~ June 2015 ~
Homeopathy by Nina Corwin
A film by Lori H. Ersolmaz using both voiceover and text-on-screen for the poem by the Chicago-based poet and therapist Nina Corwin. Ersolmaz found the poem at The Poetry Storehouse and the archival footage at Pond 5 and the Internet Archive.
Inimi / The Room by Jessie Kleemann
Swoon (Marc Neys) has been taking a “‘videopoem journey’ along the Northern countries” this year, with films based on poems from Finland, Iceland, Sweden, and Norway. This one took him to Greenland, as he describes in a recent blog post.
With Inimi (The Room) from Jessie Kleemann I found the perfect (spooky) poem to play around with. Her reading on Lyrikline in Greenlandic was an extra bonus for me. […]
I started with creating a soundscape around her reading; [SoundCloud link]
After that I was driven by the overall atmosphere of the language and the pace of her reading to look for footage by Jan Eerala again.
His images of an abandoned shed, a pink plastic bag in the wind and some shadowy puddles worked well in contrast (split screen) with the blue spooky footage I created earlier this year (playing around with software and public domain material)This marriage of Greenland, Finland and Belgium works rather well, I think.
After the Calm by Paul Nemser
A film by James William Norton in collaboration with Filmpoem. The poem by Paul Nemser was commended in the 2014 National Poetry Competition from the Poetry Society, who commissioned the film as part of a series of NPC 2014 filmpoems. NPC judge Roddy Lumsden said of the poem:
‘After the Calm’ is a mix of deliciously frothy language and mysterious narrative. It is angsty and slippery. It tempts us to solve that restricted narrative but keeps our attention. It shifts between straightforward lines and unusual phrasing (‘dizzily companionable wane’, ‘angels powdering the breezes’). Intriguing, somewhat disturbing, it impresses with its dark charm.
Historia de mi muerte / Story of My Death by Leopoldo Lugones
A Moving Poems production for a new series of poetry in translation for the group literary blog I contribute to, Via Negativa. Go there for the text of the poem and the translation; the titling on the video disregards both punctuation and lineation in the interest of displaying Spanish and English side by side, in the manner of a bilingual book of poetry. I haven’t seen this done on a bilingual poetry film before, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been — it seems like a fairly obvious arrangement.
As I wrote at Via Negativa, I translated the poem (with some invaluable assistance from Alicia E-Bourdin on Facebook) specifically with the intent of pairing it with that footage of cabbage white butterflies—which, when I shot it last week, I already recognized as having a certain Lugones-like feel. So it was just a question of finding the right poem.
Upcoming poetry-film and videopoetry events
June 27 in Berlin
Lyrikmarkt (Poesiefestival Berlin)
Darüber hinaus werden die besten historischen und internationalen Poesiefilme, unter anderem von Paul Bogaert, Kristian Pedersen, John Albert Jansen, Marie Silkeberg, Ghayath Almadhoun, Eleni Gioti, Hubert Sielecki, Man Ray, Paul Desnos und Gerhard Rühm zu sehen sein.
July 6-11 in London
Ross Sutherland’s “Standby For Tape Back-Up” at the Soho Theatre
After a hard-drive crash and a near death experience, Ross Sutherland found himself house-bound with only one thing for company: an old videotape that once belonged to his granddad.
Over the months that followed, Ross memorised every second of the tape. Slowly, he learnt how to manipulate the images into telling the story of his life. The videotape allowed Ross to open a dialogue with his late grandfather, and eventually helped him confront the illness that had nearly ended his life.
The true story of one man’s journey into synchronicity and madness.
July 11 in Penzance, UK
PoetryFilm Penzance
“A screening of poetry films curated and presented by Zata Banks” at the Penzance Literary Festival in Cornwall.
July 16 in Reykjavik
PoetryFilm Reykjavik
“A screening of poetry films and live performances curated and presented by Zata Banks” at Mengi.
Robert Peake on “poetry, film, and the dance of memory”
The American-British poet and poetry-filmmaker Robert Peake is the author of this week’s essay at Poetryfilmkanal: “Mnemosyne’s Tango: Poetry, Film, and the Dance of Memory.” I thought it was one of the most original things I’ve read about the the genre.
The relationship between art and memory has long been a family affair, since Mnemosyne is the mother of the Muses. In fact, some of the earliest uses of both poetry and film were for recording cultural history – either by compressing an epic tale into alliteration and rhyme to facilitate memorisation, or by compressing light and sound into physical media. Compression leads to portability and potency, but also imposes unique constraints, which have evolved into our current understanding of the distinct artistic possibilities of each discipline.
In format, the auditory and visual natures of film and poetry are clearly different. Yet a flickering screen can be viewed like a page, and a poem can be read like a script. The cæsura, line break, and stanza break in poetry mirror film’s range of visual transitions. Clearly, they have some fundamental moves in common. How, then, does the poetryfilm best come together to fascinate, transport, and change us?
Peake’s essay is the latest addition to the Magazin section of Poetryfilmkanal. Previous installments in this series of short essays have included “Poetryfilms: when poetry and film have a flirt,” by Eleni Cay; “CINEPOEM – or – Take a Walk on the Wild Side,” by Cathy de Haan (in German); my own essay, “The Discovery of Fire: One Poet’s Journey into Poetry-Film“; and “Redefining poetry in the age of the screen,” by Tom Konyves.
The Art of Poetry Film with Cheryl Gross: “Ursonate (an excerpt)”
https://vimeo.com/66612735
Ursonate (an excerpt)
Poetry by Kurt Schwitters
Film by William Shum
2013
According to the description on Vimeo, this is
A short excerpt from Kurt Schwitters’ sound poem, “Ursonate”. The typeface was created from scratch and inspired by the “Merz” art Schwitters created, hence the name, “Merzy”.
Kurt Schwitters, along with Hugo Ball and Hans Kasper Ivan Karp, was a major pioneer of sound poetry. This art form gained recognition in the early 20th century. A product of Dada, sound poetry has been popular in several movements and has successfully influenced and moved into postmodernism. I would say with confidence that its influence has also made its way into hip-hop and rap.
Dada is probably my favorite movement. There were so many rules that were broken. It gave significance to graphic design, paving the way for it to become a viable art form and not just a vehicle for advertisements. Dada allowed for experimentation. I believe this way of thinking was the result of World War I and its aftermath. Artists always have a lot to say but at this point in time, there wasn’t much to lose and Europe was in the process of trying to recover. Needless to say, the impact of history will always be significant because we use art to record our culture. That said, I will get on with my opinion of this mini masterpiece.
Ursonate is one of Schwitters’ better-known works. The video by William Shum is an excerpt from the poem. The typeface may be the first created from scratch and used in a video poem. What I like most about this piece is the fact that it is stimulating and I have no idea what the poet is saying. I don’t need to know. The message comes across perfectly through the images and the recording of the sound, which is Schwitters’ voice.
I love the black and white video; the imagery of toys (by the way, I had the Charlie Weaver Bartender toy that appears in the beginning of the video) interlaced with street scenes, dogs, and stoop-sales continues to enhance the feeling of a time that, although not too long ago, is rapidly dissolving. The type flies in, out, overlaps—creating a flow that keeps us at this point in time. The subway scene at the end is a very nice touch. This too has sound, which although it isn’t made up of words, seems to complete the video very nicely.
If sound poetry was invented for performance, then video poetry could be a feasible fit. It’s as if the two genres were made for each other.
Here’s what the Wikipedia article on sound poetry says about the poem:
Schwitters composed and performed an early example of sound poetry, Ursonate (1922–32; a translation of the title is Original Sonata or Primeval Sonata). The poem was influenced by Raoul Hausmann’s poem “fmsbw” which Schwitters heard recited by Hausmann in Prague, 1921. Schwitters first performed the piece on 14 February 1925 at the home of Irmgard Kiepenheuer in Potsdam. He subsequently performed it regularly, both developing and extending it. He published his notations for the recital in the last Merz periodical in 1932, although he would continue to develop the piece for at least the next ten years.
Cat on the Tracks by Mark Pajak
This filmpoem by Katie Garrett is an excellent demonstration of how to stay close to the imagery of a poem without merely illustrating it and diminishing both film and text in the process. The text, by Mark Pajak, is a Commended poem from the Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition 2014. Judge Zoë Skoulding’s remarks on the poem already seem to anticipate the filmpoem:
The ingenious structure of ‘Cat on the Tracks’ produces an eerie sense of inevitability, where the lines of both poem and the train hurtle on their collision course. The filmic detail of the cat’s eyes’ slow blink draws us into a parallel world in which physical laws seem – just for a moment – suspended.
Farerra by Gabriel Rosenstock
Farerra is a selection from a rensaku (“a sequence of haiku or tanka in which the individual stanzas do not function independently,” says AHA) by the prominent Irish poet and haikujin Gabriel Rosenstock. This videopoem version by Swoon (Marc Neys) uses the first eight haiku of the sequence, and combines Rosensack’s reading in Irish Gaelic from Lyrikline with an English translation on the screen. Marc writes:
For the visuals I decided to use stills by Pyanek, who made some brilliant macro photos. He is a photographer who uses the reverse-lense technique to delve deeper into the tiny worlds that make up the world we can see with our naked eye. I thought these images expressed exactly what I was looking for to combine with Gabriel’s observations of the nature around the Catalonian Pyrenees. They both dive into our natural world and surroundings to dig underneath the surface, somehow…
I applied the same visual haiku technique (5/7/5 seconds for each image) as I did earlier and placed the English version as (sober) text on screen with each last image. The only movement is a gentle zooming in and out.
Incidentally, Marc has just launched a low-key crowd-funding campaign to support his work as a filmmaker and composer. His main editing computer just died, and he can’t afford to buy a new one without our help. If you enjoy his videopoems, please consider making a donation. As someone who often has trouble asking for help and believes in open content and open source, I couldn’t agree more with this sentiment:
I strongly believe in art being as free as possible. Unlocked. Shared and spread all over the world (real and virtual).
But I also believe that in order for artists to create and produce, their audiences need to step up and directly support them.
I’m basically stretching my comfort zone by getting out of my comfortable hermit existence to connect with you people and hold my hand out, be it virtually.
