Letter to Fred by Mike Hoolboom & Alfred Vander

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At one level, Letter to Fred is a film about the creative obsession of film-making. At another it’s about life and death beyond that frame. It’s the fifth film I’ve shared here at Moving Poems by Canadian experimental film-maker, Mike Hoolboom, so highly esteemed in the field since the 1980s.

At the film’s heart is a letter from Mike’s long-time friend, Alfred Vander aka Fred Pelon, a former film-maker. The simple words of the letter are given on screen simply as subtitles, while the sublime images, sounds and filmic rhythms invite a subtle poetic trance, a mindset of clarity in which the authenticity of what is said can better be felt and heard.

The film itself seems like Mike’s ‘letter to Fred’, as if in answer to the words received. The film-maker’s synopsis:

A letter from my friend Alfred Vander. Though when we met he was Fred Pelon, anarchist super 8 filmmaker, a prolific machine of thoughts and pictures, growing fungi on film, and on the archaic behaviours of the state. But it turned out that film was only the next stage in a life dedicated to reinvention. In this brief post, he describes his new normal, no longer living in a boat but a monastery, working as a caregiver, a gardener, a bridge keeper. As the pandemic waxes on, and my relationships to fringe movie practices and places that used to be central feel increasingly abstract, as if part of some faraway dream, these spare lines offer new hope, and the ongoing consolation of friendship.

The drawn-out opening shot startles immediately to the edge of the seat, the knifes-edge presence of death a stark reference point for what follows. The film is highly personal to the two friends and yet covers far wider ground.

Verkeerd Verbonden / Wrong Number by Marc Neys

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Verkeerd Verbonden / Wrong Number is an hypnotic, author-made videopoem from renowned Belgian artist, Marc Neys. In slow, hushed tones he narrates his poem in Dutch. The English is given as text-on-screen and visually designed around a divided trio of screen-compartments. These also contain abstract images in flickering motion, with transient glimpses of recognisable people and objects, the whole rendered in unusual and shifting colours.

Marc is a marvelous experimental film-maker and composer. The graphic rhythms of the English text on the screen, and the way they interact with the sound of the voice in Dutch – both contribute to the deep mood, as does his sophisticated ambient sound design. The language of the poem is pared back, with a mysterious allegorical quality. The dramatic simplicity of word and image is strangely moving.

and they whisper softly
stories that are not meant for me

This is a new film from Marc Neys, uploaded only two weeks ago. Moving Poems has featured well over 100 videopoems from him since 2011.

“Hunger” and “What I Did” from The Echo Chamber by Michael Bazzett

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From filmmaker Sherng-Lee Huang and actress Veronika Nowag-Jones, whom Huang calls “a stalwart of German cinema and stage,” these two trailers for The Echo Chamber by Michael Bazzett each feature a complete, short poem from the collection. US independent literary publisher Milkweed Editions has been producing video trailers off and on for the better part of a decade. As anecdotal evidence for their effectiveness, I ordered a copy of The Echo Chamber before I even finished posting this! Here’s the publisher’s page for it.

Hat-tip: Sean Thomas Dougherty on Twitter.

Startling by Linda France

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British filmmaker Kate Sweeney, whose work we’ve featured here in the past, collaborated with one of my favorite contemporary ecopoets, Linda France, for a poetry film in support of her tenth collection with Faber. Here’s the YouTube description:

A short film by Kate Sweeney, with poetry written and read by Linda France.

“I have taken to counting what I want to call ‘Startlings’. They are creatures who, sensing their species is facing extinction, feel the cell-tingling impulse to evolve and ensure their survival. Within their tissue and bones, hearts and minds, they enact the necessary transformation. For every Endling there is a Startling.”

To celebrate the publication of Linda France’s tenth poetry collection – influenced by her three years of writing the climate – artist Kate Sweeney has created a new film responding to Linda’s words.

Linda France’s residency as Climate Writer was supported by New Writing North, Newcastle University and Arts Council England. Startling was published in partnership with Faber Books.
Find out more about the residency and its projects: https://newwritingnorth.com/event/writing-the-climate/
Order a copy of Startling: https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571379026-startling/

sex & violence #4 : what’s inside a girl? by Kristy Bowen

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I’ve featured a few of Chicago-based poet and publisher Kristy Bowen’s video poetry book trailers, but not this one yet, which was made in support of her 2020 collection with Black Lawrence Press, sex & violence. It might be my favorite of hers to date. Nobody knows better than the poet herself what kind of mood she was trying to create, and if she happens to have the graphic design skills and technical know-how to bring that to life in video form, as Bowen does, the results can be wonderful (even if, as here, also super creepy). She resurfaced the video recently on her blog as part of an annual #31daysofhalloween series.

As always, visit her YouTube channel for more. The latest trailers are in support of a collection due out on Halloween called Automagic.

Remnants by Valerie LeBlanc & Daniel Dugas

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A few weeks ago I shared a trilogy of videopoems from Canadian film-makers Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel Dugas, made during their time as artists in residence at the historic Deering Estate in Florida. This video, Remnants, is another of several made during their time at the Estate.

From a film-making view, I particularly like in Remnants the simple effectiveness of writing the poem on the spine of books. There is as well a quiet, contemplative quality that often arises in videopoems without voice, just text on screen and sound design from natural ambiences. The twin-screen of this film then calls for attention to two panels of adjacent text, the poem on one side and old book titles on the other.

Most if not all of the videopoems I have seen from Valerie and Daniel are author-made films arising from their long-time collaboration as artists. More from their Deering Estate residency are here.

La Caracola / The Conch by María Papi

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This film by Argentinian María Papi had its premiere at the 2015 Berlin Feminist Film Week. The description on Vimeo notes that it

explores the movement of intrinsic relations between two presences that give rise to life: Water and Vulva. By exposing what is hidden, the harmony of femininity is restored.

It is powerful, as well as vulnerable and touching, to see genitalia on screen without pornographic intent. That said, this is probably not content suitable for classroom use in public school.

Papi’s approach seems personal and subjective most of all, with secondary thoughts about female gender and sexuality in general. We particularly liked the starkness of the text, just singular words. Marie felt that this underscores the film’s focus: more on body than intellect. The soundtrack is interesting as well, crafting different textures from the sound of water. These seem to speak to the visuals when they become purely abstract and textural themselves. The rhythm is slow, almost contemplative, possibly reflecting the pleasant feelings experienced while filming herself naked in a river, as described in an interview with Papi about the making of the film in CinéWomen, where it was the International Selection for 2015-2016. (We’d excerpt it, but Scribd doesn’t permit copy-and-paste, so you’ll just have to click through — or, if you read Spanish, check out the translation of the interview on Papi’s blog.)

See Vimeo for the full credits list.

3 Erasures at War by Matt Mullins

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An author-made videopoem from earlier this year by Matt Mullins, who probably needs no introduction here. As someone who’s dabbled in erasure poetry myself, I was impressed by how well he handled that. There’s quite a lot of free footage of the 1934 New York World’s Fair at the Prelinger Archives, which I’m guessing might be what gave Matt the idea for the videopoem in the first place, but regardless, I think he made good use of it, taking a kinestatic approach for a pleasing contrast with the longer screen-times of the text elements. The soundtrack glues it all together, incorporating Hendrix’s rendition of the US national anthem from Woodstock.

Garden of Reason from Mythistoria by Chris O’Leary

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This is the first in a series of five filmpoems, Mythistoria: An Archaeology of Shadows. Chris O’Leary is a fine artist based in Yorkshire, and the video is in my view a masterclass in how to make a filmpoem using still images (without going full kinestasis): the images are striking, utterly lacking in cliche, and are juxtaposed in interesting ways, sometimes illustrating and sometimes contrasting with the text on screen, and the soundtrack—”Erotokritos/Music of Crete” by Ross Daly—pushes the whole thing forward. My only criticism is that some of the longer passages of text fade out a second or two too soon.

Here’s how Chris describes the project on her website:

‘Mythistoria’ is a new body of work in development by Chris O’Leary. It is an Athens based project; Chris is a member of the ‘British School of Archaeology’; an institute for higher academic research and which accommodates post-doctoral and independent research work. ‘Mythistoria’ negotiates ideas of place, myth and history in aspects of classical and contemporary Greek culture. The work addresses the european tradition of women’s travel narratives dating back to the eighteenth century; women who came to Greece and experienced it as travellers, writers,artists and scholars. Such women challenged the prevailing romantic view of the ‘epic Greek journey’ as being a ‘Byronic’ idyll, pursued only by wealthy aristocratic antiquarians. The work, therefore, aims to engage with post-colonial/feminist analysis of Hellenism and Orientalism in relation to both women’s travel writing and the rendering of Greece through the collective imaginary

Citizen Poetry by Lisa Robertson and Mike Hoolboom

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The edited stream of ‘found’ moving images writes its own wordless poem in Mike Hoolboom‘s Citizen Poetry. Meticulous sound design brings another rich texture of poetry to this film. Text-on-screen offers reading of words without voice, the content adapted from Lisa Robertson’s collection of poetic-prose essays, Nilling.

There is a a difficulty in crediting Mike’s films for cataloguing purposes. For some years they have shown conscious effort to subvert authorship. Citizen Poetry’s final credit gives only a stark list of names, with Mike somewhere around the middle:

Samuel Boudier
Murasaki Encho
Jeanette Groenendaal
Mike Hoolboom
Lucia Martinez
Olivier Provily
Susanne Ohmann
Jean Perret
Liz Straitman
Leslie Supnet
Ana Taran

And yet this piece bears the indelible mark of his film-making style over the decades of a prolific and esteemed artistic life. There’s a breathtaking, dynamic and moving quality to the choice and editing of images from multiple sources, a subtle euphoria, dark and light, deftly woven through all elements of this film.

It could well be that the other names in the credits are artists who created the disparate fragments of ‘found’ media in Citizen Poetry. I wonder if Mike directly knows any of his listed collaborators or contributors. As a fellow maker of films that assemble ‘found’ media, I relate to indirect and virtual creative connections.

However Lisa Robertson is given her own solo credit as the source of Mike’s radically condensed text for the film. As its own piece of writing, Citizen Poetry could be loosely described as prose poetry. From the film’s synopsis:

This retake on belonging and boundaries imagines poetry as a capitalist salve.

The first half of the film sets context and describes mechanisms of how life is objectified in capitalism, people and all. The second half speaks beautifully about the ‘citizen poetry’ that brings hope and liberating connections below the radar.

Borders inspire crossings.

Poetry is the speech of citizenship. It keeps escaping and follows language towards an ear that could belong to anyone.

The final line – I won’t spoil it – brings inspired closure.

Vimeo shows the title of the film as Citizen Poet but I have chosen to adhere to Citizen Poetry, as it appears on the screen.

Moving Poems has before featured three other films from Mike Hoolboom.