Posts By Dave Bonta
New developments at Motionpoems
Some exciting news from our friends at Motionpoems, the Minneapolis-based arts organization responsible for a raft of well-made poetry films (especially animations) over the last few years.
Motionpoems will partner with Minneapolis-based Egg Creative as its production management team, and has engaged Jennifer David (formerly Executive Producer of Fallon Worldwide) to produce the coming season of 12 poetry films.
Egg Creative will provide production management assistance, and its music and sound division, Egg Music, will provide Motionpoems’ film projects with original scores, music supervision, audio production and finishing. Executive Producer Eric Fawcett says, “I’m inspired by how much raw talent exists in the ad industry, and we’re eager to connect those talents to Motionpoems’ film projects.”
Replacing Motionpoems co-founding producer Angella Kassube (who takes a seat on the board), freelancer Jennifer David brings 15 years of experience in agency work, including stints at Martin Williams and Carmichael Lynch before a 9-year run at Fallon serving as EP on Cadillac and Chrysler, and as Producer on accounts like Virgin Mobile, Travelers Insurance and Bahamas Ministry of Tourism. Her 5+ years on the board of the Weisman Art Museum acquaint her with the nonprofit arts sector.
Motionpoems’ annual season consists of 12 short films per year, adapted from poems cultivated in partnership with some of America’s most important poetry publishers. In recent years, Motionpoems has partnered with Copper Canyon Press, Milkweed Editions, Graywolf Press, and Scribner’s annual Best American Poetry anthology. All will contribute poetry again this year, along with newcomers American Poetry Review, McSweeney’s, The Believer, Tin House, Alaska Quarterly Review, FSG, Wave Books and others to be announced. Motionpoems has produced 40+ films over the past four years, working with Pulitzer Prize winners and early-career poets alike.
Read the rest. It’s good to see poetry videos continuing to gain mainstream acceptance in the American poetry establishment.
The Plow That Broke the Plains by Pare Lorentz
Though produced as a documentary, The Plow That Broke the Plains may also be seen as an epic filmpoem. Consider: first-time filmmaker Pare Lorentz didn’t write the script until almost everything else was done — all the shooting, even Virgil Thomson’s magnificent score. Composer and filmmaker worked together to fit the film to the score, sometimes cutting one, sometimes the other, and Lorentz thought the music should be allowed to suggest separate and complementary story lines. And the script, when he finally wrote it, took the form of free verse — see for yourself. When the text of his second documentary, River, was published in book form, it was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry.
Which is not to say that (in my opinion at least) the script of The Plow That Broke the Plains qualifies as great poetry on its own. Rather, the successful marriage of all three elements — text, soundtrack and film — creates a poetic whole greater than the sum of its parts, a filmpoem. The fascinating story behind the making of the film is adeptly recounted on this webpage from the University of Virginia’s American Studies program.
Because it was produced by the federal government, The Plow That Broke the Plains is in the public domain, and high-resolution versions may be downloaded from the Internet Archive for reuse and remix. It might be interesting to see what a contemporary videopoet could make with this material, whether by swapping in new text or cutting and splicing Lorentz’s. (If anyone does this, be sure to send me the link.)
Allow Yourself This One Day by Max Wallis
This is Alastair Cook‘s Filmpoem 33, and departs rather significantly from his other filmpoems in its unstinting focus on the poet/narrator.
Commissioned by Harper’s Bazaar UK and poet/ model Max Wallis. Allow Yourself This One Day is the final poem in Max’s début pamphlet, Modern Love, where he traces the year-long course of a love affair and all its constituent parts: sex and sensuality, longing and loneliness, desire and disappointment, heady beginnings and inevitable endings; in a world dominated by high street brands, text messaging and social media.
Luca Nasciuti did both the photography and the music for this one.
According to Max Wallis’ website, “The Arts Council has funded Max’s new film project. He is currently Harper’s Bazaar’s ‘roaming poet’. He produces poetry videos which look at the world of modelling through a poetic lens.”
Mesostic (“Dancer/Suc/Hands…”) by John Cage
A compelling animation of a visual poem, one of John Cages’s mesostics, by Federica Cristiani. She writes:
In this video I try to create a perfect balance between music and video. The letters appear following the beat of the music. My purpose is to create a perfect synesthesia within sound and typography.
This particular text was also included in a musical composition for solo voice, Sixty-Two Mesostics Re Merce Cunningham.
Nothing as Quiet as a House by Sarah Hymas
This film by Maya Chowdhry is “a lyrical exploration of a poem by Sarah Hymas.” The voiceover is by Beth Allen, and the director of photography is Mark Rickitt. For more of Sarah Hymas’ writing, visit her blog Echo Soundings.
Uite cum ne mai rotunjim / See how we complete ourselves by Doina Ioanid
Marc Neys (A.K.A. Swoon) writes in a blog post about this video that it grew out of a face-to-face meeting with the author, Romanian poet Doina Ioanid, at the Felix Poetry Festival in Antwerp earlier this year.
After the festival I asked her and her translator Jan Mysjkin if I could make a video for one of my favourites of her performance […] The images of this piece were taken from ‘Lost landscapes of Detroit’ (Prelinger Archives) and I re-edited them, adding an extra layer of colour and light.
The result is a short (moody) piece.
The reading is by the author, the English translation is by Jan H. Mysjkin, and there are two other versions, one with Dutch titling and one with French.
To me, the ability to present a poem in multiple languages is one of the best and most under-appreciated uses for videopoetry/filmpoetry, which is itself already something of a translation. I’ve always loved bilingual editions of poetry with the original language on the facing page, but it’s so much better to be able to hear the original while seeing an English version, the two linked and in some ways brought closer together by a filmmaker’s vision (usually including a good soundtrack, as here).
Ice Hotel by Gaia Holmes
James Starkie directs. “Created as part of a collaboration between Bokeh Yeah! and Comma Press, based on a poem by Gaia Holmes.”
Take Me to the City by Lucy English
A film by Jon Conway of immprint graphic design, who notes [in a description for a version of the film at Vimeo, subsequently removed]:
The poem, to me is a description of memories of a ‘City.’ As I read I felt as though the poet was conversing directly with me about her experiences. I tried to visualise what I saw, and how the words themselves impacted the poem. By combining colours, imagery, typography and audio spectrums, the piece reacts with the words of the poem, creating new colours, and visuals. I like to think that what the piece looks like is similar to the imagery our mind creates when we listen to a story for the first time.
Performance poet and novelist Lucy English, a Reader in Creative Writing at Bath-Spa University, is co-organizer of the Liberated Words Poetry Film Festival.
Poem (“The spirit/ likes to dress up like this”) by Mary Oliver
Directed by Chloe Stites; shot and edited by Travis Stewart. According to the credits, this was made for “a special presentation by Denise Stewart at Bay Arts” — I’m guessing July’s show “The Dress Says It All“: “Women artists give tribute to ‘the dress’ in works of art that come alive through words of their own.”
How to replace a video at Vimeo without changing the link
In the past two days, two different filmmakers have contacted me to let me know that they’ve changed the Vimeo links for their films in the Moving Poems archive. On the one hand, I’m grateful to them for letting me know. I do sometimes comb the archives here for dead links, but not nearly often enough, and I appreciate hearing from users of the site when a video has disappeared. On the other hand, they wouldn’t have needed to switch URLs just to replace the video with a new version; they could’ve simply swapped in a new file. This is actually one of Vimeo’s most under-appreciated killer features, in my opinion. (And the fact that you can’t do this at YouTube is a good reason not to use it.) From the FAQs:
Can I replace a video and keep the URL, Stats, comments, etc?
You sure can!
From your video page, click Settings below the video player. From there, head to the Video File tab and click “Replace this video.” This allows you to upload a new video file while keeping the video URL, comments, Stats, likes, tags, and all the other information associated with the video.
During the replacement process, the original video will remain viewable while the new one is uploaded. Once the replacement video finishes uploading and begins conversion, the original video will no longer be viewable, and will soon be replaced.
So there will be just a short time during which the video isn’t viewable (a few minutes if you have a Plus or Pro account, longer if you have a free account and are uploading during a busy time of the day).
