Posts By Dave Bonta
Video-hosting news
YouTube has added a vuvuzela button to all its videos. As a fan of noise rock and dissonant avant-garde classical, I’m cheered by this decision to embrace the sonic chaos of the 2010 World Cup. Sadly, however, this option is not included on embeds, so Moving Poems visitors will have to click through to YouTube itself to hear Sylvia Plath or Linh Dinh accompanied by the drone of a cheap plastic horn.
In other video-blogging news from the Blog Herald, the folks at Blogger have dramatically improved their free video-hosting system, but they still don’t allow embedding. Given that Blogger also doesn’t have an export tool that allows people to take their files with them, people who upload videos to Blogger at this point are basically consigning their uploads to a Blogger lockbox.
SEE THE VOICE: Visible Verse Call for Entries
Heather Haley sent along this press release:
SEE THE VOICE – Visible Verse 10th Anniversary Celebration & Festival Call for Entries and Official Guidelines
Please send in your videopoem by Sept. 1, 2010.
- Visible Verse seeks videopoems, with a 15 minutes maximum duration.
- Either official language of Canada is acceptable, though if the video is in French, an English-dubbed or -subtitled version is required for consideration. Videos may originate in any part of the world.
- Works will be judged by their innovation, cohesion and literary merit. The ideal videopoem is a wedding of word and image, the voice seen as well as heard.
- Please, do not send documentaries as they are outside the featured genre.
- Videopoem producers should provide a brief bio, full name, and contact information in a cover letter. There is no official application form nor entry fee.
Send, at your own risk, videopoems and poetry films/preview copies (which cannot be returned) in DVD NTSC format to: VISIBLE VERSE c/o Pacific Cinémathèque, 200-1131 Howe Street, Vancouver, BC, V6Z 2L7, Canada. Selected artists will be notified and receive a standard screening fee.
For more information, see below, or contact Heather Haley at: hshaley@emspace.com
In 1999 the Vancouver Videopoem Festival, the first of its kind in Canada, began as an effort of the Edgewise ElectroLit Centre, a non-profit literary arts organization dedicated to expanding the reach of poetry through new media with programs such as Telepoetics Vancouver and the Edgewise Café electronic magazine. The VVF became critically regarded owing to its progressive regard for spoken word in cinema, presenting poets both in performance and on the big screen. The audience could explore the merits and distinctions of poetry rendered in these two forms, stage and screen, sparking new dialogue as to the essential nature of poetry. The festival then built upon that foundation, with widened explorations into poetry cinema across national frontiers. They presented significant new works from Europe and the Americas, and continued to offer Canadian audiences a remarkably broad selection of new videopoems from their own country.
Pacific Cinémathèque has been the VVF’s partner since 2000 and throughout the dissolution of the Edgewise. Founder Heather Haley continues to provide a sustaining venue for the presentation of new and artistically significant videopoetry as host and curator of SEE THE VOICE: Visible Verse. And owing to Vancouver’s strength in the film and television production industries, Haley has been able to cultivate critical interest between filmmakers and poets, with positive consequences for both.
To celebrate entering their second decade of showcasing videopoetry, Haley and the Pacific Cinémathèque are presenting two screenings this year as well as poetry performances, a panel discussion and an awards gala, Friday Nov. 19 and Saturday Nov. 20.
“I reason, Earth is short” by Emily Dickinson
Another animation by Francesca Talenti. You can watch dozens, maybe hundreds of Emily Dickinson videos on YouTube and not find anything so free of cliché as this.
I reason, Earth is short—
And Anguish—absolute—
And many hurt,
But, what of that?I reason, we could die—
The best Vitality
Cannot excel Decay,
But, what of that?I reason, that in Heaven—
Somehow, it will be even—
Some new Equation, given—
But, what of that?
Listen and Before the Flood by W. S. Merwin
This is one section of a production by the San Francisco-based Deborah Slater Dance Theatre called Men Think They Are Better Than Grass, based on poems by W. S. Merwin. (I’ll post other excerpts in the coming weeks.) Here’s the description from Vimeo:
This section features the entire company followed by a duet featuring Kerry Mehling and Kelly Kemp. The poems are LISTEN read by Arwen Anderson and BEFORE THE FLOOD read by Peter Coyote, both written by W.S. Merwin. The music is by Carla Kihlstedt and Matthias Bossi, video by Elaine Buckholtz, lights by Allen Willner, set by Mikiko Uesugi and costumes by Laura Hazlett.
Adrift by Juliet Wilson
It’s not often I get to see a new videopoem for the work of a poet whose blog I’ve been reading for years. This is a poem from Juliet Wilson’s debut collection, Unthinkable Skies, from the Scottish Calder Wood Press. The film is by the indefatigible Alastair Cook, who adds that this is the “the first of a series of films with Juliet, which will be premiered at my upcoming solo show at the Drill Hall in Leith on 29th July this year: outoftheblue.org.uk“
Father’s Day videopoem by Chris Eyre and Dick Lourie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QutfN2wb1wc
I don’t tend to post things to the main site which were uploaded by someone other than the copyright holder, but I don’t mind sharing this here. It’s making the rounds on Facebook today, and it’s been viewed 84,515 times, which makes it one of the most popular videopoems on YouTube. It’s a clip from the end of the movie Smoke Signals, directed by Chris Eyre. Sherman Alexie wrote the novel and screenplay, but the poem voiced here is by Dick Lourie, according to the YouTube notes. A little web searching turned up the text of the poem, which is titled Forgiving our Fathers.
I just updated this site (along with the main Moving Poems site) to WordPress 3.0. As soon as I did so, a new update of this theme became available, so I updated to that as well. Let me know if you notice anything funny.
Puritan Black by Kate Ruse
According to J. P. Dougan’s description on Vimeo, this is one of a series of poems entitled “Poetry of Colours” by English writer Kate Ruse. “It is concerned with the use of campeachy wood in the production of black during the 18th Century.”
A Poem for A, by Harold Pinter
I like the silent-movie style of interrupting the action with text. I wonder why more videopoems don’t adopt this style?
This is the work of independent filmmaker Justin Anderson, and is dedicated to Roksanda Ilincic. The Vimeo page contains complete credits as well as the following artist’s statement:
This film takes its structure from a short love poem by Harold Pinter written in 1974 about Lady Antonia Fraser his then lover and subsequent wife. She is and was the ‘Light of his Life’. In making this film I was trying evoke some of the feeling of the mid-seventies YSL, a beautiful girl with a rich dark skin wearing a dress that seems to emit light, she is hit by cracks of sunlight. This a very formal film about colour, form and minimal movement. Roksanda Ilincic is designer I greatly admire; her work is very sculptural, feminine and has a real filmic quality.
Paraguas (Umbrella) by Alfredo Boni de la Vega
A jazzy illustration by Barcelona-based L’esstudi of a haiku by Mexican writer Alfredo Boni de la Vega (1914-1965). I like the video better than the poem itself, which strikes me as being too metaphor-laden to qualify as a real haiku:
Flower of sadness
that opens when tears start falling
from the sky.
Sometimes a Man, by Rainer Maria Rilke
The joint reading by Zach and Larry Grossberg is especially charming here, but the animation by Francesca Talenti is nice, too. The translation is by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy.
