‘Flickers’ (forthcoming)

In ‘Flickers’, Skinner draws on the whole history of cinema, from the silent era to contemporary sci-fi, to explore, amongst other things, themes of sufferance and spirituality, the atmospheres of certain islands and cities, body doubles, doppelgängers and the need to escape or transform. There is a playfully visual side in the work, too. For certain Far East Asian movies, Skinner uses a visual style to mimic calligraphy. Disaffected voices in the films Hate, Christiane F and Voyager talk to us of urban alienation, the loss of love, finding the daughter you never knew you had. Whether set in a hotel in modern-day Tokyo, or in a country house in Wiltshire in 1694, these mercurial poems are sure to tease, baffle and delight.

​‘Each film demands its own tools – a lens that will do the job. With ‘Flickers’, Richard Skinner takes his seat in the cinematheque; casting an alertly Ekphrastic eye over the joinery, cranks, glass, and mirrors that go into making a film a film, discovering something – inside all this equipment – that escapes the machine. Like a spirit, something intangibly ‘true’. For each film, a poem. Skinner “works backwards from a series of images” – like Antonioni, whom he quotes at the beginning – in order to build his own resonant responses. Each poem demands its own tools. For Wong Kar-wai it is a fragile tower of words; for Kurosawa, a concrete box; for Alain Tanner, a scattering of reflections, drifting apart like ink in water. In his Notes & Acknowledgements, Skinner plays out his ‘credits’ – the citations and sources that have gone into rendering (or should I say ‘developing’) his film-poems. Lines of displaced and remixed dialogue; erasures of filmmaker interviews; even tendrils of Dante (he would have loved movies) that ease their way into the stalls. Like the voice of Joan of Arc, from his “The Passion of Joan of Arc”: "you will not box me in". These poems escape their frame; they "move surpassingly well".’
— Owen Vince​, author of The Adrift of Samus Aran and Umber