A proposal by Tris Vonna-Michell:

E.E. Vonna-Michell and Henri Chopin

To Ray the Rays (1985)

In 2020, while sifting through a box in my father’s studio, I came across the film work To Ray the Rays. It was mentioned on an invitation flyer for the French artist Henri Chopin’s solo exhibition, Revue OU,at Galerie J & J Donguy in Paris in 1987. Listing three audio poem films and – to my surprise – my father’s name:

3 films audio-poetiques de Henri Chopin: Pêche de nuit co-auteurs Luc Peire & Tjerk Wicky / L’Energie du Sommeil co-auteurs Serge Beguier & Gianni Bertini / To Ray the Rays co-auteur Erik Vonna-Michell

Chopin (1922-2008) was an artist, poet, novelist, concrete poet, sound poet, playwright, critic, radio producer and publisher. In 1958, Chopin started Cinquième Saison, a literary review journal, publishing contemporary French poets. By 1964, it had evolved into Revue OU. Chopin claimed that Cinquième Saison served as a confrontation between more traditionally formal poets and experimental poets. This editorial clash possibly laid the groundwork for Revue OU, which he described as a review-disc and could be seen as a magazine in a box-set edition. A packaged collection of recorded sound poetry (often on 10-inch vinyl), multiples, texts, prints and flat-packed sculptures by the international avant-garde, and often consisting of original contributions. A joint endeavour with his wife, Jean Chopin (maiden name Ratcliffe), Revue OU was an intensely collaborative and far-reaching publishing project up until its last issue in 1974.

During my childhood, Chopin lived in the same small seaside town in Essex and was friends with E.E. Vonna-Michell (1950-2020), who worked as a printer in London. Shortly after my father’s death, I discovered that he had been producing his own work and collaborating with artists, poets, and small-press publishers since the late 1960s. He also ran a label, Balsam Flex, between the late 1970s and 1980s, which encompassed and circulated counter-cultural artistic actions, including auto-destructive art, expanded cinema, sound poetry, and the British Poetry Revival movement. I rounded up hundreds of boxes of materials, many of which contained apparent works, undefined works and often seemingly incomplete works. Among the materials was To Ray the Rays, which appeared to be less uncertain in its constellation, and, importantly, the film components (8- and 16mm film rolls and reel-to-reel tape) were accompanied by letters of correspondence, graphic scores, prints, and the aforementioned invitation flyer. Examining the components, it became clear to me that E. E. Vonna-Michell had co-produced this film with Chopin. It was through publishing that my father and Chopin began collaborating, with a few notable Balsam Flex audio-cassette releases underscoring their editorial affinities, such as Bob Cobbing/François Dufrêne (1977), Michel Seuphor (1979), and Chopin’s OH audiopoems (1978). By the time they began working on To Ray the Rays in 1985, both of their respective publishing projects had slowed or concluded.

I am aware that several versions of “To Ray the Rays” may exist. However, the discovery of a reel-to-reel tape (labelled “To Ray the Rays”) was key in deciphering which film reels were finalised works, source material, or surplus footage. By comparing the durations of the audio and visual components, only one film reel nearly matched the tape’s duration. Coincidentally, amidst bundles of unwound and scattered reels, this was one of the few projection prints, hence intended for screenings. This is how the film To Ray the Rays came together, and, to my knowledge, it is now being shown in the UK for the first time. To Ray the Rays is in fact the second film Henri Chopin and E. E. Vonna-Michell made together. Their earlier collaborative film, entitled Stridence (1977-1980), also exists in multiple versions and formats (both 8mm and 16mm). Below is a quote from an interview with E. E. Vonna-Michell by Marc Matter in 2017:

All films were a live interplay between the politics of light and sound, between “circles of confusion” and recognition, Vonna-Michell explains. This was the politick [sic] of “moyospace”. A world detached from presumption and the threatof potential. This was the shadow’s silhouette – which was part of Henri Chopin’s OU-world. And was part of the cold war world we shared for 20 plus years.

In both Stridence and To Ray The Rays, the visual compositions were produced by E. E. Vonna-Michell and the sound material by Chopin, using his body, a microphone, tape recorder and speaker. At the very start of To Ray The Rays, E. E. Vonna-Michell’s voice is heard repeating the title before Chopin´s characteristic technique of sonic assemblage transcends the vocal utterances, by changing speeds, superimposing and manipulating, resulting in an intense feedback loop of vocal abstractions. After finding the film canister containing To Ray the Rays, I delivered it to my local film lab. When collecting it, the lab director expressed her surprise at finding 90 seconds of painted celluloid at the end of the film. As part of standard procedure before scanning, she washed the roll and observed a passage of celluloid that E. E. Vonna-Michell had painted on, suggesting a structuralist film affinity. Another confrontation I encountered in the editing process was that throughout the film, E. E.Vonna-Michell had alternately spliced negative and positive film. This was hard to determine how to treat since much of the material is rather abstract, and additionally, this inversion of typographic forms appears integral to the film’s rhythmic and visual language.

Soon after completing the editing, I came across a shabby sheet of hand-glued letters pertaining to the title To Ray the Rays, which prompted me to return to the editing suite and make a new, yet most likelynot the last, iteration of this film. Admittedly, this sheet, which was clearly used as a graphic score for the film, sheds more light on the two artists’ methods than intentions. This has become a recurringrealisation in my pursuit of such constellations and collaborations.