Posts By Dave Bonta
Not Talking by Chris Woods
Concept, camera, direction and editing are all credited to Christopher Hughes (Shining Tor Productions), though I can’t help thinking the content of the film might have been influenced by the title of the book in which the poem originally appeared: Dangerous Driving by Chris Woods (Comma Press, 2007). Regardless, it’s a good example of how a narrative approach to filmmaking can work with a lyric poem.
Not Talking was “Made in partnership with Bokeh Yeah and Comma Press”; Bokeh Yeah is kind of the successor to the earlier Comma Film project, as I understand it. One way or another, at least four films have now been made based on poems from Dangerous Driving, each by a different director. Manchester would seem to have a very active poetry-film community indeed.
Christopher Hughes blogged a bit about how he came to make this film:
It seems like an age since Adele Myers approached me to come along to her group, Bokeh Yeah, and join in their poetry film challenge. Even though I agreed, I was initially quite dismissive of poetry films as they didn’t appear to worry about the things I worried about with narrative short films. Things like continuity, dialogue, plot, character, etc. They could shoot any abstract images they wanted and juxtapose them in any way that took their fancy under the general heading of ‘artistic interpretation’. It all seemed a bit too easy to me – or at least, that’s what I thought.
Anyway, I’d said I’d do it so I chose a poem that I liked and came up with a concept that gave me a chance to reference my beloved spaghetti westerns and away we went. I won’t go into more detail about the film, just watch it for yourselves, except to say, that I’m quite happy with it.
Further experiments with videohaiku
The footage I linked to for a videohaiku challenge last week elicited very few responses, though each of them was very interesting. Perhaps composing a credible haiku is challenging enough without the additional burden of such WTF imagery to work with. However, in a classic example of beginner’s mind out-pacing the professionals, my friend Rachel Rawlins, who doesn’t consider herself a poet at all, suggested some lines which I thought worked very well. After some rather intense back-and-forth via email and Skype, here’s what we came up with:
To recap, the challenge was to treat the footage as if it were one part of a typically two-part haiku, either preceding or following the cut-point (usually represented in English by an em dash or colon). I find that composing this kind of videohaiku is much easier if you mentally substitute words for footage. So for this one, one could start with something like “[nudist handball—]”, e.g.
[nudist handball—]
not even netting
comes between us
which was an earlier joint effort of mine and Rachel’s.
Haiku are untitled, but Tom Konyves argued in an email that a videohaiku should have a title nonetheless. This was in the context of a critique of my first effort in this vein. I talked about it with James Brush, the author of the text, and he agreed. So we decided to call that piece flower (videohaiku) — though we didn’t remake the video itself, just changed the title on Vimeo, which was perhaps a bit of a cop-out. But for the second one with Rachel, you’ll notice we did put the title right on the video, using a freeze-frame as background.
There’s a long tradition of occasionally using bizarre imagery in written haiku and senryu. I found some truly WTF footage in the IICADOM collection (the Belgian equivalent of the Prelinger Archives), in an undated home movie identified simply as “Rural Life.” My mental substitution for the footage was “Hitler in the garden.” (This was in part a response to Othniel Smith’s video in this week’s Cheryl Gross column.) Anyway, here’s what I came up with:
I decided both videos worked fine as silent films, but I don’t think that’s necessarily part of the videohaiku prescription. I thought the ambient insect noise in flower was a good addition, and could work just as well with visitor here.
I’m now beginning to consider the best way to string videohaiku into videorenga. In classic Japanese linked verse (renga or renku), each stanza apart from the opening and closing verses is part of two different two-stanza poems in succession, which creates a dilemma for filmmakers: repeat each verse or not? And how to represent the shorter stanzas (two lines in English-language renga; 14 “syllables” in Japanese)?
I’m not going to issue another formal videopoetry challenge for now, but I am interested in continuing to work with other writers, and possibly other video remixers as well, so if you’d like to be part of that, let me know (bontasaurus@yahoo.com). Renga is a quintessentially collaborative approach to composition, and it seems to me it might be a natural fit for the remix/mashup culture of the web. But first we need to generate a prototype, I think.
Free Östersjöar (“Baltic Sea”) rentals for Moving Poems readers
You may remember my post from late December about the 31-minute poetry film based on a long poem by the great Tomas Tranströmer that’s now available through Vimeo On Demand. Director James Wine emailed with this offer:
Thanks so much for spreading the word through Moving Poems. We are nudging the audience closer to the first 1000 mark, with viewers in 20 countries on 4 continents — so far! Here in Sweden we are working on a celebration around Tomas’ birthday in April with screenings across the country.
We know the price bites many, but the cost breakdown after the 25% Swedish VAT, the platform charges and plain old taxes, it’s just about 30% left! (At least there is healthcare and free university for all!) No grants or outside funding contributed to the production.
But as thanks to you, we have put a promotion together for your followers, if you like: free rentals starting today through the end of the month. Just hit Rent and enter the code.
The Rental Promotion Code is: movingpoems
Also have put up on Vimeo Part 1 for embedding freely.
https://vimeo.com/116962956
(Be sure to click the “CC” icon to get the English subtitling.)
Here’s the link to the full-length film.
Frankly, I’m poor as the proverbial church mouse, but USD $5.00 doesn’t strike me as too much for a 48-hour rental of a high-quality, feature-length film. That said, I’m always happy to save some beer money. Thanks to Mr. Wine for his generosity.
To / For by Luisa A. Igloria
A text-on-screen-style videopoem by Swoon (Marc Neys) with a text from Night Willow, a 2014 collection of prose poems by Luisa A. Igloria. Back in September, Marc blogged some process notes about the video, calling it “The latest experiment in my series of videos where I re-think the relationship of image, sound, and text”.
Combining lines from the poem with the suitable footage, trying out different fonts and sizes for the text on screen, placement of words… It’s a puzzling way of editing.
I’m not only editing film anymore, I’m carefully trying to blend sound, image and text in one cut. It feels more like composing. It makes me rethink the way I worked (and still work) with audible videopoems.These ‘film Compositions’ are meant to be played full screen and loud!
Marc talked about this style of editing in a brief interview I filmed for Moving Poems, Swoon on finding a new angle in videopoetry composition.
And God… by Eric Blanchard
Australian filmmaker Marie Craven demonstrates one way to get away with out-right illustration in a videopoem. Had she used footage of pinball games in a poem that references pinball, it would’ve seemed merely redundant, I think. But instead she hit upon the idea of using colorful still images (by Donald Bell) alternating with dark, silent-film-like title cards bearing the lines of the poem. Cut these images in time with up-tempo, pinball-esque music by CIRC, and rather than simply depicting a game of pinball, the video actually enacts or reproduces the effect of a highly kinetic ball careening around in an inert cabinet. “The whole thing / goes tilt.” And the poem is raised to a new level, I think.
The text by Eric Blanchard, first published in Pudding Magazine, was sourced from The Poetry Storehouse.
Zman / Time by Mei-Tal Nadler
A new poetry film by Avi Dabach with text by Mei-Tal Nadler and music by Harold Robin. Einat Weizman read the poem and Adriana X. Jacobs provided the English translation used in the subtitles.
Nadler won the 2014 Teva Prize for Poetry, whence this bio:
May-Tal Nadler is a poet and doctoral student of literature and Israeli culture at Tel Aviv University. Her first book of poetry, Experiments in Electricity, was published this year.
Nadler has previously won the Ministry of Culture’s award for poets for 2008 and was among the prize winners of the 2008 Poetry Along the Way competition, sponsored by the city of Tel Aviv. Her manuscript won the Leib Goldberg award for literary work.
News round-up: FACT symposium, Tang Dynasty poetry films and more
FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), which describes itself as “the UK’s leading media arts centre, based in Liverpool,” will be hosting a day-long symposium on February 5: Send and Receive – Poetry, Film and Technology in the 21st Century. I’m not sure why it’s scheduled for a weekday rather than the weekend, but it certainly sounds interesting. The topic is somewhat reminiscent of the colloquium discussion at the most recent ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin. Hopefully they will avoid some of the pitfalls we ran into there by defining their terms (such as “platform”) a bit more clearly.
FACT, in association with the University of Liverpool, PoetryFilm and The Poetry Society, is pleased to invite you to imagine the future of poetry at our symposium Send & Receive: Poetry, Film & Technology in the 21st Century. With presentations from artists, scientists and thought leaders, the day examines innovative platforms involved in contemporary poetic practices.
How has the digital age changed the way in which poetry is written, performed, communicated and received? Further exploring themes demonstrated in Torque Symposium: An act of Reading, the day will focus on the prevalent difficulties, dialogues and collaborative possibilities that new technological avenues have revealed in the world of poetry.
The symposium will include three distinct discussion areas, with audiences invited to join facilitated discussions after each segment. Confirmed speakers include George Szirtes (poet and translator), Deryn Rees Jones (poet and director of Centre for New and International Writing), Zata Kitowski (Director PoetryFilm), Marco Bertamini and Georg Meyer (Visual Perception Labs UoL), Suzie Hanna (animator) and Jason Nelson (hypermedia poet and artist, Australia).
More information TBA soon.
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A news story from October, recently posted to the ZEBRA Facebook group by Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel, also caught my attention this week, about a very ambitious plan by CCTV and the China Central Newreels Corporation to make 108 short films based on Tang Dynasty poems. I can’t embed the English-language newscast video here; click through for that, because it includes brief scenes from a couple of the films. Here’s a bit of the transcript:
“I think film communicates Chinese traditional culture in a very powerful and vivid way. I think it will really help young people appreciate the beauty of Chinese poetry,” said President of Beijing Film Academy Zhang Huijun.
The production team carefully selected 108 poems to be adapted into short films. It explores the works through story-telling and recreating the life of the time. Each film is about 15 minutes long and involves top Chinese actors and directors.
“We selected the best poems. We also selected them based on whether it is easy to make them into a story. That is vital for the short film,” said deputy director of China Central Television Gao Feng.
The initiative aims to promote China’s rich heritage in literature, especially among the younger generation. 70 of the total 108 short films have already been completed, with the rest scheduled to be finished before the end of this year.
The organizers have also invited 108 young singers to perform the theme songs for the films. They are also planning to produce picture-story books based on the poems. The goal is to eventually promote the entire collection of poems from the Tang dynasty.
By “the entire collection,” I suppose they are are referring to the famous and ubiquitous anthology of 300 Tang poems, though that would of course involve also making films out of short lyrical poems lacking in strong narrative elements.
I must say the emphasis on story-telling, popular appeal, and “recreating the life of the time” worries me. I don’t want to pass judgement before seeing any of the films, but experience with big-budget poetry films made elsewhere makes me fear that these films will add little or nothing to the poems and risk achieving the opposite of the project’s stated goal: rather than making poetry more appealing, they will communicate the message that it needs to be sexed up and turned into glossy period drama in order to hold anyone’s attention.
I hope I’m wrong, and that these films do challenge audiences and help translate ancient poems into a new idiom. Because Classical Chinese texts do in fact need to be translated in some way in order to be comprehensible to a speaker of a modern Chinese language such as Mandarin. It’s easy to see how film could assist in that regard, because the Chinese characters are a strong bridge to the ancient language. Calligraphy or type animations similar to what Nissmah Roshdy did with classical Arabic in The Dice Player could help bring the texts across without resorting to actual translation into Mandarin, Cantonese, etc. Alternatively or in addition, subtitling into modern languages could be used with the original language in the voiceover. Traditional poetry recitation, a stylized and beautiful art, could be incorporated into the soundtracks.
As for the imagery, I do think it’s a mistake to leave out all contemporary references, which might well serve as further bridges, adding depth and nuance. One element of Classical Chinese poetry that’s in danger of being lost even to modern Chinese intellectuals is their wealth of allusions to older poems and other texts — the vast libraries that were committed to memory under the Confucian educational system. I wonder if it might not be possible to somehow work a few of those allusions in through film collage techniques? At the very least, filmmakers could strive for a roughly equivalent level of allusive depth by incorporating references to well-known movies, pop songs and the like. I’m simply worried that too conservative an approach risks dishonoring the spirit of the texts. It would be as if Tang Dynasty poets composed only gushi and never experimented with the then-daring jintishi. If they’d been that allergic to innovation, we wouldn’t still be reading their poems today.
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The January issue of Poetry brings news of a poetry film still in production, an English-language documentary tentatively titled Las Chavas focusing on girls on a Honduran orphanage who are learning to write poetry in English and Spanish, with the aid of an American Episcopal priest and the poet Richard Blanco. A brief essay is followed by a selection of the girls’ poems. Check it out. Honduras has always punched well above its weight where poetry is concerned, so I’ll be looking forward to the film.
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The Athens-based collective + the Institute [for Experimental Arts], sponsors of the annual International Film Poetry Festival, have launched a new website to replace their old Blogspot site. It’s certainly easier to navigate, not to mention better looking. The Festivals link in the header takes one to a gallery-style archive of posts about the poetry film festival.
Videopoetry challenge: help me shape a new(ish) style of videohaiku
This collaboratively produced videopoem with text by James Brush represents a new approach to videohaiku for me: one in which the first part of the haiku is represented by film footage, which freezes and transitions to text roughly where a mid-poem kireji or cutting word would occur in a Japanese haiku.
[A mid-verse] kireji performs the paradoxical function of both cutting and joining; it not only cuts the ku into two parts, but also establishes a correspondence between the two images it separates, implying that the latter represents the poetic essence (本意 hon’i) of the former, creating two centres and often generating an implicit comparison, equation, or contrast between the two separate elements.
It’s an approach for which I am partly indebted to Tom Konyves, who in his Videopoetry: A Manifesto cites Eric Cassar’s minimalist videohaiku as normative for the genre—”The videohaiku (approx. 30 seconds) uses a few words of text attached to the shortest duration of images”—and who responded to some recent thoughts of mine about different approaches to videohaiku (and there are many!) with a comment that took me a little while to digest. I had mentioned one approach in which a long shot (or series of related shots) is followed by the haiku as text-on-screen, so that the shot(s) function more or less like the painting in a traditional haiga as well as suggesting something about the poet’s observational process leading up to the composition of the haiku. This is a method both James and I have experimented with in the past. Quoting a description of the two-part structure of a typical haiku, Tom wrote:
The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that this “method” addresses a question about videopoetry’s strategies re: word-image relationships in the fact that the observation of the first segment – the division into two semantic elements of unequal length, usually corresponding to two different images or ideas, which for maximum effect should have some relationship but not too immediately obvious a one – is best achieved by the image, while the non-sequitur of the second segment is best expressed in words (the text in a videopoem).
It was with this on my mind last Monday that, rather on the spur of the moment, I challenged Facebook friends and members of the POOL group there to write something to go with a section of a randomly chosen old home movie from the Prelinger Archives. I gave them six hours, later extended to eight, and linked to my post from the Moving Poems Twitter account as well:
Ekphrastic haiku challenge: I need a haiku to feature in a haiga-style short film using footage from this old home movie—the section from 3:50 to 4:50 where the baby is brandishing a flower. Haiku should contain no more than 17 syllables but may contain fewer; kigo unnecessary; number of lines unimportant. It should work as a poem and should probably refer obliquely to the film imagery at best. You’ll be fully credited as author, and the resulting video may appear on Moving Poems if I’m satisfied with it. Email haiku (as many attempts as you like) to me: bontasaurus@yahoo.com by 10:00 PM tonight (Monday), New York time (3:00 AM GMT).
In short order I received 27 submissions from 13 people, most of them published poets along with a couple of inspired amateurs. I soon realized that my instructions had been inadequate if not down-right misleading. I shouldn’t have specified that a submission should work as a poem, because the lines that seemed to work best with the footage felt incomplete until I imagined them following the footage. James had started with a rather high-concept idea and pared it down in the course of three drafts. I suggested two further edits. What finally emerged was this:
…
how your hands burn
for the sun
with the ellipsis standing in for the footage of the baby in a meadow waving a daisy around. (One could even make it fit into a line: babe with a flower, say, or toddler in the yard.)
I’m excited by the result, and I’d like to propose a new challenge to help us further explore the possibilities of videohaiku. This time I’ll make the deadline midnight on Monday, New York time — i.e., 5:00 AM January 13 GMT. (That’s for people who get the weekly email digest and read it at work on Monday.) I tend to resist the idea that haiku need to be about nature all the time, so found a home movie, evidently from the 1930s, that features two men, naked but for jock straps, playing American handball in an indoor court. There are many minutes of that footage both at the beginning and end of the movie, but as before, I’ll select less than a minute of it, so feel free to suggest specific sections to use with your submission of haiku — or should I say, half-haiku. Because the idea this time is not to submit something that would necessarily stand on its own as a printed poem, but something that can be wedded with the footage as its other half, “generating an implicit comparison, equation, or contrast between the two separate elements” as the Wikipedia entry on kireji puts it.
Again, please use email (bontasaurus @yahoo.com) to submit, and send along as many suggestions as you like. Also, feel free to consider the possibility that the footage might fall in the second part of the verse, with one or two lines of text at the beginning. Would that even work as a poetry film? Could the flinging of a handball operate even as an end-of-verse kireji?
If you’re unfamiliar with haiku, or wonder why a lot of us who write it in English no longer believe in “5-7-5,” I recommend the Wikipedia entry on haiku, Imaoka Keiko’s essay “Forms in English Haiku,” and an excellent brief for writing haiku based on art or literature, rather than exclusively on direct experience: “Beyond the Haiku Moment: Basho, Buson and Modern Haiku myths” by Haruo Shirane. And for a good overview of 20th-century and contemporary haiku, I strongly recommend the Spring 2009 issue of Cordite, “Haikunaut.” The issue index at that link isn’t actually complete, because the essays are as illuminating as the poetry, so start with David Lanoue’s introduction and use the “next post” links to page through. By the end of it, you should have a pretty comprehensive picture of the variety of modern traditional and experimental haiku… except for videohaiku, which they don’t mention. I guess it’s up to us to write that chapter.
Simple Brushstrokes on a Naked Canvas by Howie Good
This is Five Miles (Simple Brushstrokes on a Naked Canvas) by Swoon (Marc Neys), made with the text of a poem from Fugitive Pieces, Howie Good’s new collection of poems. Here’s what Marc blogged about it:
So. A New year. New sounds. New videos. A big new project (more on that one later)
A solo exhibition (more on that one later) and
New collaborations.My first video of the year is Five Miles (Simple Brushstrokes on a Naked Canvas)
I first got the idea for this when reading ‘Fugitive Pieces’ by Howie Good.
It’s a great book of found poems published by Right Hand Pointing Press.
All proceeds from the book go to the Food Bank of the Hudson Valley.People who follow my work, know I’m a big Howie fan. His writing moves me and (very often) is a perfect fit for my videos and sounds.
In Fugitive Pieces Howie Good used the techniques of the collagist.
The poems are collages sourced from various texts as well as his own imagination.
From the author’s note:This meant creation through destruction, lifting things from one context and dropping them into another, establishing unfamiliar relationships among familiar objects.
That sounds a bit like creating videopoetry. I often find myself using that same approach (especially when working with found footage or archive material)
I first created a track around samples I took from a documentary ‘Target for today’.
Only after creating that track I chose a poem from ‘Fugitive Pieces’: Simple Brushstrokes on a Naked Canvas
The poem was the perfect match for my soundscape and would work well as ‘text on screen’ in a film composition.[…]
I collected footage (from Videoblocks) to combine with certain lines from the poem. Played around with timing, font and placement of the text and started puzzling it all together. I believe it works well.
Click through for the text of the poem (or, you know, just watch the film).
