Search Results for: profile r w perkins
Ten Typographically Alluring Films
I hesitated on how to title this list. As I thought about films I liked and that inspired me, I realised that I didn’t want to title this ‘typographic films’ because it suggests that the emphasis in all my choices is all about the typography. Sometimes in poetry film it is. The lettering, whether fonts, or by hand, can take centre stage for an entire piece. Or it can take centre stage for significant parts of a film, whether that is significant in total time or significant in moment. But for me, I am excited by the use of typography not the dominance of typography in a genre which is diverse and engaging through the variations of all the elements at a filmmaker’s disposal: sound, image, lettering, music, etc.
I was originally trained as a typographic designer, predominantly for print and books. A classic essay by Beatrice Warde (The Crystal Goblet, or printing should be invisible, 1932) describes the role of typography as a crystal-clear transparent goblet — a means to let the content (the red wine) shine through. A useful thought for the design of many books. Warde is arguing for a typography that supports and facilitates the text in a beautiful way. Though of course typography isn’t invisible and the visual choices are there on the page. Matthew Butterick has debunked the crystal goblet as a metaphor.
Butterick argues that the goblet is:
An appealing metaphor, but totally inapt. … [T]ypography is the visual component of the written word. But the converse is also true: without typography, a text has no visual characteristics. A goblet can be invisible because the wine is not. But text is already invisible, so typography cannot be. Rather than wine in a goblet, a more apt parallel might be helium in a balloon: the balloon gives shape and visibility to something that otherwise cannot be seen.
Typography can be the visual component of the written word in poetry film, but in a time-based media, the word can be manifest in many more ways, alongside, blended with, or instead of visually. The poetry can have many characteristics that are ‘visual’ because they are part of a film, though they may not be typographic. Poetry can be represented through image alone, moving footage, through audible language, sound effects, music and so on. Come back to typography and the lettering itself is affected by the timing and/or animation of text in addition to the 2-d factors such as layout, size, colour and font selection.
The typographic ‘balloon’ can be functional and practical — adding subtitles in the same or another language, and somewhat separate or external to the film. Or the ‘balloon’ can be part of the aesthetic choices and integral to the whole impact of the film. In this selection of ten films, my choices have come out of thinking about the aesthetic impact of the typography and the allure that it adds to the film as a whole.
In no particular order … ten typographically alluring films.
CRUSH
Film-maker/poet: Janet Lees
UK
I could have picked any one of a number of Janet Lees’ films. Her photography is very strong, and her typography is chosen with finesse to go with her images. Quiet, fine-weight fonts give quiet impact without being problematic with legibility, while the positioning and animation is beautifully done. Classic and understated.
SEX & VIOLENCE #4: WHAT’S INSIDE A GIRL?
Film-maker/poet: Kristy Bowen
USA
Typewriter fonts can be horribly overused in unhelpful ways. Typewriter has an obvious aesthetic appeal, a bit grungy, and with lots of retro-vibes. Like the beleaguered Comic Sans, their use can leave you thinking: ‘Yes, but why?’ or worse: ‘Oh no! Really? Out of everything you chose this?’ However, in this film by Kristy Bowen I think it is a great choice. Simple, great layout and timing, and as Dave Bonta said in his review: creepy.
THERE’S A CERTAIN SLANT OF LIGHT
Film-maker: Susan McCann
USA
Poet: Emily Dickinson
I watched this at Ó Bhéal’s Winter Warmer event (November 2022). This is a virtuoso play with cut-out lettering. I think the craft of making this lettering, and the skill in filming it, is just gorgeous. I’ll leave you to discover what it looks like…
PROFILE
Film-maker/poet: R.W. Perkins
USA
A complete change of pace and style for this ‘oldie but a goodie’ (as Joe Wicks has said about a classic workout exercise). And like a high energy Joe Wicks starting some squats, I am still as excited and delighted by the energy of this film as when I first watched it some years ago.
I just love the interplay between the voice and the text on screen, and the text on screen that is not part of the voiced poem.
It is so good that I want to be very picky about the typographic detail. For example, the ‘rivers of white’ (or in this case black) that are left in the setting of the Jack Kerouac quote. Going back to the crystal goblet metaphor – this is very much a clunky and chipped cheap tumbler here. It is not wrong as such, more than likely it is just what came out when the setting is clicked on ‘justify’. But it highlights the pitfalls of using that particular feature of computer text-setting all too clearly. Fine-tuning the typography with subtle and ‘invisible’ tweaks to this would make me even more happy to watch it.
IMAGININGS
Film-maker: Anja Hiddinga
Netherlands
In Imaginings six young, deaf signed-word artists present raps in sign language. At first glance the type in this film is functional – it is subtitling for those who don’t know sign language to enjoy the film and understand what the people are saying. But I include this film here because the functional has been done so well that it becomes part of the aesthetic energy and appeal of the film. The film was screened at Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin in 2022 where I was very happy to have the opportunity to watch it twice. I wanted to talk about it here because the subtitling is so brilliantly done. The positioning of the subtitles mean that you can focus on the hands and expression of the sign language. It would have been so easy to leave the subtitles down at the bottom of the page and the face and hands of the performers would have become secondary. But it is the subtlety of movement of the type that is genius. It makes me wonder if the movement was hard to animate, and it certainly makes the text slightly less legible at times, but it keeps the text so tightly tied to the energy and passion of the performers that, without a doubt, it adds to the allure of this film.
I can only find the trailer viewable online, but I think there is enough to see what I’m trying to describe.
The effort and style with which the subtitles have been provided for me (as a non-signer) makes me more determined that we should be making more effort with subtitles in return for the deaf community. And that is the very least that the performers are hoping for in their imaginings for the future.
THE FERROVORES
Film-maker/poet: Ian Gibbins
Australia
I’m generally not a fan of landscape footage in which there is blowing wind, the waving of a blade of grass, the tremble of a spider’s web, or a shaft of light. It is an almost immediate turn-off because it is often the bearer of a slow, ponderous film that just isn’t my cup of tea. But in this film by Ian Gibbins, the treatment of the typography turns this around for me. It has some pace and doom about the lettering that is compelling, and juxtaposes well with the footage. The coding text and the text of the poem work well together and add to the interest and feel of the film. More about the subject of the film in Dave Bonta’s review.
ODE ALL’ANSIA / ODE TO ANXIETY
Film-maker/poet: Milena Tipaldo
Italy
This animation has a great handling of modernist typography, very much in the mode of Jan Tschichold and his manifesto Die Neue Typografie (The New Typography), first published in 1928. A fantastic example of how inspiration can be taken from printed graphic design and manipulated in a film. It is tricky to read in English because one wants to follow the delicious animation and design of the primary Italian text, but not a bad typographic solution to a duo-lingual film.
PLASTICPOEMS
Film-makers: Fiona Tinwei Lam, Nhat Truong
Poem: Fiona Tinwei Lam
Canada
Spirals always have allure for me in whatever medium … ancient stone carving, graphic design, clothes or furniture. So I was always going to be drawn to this film. The spiral animation of swirling plastic makes a very effective concrete poem. The film is described as two concrete poems, and there is a distinct shift from the spiral to a floating sea of broken apart plastic. The typography of the spiral is great. The font choice feels like a ubiquitous, dull text font – as such, it is perfect to depict the plastic problem. But it also feels just a bit different to a default, so perhaps it is very carefully chosen. What makes the typography great is the tacky choice of colours and font outlining. It feels like horrible plastic that is swirling in water. And those fine serifs? … They are going to break off and be micro-plastics all too soon.
However, I wanted the second poem to be the breaking apart of the first one and follow on the story. It is that conceptually. But typographically I’m confused and disappointed. The colour is lost but maybe that is fading and degradation over the inordinate time it takes the plastic to break-up? Perhaps the colour should have been tints? The main problem for me though, is that the case changes. What was all capitals has become lower case. The one thing hard plastic isn’t likely to do is to morph into a whole other shape. If the second poem is a whole other thing, then why put them as a pair?
NEW ARCTIC
Film-maker/poet: Allain Daigle
USA
This is a very powerful film, in the strength of the film footage and in the subject matter. But the typography supports it all the way. I think the font choice is excellent, and the positioning of the text relates to the images is superb. The poem is in the text only, not the audio, and this film is exemplary for this approach.
SEED
Film-maker: David C. Montgomery
Poet: Asim Khan
UK
This film is extremely simple typographically – four letters in the four corners of the screen. But the simplicity has been beautifully done and as the letters change and the words they spell change, the film becomes a frenetic but alluring race for the brain to keep up. I’m not sure what the message of this film might be but I’m compelled to keep watching to try to decide.
The Inevitability of Narrative
As humans, we are driven to narrative. It is almost impossible for us to experience a sequence of events and not attempt to ascribe some kind of narrative arc to it. What just happened? What does it mean? How did it start? What will happen next?
There is a considerable literature on the theory and practice of creating narrative in different contexts: fiction or non-fiction; in print or on stage or screen; or via any other medium. Narrative can be language-based, as in a novel, or non-verbal, as in a choreographed dance, or a combination of both, as in a movie. But the basic structure of narrative mostly boils down to a few key points: there is a beginning, middle and an end; something changes along the way; it occurs in some kind of contextual framework. If any of these key elements is missing, we, the readers or viewers, inevitably will try to fill in the gaps.
Over the last 20 years, neuroscientists and cognitive scientists have made significant advances in understanding how – and to some degree, why – the brain creates narrative. Much of this new research complements well the ideas of theorists and practitioners concerning the role of narrative in literature, cinema, theatre and dance. Indeed, many authors have integrated data across the sciences and humanities to build new appreciations of how and why narrative works. Key foundation texts in this field include The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language and Understanding by Raymond W Gibbs, Jr (1994); On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction by Brian Boyd (2009); and How Literature Plays with the Brain: the Neuroscience of Reading and Art by Paul B Armstrong (2013).
From a cognitive point of view, we can consider the construction of a narrative as coming in different flavours: for example, we can describe a series of external events, that is, things that others can also describe from their own experiences of the same events; we can create a story from our own remembered experiences that is essentially private, since no one else can have those same memories; or we can create a fiction, a story that no one has ever actually experienced, even though such a narrative necessarily contains elements that are relatable to the external world.
Autobiography, memory and narrative
In order to create a narrative, we must access several different elements of memory. There is no single phenomenon called “memory”. Rather, there are many forms of memory, some of which are so fundamental to neural processing that we are not consciously aware of them. The duration of different types of memory can range from a few tenths of a second (eg the early steps of processing visual or auditory stimuli) to a lifetime (eg learning to walk or knowing what a flower is). Furthermore, many forms of memory lie outside easy verbal description, eg how to button up a shirt; how you solved a crossword puzzle; how you felt at lunch-time yesterday.
The components of a traditional first-person narrative (“I did this, and then I did that…”) rely on what is generally known as “autobiographical memory”. This is memory of what you have done in the past. It is fully private, in that only you can access it. Unless you have a very specific type of brain injury, it is updated continuously as you consciously experience the world. There are several remarkable features of this memory system:
- It is initially encoded by the same part of the brain (the hippocampus) that also encodes and keeps track of our movements through space and time in our local environment.
- This means that salient events are automatically linked to a time and place.
- Some time after these events are first recorded into memory, they are transformed into long-term memory stores elsewhere in the brain where they are associated with other memories of varying degrees of relevance or significance: the nature of event itself, the weather beforehand, the person who wasn’t there, the name of the movie, the music playing at the bus-stop…
- Each time these long-term autobiographical memories are actively retrieved they are remade: in effect, they are re-remembered.
- The neural processes involved in imagining a future autobiographical event are almost the same as those remembering a past autobiographical event. People with a damaged hippocampus not only cannot remember what they did in the past, they cannot imagine themselves doing something in the future.
- As a consequence, autobiographical memory, most of the time, is hopelessly unreliable (there are other factors contributing to this, but that’s another story).
- And as a consequence of that, virtually all narrative is a construction of unreliable memories. In other words, I suggest, all narrative can be considered to be first-person fiction (and that is yet another story…)
For the reader or viewer of a narrative, we automatically feed the story (such as it might be) through our own autobiographical memory processor. We identify the temporal sequence, the salience of each component, the relationships between the components, assign meaning to elements we recognise and make a guess at the meanings of elements new to us. Even the most abstract, abstruse, uneventful “narrative” will have a beginning, middle and an end, a context in which it is viewed, an emotional and cultural framework within which we will evaluate it. And so we create our own narrative version of “the story”, almost certainly incomplete when compared with the narrator’s intent, perhaps remembered only fleetingly, but more likely, generating a new entry of our own autobiographical memory (“Let me tell you about the movie I saw last night…”).
Selling the story – you don’t need much…
This ability for the viewer to make narrative out of minimal clues has been well recognised for many years. A famous experiment by Heider and Simmel (1944) showed how moving abstract shapes are commonly read as behaving like people within a strong narrative arc.
Similarly, short form texts such haiku, one-sentence poems, even Tweets (!!) can be commanding in their narrative intensity. Advertisers have known all this for a long time. Successful television advertisements must tell a story in as few as 15 seconds (“Look at this! See, it’s amazing! That’s why you need it… Buy one now! Get it here!!”). Indeed, some television advertisements have been recognised as stand-out examples of short-form video narration, for example, highly-regarded productions for Budweiser and Google.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZhO57NBJm0
Most television advertising lacks such sophisticated production values, but even the most simple, hackneyed approaches can inspire a poetry video narrative. In my 42nds, the timing of the scenes and the amount of text per scene closely follows that of typical advertisements 15-45 seconds long. This video was commissioned for outdoor screening in a downtown shopping mall and has since been screened on other public locations mixed in with genuine advertisements.
I’ll finish with two examples of masterful, albeit unconventional, poetry videos, both of which have featured on Moving Poems previously, that incorporate many of the elements mentioned above. These episodic narratives subvert the tropes of commercial television whilst illustrating the highly mutable state of autobiographical memory: Profile by RW Perkins and Human Condition by Rich Ferguson and Mark Wilkinson.
The success of these videos relies totally on our ability to:
- recognise the contexts of what is happening in each episode;
- hold the episodes in our short-term working memory long enough to understand the relationships between them;
- synthesise the meaning of the full narrative in terms that make sense to us, thereby embedding the external narrative in our own autobiographical memory, ready to reappear, perhaps in a subsequent narrative of our own. Which is more or less what has happened in this essay…
Sonnet on Time by John Poch
A poem from John Poch‘s new book Fix Quiet, winner of the 2014 New Criterion Poetry Prize, turned into a film by Alex Henery. The Vimeo description notes that it was “Shot in Lubbock Texas over the Thanksgiving weekend.”
This is the second Poch-Henery videopoem I’ve posted (Shrike was the the first). I reached out to Poch by email for more information about their working relationship. He told me that Henery is his nephew, and that he makes rock videos for Run for Cover Records, as well as playing in the UK-based melodic hardcore band Basement. (The guitar music in the soundtrack is his work, played on the $30 toy guitar shown in the video.) I asked to what extent they collaborated on the video, and Poch replied,
We definitely worked together a lot on this, and I made a lot of suggestions for changes toward this final project. I took him around in my red truck to a lot of the scenic sites in Lubbock, and he just shot the footage. And some around our house of my girls. Nevertheless, but for the poem, it’s all his work.
It’s kind of cool that even though the poet is not foregrounded in the way he might be in a spoken-word-style poetry video, he still appears in profile, unidentified, as the driver of the truck. Also, given the general influence of music videos on contemporary videopoetry, it’s fascinating to see what someone who makes rock videos for a living does with a poem. The relationship between the text and the accompanying shots is as elliptical and allusive as it gets, even as the shots themselves are sharply focused and charismatic. As with the work of such filmmakers as R.W. Perkins or Marie Craven, the populist/accessible and the experimental happily co-exist.
I see that in a tweet from 5 April, Poch mentions “a huge video project with TTU grads” in the works for next year, so it sounds as if we can expect much more from him. As he says in a follow-up tweet: “Video poems are probably a huge part of the future of poetry.”
Matt Mullins: Ten Notable Single-Author Videopoems
I really enjoy all forms of videopoetry, and collaborations have certainly led to some of the most groundbreaking and vital work out there, but I also have tremendous admiration for those people who work primarily as singular “videopoets.” To have the skill and talent to write a compelling poem and the ability to place that poem into an equally compelling visual and sonic context is an impressive artistic accomplishment.
But as I sat down to compile a list of ten single-author/author-made pieces that have influenced me, I quickly realized that there’s a tremendous amount of excellent work of this type out there. So I decided to narrow my list even further to focus on those poets who have demonstrated that they have the skills I mention above, and the ability to read their own poetry convincingly, and the ability to deliver the whole package in four minutes or less.
So in no particular order, here they are: Ten notable single-author videopoems under four minutes where the author also reads the poem.
Mouth
Timothy David Orme, 2012
Kleine Reise (Little Trip)
Claire Walka, 2010
The Dinosaur Book is Green Fire
Brenda Clews, 2011
the giant
Kate Greenstreet, 2009
Vowels
Temujin Doran, 2012
Where They Feed Their Children to Kings
John Gallaher, 2012
when you land in New Orleans
Ben Pelhan, 2012
Profile
R.W. Perkins, 2011
It turns out
Martha McCollough, 2012
Who’d have thought
Melissa Diem, 2013
Swoon: Top Ten Videopoems
Here’s a top 10 showcasing some of the possibilities in videopoetry. Things I like a lot over the last few years…yes there are many more.
Heimweg (poem by Peh)
Film and animation: Franziska Otto (2010)
Racing Time (poem by Chris Woods)
Adele Meyers & Ra Page (2012)
Delikatnie mnie odepchnąłeś całą (poem by Bozena Urszula Malinowska)
Marcin Konrad Malinowski (2012)
https://vimeo.com/35127990
You and Me (“May i feel said he” by e.e. cummings)
Kartsen Krause (2009)
Profile (poem by R.W. Perkins)
R.W. Perkins (2012)
The Forty Elephants (poem by Gérard Rudolf)
Alastair Cook (2011)
Silent Scene (poem by J.P. Sipilä)
J.P. Sipilä (2013)
Our Bodies (A Sinner’s Prayer) (poem by Matt Mullins)
Matt Mullins (2013)
Who’d have thought (poem by Melissa Diem)
Melissa Diem (2013)
What Remains (poem by Gareth Sion Jenkins)
Film by Jason Lam (2010)
Two new essays on videopoetry
I have been doing much thinking about Visual Text in a videopoem. Unfortunately, at the rate that my fingers touch the keyboard, I haven’t had much to show for it. But Litlive just posted my essay, Visual Text/2 Case Studies, in which I comment on two of my favourites from the finalists for their VidLit Contest, both in the Visual Text category: “24” by Susan Cormier and “Profile” by R.W. Perkins.
This past year I was also invited to participate in the Zebra Poetry Film Festival Colloquium in Berlin, but had to cancel the visit due a family emergency. A few days before the event, it was suggested I write something to contribute to the discussion. My good friend and former Vehicule poet, Endre Farkas, read it aloud at the Colloquium. It’s now been posted at http://www.academia.edu/3474487/Address_to_the_Colloquium_Berlin_Zebra_Poetry_Film_Festival_2012. In it, I argue that, among other things,
A good videopoem is not predetermined from a script juxtaposed with illustrative elements – it is produced during the editing stage, when the elements are brought together, positioning and duration of text are determined, images and their duration are selected, and sound is chosen, the work is constructed segment by segment, as if they were raw materials in a cauldron. The role of “chance” in this process should not be underestimated or absent.
Editor’s note: For more on Tom and his work, go to TomKonyves.com.
Close readings/viewings at The Third Form
This month’s “Third Form” column by Erica Goss features close readings of three videopoems: Profile by R.W. Perkins, The City by Marie Silkeberg and Ghayath Almadhoun, and I-poem 6 by Pablo Lopez Jordan. A couple of snippets:
Jordan is a filmmaker, not a poet, but he states that “to use a poem as a script for a video is a great exercise of liberation. When you work with a poem, the structure is more open and increases the chances of experimentation.”
[…]
“I wanted to show little things from ordinary life; words make those insignificant things grow in importance,” Jordan said. The poem appears as text on fragments of torn paper at the bottom of the screen, where it becomes part of the visual collage of shadows, graffiti, trees and sky. Jordan writes that he stayed away from high definition for this video, preferring what he calls a “domestic camera.” This gives the video a handmade look, like that of a very well-done home movie. This was to honor the poem, which Jordan describes as “very emotional, bright and totally real.”
