Posts By Dave Bonta
Call for submissions: Filmpoem Festival 2017 at Depot, Lewes
Filmpoem, the artists’ moving image project founded by British artist Alastair Cook in 2010, is at long last sponsoring another poetry-film festival and competition, this time partnering with Depot in Lewes, East Sussex and the UK’s Poetry Society. Submissions are open through September 8th, and the festival will be held on Saturday, October 28th.
Note that the rules are a bit stricter than for most poetry-film festivals: submission is by physical artifact (USB stick or DVD) only, and explicit permission, rather than simply the blanket permission granted by a Creative Commons licence, must be obtained for all copyrighted material such as music used in the film. UPDATE: Digital submissions and CC licences are now permitted. See the complete guidelines on the Filmpoem website.
While you’re there, be sure to read the essay on the About page, which appears to have been recently augmented with new material, for a better understanding of what Alastair means by filmpoetry.
Bloodshot Cartography by Sarah Sloat
The latest in an occasional series of Moving Poems productions matches Sarah Sloat‘s evocation of travel in the tropics to a beautifully decayed old home movie in a sort of lazy person’s homage to Stan Brakhage. The soundtrack is courtesy of the bird-sound library xeno-canto, from recordist Rodrigo Dela Rosa in the Atlantic rainforest of Brazil. The footage has been lightly edited from a single movie at the International Institute for the Conservation, Archiving and Distribution of Other People’s Memories (IICADOM).
Since one of my main motivations in producing videopoems like this, apart from simply having fun, is to demonstrate to other poets just how easy it is, let me give a few more detailed process notes. The whole idea was prompted by viewing the footage (which was silent, like most old home movies, and therefore I think easier to imagine juxtaposed with poetry). I thought it might be interesting to pair it with a text that dealt with decay and/or travel somehow, and after messing around with some Elizabeth Bishop recordings — “Sleeping on the Ceiling” was one strong possibility — I remembered that Sarah Sloat had written something that might work.
I’m in London for the summer and my copies of Sarah’s chapbooks are back home in Pennsylvania, but a web search turned up the likely poem title (from Heiress to a Small Ruin), and since I’d worked with her before, it was simply a matter of emailing to ask for a copy (and of course permission to mess around with it). I experimented with a news ticker-like scroll of the text along the bottom of the screen, and shared that with Sarah via a private upload to Vimeo, but she felt that it was too distracting for a viewer to concentrate simultaneously on the text and the rapidly changing images, and offered to supply a voiceover instead.
I asked Sarah for three readings so I could pick and choose the best bits to combine with the rainforest soundscape (editing as always on Audacity, which is excellent, free, and easy to use). Then it was simply a matter of cutting and splicing the footage to fit. (I use MAGIX Movie Edit Pro, which is a cheaper and somewhat more sophisticated alternative to novice-friendly software such as Adobe Premiere Elements. Its widespread adoption means that most questions one might have about its use are addressed in tutorials on YouTube.) The biggest change I made was to apply a warm filter to most of the footage — all but the “northeast” portion of the poem, which retains the original, cooler look — for that “bloodshot” effect. That might seem like an essential edit, but in fact it was the last thing I thought of, and the video worked almost as well without it. It’s always tricky to decide how much literalism to allow in a videopoem, but given the abstract nature of most of the images, I figured I could get away with some pink, blood-vessel-like webbing here and there.
Przesłanie Pana Cogito / Last Message from Mr Cogito by Zbigniew Herbert
A 2010 film by Canadian director Anna Woch using a poem and reading by the great Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert. The YouTube description notes that it was awarded “Best experimental video at the Black and White Audiovisual Festival in Porto. Also projected at the Miden Film Festival in Kalamata and Obraz + Idea Festival in Brodnica.” The soundtrack includes original music by the Wintership Quartet.
Also translated as “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito,” the poem was the first to feature Herbert’s character Mr. Cogito, who supplied the title for a 1974 volume of poetry and appeared in four successive volumes through 1998.
Initially Mr. Cogito was an Everyman, a universal element of humanity sharing his opinions on various aspects of life and existence. However, the more he says, the more disembodied he appears, and becomes transformed into an ethical symbol and a metaphor of the tough choices we have to make between good and evil.
The character’s name originates from Descartes’ famous phrase, “Cogito ergo sum.”
(Hat-tip: The Film & Video Poetry Society)
The Leash by Ada Limón
After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear,
the frantic automatic weapons unleashed,
the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands,
that brute sky opening in a slate metal maw
that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what’s
left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned
orange and acidic by a coal mine….
Ada Limón‘s searing poem was animated by Rachel Visser using “After Effects, paper, paint, sand, clay, yarn, other found objects” and the poet’s own recitation.
Visser has also animated a poem by Czesław Miłosz.
Dear Alison by Helen Mort
Chris Prescott of Dark Sky Media (“specialists in adventure film production”) directed this short, documentary-style poetry film featuring Helen Mort as poet and climber. The Vimeo description:
‘Dear Alison’ is a poem featured in the anthology No Map Could Show Them by critically acclaimed poet Helen Mort – a collection of poems centring on women making their mark and forging their own paths throughout history, both in the wilderness and in modern urban life. ‘Dear Alison’ is a personal tribute written by Helen to the late British mountaineer Alison Hargreaves – a mother, a wife and a talented climber who faced criticism due to her risk taking and her decision to continue climbing as a young mother, before her untimely death on K2 in 1995. The short film Dear Alison by Dark Sky Media and UKClimbing.com is a visual recreation of Helen’s words with imagery and sounds which evoke the poet’s emotional connection to Alison.
The film is currently featured on the front page of Liberated Words, where the accompanying, unsigned essay calls Dear Alison “a metanarrative on the process of writing: of the struggle of putting one word after another; of literally conceiving poetry, line by line.”
With the topic of non-metaphorical poetry films still echoing in our minds we also might consider this particular work as riven with metaphorical seams (rock metaphors to discuss metaphor notwithstanding). Throughout ‘Dear Alison’ close-up shots of Helen’s hand writing the poem punctuate the film and at the end she draws a firm but balanced line under the last word. We might think of this as jointly associative for both climber and poet: the metaphorical horizontal evocation of the joyous release from the vertical ropes and carabiners that stop a climber’s fall; or equally, the poet’s release from language, deliberately letting the line go; the summit having been reached. However, the analogy between mountaineering and writing ends there: the poet displays their roped words, carabinered like woven lace; the mountaineer hauls in their rope erasing all traces of the climb.
Poem on Prayer by Tolu Agbelusi
I see a lot of religious poetry videos on Vimeo and YouTube, and most of them, it has to be said, are pretty godawful. Not this one! Filmmaker Toby Lewis Thomas and poet Tolu Agbelusi really raise the bar for poetry films of Christian witness in this video uploaded a week ago by the London Diocese, who note:
On 3 June, we hosted a beacon event at St Paul’s Cathedral as part of the global wave of prayer “Thy Kingdom Come”. Tolu Agbelusi, a Nigerian British poet, playwright, facilitator and lawyer, wrote a poem on prayer commissioned specially for the event.
Tolu worships at St Luke’s Kentish Town and her father is Vicar at Christ Church, Crouch End.
The film was made in London by Toby Lewis-Thomas who is part of St John at Hackney church, with the support of Christian Vision.
The British election through poetry (and music) videos
From time to time, it’s worth looking at major contemporary events through the window of poetry videos, to get a sense of the extent to which videopoetry and poetry film are taking part in the general zeitgeist. The just-concluded general election in the UK is a case in point. Commentators from all sides of the political spectrum are saying that the unexpected, unprecedented surge in support for Labour and Jeremy Corbyn may mark the beginning of the end of print media’s traditionally out-sized influence on British politics: all the tabloids came out strongly against Labour, but the youth don’t read the tabloids, and it was their turn-out on election day which appears to have tipped the balance. Where do they get their news? From YouTube and social media, apparently. Pro-Labour and anti-Conservative memes were rife on Facebook, including this Theresa May mashup from the inimitable Cassetteboy:
One of the last Labour ads released before the election features Corbyn reciting Shelley’s memorable lines from “The Masque of Anarchy” (Stanza XXXVIII):
At The Guardian today, Manchester-based spoken word poet Tony Walsh, A.K.A. Longfella, “performs his poem Net Worked about the young people who voted in the 2017 General Election on Friday”:
If the embed doesn’t work, watch it on their website.
The Guardian also posted a poem by the poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, in response to Theresa May’s disastrous campaign, though sadly it’s only available as text. For those who don’t understand the reference in the last line, once again here’s a videopoetic YouTube remix to get you up to speed:
That video by “Musician, Electronic Music Producer & DJ from Liverpool” Keeley Ray has been viewed 37,739 times — respectable, but nothing like the nearly 3 million views logged by Captain SKA‘s general-election remix of their song “Liar Liar,” which was downloaded 40,000 times and made it to No. 4 in the UK charts in the weeks leading up to the election despite a complete embargo by radio stations. This may not be a poetry video per se, but it’s a good reminder of the power of sung, chanted and spoken words to goad people into action — especially when yoked to visual images:
Perhaps if the song had been allowed on mainstream UK radio, the political punditocracy might not have been caught so completely off-guard by the election results.
Encontrada by Erica Goss
A new videopoem from Erica Goss, who notes on Vimeo:
This is the second video from my poetry collection titled Night Court. I filmed the whole thing at Villa Montalvo, a center for the arts in Saratoga, California, in May 2017. I spent about two weeks, on and off, editing it. “Encontrada” means “found” in Spanish.
The music is by Podington Bear; everything else is Goss’s work. See also her video for the book’s title poem, “Night Court.”
