Posts By Dave Bonta
“the hours rise up putting off stars and it is” by e.e. cummings
https://vimeo.com/81516242
A novel approach to poetry-filmmaking, and one that fits the poem well: cycling through the text again and again, in different voices, the way a musical round is sung. Elizabeth Wilkins directs.
Deliquescence: A Meditation in Seven Parts by Elizabeth Bradfield
A film by Demet Taspinar with poem and voice-over by Elizabeth Bradfield. The fascinating back-story of their collaboration, as described on Vimeo, suggests that the images may have elicited the text to some extent:
A collaboration between video artist Demet Taspinar, who made this film, and me (Elizabeth Bradfield) who wrote a poem to it. Demet made the movie when working in Antarctica, which is where we met aboard an expedition ship. She was the ship’s doctor; I was a naturalist. We’ve made three of these collaborations so far. This one was published (in video and as a printed poem) in Alaska Quarterly Review.
For more on Demet Taspinar, see her website (but beware of video on autoplay). Elizabeth Bradfield is
the author of Interpretive Work (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2008), which won the Audre Lorde Award and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, and Approaching Ice (Persea Books, 2010), a book of poems about Arctic and Antarctic exploration that was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets.
New resource for videopoets: one million+ images from the British Library
Thanks to Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing for bringing to our attention this very welcome news: “British Library uploads one million public domain images to the net for remix and reuse.”
The British Library has uploaded one million public domain scans from 17th-19th century books to Flickr! They’re embarking on an ambitious programme to crowdsource novel uses and navigation tools for the huge corpus. Already, the manifest of image descriptions is available through Github. This is a remarkable, public spirited, archival project, and the British Library is to be loudly applauded for it!
Read the rest. I’ll be interested to see how poetry filmmakers make use of this new trove.
(Hat-tip: @jacsongs on Twitter)
“Where are the dolls who loved me so…” by Elizabeth Bishop
This is Where are the Dolls, a stand-out filmpoem by Cassandra Nicolaou of Fighting Fish Pictures. I’m grateful to Swoon for introducing me to it in his monthly column on videopoetry. As he writes,
The editing is thoughtful and draws the viewer inside the story (I love the jump cuts between the introvert close-ups of the woman and the loud and intimidating girls). Nicolaou did an amazing job in translating the poem to this day and age with respect and love for the original words, accenting the power of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry. And when it’s over, I want to see it again.
See the column for more on the filmmaker and her thoughts about Elizabeth Bishop and the film-making process, which are all very interesting. She says in part:
“Where are the dolls who loved me so…” is actually an incomplete fragment of a poem, unpublished until 2006. To me it is a beautiful, sad piece – filled with longing for love and comfort, complicated feelings of abandonment, frustrations with idealized femininity, and despair at not measuring up or fitting in. I used the poem as a starting point to explore a middle-aged woman alone in the world – a self-exile of sorts. Maybe she’s grappling with repressed desires, maybe she’s got some of those feelings of not measuring up. Wanting to be one of those perfect women – impervious to age and unforeseen emotions; and hating them at the same time. The film is impressionistic and dreamy, but more overt than both the poem and probably Bishop’s public self. Having read up on Bishop, I worked in a few references to some of her other work – stuff that the Bishop scholars might catch. Beyond that, it’s very much the world of present-day Toronto, as opposed to Nova Scotian 1910’s. I was excited to cast Megan Follows (of Anne of Green Gables fame) as the lead. When I saw the photo of Bishop on Wikipedia, the resemblance struck me immediately. I’m hoping to do a feature about Bishop with Megan in the future.
Megan Follows granted an interview to AFter Ellen in which she talks a bit about the film. Here’s one exchange:
AE: Because it is such a dreamy, non-formed piece, how did you get yourself in the mindset of that character, E? What interested you about her journey?
MF: You know, it was somewhat guerilla filmmaking for sure. What is interesting is when we shot in the club, the club was live and it was just really a club that was happening. There were some signs that said there might be a film crew walking around and we used a very subtle camera. So we just went into that club and started to dance.It was pretty funny because it was very, very loud in there. And we couldn’t hear each other over the sound of the music. We had to devise hand signals. So often times my character was dancing with her eyes closed. I would no idea if the camera was still rolling or if they’d moved on to a different shot. A couple of times I got pretty intimate with people who were dancing who had nothing to do with the film. And then I’d be like, “Oh, I’m sorry, I guess we’re not rolling. If you could please get off of me, I have to go find my crew.” [Laughs] So, we had some fun.
Housekeeping by Donna Vorreyer
https://vimeo.com/80140293
This Nic S. video remix of a poem from The Poetry Storehouse uses unexpected imagery to suggest perhaps some different things about God from what the author of the text, Donna Vorreyer, had in mind — but that’s as it should be, I think. (Vorreyer called the video “haunting.”)
Melancholia by Jacob Balde
A videopoem with a decidedly neo-classical feel by German filmmaker Patrick Müller, who sets it up in the Vimeo description as follows:
MELANCHOLIA (Melancholie/Melancholy) A short silent film by Patrick Müller after the poem by German Latinist Jacob Balde (1604–1668). This film was entirely shot in Ingolstadt, Germany, where Balde was a professor of rhetoric from 1635. He was widely known as the “German Horaz”.
(Horaz = Horace.) The attention and care Müller brought to the project even extended to the credits, where he had the filming details translated into Latin — a nice touch. For more on Balde, see the Catholic Encyclopedia.
Lisp of Cloud by Leila Wilson
The Motionpoem for December is by David P. Hanson. The text is from Leila Wilson’s new collection The Hundred Grasses. The Motionpoems email newsletter quotes her reaction to the film:
I’m really pleased with the results of David’s piece—in terms of its quality of production and fullness of vision—and I’m honored that he examined and expanded my poem with such attentiveness to detail. The film captures the speaker’s dependence on her surroundings to make sense of her sensual experience, and it offers surprising visual nuance.
The unfurling of color and movement that the amaryllis provides feels necessary. Though in many ways the amaryllis serves to represent the lyrical speaker driving the poem, it feels like a surreal presence, which I quite like. I’m also really interested in the quivering soundtrack. It expresses the omnipresence of the snow and seems to hold the melt within it. Kellie Fitzgerald’s lush reading captures a longing that’s definitely present in the poem, and she gives it a force that makes me blush!
4th Sadho Poetry Film Fest will be held Dec. 11-12 in New Delhi
Asia’s premiere poetry film festival is set for next Wednesday and Thursday, running from 6:30-8:30 each evening.
We showcase films, that broadly fall into following categories:
- Poetry films – based on or inspired by a poem. Most of the films in the festival are of this genre
- Poetic films – films that are highly poetic in their cinematic construction. We include some of the finest of this vast and varied genre in our festival.
- Poetry Discourse – films that engage in a debate about the image, the word and life.
- Film on poets
I was interested to learn that the name Sadho is derived from the poetry of Kabir:
Sadho is a voluntary organization that aims at taking great ‘poetry to people’ from all walks of life, through the innovative use of arts, media and social action.
Sadho is based on the conviction that poetry should not remain confined to books and literary circles. It should reach out to all sensitive people who have an interest in other arts and issues. Towards this end, Sadho tries to create new ways of sharing, promoting and enjoying poetry.
Initiated in 2007, Sadho has set-up Asia’s first poetry films festival, has introduced sign-language poetry films to India, organised workshops on poetry, painting and cinema and created art based on poetry, including poetry souvenirs and wallpapers. IT also tries to encourage poetry among children by publishing their poems on the website and offers special screenings of poetry-films for children.
Sadho soon plans adding a new vertical to its activities – poetry albums. These would include recordings featuring some of the prominent poets from various languages.
Sadho functions as a not-for profit charitable trust supported mostly by the donations of volunteers and well-wishers. Its trustees and core team members are unpaid volunteers, and include people from various fields like literature, cinema, music, art, media and education.
Sadho, which literally means ‘O sage’, is the familiar addressee in the poetry of the great Indian saint poet Kabir. For us ‘Sadho’ is a call to all those with poetic hearts!
(Hat-tip: @ZebraFestival on Twitter)
Call for submissions: 7th biannual ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin
I’m a little late in sharing this announcement, but the 2014 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival is open for submissions:
For the seventh time, the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival is calling for entries to find the best poetry film. Entries may be short films made on the basis of poems. The total value of the prizes in the competition is € 13,000. From among the films submitted, a Programme Committee will nominate the films to be entered for the Competition and select the films for the various sections of the festival programme. The winners will be chose by an international jury.
The Festival is also inviting entries of films based on this year’s »Festival poem«, Love in the Age of the EU by Björn Kuhligk. The directors of the three best films will be invited to Berlin to meet the poet and have the opportunity to present and discuss their films. You can find the poem with a sound recording and various translations here.
Closing date for entries for all the competitions is 25 April 2014
See the complete call for entries [PDF].
