. I asked the women – nearest town about forty
miles - where they bought their paint.
They answered no, they fetched their colours from the river. I was dubious. I
think they took that as a challenge. I had lunch with the local Imam, the best
I would ever have in my 18 months in Cameroon. By the time I finished, they
were back. Six plastic bags, each with its particular mud.
Back home, I had a kind of makeshift studio, a
disused garage, with chickens. I dried and ground the mud. I was astonished.
Here were the purest Renaissance colours, Burnt sienna, raw umber, yellow
ochre, the cleanest black and white. I was vividly reminded how the Italians
found their basic vocabulary out of the earth iself. I started to paint. But
what? In any case, the canvases just got
bigger and bigger. I would paint late into the night. The chickens kept me
company.
Q: What about
the Suprematist part?
A: I’ve always been interested in Kasimir Malevich,
if you will, his arrogance, his stubborn insistence on the primacy of concept
and sensibility over representational form. We should remember he had a
revolution behind him, at least for a time. As a student, I did plough through
his Non-Objective World. But I only knew his work through textbooks. It wasn’t
till the show at the Berlin Guggenheim that I got up close. I’d always imagined
him, among other things, as a precursor to the much later American hard-edge
movement. Up close, not at all. Quite
rough. And none of the corporate sterilities of Stella, Kelly and the likes.
So the mix of African and revolutionary Russian seemed like a natural
combination. Not exactly Mondrian’s Broadway Boogle-oo, but a distant relative,
different aims and impacts. Problem with my paintings was mud on wood, they
just couldn’t travel. I tried all kinds of fixative. The mud despised them.
Refractive index. Even simple egg white, the yellow ochre turned a dull grey.
Back in Berlin, I had to turn to acrylic. Not quite the same vibrancy, but that
might be just as much to do with the different qualities of daylight. The
Mbororo themselves, I guess it would take a heavy downpour and they’d have to
start again from scratch. They’re fighting for their political identity, and
fighting well. But something else, they’re nomads, with a nomadic history and,
back of that, perhaps an aesthetic of transience. I like that very much.
Q: Earlier, you mentioned an Imam. What’s your take on Islam?
A: None. My experience is limited to West Africa and the Maghreb. These
people, Muslim men and women, I find conscientious and honest, the people I’m
most comfortable doing business with. I have no spiritual disposition. But I
respect them. I’m an atheist, but not, I hope, an idiot.
Q: And Greece now. What?
A: Austerity. IMF. I suggest they go the way of Iceland and former
Argentina, and default. Sure, a deficit of treasury bonds, and the inevitable
inflation. But they’ve been cheated by their politicians. Credit is not a
facility, it’s a commodity, and that’s the root of the problem. They’re a smart
and energetic people. They’ll find their feet. Meanwhile, I suggest we squat
the Parthenon.
10 poems from Collected Poems 2012 - 16
ON MY FATHER’S EIGHTIETH
BIRTHDAY.
Four score years in the
human boat
no shore as such
no land to speak of
and our voices are so
faint
even this fine rain
drowns us out.
There is nothing wrong
with sadness,
or just this sea
where we lost each other,
or just this night,
life heals itself,
the ship of memory
forty fathoms sunk,
and the body remembers
in the jetsom of floating
things :
bathtub, soapdish, rubber
ring,
battleship,
the miracle of toes
in the ocean of
childhood.
Lamb, you called me,
wee lamb,
as you ridiculed my
thinness
and failed to blunt the
sharpness
of my tongue.
I will buy a smart
new suit for your funeral,
and maybe,
just maybe we could laugh
about that.
But quick now -
something to cure these
trembling hands!
Then sinking, we sink in
each other.
AFTER XMAS
Three days gone
one day till your return
I have already forgotten
your face...
It is a trick
not to be believed
a heart’s trick
of the mind and its
divisions
that wants
and doesn’t want
from too much wanting,
a gift
stowed and blindfold
hidden from myself
and its childish
grasping,
so much the better
for the waiting
for the openings of doors
and coats
and that moment
that will unwrap
your face and form
in the doorway,
and neither you nor I
of one piece in ourselves
nor ever will be,
yet mind and parts
regardless
the sum of our difference
will make the whole.
for Emily, Berlin 2014.
A
SCOTTISH ISLANDER TO HIS WEST AFRICAN FRIENDS
We were not like you,
not dispossesed
and sold into slavery.
We were dispossesed
and sold into industry.
There, the islands,
houses burned,
the rubble now,
an empty chimney chain,
a tree there,
open to the sky
in some imagined dining
space,
its berries red as blood.
Down there
We caught on fast
We were as we were told
we were.
We were wild animals.
We were unteachable.
White on red,
our fists like flowers
flowered in your
playgrounds.
To this advantage
Our thoughts were our
own.
We taught ourselves.
Our minds are our
revenge.
Cameroon / Isle of Skye
2011
THE LOST BUTTON
I have mislaid my overcoat
some place by the river
I think..
I will wait here this night
out in the grass,
as the sky turns on my face,
and the seven stars,
the seven sisters,
hang on their exquisite threads,
and the moon beams fully down on me
:
the moon - the mother
of all buttons.
I will dream
the comfort of wardrobes,
of tribes and teamwork,
of chatter, conflict,
controversies,
brothers in buttonhood
and sisters,
each in its fashion,
a parliament of buttons,
deep into the night.
We imagine things.
This sky,
this firmament : pole star, dog
star,
creatures cruel, fantastic,
sketched in needlepoint,
I offer up
my candidate,
this wonder, coronation,
this newcomer
to
the ranks of the heavenly circus,
this ascension -
the Celestial Overcoat.
My owner will come,
will find me with his two eyes,
mine, mine are four,
the better to see the true
dimension of things,
how
little provenance there is in this world,
how
few things endure
in the scale of ownership and loss.
I have lost my overcoat.
Prayer is pointless,
sense, senseless.
The grass will cradle me.
The mother of all buttons shines on
my face.
I will dream of questions,
or they will dream of me,
like
to whom to do I belong,
to what,
and so will pass the night.
SOCK (After the End)
Mother, darn this sock
the red one
you’ll know the one I mean.
This night
this bedside
you seated next to me
once more
share this dark
this work
ten years parted.
Our difference
this
mine the priviledge
of living dreams;
that still,
that
at least.
Life. Some things need repair.
The red one
the wear on it
the tear
you know the one I mean.
Mother
darn this sock.
OWL
And we rise in air
the earth beneath us
over the rooftops
over the crossroads
the world turns in its sleep
what sound does a cloud make?
over the parasols and bonnets
of your festive midnight
over your lanterns, ribbons
laughter, dancesteps
sound of your accordions
a provenance of mice
we float and fall
swallow you whole
into the grinding tract
the twists and turns
of the winding gut
and skull and skeleton
shit you out
and cast you from our
towers and treetops :
we are told
we are the creatures of darkness
creatures of night
yet the divine attendants
of Minerva
also Athene
so the handservants of wisdom
the bringers of light.
A SOCIALIST CHRISTMAS 1914/2014.
The wounds no longer deep
and love
once had its reasons
Out of the trenches
crossing the divide
of no-man’s land
we played
replayed together
not that game with the ball
but the game of memory
game of forgiveness
game of love
the shouts and screams
the rules that simply made it up
as it went along.
Then back to our positions
Nightfall
Rain on the tin roofs
We slept in our overcoats
and wrote of it :
a letter home.
ORPHEUS.
He is naked
bar the ivy on his head:
long decades past
since they smelted down
the gods,
recasting them as angels
and cathedrals
and that instrument of
torture
they so worship.
He fled and took refuge,
up to his knees
in the sanctuary of this
swamp,
but the birds come daily
to him
bringing nuts and
berries,
and sun and moon attend
him,
and when he sings
even the mangroves weep.
Night falls,
rekindling the lamp
of her absence.
Was that the voice
we heard that evening?
out of the dark
of an abolished world,
where even her ghost
is relegated to mere
legend,
And a stream of light
rushed in on us,
a flood of sadness and
delight.
BRUTES
His eyes cross your face
both looking and seeing
both seeing and watching.
He opens his heart
and takes out his wallet.
His love is a flower
store
devoid of scent
devoid of colour
a matter of black and
white.
Just give him the word.
Bring your lamp and
helmet
and pickaxe
you will need it,
the elevator down its
thousand feet
down the mineshaft of his
spirit
where the pit collapsed
on you
at the coalface of his
soul,
a life without yield
and only darkness and gas
and caged canaries
attended you.
Then the sound of brutes.
But no alarm.
Forget to steel yourself.
This is your rescue party
coming
wth their spades and drills
with their thin, hard
bodies,
with their grim, hard
faces,
brutes,
and their eyes filled
with joy.
NEW YEAR - SYLVESTER 2014
After the bells
after the fireworks
and the shouts
and flirts
and old friends
and new friends
after one too many
too much of time
the old year
left his hat and scarf
on the trolleybus seat
fell down a stairwell
made a fool of himself
just for the hell
of it
slipped
on something unpleasant
had words with
somebody’s dog
considered his shadow
under a streetlight
lost his wallet
couldn’t care less
tripped
over
a brick
lost his overcoat
lost a shoe
lost his way home
nothing but wreckage
doesn’t give a damn
and sleeps
on the railway track.
Berlin
Jan 1. 2014
3 Performance songs.
La REQUETE
Le chien vert
le asteroid
je suis
la nurriture
l’overture
l’ iventeur
de l’amour
purquois
l’ embrouille ?
Parlez moi
chien vert
parlez.
TRAPEZZE
Risquer
voler
attraper
risquer a nouvea
uattraper a nouveau
voler a nouveau !
27
Jan 2015
Paris
l’Entrepots
rue
Sorbier
for
Fred, for Drift performance group Zurich
NEXT. For the Physical poets Seoul
International Performance festival Nov 2014. Open Space Betlin 2016.
the debt matures
the world turns
in its sleep
and forth
and back
and back again
and forth again
the flying thread
the shuttle
on its magic loom
the ins and outs
of things
what’s in
what’s out
what’s new
what’s up
what’s next
next is an appetite
next
is a finger
pointing the way
five
is a fist
two is fuck you
scene of the crime
hell is the other
finger your neighbour
finger your lover
stuck in the dyke
of things to come
join the procession
wipe your bum
next
a page is turned
a story told
and then
and then
next
is next in line
footsteps following
one foot
after another
keep in step
keep in time
next
the list
of lists to do
timetables
cancelations
fate and its inspectors
on every platform
selfsame word
same sign
on every face
same question mark
the waiting room
a sleeping car
the wheel marks out
the metal track
in measured doses
an accident up ahead
one thing
leading to another
next thing you know is
what comes next
next love affair
next morning after
next memory
forget it
just
the dining car
forget to steel yourself
this is your final waitress
coming
next is an appetite
time is an appetite
world turns in its sleep
your final waitress
worlds fly past
and we
are stopped
and
still.
Next.
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