I don’t share videopoems of my own work on Moving Poems; that’s confined to my literary blog Via Negativa, where earlier this week I got a little carried away with introducing a new video. In fact, I’d been meaning to say something about common videopoetry images and strategies, and it occurred to me that the popularity of at least a couple of them — moving landscapes from a train or car window and P.O.V. shots of walking feet — may suggest that something deeper is going on:
Moreover, a certain interplay between movement and stasis seems intrinsic to the videopoetry genre. Archibald MacLeish’s justly famous “Ars Poetica” says that “a poem should be motionless in time,” which while hyperbolic does capture the essential stasis in much modern lyric poetry (including my own): “A poem should be palpable and mute / As a globed fruit,” states the opening line. By contrast, motion is the soul of film, and therefore I suggest that an unresolved tension between movement and stasis is the fundamental agon in poetry film, akin to the dynamic balance between life and death in any organism or ecosystem.
As just announced on their Facebook page,
The date is finally set. On Saturday May 4th 2013 at the Lyric Cinema Cafe in Fort Collins CO. The Body Electric Poetry Film Festival will come alive! So now you can tell everyone you know, to tell everyone they know about the what, where and when. Also, don’t forget we are still open for submissions.
This was the first of the three films Kate Sweeney made in collaboration with poet Colette Bryce for her residency at the Dove Marine Laboratory. (The other two are Ballasting the Ark and Turbines in January.) Sweeney wrote:
‘The Lab Aquaria’ seeks to capture a tone, a feel of the lab; a sort of visual mood or reflection that leaves an after-image of the poem. Colette wished to include one site-specific piece about the Dove laboratory and we visited together to collect imagery in photography and video.
Though there are a couple of direct matches between text and film image, the film as a whole escapes the trap of excessive literalism, and comes across as a lyrical meditation on marine life and the work of science.
[UPDATE] The three films were shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Prize for new works in poetry in 2013.
This is — the credits tell us — a production of the San Diego State University School of Theatre, Televison, and Film. Alexander Ameen, Miles Feld and Kurt Conety jointly directed a disturbing and imaginative interpretation of Neruda’s “Clenched Soul” as translated by W.S. Merwin.
The recent death of Jayne Cortez prompted a post on Metafilter calling attention to her pioneering and musically compelling work with jazz musicians. Though most of the YouTube material is audio-only, the above videos were expertly filmed and recorded. They’re from a concert/reading in 2010 with Denardo Coleman accompanying his mother on drums. Andrew Lynn directed, with camera work by Elanor Goldsmith, Ira McKinley and Joshua Thorson. The description on YouTube reads:
“A Dialogue Between Voice and Drums,” live at The Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy, NY on October 23, 2010. A firespitting evening with drummer Denardo Coleman, featuring a voice celebrated for her political, surrealistic, dynamic innovations in lyricism, and visceral sound. Cortez’s literary work and impassioned activism, inspired by the ideals of human dignity and social justice, have been called blues poetics, part of the foundation of hip hop and performance poetry. Denardo Coleman is a musician, composer, producer and drummer with the Ornette Coleman Quartet.
Erica Goss should be familiar to regular readers of Moving Poems for her monthly column about videopoetry, The Third Form, but she is also a very good poet in her own right, as this new collaboration with Swoon (Marc Neys) demonstrates. This was actually a tri-national collaboration, because the cinematography was by Alastair Cook, re-edited by Marc. For the text of the poem, as well as some process notes, see Marc’s blog.
A Russian videopoetry classification scheme shows some interesting parallels with British and North American thinking about the hybrid genre, which — I’m guessing from the name of the site — is called Videopojezija (Видеопоэзия) in Russian. Since the site includes foreign as well as Russian videos, I assume their classification is meant to be universal, and as the closing note indicates, they welcome criticism and suggestions.
Here’s a Google translation of the page, amended to reflect the word choices in a summary at the Text in Art blog (which is how I learned about it). I’ve done my best to render Google’s amazingly good machine translation into something resembling idiomatic English, but this has invariably involved some guess-work since I don’t know any Russian. I invite Russian speakers to suggest corrections and improvements, and I’ll amend the post accordingly.
Classification
Depending on the purpose, videopoetry can be categorized in various ways: by content, by technical devices employed, on a territorial or chronological basis … Plus one can also add all the known classifications for each of the included arts and combinations of these. But in the synthesis of two arts there is at least one base, which describes the nature of communication of one art with another. Let’s try to identify this classification, and since it seems most interesting to the authors of this resource, it will form the basis for the structure of the site.
Note that in any art it is very difficult to strictly classify anything — there are too many variations, and our case is no exception, so any one videopoetic film or video can be assigned to multiple categories simultaneously.
So, in our view, taking the nature of the poetic text and the visual aspects into account, videopoetry should be divided into:
- documentary (dokumentalnaja)
The reader is at the center in this videopoetry type. It can move in a certain space, its image can be combined with other visual images or alternate them, but most importantly: reading is the main object of the image. It is very difficult to distinguish this case from a simple video-recording of poetry recitation. Usually videopoetic clips contain additional meanings introduced into the text by the video. Whereas simple video carries no additional imagery.
We think that such works can be called documentary because they contain a particular record, a real-life act of reading the poem.- textual (tekstograficheskaja)
In the center of the clip: the image of the written text. It can be superimposed on a shaped video sequence, can pass in a running line or move, as titles. May be reproduced in sign language or even as a physical object is made of a material and filmed. In this video a written text is always present in the frame. A feature of this species is that it can be free of audio or only contain music, without sounding text.
- illustrative (illjustrativnaja)
In these videos, visuals are almost a verbatim repetition of all the images of the poem. These clips are called “akin” (?) because they are made on a “what I see, I sing” basis. Technically, this method is embodied in different ways: through drawings or photos illustrating every word in a poem, or by picture-stories very similar to the plot of the work.
- conceptual (konceptualnaja)
Here the storyline visuals are associated with a poem on the level of ideas, while making it more meaningful. In the video and in the text of such a project, the different images used relate on an associative level. The video may contain a completely different reality than the ones described in the verse, but they look like an organic whole, complement each other, creating a new one.
- story/plot (sjuzhetnaja)
In this film, the poem itself is pushed to the background, giving way to a video scene. The sound of the text in this video may take even less than 50% of the duration. Usually, this is more like a video/short film containing poetic inserts.
- musical (muzykalnaja)
The focus of the film isn’t the poem, but the music to which it is put. Visuals are rhythmically linked to a greater extent with the music, part of what’s lost without words (?). These are close to music videos.
- visual (vizualnaja)
This is a special genre of videopoetic movies from which a poetic text is absent. Poetic quality in such videos is achieved by other means. Rhythm is present directly in the video.
This classification is not definitive. Constructive criticism and additions are welcome.
When using this classification, please refer to us.