Black Country Cinema

Black Country Cinema is a video poetry movement that emerged from the West Midlands film scene in early 2009. The group was set up by various Black Country artists as a retaliation to the rising number of film-makers, photographers and artists that felt they had to leave the West Midlands to become successful. One of the video poems What's So Good About London? (Carter, 2009) attacked this issue directly by studying a local photographer who was planning on leaving the West Midlands for London. The photographer in the video painted London almost like a utopia for creative people, which in many ways depicted the general mentality of young creative people in the Midlands at the time.
Despite this particular video poem being a social commentary, many of the videos were extremely personal to the artists. Reflections Of A Lonely Routine (Gill, 2009), He's A Nice Lad, But He Ay Never Right!? (Carter, 2009), A True Bikers Calling (Walker, 2009) and That One Day Burnzy got pissed off with Dan, but then realised there was no point getting angry! (Singh, 2009) were poetic studies of themselves and the everyday life.
Like the British Free Cinema movement before them, the poets stressed the idea that “No film can be too personal”. At their first screening at Wolverhampton's Light House Media Centre the artists quoted this often. When Screen West Midlands advertised the exhibition, they referred to it as “Personal, Instinctual & Organic Video Poetry of everyday life”.
Another theme that the Black Country poets focused on was the use of Video and its importance when producing poetry. The groups’ official website reads:
'Iranian Film -maker Abbas Kiarostami famously said
"Digital camcorders allow the artist to work alone again."
We also believe that video allows us as artists to be spontaneous and free to capture the poetic nature before it is lost. Resulting in most of our Video Poetry being shot on small Handycams!
Poetry is usually an encapsulation or expression of the poetic elements in life that tend to go unseen or unappreciated by the average person. It is usually the poets/artists vision and state of mind that is able to see these poetic elements and expose them to them World. This poetry can be captured in a painting, written in literature or in our case, shot in video. Japanese silent filmmaker/director Shimizu Hiroshi once said "If most of the classic poets of old times were around today, I’m sure most of them would replace their pens and papers with cameras." We have more ways of creating poetry now, breaking the limitations of pen and paper and giving the written word true life in video.'
The videos were first screened on the 29th of September 2009 at the Light House Media Centre in Wolverhampton (UK), gaining critical appeal.
The videos are now archived at [http://www.macearchive.org/Media.html?Title=32268# Media Achieve for Central England] (M.A.C.E)

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