Gwylym’s World

Poet and filmmaker Gwylym Cano describes his recent work as cine-poetics, since it melds repurposed video with verse — or at least the sense of verse — in a marriage of his favorite disciplines. The result is pure, true, funny, wise, profoundly visual and especially subjective, forged in the footsteps of a personal hero, the late Stan Brakhage, whose own filmmaking mantra raged against the concept of the Hollywood narrative.

“Oftentimes, the images in films conflict with images I’m making in my mind,” Cano says. “Instead, they’re more about the actors, pretending to put words in my mouth.” His own brand of visual poetry cuts through the artifice, he adds, and that’s what the audience will discover tonight during Viewer Indiscretion Advised, a one-night screening of nine Cano works at Crossroads Theater, 2590 Washington Street.

The program roams from Ovideo — a film that re-renders pornographic footage until all of the graphic content disappears, replaced by uncorrupted organic movement — to One Thousand Year Old Sex Goddess, in which an ancient Venus figure from the collection at the Museo de las Américas comes to life, strutting her stuff across found footage of Chaco Canyon as men whistle at her. But perhaps the most personal work is To Write, a short film made in collaboration with the late comedian/poet Don Becker, a good friend of Cano’s who burned a photo of his ex-girlfriend, mixed the ashes in his coffee grounds and drank the metaphorical brew on camera. “Then the steam comes up out of his coffee all lit up, just by sunlight, but it looks like his spirit rising,” Cano recalls. The films begin at 7:30 p.m. and admission is $10; go to www.denvercrossroads.com.
Sat., Aug. 22, 7:30 p.m., 2009