This is one of the best, most satisfying films based on a poetry collection that I’ve seen. It was made in 2013 in support of a pamphlet (chapbook) of the same title from Happenstance Press. The poems are clearly differentiated, yet blend pretty seamlessly into a whole, with shots of the poet in a vineyard as part of the connective tissue. British poet Matthew Stewart collaborated with Spanish filmmaker José María Fernández de Vega of GLOW production company in Extramadura, where Stewart works in the wine trade. It’s hard to imagine a more poetic vocation! And since the speaker in each poem is a different variety of wine, and they’re all delivered in the poet’s own voice, it’s as if we’re hearing missing metamorphoses out of Ovid.
A while back I compiled my Top Ten Multi-Poem Films and Videopoems. This would certainly have occupied a prominent position in the list had it been available at the time. Conservative as the choice of images is, they rarely feel overly obvious. And Stewart’s voiceover is well done: readerly, but with excellent cadence and modulation. I’d have preferred somewhat less melodic music by way of contrast, but otherwise there were no false notes for me among these very tasty words and images.
Just uploaded to Vimeo last week, Magpie – a conspiracy story is a subtle and atmospheric videopoem by David Ian Bickley in Ireland. The quiet, eerie mood of the piece is hypnotic.
This folkloric exploration imagines the ancient magpie rhyme as one created by the birds themselves, deep in some misty past. Through careful propagation a protective spell was woven through their close community. (source)
The film has a relation to the nursery rhyme, One for Sorrow, and a hint of Edgar Allan Poe. Bickley created the minimal music score as well, timed beautifully with visual changes and words appearing on the screen.
Two other of Bickley’s earlier videos have been featured here at Moving Poems, including the extraordinary Marsh, an award-winning film with poet Paul Casey.
Porsche Veu writes, directs and performs in I Am Here, an inspiring dance and music video on personal empowerment.
Porsche Veu aka The Poetic Activist is an unapologetic author, spoken word poet, speaker, educator, and artist of many talents from Oakland. (source)
Porsche uses her art to fight social injustice, empower women, youth, & the Black community, and advocate for mental & emotional health. (source)
The film was winner of the multimedia category in the Button Poetry Video Contest in 2022. The poem can be read on the page here.
Atmospheric and experimental, Orion is by Maria Vella in Victoria, Australia. The soundtrack is abstract, incorporating just a few distorted lines of ‘found audio’ from NASA. The strobing stream of personal images creates the sense of poetry without words.
Maria Vella was born in Qormi, Malta, in 1980 and immigrated with her parents and younger brother to Melbourne in 1983. She is a video poet, poet and visual artist. Her work has appeared in The Best Australian Poems, Overland and elsewhere. (source)
Dave Bonta previously shared another of her films here at Moving Poems. I screened that same film, Broken Words, in a number of international venues as part of the touring project, Poetry + Video.
A lovingly crafted, gentle and touching film set during lockdown, Subtleties of Shanghai is by Chinese-American writer and artist Angela Kong. It was a finalist in the 2023 Spoken Word Competition at The Artists Forum in New York, and winner of the international category in the 2022 Button Video Contest.
Angela Kong is a Chinese American writer and activist committed to social change and awareness through photography, videography, and spoken word addressing issues such as experiences of racism, injustice, and privilege. A 2017 graduate of Colorado College, Kong currently works and lives in Shanghai. (source)
First published at Atticus Review in 2021, Ten Bag of Albion is by Charles Putschkin, a Swedish-Polish artist living in Bristol, UK, and Richard Capener, also in Bristol.
The video seems like an interwoven collaboration with each artist contributing writing and film decisions. The text is deconstructed into snatches of phrases and words within an audio mix of interesting sound textures and treatments. This is experimental film-making with text, abstraction and unexpected rhythms in the editing.
I previously shared Putschkin’s Disorderlily, a finalist in the Ó Bhéal Poetry-Film Competition in Ireland.
This unique and original video was uploaded just two weeks ago. Described as an “animation collage of dreams”, cage-free is by multi-media artist, Donna Kuhn. As well she is a sometime poet in an experimental vein, words written and fused with the audio-video elements. More about her creative work:
Donna Kuhn’s experimental videos incorporate poetry, datamoshing, slit scan, dance, digital and visual art, sound text poetry, speech synthesis, animation, hologram/3d and sound/music. (source)
The text in this video is made up of many single lines and phrases from dreams, written and spoken in different ways, describing places, events, situations, momentary impressions. The surreal juxtapositions between these dream fragments are sometimes humorous, or dark, strange, light, or ordinary. The visuals similarly seem like a stream of glitchy consciousness. As someone who is fascinated by dreams, I enjoyed the video for its shifting moods and intriguing surprises.
Donna Kuhn created all elements of this video. We have previously featured other of her videos here.
How long does a videopoem need to be to successfully provoke a new understanding? This 42-second movie by experimental filmmaker Mike Hoolboom, whom we’ve featured here before,
is animated by a question. Can we see what we see? I think of what is close at hand, the painting on the wall, book titles shouting from the choir on the shelf. And then further afield, to countries that have been made visible or invisible because of my media affiliations, my nervous system extended into information portals that allow some to appear as people, while others are relegated to a faceless throng. How can I see what I see?
A sense of planetary emergency is vividly evoked here in a videopoem with the power and urgency of a feature film, co-directed by American poet Kimberly Reyes and Irish/Australian filmmaker Gary de Buit (Studio 8 Labs) with music by Aiden Guilfolye, and uploaded to YouTube two years ago with this description:
Made in Monaghan, Ireland by Studio 8 Labs with funding from the Irish Arts Council. First published on Poethead.
Visit Reyes’ website and scroll down for a bio, before checking out her other poetry films. It’s always encouraging to see ambitious, career-oriented poets getting into poetry film (as opposed to aging burnouts like me). Here’s how her bio begins:
Kimberly Reyes is an award-winning poet, essayist, popular culture critic, and visual culture scholar who began her career as a music and entertainment reporter. She transitioned to creative writing after receiving her Master of Arts from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2013 and has since been awarded grants, bursaries, fellowships, residencies and scholarships from the Poetry Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the Academy of American Poets, Tin House Workshops, Culture Ireland, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, New York City Artist Corps, Miami Writers Institute, the Arts Council of Ireland, CantoMundo, Callaloo, Hambidge, Cave Canem, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the Munster Literature Centre, Summer Literary Seminars in Kenya, the Prague Summer Program for Writers, the Community of Writers, and many other places.
Pete Mullineaux won the 2023 Poetry & Folk In The Environment competition sponsored by UK performance-poetry organization Home Stage with this highly entertaining video, a collaboration with Roj Whelan AKA The RoJ LiGht of RoJnRoll Productions in Dublin, who handled the camerawork and editing.