Poet: Jan Baeke

At the border by Jan Baeke

3 February, 2017 by Dave Bonta - Leave a comment - Posted in Author-made videopoems
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This videopoem from Public Thought, the collaborative team of Dutch poet Jan Baeke and designer and media artist Alfred Marseille, was screened at ZEBRA 2016. Completed last July, it is sadly more relevant than ever: a “Poetic reflection on the ambiguities of the refugee crisis, media coverage, extremist propaganda and EU politics,” as Baeke and Marseille describe it. (Click through for the text.)

What we had has not yet been by Jan Baeke

28 December, 2012 by Dave Bonta - Leave a comment - Posted in Videopoems
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Another one of the Public Thought collaborations between Dutch poet Jan Baeke and media artist Alfred Marseille. Let me quote the description at Vimeo in full:

Originally conceived as an interactive installation for the 2007 Literature and New Media project in the Waag, Amsterdam, this production by Jan Baeke and Alfred Marseille mixes poetry, moving images and sound in a movie directed by words, and talks about memory, longing, the misguided monologue and the meaning of the kitchen in modern society.
Images and sounds are mainly drawn from the Prelinger archives.
This version is an entirely new edit made for the 2011 Beijing Book Fair and also featured at the 2011 Noorderzon festival in Groningen (Netherlands).
Text: Jan Baeke
Editing: Alfred Marseille
English translation: Willem Groenewegen

(The Waag, incidentally, is an old city gate and guild hall, “the oldest remaining non-religious building in Amsterdam.”)

There’s also a version in Mandarin Chinese.

Rue des Abeilles and No Other Way by Jan Baeke

11 December, 2012 by Dave Bonta - Leave a comment - Posted in Author-made videopoems
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This is Rue des Abeilles, part of an on-going collaboration between poet Jan Baeke and media artist Alfred Marseille that they call Public Thought: “Cinépoèmes – data poems – moving shorts – speculative analysis.” This was screened at the 2012 ZEBRA Poetry Festival (to whose Vimeo “likes” I’m indebted for the find). In the credits, “Idea & screenplay” are attributed to both Baeke and Marseille, while Marseille alone handled production, editing and sound. The English translation is by Willem Groenewegen.

I was especially struck by the myriad ways in which motion and energy were coaxed from still images and kinetic type animation (even to the point of making the word “motionless” pulse and tremble). The description at Vimeo reads:

One summer morning at dawn in a French town, sleepless and without a clue. Everything was breathing…

Short film based on two poems by Jan Baeke, Rue des Abeilles and No other way (10).
(first revision)

Thomas Möhlmann’s bio of Jan Baeke on Poetry International Web makes it clear that film has been a crucial influence on his work:

Besides being a poet and translator, Jan Baeke works for the Amsterdam Film Museum. In a note to his fourth collection, Groter dan de feiten (Larger than the Facts, 2007), he lists a number of people who inspired him during his writing process. This list shows that the work of international film makers such as Andrej Tarkovski, Federico Fellini, Michael Haneke and Luis Buñuel are as important to Baeke’s poetry as writing of poets like János Pilinszky, Wallace Stevens and Anne Carson. Both Baeke’s imagery and technique seem to be fuelled and formed by film and poetry alike.

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