Nationality: Belgium

The End or the Beginning by Jan Lauwereyns

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The origin of this recent videopoem, Diving into Broken Bits (The End or the Beginning) by Marc Neys (A.K.A. Swoon), is a little complicated, so I’ll just quote his blog post about it:

A while back I made a video for ‘Het einde of het begin van een mensenleven / The end or the beginning of a human life’
This poem by Jan Lauwereyns (you can read about the videopoem) has an extended English version (published in the book ‘Three Poems To the Question of Four. 27+3 Drawings’)
Because they were so obviously connected I wanted to create a second video for the English poem; ‘The End or the Beginning’

I asked Michael Dickes to read/record the poem and he delivered a perfect (dark blue with bits of fading grey) reading. I created a very slow and deep track around that recording […]

This time I didn’t want to use IICADOM footage. No family memories. The video needed to be more abstract.
The first thing I wanted to use was an experimental performance/recording by Ephemeral Rift.
The mask and movements in this short video reminded me of bunraku. It was the perfect link to Jan’s frame of mind.
(Jan lives and works as a scientist in Japan)
This video was going to be the lead in my videopoem. I added a variety of images around this storyline. Hints of science, nature, death,…
A poetic storyline through images. It’s a flow of thoughts surrounding the poem, being a flow on itself…

I am very happy with this one, so was Jan. We started a journey together with this project. It will take us to other places, new ways of combining, crossing borders. More to follow in the future…

Black Canary by Peter Wullen

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A film by Chris H. Lynn with a text by Belgian poet Peter Wullen, read by Una Lee. In a blog post introducing the film, Wullen writes:

The aim of a poet is not to win prizes. To be famous. To be popular. Even not to produce books. That’s left for the others to decide. The aim of a poet is to leave as much traces as possible during a lifetime. Like seeds we blow in the wind. Like water we flow in all directions. We project fire. We consume everything before we are consumed ourselves.

De barometer hapert / The barometer’s stuck by Jan H. Mysjkin

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A piece by Belgian poet Jan H. Mysjkin, ably translated into English by John Irons, supplied the inspiration for Swoon’s first videopoem of 2014. Check out his process notes, where he talks about how the soundtrack took shape and what led him to settle on the footage he used from the Prelinger Archives.

La Casina Rossa / The Red House by Michaël Vandebril

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A film by Dutch photographer and filmmaker Judith Dekker with words by Belgian poet Michaël Vandebril. The English translation for this version of the film is by Will Stone; there’s also a version without any text in the soundtrack at all, which Vandebril uses for live performances. The poem appears in his book Het Vertrek van Maeterlinck.

This was Dekker’s very first filmpoem, and it won the 2013 Filmpoem Festival Prize in Dunbar, Scotland.

Casina Rossa is the name of the house in Rome where John Keats died.

Day is Done by Johan de Boose

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Swoon‘s latest videopoem features a text, reading and English translation by Belgian author Johan de Boose. As Swoon wrote in a blog post introducing the film:

For poetry day & week (here in Belgium & The Netherlands) Johan de Boose wrote a poem.
The ‘Provincie Oost-Vlaanderen‘ and ‘Het Poëziecentrum‘ gave me a commission to make a videopoem for it.

During these days filled with poetry, Johan is visiting schools, showing the video, reading the poem and talking with the students…

Some things speak for themselves.
Loud and like crystal.

[…]

It was clear from the beginning that I wanted someone young to feature in this video. And I found the perfect one. Filming and editing was made easy with her natural expression and Johan’s strong words.

Dutch and Flemish Poetry Day is the fourth Thursday of January (January 24th this year).

Click through to the post to read the poem in both languages.

Notes from Noise by Jan Lauwereyns

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Swoon used public-domain footage from the U.S. Navy’s MSTS Arctic operations (1955-1957) to accompany an English-language text by the multilingual Belgian writer and scientist Jan Lauwereyns. He first constructed a soundscape, then found footage to match, but in a departure from his usual modus operandi, decided not to include the poem in the soundtrack:

Reading or recording the poem was no option…
It wouldn’t work. I needed to see the words ‘floating’ slowly, using the pace of the music and the images.
Giving them time to interact with the sounds and the images.

Idioticon by Peter Wullen

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Animator Kris J. Yves Verdonck performs a kind of open-heart surgery on Peter Wullen’s text (or an English translation of it). The author’s reaction on his blog is worth quoting in full:

With the videopoem ‘Idioticon’ Kris J. Yves Verdonck created something really special. Together with Ian Kubra and Marc Neys this is exactly what I had in mind when I started this. Poets are egotistical and selfish creatures. They don’t like others to play with their words. But in these videopoems the ego is finally abolished. The words stay visible and primary but somehow they disappear inside the videopoem. The viewer or reader has to look very carefully to find them. The meaning of the videopoem is the perfect integration of word, sound and image.

1 November by Bernard Dewulf: Remembering Lidice

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Swoon used a small piece of footage from the documentary Lidice Lives by James Truswell, as well as a loop of his own images, for this memorial film. “Repetition was the key word here,” he notes. He was moved to search for a poem to envideo after reading a book about Lidice, and discovered “November 1” by the Belgian poet Bernard Dewulf, also available in an English translation by Sapphire/Ramona Lofton. Even before that, though, his first step had been to compose the music later incorporated into the soundtrack.

From the Wikipedia:

Lidice is a village in the Czech Republic just northwest of Prague. It is built near the site of the previous village of the same name which, as part of the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, was on orders from Adolf Hitler and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, completely destroyed by German forces in reprisal for the assassination of Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich in the late spring of 1942. On 10 June 1942, all 173 men over 16 years of age from the village were murdered. Another 11 men who were not in the village were arrested and murdered soon afterwards along with several others already under arrest. Several hundred women and over 100 children were deported to concentration camps; a few children considered racially suitable for Germanisation were handed over to SS families and the rest were sent to the Chełmno extermination camp where they were gassed to death. After the war ended, only 153 women and 17 children returned.

ctrlC/ctrlV by Katrijn Clemer

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Belgian poet Katrijn Clemer reads her poem, which, according to the note at Vimeo,

was constructed out of 100 lines taken from a diary.
Each line deconstructed into separate words, constructed back into 20 new lines.
Deconstructed those 20 again into words and then constructed the poem using the cut/up technique.

Annmarie Sauer translated it into English for the subtitles. Swoon did everything else.

Guesswork (Raden) by Bart Van der Straeten

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An interesting, high-concept videopoem, and the first I’ve seen to credit the typeface designer. Let me quote the description from Vimeo in full:

Guesswork. Variation 8 (Belgium, 2011) – short version (3 minutes)
film by Jan Peeters
text by Bart Van der Straeten
typeface: Jean-Luc by Atelier Carvalho Bernau, carvalho-bernau.com

In “Guesswork” poetry and film literally come together. A super 8 reel with worn and withered documentary footage is overlaid with the text from the Dutch poem Raden (meaning ‘guesswork’) by Belgian writer and critic Bart Van der Straeten (°1979), forming a filmic-typographic collage.

The condensed verses are unravelled word by word, inciting a tentative reading. They describe the existential and uncomfortable feeling of instability one can have with the public space of the city one dwells in.

Although the word and image layers are in disjunction, involuntarily the found footage of Parisian monuments starts connecting with the text, stressing a distant and impersonal relationship with the surrounding urban environment.

Jan Peeters has also uploaded a version in Dutch, which is almost two minutes longer: