Posts By Dave Bonta
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.
Render, Render by Thomas Lux
Good advice for anyone making a revolution. According to the note on YouTube,
This motionpoem was created by Jeff Saunders with Scott Olson, Ben Myrick, Adam Tow, Carly Zuckweiler, and Andre Durand. It was shot in Jeff’s studio. The audio is from The Academy Audio Archive POETS.org and was recorded at Poet’s House, March 29, 2004.
Inexplicably, Lux doesn’t appear to have a website or blog, though of course he’s published widely in treeflesh media.
Egypt’s poetry of revolt
I’ve long avoided demonstrations here in the U.S., even ones I strongly support, due to my aversion to stupid, boring, time-worn slogans. So I was really excited to read that
The slogans the [Egyptain] protesters are chanting are couplets—and they are as loud as they are sharp. The diwan of this revolt began to be written as soon as Ben Ali fled Tunis, in pithy lines like “Yâ Mubârak! Yâ Mubârak! Is-Sa‘ûdiyya fi-ntizârak!,” (“Mubarak, O Mabarak, Saudi Arabia awaits!”). In the streets themselves, there are scores of other verses, ranging from the caustic “Shurtat Masr, yâ shurtat Masr, intû ba’aytû kilâb al-’asr” (“Egypt’s Police, Egypt’s Police, You’ve become nothing but Palace dogs”), to the defiant “Idrab idrab yâ Habîb, mahma tadrab mish hansîb!” (Hit us, beat us, O Habib [al-Adly, now-former Minister of the Interior], hit all you want—we’re not going to leave!). This last couplet is particularly clever, since it plays on the old Egyptian colloquial saying, “Darb al-habib zayy akl al-zabib” (The beloved’s fist is as sweet as raisins). This poetry is not an ornament to the uprising—it is its soundtrack and also composes a significant part of the action itself.
That’s Elliott Colla in an essay titled “The Poetry of Revolt” in Jadaliyya. Following a concise history of Egyptian revolutions and uprisings, he lists some of the most famous literary poets of revolt since the 1880s, and describes the extent to which their poems have been used to inspire demonstrators and galvanize action.
But beyond these recognized names are thousands of other poets—activists all—who would never dare to protest publicly without an arsenal of clever couplet-slogans. The end result is a unique literary tradition whose power is now on full display across Egypt. Chroniclers of the current Egyptian revolt, like As’ad AbuKhalil, have already compiled lists of these couplets—and hundreds more are sure to come. For the most part, these poems are composed in a colloquial, not classical, register and they are extremely catchy and easy to sing. The genre also has real potential for humor and play—and remind us of the fact that revolution is also a time for celebration and laughter.
Colla goes on to speculate that this communal experience of poetry is key both to building crowd solidarity and helping them overcome their fear of the regime through laughter. Read the full essay. There’s also another YouTube video of protestors at Tahrir Square which includes a translation of sorts in the description.
I am indebted to a Facebook friend (who is @kitabet on Twitter, but otherwise currently blogless) for links to both the essay and the video, and I gather from the notes at YouTube that we owe the translation to Facebook, as well—not surprising given the site’s role in the uprising.
Video previously posted on Facebook, “Bravest Girl in Egypt”, translated into English. You can now read and understand the slogans of the demonstrators. Translated by Iyad El-Baghdadi, subbed by Ammara Alavi. A shout out to Dana Kagis from Vancouver who asked for a translation.
The Chimney Sweeper by William Blake
Blake in Turkish kinetic type animation! I think Alper Yildirim really captures the mood of Blake’s poems (see the Wikipedia for the complete text). In the notes on Vimeo, he explains:
This video is done for the typography course, when i was in the post-graduate program of Hacettepe University -i am not studying there now ,thanks to god-. I tried to make a mixage of using moving typographic elements with animation. The Chimney Sweeper is a poem of William Blake, and i used its first verse.
When my mother Died, I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue,
Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep,
So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.
Sounds (excerpt) by Roger Bonair-Agard
Carmen Kordas and Erika Harrsch, from the NYC-based collective VisionIntoArt, have envideoed a section of the Trinidadian poet’s reading to make a very compelling videopoem.
Advance screening of Korean film Poetry in NYC Feb. 9
The following press release from Poets House just came over the transom, and I thought it might be of interest to those in the New York City area. —Dave
Poets House is delighted to present an advance screening of the new, award-winning Korean film Poetry with an introduction and discussion by film critic Michael Atkinson. A reception to follow.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011, 6pm
Poets House, 10 River Terrace, at Murray Street
This event is FREE FOR POETS HOUSE MEMBERS. To renew your Poets House membership, click here. $10 for the general public.
RSVP by Friday, February 4, 2011 to rsvp@poetshouse.org or by phone 212-431-7920, ext. 2832. (Email strongly preferred.)
Advance praise for the film Poetry
“An extraordinary vision of human empathy.” – Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
“A life-size movie about loss and self-discovery.” – Wesley Morris, The Boston Globe
Acclaimed Korean director Lee Chang-dong (“a major figure in world cinema” – The New York Times) follows his award-winning Secret Sunshine with the story of another woman raising a child on her own.
Mija (an extraordinary performance by veteran actress Yun Jung-hee) is a proper, sixty-ish woman struggling to provide for her adolescent grandson. Faced with the discovery of a heinous family crime, she finds strength and purpose upon enrolling in a poetry class — a creative process that allows her to understand and escape her own pain.
Best Screenplay winner at the Cannes International Film Festival and an official selection at the New York, Toronto and Telluride Film Festivals, Poetry is a masterful study of the subtle empowerment of an indefatigable woman.
Poetry opens in New York City on February 11. Click here for the film’s official page.
MICHAEL ATKINSON is a former film critic for The Village Voice and has written for The Believer, Spin, Details, LA Weekly, The Boston Phoenix, The Stranger, Interview, and more. He is also the author of five books, and he lectures on film history and screenwriting at C.W. Post/Long Island University and New York University.
Rebels of This Timeless Town by Niki Andrikopoulou
Natasha Pantazopoulou and Gerry Domenikos (uncut productions) made the film for This Collection, where you can read the poem. According to the description on Vimeo, this is
A film and dance response to Niki Andrikopoulou’s poem about Edinburgh— The Athens of the North. The experimental interpretative dance with performer Vanessa Spinassa was filmed in the Ancient theatre of Ilida, Peloponnese.
Unlike most videos in the Dance category here, the filmmaking is as experimental as the dance, which gives this full videopoem status, I think.
In Earth Dreams by Daniela Elza
Interesting kinetic text animation by Daniela Elza’s husband Dethe, “programmed in NodeBox, final video produced using QuickTime and iMovie.” To me, this kind of fits in the “concrete poetry” category (though I admit that’s subjective, and I should probably just merge it into a kinetic text category).
