Posts By Dave Bonta
Happy Fifth Birthday to Moving Poems!
Five years ago today, I posted the first video to Moving Poems — a clay-on-glass animation by Lynn Tomlinson of Emily Dickinson’s “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died” — and the site was born. The brash site description, “The best poetry videos on the web,” was meant largely as a joke on self-serious websites obsessed with search-engine optimization. As best as I can recall, I anticipated spending a month or two posting all the cool poetry videos I was aware of, and letting it go at that. I really just wanted to get them all in one place, largely for my own convenience. Ha!
So here we are. I don’t have the stomach for a long, boastful list of accomplishments, because I am painfully aware of all the things I’ve done wrong or could be doing better. I will say that to the extent that this site has helped expand filmmakers’ and poets’ horizons and led them to create new multimedia works, to network more effectively, and even to create new videopoetry/filmpoetry/cinepoetry-related events that might not have happened otherwise, I am enormously gratified. I continue to be astonished by the breadth and quality of poetry videos that all you filmmakers, video artists, film students and remix geniuses are uploading to the web every day. Since the main site consists entirely of embedded media, it is literally the case, and not the usual bollocks you hear in these kinds of statements, that I couldn’t have done any of this without you. So thanks for sharing your work with the world, and please keep it coming.
Will “House of Cards” save poetry videos on the web?
The lion’s share of online poetry videos (in English, at any rate) are uploaded in the U.S. and, if Moving Poems’ site stats are any indication, their largest audience is also in the U.S. That’s to be expected, I suppose. But there’s a big problem: our internet infrastructure is terrible, among the worst in the developed world. It’s slow, it’s hideously expensive, and a significant portion of the rural population is still on dial-up. I personally have a slow DSL connection via Verizon, one of a handful of enormous, nearly monopolistic providers. Verizon, however, seems to have given up earlier plans to build out its fiber optic network in favor of concentrating on its mobile network, which needless to say is not a viable option for the regular consumption of video for anyone who isn’t pulling a six-figure salary. And the two biggest cable providers, Comcast and Time Warner, recently announced plans for a merger, further reducing competition and thus any fucking incentive whatsoever to improve U.S. internet service.
Against this background came last month’s decision by a federal appeals court to strike down parts of the Federal Communications Commission’s admittedly Byzantine “net neutrality” rules cobbled together in 2010. This means that ISPs could start throttling the bandwidth from any website they choose, for any reason — and what uses more bandwidth than streaming video? It doesn’t help if an ISP is also a significant content provider such as Time Warner and doesn’t fancy the competition. YouTube’s owner Google could easily afford to reach agreements with ISPs. But could Vimeo, and the welter of smaller video hosting companies? What about start-ups bringing us the Next Big Thing in online video?
And sure enough: within weeks, charges were flying that Verizon was deliberately slowing down Netflix. With the second season of the über-popular American version of House of Cards, a web-only Netflix original, released this month, the politicians in D.C. might actually be paying attention, because the show is all about corrupt congressmen — and as we all know, politicians are a supremely self-regarding lot. Susan Crawford, author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the Gilded Age, said in an excellent interview on NPR’s Fresh Air that many if not most congressional representatives will admit in private that net neutrality is important, but may be afraid to say so publicly because of the power of the telecom industry. So let’s hope they and their aides are big House of Cards fans… and that their constituents keep up the pressure.
But the main action on net neutrality rules shifted from stop-gap measures in Congress back to the Federal Communications Commission this week, as FCC chair Tom Wheeler issued a statement recommending that the commission write new rules that the courts might find acceptable. Predictably, a telecom industry tool in the House of Representatives immediately proposed legislation that would block the FCC from doing this.
Comcast, meanwhile, announced that it had reached some sort of agreement with Netflix, as tens of thousands of people registered their discontent with the proposed Comcast-Time Warner merger via online petition sites, emails to the FCC, etc. Comcast are desperate to portray themselves as reasonable players — and Netflix is surely eager to hedge their bets in case net neutrality isn’t restored. Or as GigaOm writer Stacey Higginbotham put it:
There are two ways of interpreting this news. The first is that Netflix, worried about the threat of the FCC dismantling network neutrality and allowing ISPs to start charging content providers for delivering their traffic, decided to make a deal early when it could get lower prices. The second is the opposite; that Comcast, trying to appear benevolent as it seeks to create the largest broadband provider in the country via a merger with Time Warner Cable, peered with Netflix to avoid regulators asking tough questions.
Let’s take the optimistic scenario and assume that the FCC approves new net neutrality rules, the courts uphold them, and Congress doesn’t fuck with them. We’re still left with craptastic internet in the country that invented it. According to Susan Crawford, it may be years before that will change, and it will probably happen city by city and region by region in a piecemeal fashion. But at least net neutrality would provide a level playing field for new innovators — and allow me to continue surfing Vimeo and YouTube for new poetry videos on my 1.5 mps “broadband” connection from Verizon.
The Fucking Titanic by Dave Lordan
Irish poet Dave Lordan’s stirring recitation is backed up by music from Sunn O))) and an inspired cut-up of a movie about the Titanic, A Night to Remember (1958). Though I post a lot of videos that remix old film footage here at Moving Poems, I thought it was pretty unusual to make such a lengthy poetry film all from a single source—and one on the same subject as the poem. So I asked the video editor, Eamonn Crudden, to comment. Here’s what he wrote.
I made the video for “The Fucking Titanic”in about 20 hours over two days. Dave knew that his book of prose experiments—First Book of Frags—was about to come out and asked me to get involved in making a video for one of the pieces.
He left the choice of piece up to me and I picked the Titanic one because, reading it online months earlier, I had been struck by the ‘voice’ of the poem—a proletarian female voice cursing her fellow passengers on the Titanic, and the world generally, from beyond a watery grave. I imagined her voice condemning those on the upper levels of the ship, to reliving the disaster over and over for all eternity.
That thought was the hard work in the process of making something for Dave! The rest was really just a mechanical process. I knew that with any dramatized reconstruction I could get my hands on I could capture that thought. It would be as simple as putting the ‘voice’ in the piece over footage of the disaster in progress.
I have made a number of quite experimental films in the last few years—constructing new stories using original monologues (of my own usually) and combining these with edits of my own footage and footage drawn from films that come to hand. Dave knew about my approach so I guessed, without ever directly asking him, that he’d be OK with a piece made through appropriation.
He made a rapid voice recording at my request and e-mailed it to me. I decided to work by having a look at A Night To Remember—an old black and white film about the Titanic. I downloaded and started to watch a just-OK rip of it ‘in’ Final Cut Pro. As I viewed it, sometimes at double and triple speed, I started to strip out all of the dialogue scenes, keeping the unfolding action sequences, and started to make a sub-selection of resonant images that would suit being looped. I knew the moment I first tried looping some of those more resonant shots over the reading and the soundtrack by Sunn O)) that I had a crescendo to build up to. I then started into editing a fast summary of what was left of the film when the dialogue was removed and immediately knew that the almost ‘nouvelle vague’ feel that resulted, combined with a crescendo based on loops, would work as an approach for the whole piece.
I don’t feel bad or guilty about this kind of appropriation at all. It is not as if I or Dave will profit from the venture. I think the quite compelling nature of the result justifies the approach. I am primarily an editor and editing to me is a creative activity. The creative part of my work on it was a simple choice of music and of an existing text to rifle for imagery. Maybe it is useful to compare this approach to VJing? I don’t think there is ‘originality’ in the video—but as a little machine to heighten the intensity of Dave’s piece I think it works. That’s enough for me. I heartily recommend this cheap and dirty approach to others who want to give their poetry and writing a visual element.
To order a copy of First Book of Frags, see the Wurm Press website.
Daffodils by William Wordsworth
Judging from YouTube, Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” must be one of the most popular poems to make into a video, but none of the versions I’ve seen quite made the cut — until now. Polly Zwolinski is a linguistics student at Kings College, London, planning to write her thesis on film poetry, and if this video is any indication, she really grasps what makes a good filmpoem work. Not only is the juxtaposition of film and text images nicely oblique and suggestive, but by transposing such a quintessentially pastoral poem to the urban sphere, Zwolinski has a good chance of expanding its audience.
Lebensweisheitspielerei by Wallace Stevens
A film by the Greek composer, musician, filmmaker and video artist Makis Faros, who writes in the Vimeo description:
The project is based on a poem of Wallace Stevens titled “LEBENSWEISHEITSPIELEREI”.
The lyrics : “The proud and the strong Have departed” marks a huge portion of the history of the African states calling for their independency at the decades of 60 and after. People who were cut off from their land, used to be dependent on slave labor and within a culture imposed on them, had to stay stool when their invaders departed. These mechanisms can also be found at the contemporary consumer societies of the western world. The video focuses on the endless vicious game of them: those who remain, between desire and the “grandeur of annihilation”
This was uploaded by Vital Space Projects, who have a number of other interesting experimental films on Vimeo.
Sandburg and Photograph by Lennart Lundh
https://vimeo.com/84858997
A simple but effective videopoem. Nic S. used a text from The Poetry Storehouse contributed by Illinois-based writer and photographer Lennart Lundh, but as she notes at her blog, the video imagery came first.
For this one, I started with the footage and then searched for the poem.
One of the challenges for a videopoem maker not yet handy with his or her own camera (that would be me) is finding video footage that a) works and b) is copyright-free and c) is either free or inexpensive. There are a few sites (eg Motion Elements or OrangeHD) that put up video clips for free use, and I trawl them regularly, downloading and saving footage against future need. The clip subjects are super-odd and almost comically random and nearly always fall in the ‘you never know’ category.
In this case, I found a series of shots taken of and through the side rear view mirror of a car. They struck me as metaphorically powerful and I went back through the Storehouse poems, deliberately looking for one which would match the metaphor. Lennart’s elegantly tragic simple/complicated piece, with its telescoping rearward/forward depiction of time and space jumped out at me very quickly.
“Shot Through the Heart”: a poetry film competition from Southbank Centre
London’s Southbank Centre is holding a love-themed poetry film competition with Alastair Cook, Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel and Malgorzata Kitowski as judges.
Shot Through the Heart – Southbank Centre Poetry Film Competition
Friday 14 February – Friday 30 May
Calling all poets and filmmakers! Love is in the air at Southbank Centre and we want you to create poetry films that explore the joy of first love, the pain of lost love, the confusion of displaced love, the purity of platonic love, or any other kind of love.
There are two categories to enter:
Poetry films on the theme of love made for adults
Poetry films on the theme of love made for children (under 12)
Throughout the summer, Southbank Centre’s celebrates the Festival of Love. Our biennial Poetry International festival (17 – 24 July 2014) explores many different themes including the various ways in which love can impact on writers’ lives. Poetry film will be a major part of this year’s Poetry International.
A poetry film can be many different things, as Alastair Cook, Filmmaker and Director of Filmpoem Festival in Dunbar, explains –
‘A poetry film is… a single entwined entity, a melting, a cleaving together of words, sound and vision. It is an attempt to take a poem and present it through a medium that will create a new artwork, separate from the original poem.’
Dates:
Shot Through the Heart Competition opens: Friday 14 February 2014 at 12noon
Shot Through the Heart Competition closes: Friday 30 May 2014 at 6pm
Prizes:
Southbank Centre is very keen that each submission is seen as a collaborative artwork between poet and filmmaker, so this prize is awarded jointly to the winning poet and filmmaker in each category. Poems must be by living poets and follow the copyright guidance and rules here.
Poetry films made for adults:
• Shortlisted films will be shown in Purcell Room at Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, on Friday 18 July 2014 and all shortlisted filmmakers will be invited to the screening. The winner and a runner-up will be announced on the night.
• The winning film will receive £500 to be shared between poet and filmmaker as well as a pair of tickets each to Poetry International’s Gala Reading.
• The runner-up poet and filmmaker will receive a pair of tickets each to Poetry International’s Gala Reading.
Poetry films made for children:
• Shortlisted films will be shown in The Clore Ballroom at Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre on Saturday 19 July 2014. The winner and runner-up will be announced on the night.
• The winning children’s film will receive £500 to be shared between poet and filmmaker as well as a pair of tickets each to Poetry International’s Gala Reading.
• The winning film will also be shown in Imagine Children’s Festival 2015 headlining a children’s poetry film event – this is one of our busiest festivals, attracting thousands of audience members every year.
• Both winning films will be shown at 2014’s ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin.
New, two-week course on film poetry from Literature Wales
Llenyddiaeth Cymru/Literature Wales is offering a course called The Language of Film Poetry. Let me just paste in their description of the course and instructors (none of whom I was familiar with):
Course 20: The Language of Film Poetry
31 March – 13 April
Tutors: Zillah Bowes, Asher Tlalim and Jane Corbett
Guest: Chris Pow
Fee: £1,750 per personParticipants will be selected. Please download the course document for full details on how to apply.
Whatever your background in documentary film-making, this practical course will help you develop your creativity and find fresh ideas in your work. During the course, you’ll make a short film poetry exercise in response to a written poem of your choice. In a series of workshops, we’ll focus on how to think about sound and image in a juxtaposed way. In the first week, tutorials will focus on developing your idea and shooting your short film, and during the second week, on editing it.
Zillah Bowes is an award winning film-maker and poet. Her films as a cinematographer include Enemies of Happiness, and She, A Chinese. Her debut as a director, Small Protests, was nominated for a Grierson Award, screened internationally and won, among others, the Current Short Cuts award. Zillah trained at the National Film and Television School, where she currently teaches. www.zillahbowes.com
Asher Tlalim has run workshops on Film Poetry at the Sam Spiegel Jerusalem Film School and the National Film and Television School in the UK. An Israeli Film Academy Award winner based in London, he’s been the screenwriter, editor and director of many of his films. His films have been shown at the Berlinale, Montreal, Hamptons, Hollywood and many other film festivals.
Jane Corbett is a screenwriter and novelist, who’s written award-winning screenplays for film and TV over the past twenty years. For many years she ran her own successful film-making course in central London and currently teaches at the National Film and Television School.
www.janecorbett-writer.comChris Pow is a senior tutor in sound design and mixing at the National Film and Television School. He teaches all aspects of sound design for documentary, fiction and animation. Before joining the NFTS he was a dubbing mixer and director of facilities company Universal Sound.
There’s more information in the linked PDF. The introductory paragraphs suggest that the focus of the course is more on making documentary poetry films than on filmpoetry, videopoetry, cinepoetry, etc., but that’s not entirely clear:
This is a practical course to introduce and explore the language of film poetry in documentary filmmaking. Whatever your background in documentary filmmaking, this course will help you develop your creativity and find fresh ideas in your work.
During the course, you will make a short film poetry exercise in response to a written poem of your choice. As it is the centenary of Dylan Thomas, you are also welcome to respond one of his poems.
During the first week we will explore the concept of film poetry and its parallels with written poetry. We will look at the differences between film prose and film poetry. In a series of workshops, we will focus on how to think about sound and image in a juxtaposed way. We will look at how to create expressive images and explore the use of non-synchronous sound and music.
Regardless of which sort of poetry film will be taught, it’s exciting to see such a course being offered, and the venue looks gorgeous. Visit the webpage to download an application.
Telegram by Amy MacLennan
For all you lovers, here’s a videopoem by the indefatigable Belgian filmmaker Swoon (Marc Neys).
Since the beginning of The Poetry Storehouse last year, a gentle stream of new arrivals and voices filled up the shelves. It was about time I went shopping for words again.
It’s such a fun place to nose. Different styles, themes, voices and ideas… This time the poem ‘Telegram’ by Amy MacLennan caught my eye. […]The images came fairly easy. I wanted a very subtle, understated almost, scenery. slow movements, details of bodyparts and a slow veil of colour…
The video practically made itself…it felt right from the start. A good sign.
The poem first appeared online in Linebreak, and in print in MacLennan’s chapbook Weathering (Uttered Chaos Press, 2012).
Nic S. (who provided the reading used in the soundtrack) interviewed Amy MacLennan for our ongoing series of interviews at the Moving Poems Forum with poets and remixers who have provided or worked with material from The Poetry Storehouse. Here’s what MacLennan had to say about “Telegram”:
I never expected to hear that kind of music, see that kind of video, hear that kind of voice merged into something that I had provided words for. The pacing was crazy interesting for me. I saw other things in my own poem that I wouldn’t have thought before because I was too attached to the rhythms of “Telegram.” I watch this now and think, “Wow. My words were the beginning to THIS? Oh my goodness!”
Be Drunk (Enivrez-vous) / Bądźcie Pijani by Charles Baudelaire
https://vimeo.com/85184160
A Polish-language videopoem with English subtitles (sorry, French people) by Gaba Sibilska, who says in the Vimeo description:
It’s an attempt to re-interprate Charles Baudelaire’s poem in a way that fits in our world – world of young people. It’s the inevitable future that frightens the youth. In the juvenile joy of life and affirmation of fun, one can find denial, lies, fear, despair, a desperate attempt to escape from the reality. Eventually, though, every young person must realize that however change of perception may ease the fear, it has no affect on time. And no matter how distant it seems, the end of carefree youth will come one day…
House Clearance by Gaia Holmes
A charming stop-motion animation by Terry Wragg, who notes that
‘House Clearance’ was first published in Lifting the Piano with One Hand by Gaia Holmes, published by Comma Press (2013).
Terry Wragg is a member of the Leeds Animation Workshop, and had a filmpoem called Working Metal screened in the The Body Electric Poetry Film Festival last year. For more from Gaia Holmes, visit her poetry blog (and, of course, check out her other poetry videos at Moving Poems).
