Aloud/Bagatelle
1983 · 6m · Canada
Directed by Donald McWilliams
Genres: documentary, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, theatrical, whimsical
Poet Earle Birney performs a sound poem about rail travel using archival train footage. Rhythmic speech mimics wheels, couplings, and countryside motion.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A poet doing sound-poem theater over train footage sounds like the kind of NPR-approved experimental cinema everyone pretends to understand—and yet McWilliams actually pulls it off by letting Birney's voice become the machine itself, which is genuinely weird in a way most 'experimental' work isn't.
This is essay film working at its most rigorous: McWilliams locates himself in a precise lineage of concrete poetry and structural cinema, using archival material not as illustration but as rhythmic counterpoint, where the editing becomes inseparable from the sound design's formal logic.
The singular choice here is letting Birney's vocal percussion *precede* the visual match—you hear the wheels before you see them—which reverses the usual hierarchy and forces the archive footage to follow the performer's body instead of anchoring it.