Posts By Dave Bonta
Self Portrait by Edward Hirsch
http://www.vimeo.com/18203490
The wacky folks at Teleportal Readings say about this one:
We filmed esteemed poet Ed Hirsch during a shoot Teleportal did in collaboration with Rattapallax at the Bowery Poetry Club last summer. Though “trippy” isn’t a term we’d normally use to describe Hirsch’s work, the hand-painted, rotoscoped animation by Teleportal art director Scott Gelber makes the poet’s “Self Portrait” just that.
For more on Hirsch, see his page at the Poetry Foundation website.
She Walks in Beauty by Lord Byron
This is “Harenberg,” by Klaus Hommerich and Daniel Gerken,
Shot on film and video; different gauges, resolutions and intentions show the pursuit of quiescene and ease of mind. […] Techniques: 8mm, 16mm, HD 1080P (EOS 5D, 550D), SD, Greenscreen with 8mm and 16mm,Feltpen on b/w film, Snorricam, Ikegami camera tube, GoPro HD, …
The reading is evidently by J. Milsome of the BBC.
How to Remain by Heather Haley
Heather Haley wrote and directed this entertaining film about a very serious subject. Here’s her gloss from the video description on YouTube:
The audience is along for a wild ride in AURAL Heather’s “How To Remain” with a compulsive protagonist resolutely heading toward an elusive goal of perfection, perpetually struggling to stay *on* and, or to stay thin. *How to remain in control* is at the heart of anorexia and bulimia. Ubiquitous images of the ideal woman provide pressure and anxiety for us all. She turns to her trusty steed but instead of her body disintegrating, the horse’s body withers away. A symbol of intense desire and instinct, the horse’s ribs start to protrude as it becomes increasingly emaciated until finally disappearing with a *POOF! * Though eating disorders are a serious matter, the story is really about facing our all-too-human mortality. REMAIN is the key word and our secret desire, fueling our heroine’s quest for eternal youth and beauty, i.e., immortality. She is in a race. A horse race. A rat race? Or a labyrinth. Reel time accelerates as it does in real life; time seemingly flying by with advancing years as we move toward our inevitable departure. Of course HOW we live is what really matters.
Nominations of exemplary videopoems wanted for a new section of the site
I’ve now shared close to 500 videos on Moving Poems, more than 400 of them in the Video Poems category. It occurs to me that the site would be a lot more useful to students, poets and filmmakers if I created a new, top-level page to display a small number of exemplary videopoems (filmpoems, cinepoems — I’m not hung up on the terminology). Of course I have my own ideas of what should go on this page, but I’d really like input from people who know the genre well. Please email me: bontasaurus [at] yahoo [dot] com with suggestions of videos to include, or leave a link in the comments. Obviously they have to be embeddable, if you’re thinking of things I haven’t yet posted. (And please don’t send me links to your own work. Who among us is capable of being truly objective about the work of our own hands?)
I’m thinking no more than 20 videos, illustrating a range of styles, and including inspired amateurs with cheaper equipment and software as well as those with professional-level tools and experience. I wouldn’t want them all to be so technically perfect that neophytes would be discouraged from getting into it, but I also would like to show some examples of what ace filmmakers have done in the genre so people already making videopoems will have something to aspire to.
Naming by Scott Edward Anderson
A new filmpoem by Scottish artist Alastair Cook for a piece by the American poet Scott Edward Anderson. Alastair notes, “Naming was premiered at The Out of the Blue Drill Hall in Edinburgh in January 2011; it was shot entirely on Kodachrome Super8 in 2010 and contains no post production, after effects or erstwhile digital trickery.”
Poetry animator Jim Clark’s YouTube account suspended
UPDATE (2/15/11): As Jim informs us in a comment (see below), he’s back with a new YouTube account.
Sometime in the past two or three weeks, Jim Clark’s poetryanimations channel at YouTube was terminated. Alex Cigale just discovered this today when going back to look at Clark’s video for the Russian Symbolist poet Zinaida Gippius. The notice on what used to be his account page reads,
YouTube account poetryanimations has been terminated because we received multiple third-party notifications of copyright infringement from claimants including:
* Walt Whitman House/Walt Whitman Association
* Walt Whitman House/Walt Whitman Association
* Walt Whitman House/Walt Whitman Association
So multiple complaints from a single source? Perhaps they objected to the use of some still image they held copyright on, since Clark’s technique was to “reanimate” dead poets through computer manipulations of photos or paintings, often with fairly realist results. I’ve only posted a couple, but Clark produced well over a hundred. Many of them can still be viewed at (and embedded from) DailyMotion, if you can put up with the ads. Here’s a Walt Whitman one to illustrate his technique (maybe one of the ones that sparked the complaint?):
It seems odd that Clark would put such a prominent copyright notice of his own on the video, since there’s no indication that he had permission to use Garrison Keilor’s audio. But what do I know?
Excerpt from Little Gidding by T. S. Eliot
“Midwinter spring” is Peter Stephens‘ first foray into videopoetry, a film for the opening stanza of Eliot’s “Little Gidding.”
What comes first, the video or the poem?
…The videopoet’s version of the chicken-and-egg question. I was discussing this with my fellow amateur videopoet Brenda Clews over at a new online community site called Writing Our Way Home, where Brenda set up a videopoetry group, and I thought I’d pose the question here, too. Brenda wrote:
Do you plan out beforehand what you might create a videopoem out of, and then go looking for footage? Or do you take what you find and make something out of it?
I am fully in the latter camp, working with ‘found’ images, sort of ‘oh that looks good, can I videotape it, & then what can I do with this footage?’ though think to try to storyboard a little might be good just to see what that might produce.
My reply is a bit long-winded, but I guess it boils down to “sort of”:
I rarely plan anything in advance, and when I do, it doesn’t tend to work. For example, for that Egyptian poem, I thought it might be cool to start with some footage of the front of my woodburner, which has an isinglass window with bars on it — I thought the image of flames dancing behind steel bars would be interesting and suggestive. It wasn’t. Instead, I decided to make my first documentary-style videopoem, without hopefully getting unbearably literal: for example, when the poem says, “From Tunisia, to Egypt, to Lebanon and Yemen,” it would’ve been cheesy to flash shots of each of those countries — but I still had to do something to suggest movement. And I was pleased when, during my playing around with juxtapositions, images of police soaking a crowd with a water cannon coincided with the line about people becoming as combustible as dry wood.
But that was a rare-for-me example of a videopoem done on assignment. Usually I am working with my own footage in an ekphrastic manner: watching the raw footage prompts a poem — maybe right then, maybe a week later. When I’m satisfied with the text, I record and edit the audio. Then I start cutting video to fit and looking for other sounds or music to fill out the soundtrack. It is usually at this point that I become acutely conscious of my limitations as a visual artist…
I’d love to hear from other videopoets on this.
What is to Give Light by Yahia Lababidi
Egyptian poet Yahia Lababidi, a Facebook contact, shared the text of his poem at The Idler just after I discovered that Al Jazeera has a cache of Creative Commons-licensed videos available for remix. So with Lababidi’s blessing I pulled this videopoem together, using some of that Egyptian street poetry for a soundtrack. I did the reading myself because he was having internet-connection problems and wasn’t able to send me his own reading.
Videos in the film/animation category at YouTube don’t seem to attract too many views, so I identified it as “News & Politics” instead. We’ll see if that makes a difference. In any case, it needs to be watched by people with an interest in the uprising.
