Posts Tagged: ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival
Syrinx by Norbert Hummelt
A very successful example of a poem used as dialogue between characters in a familiar movie set-up — a surprisingly uncommon tactic for videopoem makers. This was uploaded to YouTube by the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival folks, who solicited it for this year’s festival:
For the 6th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival Polish film makers Maciek Majewski, Łukasz Twarkowski and Wiola Sowa have collaborated with German poets Norbert Hummelt, Nico Bleutge and Christian Filips to make film versions of poems of theirs. Together they chose the poems and worked on turning them into scripts. In the run-up to the festival the pairs of artists were meeting up in Berlin to turn their ideas into films within six days. The short films that have been created in this way were premièred in the fesival. This is Maciek Majewski’s film-version of Norbert Hummelt’s poem “Syrinx”.
The translation is by Christina Hales and the poet, who is also known for his translations.
[meine heimat] by Ulrike Almut Sandig
The 2012 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival has introduced a new contest, inviting filmmakers to
make a film of the poem [meine heimat] by Ulrike Almut Sandig. The directors of the three best films will be invited to come to Berlin to meet the poet and have the opportunity of presenting their films and talking about them.
This is Swoon‘s entry. Ulrike Almut Sandig’s webpage is here, and there’s a bio in English at the online journal No Man’s Land.
tour de trance by Monika Rinck
Argentinian-born artist and composer Mario Verandi directed and wrote the music for this “audiovisual composition,” as he calls it, which appears to have benefitted from a very active collaboration with the poet: that’s Monika Rinck’s face in the film and her voice reciting the German text. I was also interested by the fully bilingual nature of the compostion, the German in the soundtrack alternating with English in a different voice (that of Douglas Hendenson). The film premiered at the 2008 ZEBRA International Poetry Film Festival in Berlin.
For more on poet, essayist and actress Monika Rinck, including English translations of some of her poems, see her page at Poetry International Web.
Making of Poetic Encounters
This brief documentary on the making of the three poetry films to emerge from the 2010 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival workshop (see the previous three posts here to watch videos of the films) is a must-watch for anyone interested in ekphrastic collaboration. I was particularly impressed by poet Monika Rinck’s remarks on the life of a poem beyond the page, and her interest in avoiding the sort of filmmaker who might over-interpret a poem:
I like poems and I think also movies about poems to guard a certain openness. I don’t want to have the pictures in the poem locked, as if it couldn’t be otherwise, as if the pictures of the movie override everything which was open before.
I also liked her collaborator Avi Dabach’s admission that he is better able to connect with poems that he doesn’t fully understand, implying that the making of a poetry film is a kind of close reading or exercise in hermaneutics.
Die unsichtbare Hand (The Invisible Hand) by Daniel Falb
The last of the three collaborations between German poets and Israeli filmmakers sponsored by the 5th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival. Christian Hawkey is credited as translator for the English subtitles. I was struck by how the inclusion of a song at the end, during the credits, helps unlock the meaning of the videopoem.
For more poems from Daniel Falb in English, as well as a bio, see Poetry International Web.
Teich (Pond) by Monika Rinck
Another of the three collaborations between German poets and Israeli filmmakers sponsored by the 5th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival. The text seems like an especially good one for a poetry film, since it imagines multiple interpretations or applications for a central image, accentuating the synergy of the text-film combination.
For more English translations of Monika Rinck’s work, see her section on the Poetry International Web site, as well as the volume 16 Poems translated by Alistair Noon.
Christmas in Huntsville, Texas by Jan Wagner
The world’s premiere poetry film festival, ZEBRA, in Berlin, has now begun sponsoring the production of new videopoems as well, as the video description on Vimeo makes clear:
The result of the Film-Workshop held during the 5th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival. Three pairs of artists comprising Israeli filmmakers Emanuella Amichai, Avi Dabach and Joshua Simon and German poets Daniel Falb, Monika Rinck and Jan Wagner were working together to produce scripts and create poetry films in six days.
The poet here, Jan Wagner, is also a “translator of poetry from the English (including Charles Simic, James Tate, Simon Armitage, Jo Shapcott, Louis MacNeice, Kevin Young),” according to this online CV.
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