Posts in Category: Author-made videopoems

Ursula by Robert Peake

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A new videopoem by Robert Peake and Valerie Kampmeier. Peake blogged the text of the poem and some process notes. The poem was prompted by an old postcard, he writes, and

Valerie and I found some old excess footage, now in the public domain, from a Los Angeles film studio in the 1950s, and we put this together with road, wind, and bear noises as accompaniment.

Sonder, from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig

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https://vimeo.com/80318195

Whether he intended it to be or not, John Koenig’s first (?) video in support of his popular site The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a videopoem.

SONDER, noun: “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.”

From The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com), a compendium of made-up words written by John Koenig. Each original definition aims to fill a hole in the language, to give a name to an emotion we all feel but don’t have a word for.

This was a staff pick at Vimeo, though a few people criticized (unfairly, in my opinion) his use of found footage, which he defends in the comments:

At the end of the video you’ll find a full list of credits for all the footage that appears in it. I believe my usage here falls under Fair Use/Fair Dealing, by virtue of its educational, transformative and fleeting handling of the source footage.

Endlessly by Daniel Dugas

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Poet, musician and videographer Daniel Dugas writes:

This video is part of a two channel video installation What We Take With Us, a collaborative work with Valerie LeBlanc. For the installation, we each created a distinct program of short videos poems exploring different aspects of memory and presence. Endlessly deals with the implication of what is seen and the tourist gaze. It is one of six videos that I created for the installation.

For more about the project, see its website.

expect something and nothing at once by Michelle Elrick

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A film by Canadian poet Michelle Elrick and photographer Tyler Funk based on a poem-performance installation. The description on Vimeo explains it best:

This film is part of the larger project Notes from the Fort: a poetic of inhabited space, which is a series of performance installations that create intimate places in unfamiliar environments through the play-act of fort building. Using only existing structures and a suitcase full of hand-crafted materials, each fort is constructed, inhabited, noted and dismantled in a live poetic document of sense of place and the origins of home. Notes From the Fort was under way in Reykjavík, Iceland from July-August 2012, then moved to Winnipeg, Canada from September-November 2012. The soundscape that underlies the film was made from sounds collected from the poet/director’s ancestral homes of Austria and Scotland, as well as sounds collected during the implementation of the project in Reykjavík. The poem “expect something and nothing at once” is an imagistic retelling of the poet’s personal sense of home, focusing briefly on a series of bright, vivid images that carry the listener within the walls of the fort and of the poem itself.

For more, visit the Notes from the Fort website. The film was awarded Best Cinematography at the 2013 Suffolk International Film Festival.

Did He Struggle by Philip Hartigan

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Found via the increasingly useful Liberated Words website (see especially their videos section). They write:

Philip Hartigan is a British multimedia artist now living in Chicago. This work is part of an ongoing series of stop-motion animations paired with short written moments of personal narrative, mainly relating to the death of his father. Philip is interested in putting together pieces as a counterpoint to each other, rather than as illustration. His prints, short films and illustrations have been exhibited in solo and group shows in both the USA and the UK.

Here’s a bio. He blogs at Praeterita.

Pheasant Hunting by Sara Mithra

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Another videopoem using found film by Sara Mithra. The description on Vimeo reads:

A poem film by Sara Mithra with music by Maali Maal for Hameenia. I edited footage from the Prelinger Archives of color home movies from the 50s and 60s, cataloguing at least ten hours of film to select these two minutes of clips. The amateur quality of these films, together with the hand-held cinematography and lack of zoom, inspired me to select clips which show the film’s age and draw attention to its material quality by being discolored, scratched, poorly digitized, etc.
As far as my poem, I wanted visuals which were rich, vibrant, and if not capturing the narrative quality of pheasant hunting, could match its erotic power.

Who’d have thought by Melissa Diem

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The latest film from Irish poet-filmmaker Melissa Diem. According to the description on Vimeo, it was filmed in Peru and Ireland. Sound production is by Colm Slattery.

Broken Horse by Sara Mithra

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Sara Mithra is a Vermont-based poet with a particular interest in the use of old home movies and other archival footage for videopoetry. She’s also active on SoundCloud. About Broken Horse, she writes:

This poem film explores the relationship between the labor of the Western frontier and its emotional legacy. Choosing semi-professional archival footage allowed me to present a story of wreckage. Thanks to the Prelinger Archives for providing such a rich trove of creative commons films.

Omelet by Fiona Tinwei Lam

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The poet, Fiona Tinwei Lam, also directed and produced this film, with animation by Toni Zhang and Claire Stewart. The text has appeared in Enter the Chrysanthemum (Caitlin Press, 2009) and Poet to Poet, edited by Julia Roorda and Elana Wolff (Guernica Editions, 2012).

Afraid of what I would write by James O’Leary

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https://vimeo.com/67137245

A videopoem from the Irish writer, theater director and filmmaker James O’Leary.