Posts By Dave Bonta
Wax Ear by Alice Lyons
A short poem by Alice Lyons made into a film by Orla Mc Hardy. As with The Polish Language, this appears to have been a collaboration: Lyons is credited with 2-D animation, and Mc Hardy with photography, compositing, computer animation and sound.
Kata by Lavinia Greenlaw
Another in the Winning Words series of poetry videos filmed by Andy Hutch. “Here professional parkour athlete Jolade Olusanya reads Lavinia Greenlaw’s ‘Kata’ in Stockwell.” I don’t have a category for parkour, but this seems close enough to some of the poetry dance videos to include in that category.
The text of the poem, which appeared in the 2011 collection The Casual Perfect from Faber & Faber, is here. For more on Greenlaw, see her website.
Quartet by Howie Good
http://vimeo.com/46184070
Another of Swoon‘s adaptations of poems from the qarrtsiluni podcast, this one by Howie Good from the Fragments issue currently in serialization. (Read the text here.) It was screened at “Filmscape” in Dunbar, Scotland on July 30. Here’s what Swoon said about it in a recent blog post:
I had a track (‘Gaze‘) that I used before for an older videopoem that I wasn’t to happy with.
But I still love the track.
‘Gaze’, by the way is on ‘Pathways’, a great sampler on netlabel NSI. You can get that just for free.I made use of some great footage I found on Prelinger from a guy Ivan Besse, who filmed everyday life in South Dakota somewhere in ’38 ’39…
I combined that footage with layers of recordings I made myself to add a ghostlike atmosphere (to fit the soundscape) and a bit of colour and depth.
The poem also appears in a brand-new collection from Fowlpox Press, Desecrations by Howie Good, available through Smashwords.
Qua Insurrection by Brian Ang and Mayakov+sky
I find this to be a visually witty commentary on Marxist cant; your milage may vary. The text is computer-generated, from Theory Arsenal, programmed by Ryan Loewen and based on the poem “Free Sets” by Brian Ang, who’s also responsible for the recitation here. The filmmaker and composer is N.O. Koumoundouros, A.K.A. Nicholas Komodore, who shares attribution with his experimental poetry project Mayakov+sky, a “Polemical Platform Constructing Potent Poetics.” What the credits call a dialogical montage includes text, so it seemed appropriate to designate Mayakov+sky as co-author in my fusty cataloguing system. Ang and Koumoundouros are both based in Oakland, California, ground zero for the cinepoetry movement.
Schöne Jugend (A Fine Childhood) by Gottfried Benn
The Gottfried Benn Electronic Library includes an English translation of this poem (click through to read it side-by-side with the original):
A Fine Childhood
The mouth of a girl who had long lain in the reeds
looked so chewed up.
When we broke open the torso, the esophagus was so full of holes.
Finally in a bower under the diaphragm
we found a nest of young rats.
One little sister rat lay dead.
The others were living off liver and kidney,
drinking the cold blood and enjoying
a fine childhood.
And fine and fast was their death too:
we threw the whole bunch into water.
Oh, how those little snouts squeaked!
As for the film, this is a bit of a remake with extra audio effects added. Here’s what Lasse Kuhlmann posted in the description at Vimeo (italics added):
Schöne Jugend (A Beautiful Youth) is an award winning 60 seconds short film based on the same-titled poem by Gottfried Benn. This modern interpretation of Benn’s classic (poem) illustrates today’s society in a clear-cut formal structure. It is shot in only one take, one steady camera-spin of 360 degrees. The PoV (point of view) is thought to be in the middle of a table, around which eight people are eating in a gross manner. The well-thought-out visual concept is both enhanced and contrasted by the raw cruelty of human disgust.
Schöne Jugend was entirely reworked for the KLX 3D Sound format. While the original clip features only a narrative voice and “silent” pictures, Lasse Kuhlmann and Patrick Leuchter enriched the soundtrack by breathing life to those eight people shown in the frame. And while the camera spins around, the sound will spin AROUND YOU just accordingly.
Schöne Jugend wonderfully demonstrates the immersive real-life experience of the KLX sound format and was kindly provided by the director himself, who is highly enthusiastic about the new version.
The Grass is Greener by Ivor Cutler
An Orla Mc Hardy film based on a short piece by Scottish poet and radio performer Ivor Cutler — an evocative, dream-like interpretation that takes the poem to a whole new level, I think.
Talent by Carol Ann Duffy
One of a series of films from Winning Words, an Olympics-related public poetry project in the U.K. As with the 11 other videos in the series, it features the reader as a performer — kind of an interesting wrinkle on the usual (wo)man-on-the-street-reads-poem video, making it more of a filmpoem. “Here Strategic Planner Angella Tapé reads Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Talent’ in her office at McCann Erickson,” says the description at YouTube. Andy Hutch is the filmmaker.
When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be by John Keats
Video by Louise Dautheribes McKerl, who notes that she has borrowed the narration from the BBC and the music, “Entendre la fôret pousser,” from Chapelier Fou.
New column on videopoetry/filmpoetry at Connotation Press seeks submissions
The innovative online magazine Connotation Press has just launched a new column dedicated to videopoetry and related forms called The Third Form. It’s authored by San Francisco Bay-area poet Erica Goss, who writes:
My intent with this column is to open up a conversation about video poems. Every month I will feature a selection, so if you make video poems, please send me your work. We’ll post several submissions here. I will explore other topics such as the origins of video poems, their significance as an art form, screenings at festivals, and in-depth interviews. I’m also interested in the technical aspects of making video poems, so feel free to send me any craft tips you’ve picked up, whether they deal with cameras, software, royalty-free film footage, or sound.
Goss devotes the rest of her inaugural column to a brief survey of the field, sharing a few films and videos that illustrate the diverse range of approaches one encounters on the web these days, and I was pleased to see some of my favorites among those she cites. I like her conclusion:
In 1969, William Carlos Williams wrote that “a poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words” and “as in all machines, its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.” A video poem is also a machine, small or large, and capable of transporting the viewer to a new place of understanding.
I’ve updated the list of Journals that publish poetry videos to include The Third Form.
