Posts By Dave Bonta
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.
American Haikus (excerpt) by Jack Kerouac
http://vimeo.com/10469119
A brilliant, if much too short, film by Irish artist Orla Mc Hardy.
For audio of Kerouac reading a number of his haiku (which are unusually fine examples of the form, in my opinon), see the six-minute track from the album 100 Great Poems — Classic Poets & Beatnik Freaks which someone has also thoughtfully uploaded to YouTube.
You Are Here to Receive This Prophecy by Hannah Stephenson
http://vimeo.com/44861361
The poem by Hannah Stephenson appeared in qarrtsiluni‘s Worship issue (whence the reading in the soundtrack). Swoon notes in his blog post about the film,
For me, the videopoem had to have a seventies-summer-childhood-anything-is-possible-nostalgia feel…
I wanted to say thanks to my father and mother who gave me a good childhood…But I also wanted to recycle.
Recently I had an interesting talk about recycling parts of ones own creations.
Writers can use the same words, phrases even…so why not try to create a new videopoem with exisiting and used material
(exept for the poem, I hadn’t used that before)
The music is a remix of a very short track I made for a commissioned one minute-film.The images I shot myself (from a train, through the trees, into the sun) were also the base for this videopoem (although for that one I abstracted those images, but the basis is the same)
The footage of the boy trying to climb the fence (thanks to an old family film of the Harris Family from 1975) comes from the same youtube video I used images from for this videopoem.
The blips and cuts from the sculpted head (of my father) and the hands holding it (my mother’s) were also used in this videopoem.
So, I think I was able to create a new videopoem (thanks to a poem and a reading I hadn’t used before, I do realise that) with bricks and mortar that I used elsewhere before.
For more of Stephenson’s work, visit her daily ekphrastic poetry blog, The Storialist.
Having intended to merely pick on an oil company, the poem goes awry, by Bob Hicok
“An ounce of humility goes a long way in this grounded adaptation of Bob Hicok’s runaway musings on big oil by documentarian Joanna Kohler,” say the folks at Motionpoems. Visit their website for the text of the poem and seven snapshots from behind the scenes in the production of the film. (My favorite is captioned: “Everyone waits and works with the cow’s mood in a single-car garage.”) In this month’s Motionpoems newsletter, Kohler says:
This poem’s most important moment for me was the invitation to being honest with ourselves. I was attracted to this poem’s critical reflection and struggle to put all the pieces together.
My biggest challenge in turning this piece into a film was getting a cow into a South Minneapolis Garage. I had a kick-butt crew who worked some film magic!
I thought it was critical to have a moment in the film that shows the “mass” of what I felt Bob was holding in his words. From a distance a cow is pretty and fun to look at. Up close they are huge, breathing, dirty, sweating and alive. Which is an example of the effort I thought the speaker was trying to make at seeing himself closer.
It’s great to see Motionpoems branching out beyond animation. This is a true videopoem, and a very successful one indeed.
