Posts By Dave Bonta
-ed by Mairi Sharratt
Scottish artist and filmmaker Alastair Cook’s latest filmpoem (and in my opinion his best to date). Here’s what he says about it at Vimeo:
-ed is my film of a poem by Mairi Sharratt, from her as yet unpublished (nudge) collection This is a Poem. You can read more of Mairi’s work on her excellent blog, alumpinthethroat.wordpress.com.
It took a long time for me to begin this filmpoem for two reasons: I have been busy with this summer’s solo film and photography show as part of the Edinburgh Festival; also the poem is dark and yet meditative, lifting to a powerful crescendo and as a result I felt that I needed to introduce a figurative element. So I ruminated…
Mairi says in a blog post that the film will be screened at Edingbugh’s Hidden Door Festival, which runs from October 22-24.
Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) by Eileen Myles
The reading is evidently an excerpt from Myles’ new book. Update: this is not from Inferno, but a more recent piece (see comments). It takes a little while to get going, but stick with it: the hand-drawn, typographic animation on a green screen behind the reading is unique. It’s the work of Scott Gelber for Teleportal Readings, which includes some additional information:
This is the first of nine videos we shot in collaboration with Rattapallax at the Bowery Poetry Club this summer. That’s BPC founder Bob Holman you hear in the background during the beginning, before he gets whatevered by Eileen. We filmed with a green screen and Scott Gelber added animation after the fact (we’ve yet to perfect the magic of manifesting amazing, hand-drawn typefaces live, but believe us when we say we’re working on it). Eileen’s newest book, Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) is available from OR Books.
And here then is an excerpt from Inferno (via EileenMyles.com).
http://vimeo.com/14155318
Finally, here’s a book trailer for Inferno.
The Watcher of Vowels by Robert Bly
One of the new batch of films from MotionPoems, read by Todd Boss and designed and animated by Matt Van Ekeren. If you can get to Minneapolis this Friday, October 8, it will be part of a screening of new motionpoems.
The Neighbour Procedure by Rachel Zolf
The title poem of Rachel Zolf’s new book from Coach House Books, “a virtuoso polyvocal correspondence with the daily news, ancient scripture and contemporary theory that puts the ongoing conflict in Israel/Palestine firmly in the crosshairs.” Poetry blogger Joshua Corey calls it “A work of radical and rigorous empathy for Jew & Arab.”
I like the cut-up approach to a live-reading video here. Poet Laura Mullen is the filmmaker. For more on Rachel Zolf, see her author page at the Electronic Poetry Center.
On Poetry
http://www.vimeo.com/15430101
Film student Sebastian Lasaosa Rogers found a great visual metaphor for the pressure to write.
Zucchini by Major Jackson
Animator Allison Alexander Westbrook IV says in the notes at YouTube,
This is a commissioned animation I did for the poet Major Jackson. It was created by using a combination of Adobe photoshop and after effects. It first debuted at the exhibition titled “More Than Bilingual: Major Jackson & William Cordova.” at the Fleming Museum located on the campus of the University of Vermont on January 27th, 2009.
Three Hundred Tang Poems: “water” fragments
Another video of an interactive video-art installation involving poetry. The artist is Yan Da (see also his Vimeo profile), and the piece is titled Water Poem. To say this is high-concept would be a bit of an understatement. Here’s how Yan describes it:
Water Poem is an interactive video installation. The audiences are encouraged to interact with the projector by simply moving it and project wherever they want. The projected content is texts coming from English website of 300 most famous ancient Chinese poems from Tang dynasty. Water Poem will search any sentence that contains the word “water” and randomly display each sentence based on a pre-designed condition. If the projector is not moved, the text will change in a random interval from 30 to 45 seconds, if it is moved, based on the strength of the motion, when it reach a certain threshold, the text will change immediately. The visual of the text is in a constant fluid status, the more motion applied to the projector, the more fluid the text will appear until it totally become illegible. Once the motion become subtle, the text will gradually turn back into a relatively stable mode that makes itself legible again.
Water Poem tries to express a sense of dislocation. By this dislocation of space, time and meaning, Water Poem tends to reflect the artist’s current experience and feelings, a dislocation of life in a foreign country with different culture and way of understanding. By inviting the audience to control and to transform the text in space, time and meaning, Water Poem also hopes to dislocate the audience into their own floating memory and imagination.
The poetic meaning related to water that the text reflects and the fluidity of the visual are embodied into the space, transforming its concrete character of the space into a constant flux, a liquid skin. Meanwhile, the difference between the meaning of English translation and the original Chinese text, the fragmented phrases from randomly chosen poem all contributes to the dislocation of the meaning, making it ambiguous and fluctuating. Water Poem encourage the audience to control the projection of the text thus to embody the literal and visual content onto anything they want, the de-construction of the meaning might be enhanced. By encountering the thousand years old content of the poem to the modern technology of Internet is another way of dislocating the time.
Read the rest of the description on Vimeo to learn about the technical aspects of the installation.
Three Hundred Tang Poems (Tang Shi San Bai Shou) is one of the most famous and widely read of all Chinese poetry anthologies. See the Classical Chinese Poetry website for English translations of all 300 poems by Innes Herdan, or the Wengu website for translations by Witter Bynner and the Chinese texts supplemented with character-by-character definitions on mouseover that allow one to attempt one’s own translations.
Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll
Not a video poem, but a video of an interactive digital installation, a piece called Dinner Party, which involves the animated text of “Jabberwocky.” Artist Hye Yeon Nam explains,
Dinner party provides a space where people meet and interact with Lewis Carroll’s poem, Jabberwocky, inspired creatures hiding in the shadows.
At first glance, the single chair and place set for one, seemingly provides a solitary dinner; rather the interaction offers a communication between oneself and the imaginary creatures. Initially gathered under the shadow cast by the plate, disturbed creatures will nervously scatter attempting to go around any other shadow cast on the table. A period of quiet status will encourage the creatures to reveal themselves.
Zach Lieberman and Jeremy Rotsztain are listed as collaborators. I’m not sure who created the video itself, but I’ll credit Hye Yeon Nam in the filmmaker category, since I don’t have a separate taxonomy for video artists here.
The Briefcase Phenomenon by Libby Hart
Directed by Siena Stone and Jalen Lyle-Holmes, this is one of the 2010 finalists from the Poetry in Film Festival held in Melbourne, in which all contestants were challenged to make a 4- to 7-minute film based on the same poem by Australian poet Libby Hart. (See Vimeo for the full list of credits.)
No sooner had I posted about the festival at the Moving Poems forum than this video pops up on Vimeo. Here’s hoping some of the the other finalists appear, as well.
New Poetry in Film Festival debuts in Melbourne
Last Sunday I happened on the website of the Poetry in Film Festival — as it happened, the very day the festival was to be held. It sounds really neat. The unique thing about it was that all contestants were given the very same poem to interpret: “The Briefcase Phenomenon,” by Libby Hart. Films had to be between 4 minutes and 7 minutes in length, and could be in “any genre including drama, comedy, horror, sci-fi, documentary, music video, animation or experimental. Words from the poem can be used within the film but this is not a requirement.” (See the complete rules.) Judging by the brief descriptions, the finalists seem quite different from one another.
With sponsorship from the Australian Poetry Centre, ABC Radio National, and a major Australian movie theater chain, this hardly sounds like a fringe event. However, a Google news search turns up no coverage of it whatsoever. I hope it was a success.
