Nationality: United States
Victim by Nicole Blackman
A short film shot in Australia and based on a spoken-word poem by the New York-based poet Nicole Blackman. I found a review from 2005 in RealTime Arts Magazine. This was apparently Corrie Jones’ directorial debut. He persuaded Blackman to take an active role in adapting the poem for the film, and it is she doing the voiceover.
Victim was filmed and produced in Perth by a group of relative newcomers, but its local impact was immediate. The first screenings in Perth were controversial, where it was shown with Siddiq Barma’s Osama as part of the 2003 Perth International Arts Festival. With the serial killings of 3 young women in Perth’s northern suburbs still haunting the newspaper headlines, Victim hit a raw nerve. Although the film shows a bound and gagged woman at the mercy of an armed kidnapper, many viewers interpreted the film as being about a woman’s rape, which is not even indirectly implied.
Jones views the film’s real subject as self-empowerment rather than victimisation. His protagonist struggles to the end, and when she realises she may die, she attempts to live the last moments of her life with psychological strength and resolve, rather than annihilating terror. “I wanted to show an inner strength through the detachment of the narration”, Jones explains. “The film is about a woman confronting her fears, dealing with them as they hit her.”
Victim has already won a number of prestigious Australian awards, including an Early Career Award at the 2003 WA Screen Awards, the SBS Eat Carpet award, and Best New Director award at the 2004 St Kilda Film Festival.
Question by May Swenson
Another video from Dara Elerath at the Art Center Design College in Albuquerque. The full poem includes an additional two stanzas at the end — read it on the Poetry Foundation website.
34 by Patricia Smith
Patricia Smith is both a master poet and a master performer. Would that all poets read this well! The poem is from Blood Dazzler. (Hat-tip: Sherry Chandler.)
Rush Hour by Thylias Moss
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdoZbbZfnFs
Moss writes,
A video poam that explores the simultaneous and related journeys of workers from two social strata whose need of each other does not include the exchange of essential aspects of identity.
She also uploaded another version, “Rush Hour (too).”
Confused Rain by Nam June Paik
nam june paik’s confused rain (1967) was the chaotic distribution of the letters C-O-N-F-U-S-E on a sheet of paper.
clint enns’ confused rain (2008) is a posthumous collaboration with nam june paik that expands paik’s work into a computer program that produces an animation of the letters C-O-N-F-U-S-E falling like rain drops.
this was written in visual basic.
For more on the Korean-American artist Nam June Paik, see the Wikipedia, which says he was “considered to be the first video artist.” For more on Clint Enns, see his Vimeo page.
Coney Island by Andrew Marotta
Interesting Beat-like, collaborative approach to videopoem-making by poet Andrew Marotta and filmmaker Brandon Knopp, who captured all the material for both the poem and the film in one day, according to Brandon’s note:
Working together on a project created during a day spent at Coney Island. Filmed and written in one outing.
The Body Show: How to Boil an Egg by Nora Robertson
UPDATE (3 August 2015): I’ve found and swapped in the complete film.
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This is actually a trailer for a short film by Jason Bahling called The Body Show, due out in November. The whole film is essentially a videopoem for “How to Boil an Egg,” which is from Nora Robertson’s unpublished collection Body-Making Cookery — or so I gather from Jason’s notes at Vimeo and a recent post at Nora’s blog:
About five years ago I appeared in a line-up at Borders downtown and read from my then-new collection Body-Making Cookery which is still in progress (cue internal groan). The collection is all recipe poems and explores the associations food has for us, that food is almost never just a way to keep our bodies going, that it reminds us of other things like family, personal biography, history, body image, desire, mythology, religion. When we eat, it’s my belief that we don’t just take the food into our bodies, but all of these associations into the body of our self. I was experimenting with a persona, the housewife, which later morphed into cooking show host gone awry as explored in the short film The Body Show, a collaboration with video artist Jason Bahling to be released in November 2010.
My Friend, The Parking Lot Attendant by Charles Bukowski
English film student Tom Ralph notes,
The piece is meant to be shown on two screens facing each other, one for each character in the film. This gives the impression of a conversation in which the audience can place themselves where they please. For the purpose of viewing now, both characters appear on one film. Filmed on a Kodak Zi6 and edited on Final Cut Pro. Thanks to Dennis Thompson and Roy Winspear.
On Writing Hat Poems by Marvin Kimbrough
An animation by Francesca Talenti. I wasn’t able to locate a website for the poet.
UPDATE (9/7/10): After posting this, I got a note from Austin-based poet Scott Wiggerman on Facebook saying that Dr. Marvin Kimbrough had been active in the Austin poetry scene and was “a very warm, wonderful person,” though now she was in the hospital with terminal cancer. Yesterday, he sent a follow-up note saying she’d died that morning. Rest in peace, Dr. Kimbrough.
