The Monthly discusses film and film poetry with Csilla Toldy – Part 1 – From making films to film poetry

What made you venture into working with film, particularly film poetry?

I had a very long history of working with film. When I started off my writing career, I was working with film-makers and directors in Hungary. I wrote film scripts, worked on music videos, but after a while I became totally frustrated with the industry. At one point, I had three feature films in development and optioned, but they were never made into films.

It was about that time that Digital Technology emerged. My first films were shot on video and then I started working with digital technology and I discovered a niche in film poetry and I was a poet anyway so that seemed like an interesting idea to pursue. I wrote a collection of poems about making films and about film and that was called “Vertical Montage”. That was published by Lapwing.

Were the films you had in development in Hungary?

Well one of them was to be shot here, which was the reason I came to Northern Ireland, but the people involved couldn’t get the film off the ground. One of the problems was that my work wasn’t particularly commercial. It was much more an art film rather than a commercial proposition necessarily. Northern Ireland Screen did support the writing of the script but the filmmakers were unable to finance the making of the film.

The film poetry you were working on when we first covered it in The Monthly looked like you were working with an Iphone. Is that correct?

That was called “Belfast Exposed” and it was made in 2019. It was made for the Centre for Creative Practices in Dublin and it was exhibited in a gallery in Dublin for a week.

What were your skills like when you first started?

In 2007 I made a documentary and I was working with a team, a camera crew and editing and I just watched the editor editing the film. I think I just picked up slowly what you had to do to edit your work.

I did a course at Queens University in Audio Visual, Sound and Post Production. That was in 2022, but by that stage I had developed my skills. Actually I developed my skills just by doing.

There was a more substantial film, “Axis Mundi”, which was a film about the environment and Climate Change?

That was also supported by the Centre for Creative Practices and the Arts Councils in the north and the south. That was shot during Lockdown. At that time I was doing a lot of walking and I was shooting film while I was walking. While we were still in lockdown, I decided I wanted to go around the world through languages with that project, so the poem I wrote was translated into 19 languages and then I asked the translators to recite the poem and record it themselves.

The rest of the work was put together completely from my own home. We had poets from New Zealand, China, Japan, and other places and it was a very enjoyable project. I shot all the footage, put the whole thing together and then sent it out around the world.

Then you went on to produce the film poem, “Ec(h)o”?

That was produced with funding from the Digital Development Fund from the Arts Council. The film was finished last year and was also about the elements. It revolved around a very short poem, it’s a Haiku, and the film is the longest film poem I have made. It is 16 minutes long. It is split into 4 sections, Air, Water, Earth and Fire and the film was shown in the Armagh Planetarium for 4 weeks. It was shown on huge billboard type screens and you could be in the space with the film.

My original idea was to exhibit the film in a cube, so you could walk in and be confronted with the images. We couldn’t do that but we were able to get that film shown and that was important. I hope, I can find a gallery where I can screen the film on four walls simultaneously as originally intended. Then it would be really “immersive” and it would create a concave space – the world around us. It would make a nice juxtaposition of Axis Mundi, where we travelled around the globe.