Poetry Film Live, the UK-based online journal edited by Chaucer Cameron and Helen Dewbery, has just announced its first competition. It’s also on FilmFreeway:
The Film Poetry Competition is inviting submissions of film-poems. The film should contain all or part of a poem. The poem can be pre-existant, or created as part of the filmmaking process. The emphasis should be on a convincing poetic experience rather than simply technical excellence. We encourage poet-made films, or where the filmmaker has worked closely with the poet.
Film-poetry harmonises words, images and sound to create a new poetry experience … it’s more than spoken words, visual images and sound being in the same room together, it’s their ability to talk to one another that creates the magic in poetry film.
The Film Poetry Competition is in partnership with Poetry Film Live and Swindon Poetry Festival.
Awards & Prizes
Prizes will be awarded at Swindon Poetry Festival on 4th October, at a live screening of all shortlisted and winning films.
The following prizes will be awarded: £400 for the overall winner. Recognition will also be given in the following categories: Single author made film, Animation, Best Newcomer.
The deadline is July 12. You can submit either through the website or on FilmFreeway.
I let Chaucer and Helen talk me into being one of the judges for this, alongside Lucy English. And barring any problems with the UK Border Force or Brexit-related chaos, I plan to be in Swindon in October for the screening. So I hope to see some of you there! And I look forward to viewing your submissions.
There’s a brand-new poetry festival in Bristol this month called Lyra. Lucy English is one of the co-directors, so you know there’s got to be at least one poetry film screening. And sure enough, there is. Here’s the description from the full programme [PDF]:
UPROOTED POETRY FILM SCREENING
Filmmakers for these short poems include Ghayath Almadhoun and Marie Silkeberg, Jan Baeke, Alfred Marseille, Maciej Piatek and poet Hollie McNish.
ARNOLFINI FRONT ROOM
Time: 12:00 – 1:00pm
Price: FreeUprooted is a curated poetry film screening by Liberated Words co-directors, poet Lucy English and videopoet Sarah Tremlett, reflecting on the lives of refugees and migration, and how artists can illuminate and fulfill important roles. Three types of film will be shown: those centred on war zones, those in transit and the views from those both welcoming and ‘settling’ in a new country. The films show how artists can bring another view of the refugee crisis beyond how it is portrayed in the media.
These regional poetry festivals around the UK are really turning into a good venue for poetry films. If you’re able to get to Bristol in two weeks, the whole event sounds grand.
ZEBRA, the biannual poetry film festival, is expanding this year for the first time to include a Germany-only competition and screening in alternate years. I don’t know German, but it seems as if the main competition is for poetry films made in Germany — in any language — since 2016. There’s also a competition for films made from an official festival poem, and it’s not entirely clear, but it appears as if that film must be made in Germany also. Anyway, here’s the call for entries.
Back on February 22 I shared the call-out for Motionpoems‘ new Epiphany Awards, but that isn’t all that the Minneapolis-based arts organization has going on, as their latest newsletter makes clear. For one thing, their upcoming season sounds right up my alley:
Save the Dates for Motionpoems Season 9!
Our ninth season of motionpoems is nearly complete! This season, called “Future: Earth,” features work from brilliant emerging poets and filmmakers. Want to be one of the first to see the new motionpoems? Join us:
- In Minneapolis on May 3rd at the A-Mill for a special, donors-only sneak-preview!
- In Minneapolis on May 10th at Mia: Minneapolis Institute of Art
- LA and NYC: stay tuned for dates and locations TBA!
Then there’s this:
We’re launching a new program: The Motionpoems Hothouse. Our vision for Hothouse is simple: Taking a page from the 48-hour Film Project’s playbook, we’ll challenge filmmakers to capture the raw beauty of a poem and run with it.
For our pilot program, we have selected four dynamic poets and four teams of amazing filmmakers from our vibrant literary and film communities here in the Twin Cities. These filmmaker-poet teams will meet at our premiere on May 10, and the final films will be screened at the WordPlay festival at the Loft on May 12!
To help kick-off this one-of-a-kind event, we’ve launched a Kickstarter campaign. Support local artists and take advantage of our exciting rewards–including cameos, producer credits, and undying gratitude–here!
One thing I’ll say about Motionpoems director Todd Boss: he never seems to run out of new ideas. (Also, his own poetry is pretty great.)
Two very different but equally intriguing poets were interviewed recently in wide-ranging discussions that included questions about their film and video projects. The March 2019 issue of an Australian, bi-annual online literary journal called StylusLit featured Ian Gibbins in conversation with Rosanna Licari, and on March 5 the blog HeadStuff.org posted ‘It was an experiment and I didn’t really know how people would react’ | Interview With Lucy English. Taken together, they present an interesting range of possibilities for how to translate poetry into film/video, and the backgrounds of the poets are a study in contrasts: Ian from the world of science, and Lucy straddling the creative writing and slam/performance divide. It’s hard to select just a couple of quotes, but these should give you a taste:
Constructing the videopoems can happen in many different ways. Sometimes, I will have pre-existing text and then I get an idea for a video sequence which I will then go out and acquire. Sometimes I have some images I’ve collected for no special reason, and then I’ll match them to a pre-existing poem. Sometimes I’ll come up with a concept and then write some text and get the video more or less simultaneously.
The audio part of the video is an important element too. I’ve been putting some of my poems to my own music for a long time now either as performance or as part of art installations. So for some videos, I already have the complete soundtrack. Otherwise, I’ll compose music or soundscapes to suit the project at hand. In general, I prefer to have the soundtrack first and then fit the video to it. This allows me to closely match the visual and aural rhythms of the piece.
I’ve always enjoyed experimenting with animation and some of my early video poems were entirely based on animated text. More recently, I’ve been learning advanced video compositing techniques and 3D animation which allow me to create totally new visual environments from a mixture of pre-existing images and computer-generated scenes or effects. This process is 100% analogous to the way I use found or sampled text in my poems.
Ian Gibbins in conversation with Rosanna Licari
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What I have learned from making short films in collaboration is that there is a visual language which although I was aware of I hadn’t fully taken on board how this works. I was so used to looking at films I wasn’t analysing them. I have now got a deeper insight into how using images affects the viewer and how a film maker doesn’t need to ‘illustrate’ what is in the poem. The language of film isn’t necessarily narrative; we are shown a series of images and we ascribe ‘meaning’ to them. Obviously when writing a novel there is a narrative structure which I don’t need if I am writing a poem or making a poetry film. I have a visual imagination and I have really liked exploring the world of visual images in poetry film. It’s going to be interesting to see if any of this is transferred to my writing of fiction. Perhaps my prose will become more ‘poetic’ and less led by ‘story’!
‘It was an experiment and I didn’t really know how people would react’ | Interview With Lucy English
This week, Australian filmmaker Marie Craven launched Poetry + Video,
a new touring program of shorts from around the world. This hour-long collection surveys diverse contemporary expressions of poetry in video. A wide range of approaches includes: screen adaptations of page poetry, prose poetry, animations, poetry from found text and media, poetic cinema, text-on-screen, and spoken word.
The program is designed to be highly portable, and easily obtainable on request to screening spaces in any location. It is available for small to medium-sized venues in Australia and other places during 2019/2020.
The premiere screening will be on 4 May, 2019 at Garden Gallery, Murwillumbah, Australia. See the program itinerary for more details, including the outstanding live poets performing on the night. If you are in the vicinity of Murwillumbah, we hope to see you there to celebrate the launch!
The website is admirably complete, with bios of authors and filmmakers as well as descriptions of each film, all indexed in the right-hand sidebar. There’s even a trailer. Check it out.