Poet: Annelyse Gelman

frog_poem_text.doc by Annelyse Gelman and Chaucer Cameron

3 July, 2020 by Marie Craven - 1 Comment - Posted in Videopoems
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frog_poem_text.doc is a videopoem from Annelyse Gelman in Berlin, whose earlier film-making and poetry have featured at Moving Poems over some years.

This film was made as part of Chaucer Cameron’s marvellous Wild Whispers project, which involved an array of artists around the world. Chaucer’s original poem was sent on a transformative journey through different nations, in a chain of writing, translation, reinterpretation and finally film-making. The project inspired very interesting and varied videos, reflecting the shifting ways we understand and express language, both textual and filmic. At its completion, Wild Whispers had inspired 14 distinct texts in 10 languages and 12 unique poetry films.

Annelyse’s film came towards the end of the two-year process of the project’s evolution across cultures. The words are almost unrecognisable from the original poem, more like a deconstruction and reconstruction of it. She arrived at this via Google Translate. The voice is synthetically generated. She has written about her approach:

I was interested in maintaining some of the imagery and observational eye of the original text while transforming its sensuousness and sentimentality into something cold and mechanical, and in working with a software collaborator that can produce, but not understand, language. (read more)

Of the 12 films in Wild Whispers, this one may have the closest relationship to a history of experimental cinema starting in the early 20th century. Still now this is a movement often abandoning populist or classical approaches to text, whether narrative or poetic, and with a similarly expanded and exploratory approach to making films. It is a movement that continues to be strongly allied with avant-garde art.

The Center by Annelyse Gelman

3 April, 2019 by Dave Bonta - Leave a comment - Posted in Author-made videopoems
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A simple but powerful videopoem by Annelyse Gelman, from TriQuarterly 155. Here’s how editor Sarah Minor introduces it:

Our second video, “The Center” by Annelyse Gelman has us eyeing the eerie potential for non-human entities to replicate or replace human jobs, relationships, and even literature. Like examples of video art that pushed the limits of early green screen technology, “The Center” repurposes face swap and text-to-voice in a savvy, uncanny pairing of poetry and digital media that brings out the specific resonances of the text. Gelman’s project nods to animal experiments involving cages with electrified flooring, centers and peripheries that implicate and confront the viewer: “Are you thinking about your own heartbeat?”

Body With No Windows by Annelyse Gelman

10 November, 2017 by Dave Bonta - Leave a comment - Posted in Author-made videopoems
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A film written and directed by Annelyse Gelman, who also composed the music in the soundtrack. Her description on Vimeo:

Body With No Windows explores death and embodiment through a collage of faceless sequences from public-domain home video footage of a Pennsylvania family in the 1950s.

It was featured in Issue 152 of TriQuarterly, where video editor Sarah Minor wrote:

In “Body With No Windows” by Annelyse Gelman, “human faces have been elided,” first found and then lost. Here, the tensions between vocal annunciation and the sharp timing of archival clips showcase Gelman’s practiced hand at working in collage. A woman on camera walking alone becomes a mother holding a child’s hand just as suddenly as “the feeling that your body belongs to you” might go away. Gelman’s opening soundscape signals a kind of dread or apprehension. This tone is quickly disrupted by quotidian footage of sunbathers in crabgrass, yard dogs, and tandem swimmers curated from the Prelinger Archives. In a particular fleeting style that intermedia texts seem to capture best, Gelman asks us to recognize the uncanny that we only witness in the daily lives of others, that particular waiting “to be carried from what you cannot remember to what you cannot forsee.”

Ars Poetica by Annelyse Gelman

11 February, 2014 by Dave Bonta - 2 Comments - Posted in Author-made videopoems, Performance Poetry
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“A fireman puts out fires. An artist puts out artist statements.” So begins this entertaining poem by Annelyse Gelman, recited as any good ars poetica should be: in clown makeup, auditioning for the part of a poet who shares her name. The Vimeo description reads:

Poem and direction by Annelyse Gelman.

From the collection ‘Everyone I Love is a Stranger to Someone’ (Write Bloody, 2014).

Thanks to Rick “Tricky the Clown” Sahar for help with set and makeup.

The book is due out on April 4. Meanwhile, best of luck to Gelman in getting the part.

Giraffe by Annelyse Gelman

28 January, 2014 by Dave Bonta - Leave a comment - Posted in Animation, Author-made videopoems
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A fun, author-made animated poem by Annelyse Gelman, with additional animation by Auden Lincoln-Vogel and voiceover by Genevieve Scanlan. The poem is from the forthcoming collection Everyone I Love is a Stranger to Someone (Write Bloody, April 2014), and the YouTube version of this video has appeared in two online magazines: The Destroyer and Atticus Review, which is where I found it — go there for the complete text of the poem.