FareWell Poetry – Hoping for the Invisible… (Deluxe Vinyl)

‘As True As Troilus owes its title to Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (act III, sc .2). In this work, Troilus embodies denial, he does not want to see his lover for what she really is. Despite the fact that she is ‘as false as Cressida’, he remains resolutely faithful in his love, desiring to be the superlative lover.  ‘True swains in love shall in the world to come / Approve their truths by Troilus: when their rhymes, / Full of protest, of oath and big compare, / Want similes, truth tired with iteration (…) / Yet, after all comparisons of truth, / As truth’s authentic author to be cited, / ‘As true as Troilus’ shall crown up the verse,  /And sanctify the numbers.’

Unflinchingly wrestling with denial, As True As Troilus combines two antithetical energies : elucidation that puts into perspective/expounds upon the complex afflicting Troilus, and enchantment that champions over lucidity in order to access a full experience, deeper than any rational knowledge. The film finds its answer in an overwhelming radiance: images that radiate clarity, visceral logic, symbolic readability, and graphic splendour unfurling in symmetry and duplication.

From the onset Jayne Amara Ross retraces denial to its source, death, defining the pathologies of obsession, addiction and monomania. As fugitive passengers in free-fall through time, we reinvent passion, heroism, adventure, or even a tragic destiny, all in order to repress our ineluctable end. Following in the tradition of great cinematic mythographers Jean Cocteau, Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Gregory Markopoulos, Etant Donnés but also David Lynch in Eraserhead, Jayne Amara Ross reworks the traditional iconography of the Fates and weaves an astonishing portrayal of the human condition. As True As Troilus is endowed with a poetic fullness, as assured in the (visual, written, musical) images themselves as Troilus is confident in Cressida.

Such enchantment is born from this raw fullness: black loyal to white, a musical soundtrack loyal to the optical vibrations, a film loyal to a strange Elizabethan drama. Never ‘tired with iteration’, As True As Troilus becomes its own protagonist in the sense that it evolves into negativity and magnifies the vulnerability that results from a willing blindness. What madness. But the point here is to transmute this succession of images into psychic irradiance. A declaration of love.’