~ Video Library ~
3 Erasures at War by Matt Mullins
An author-made videopoem from earlier this year by Matt Mullins, who probably needs no introduction here. As someone who’s dabbled in erasure poetry myself, I was impressed by how well he handled that. There’s quite a lot of free footage of the 1934 New York World’s Fair at the Prelinger Archives, which I’m guessing might be what gave Matt the idea for the videopoem in the first place, but regardless, I think he made good use of it, taking a kinestatic approach for a pleasing contrast with the longer screen-times of the text elements. The soundtrack glues it all together, incorporating Hendrix’s rendition of the US national anthem from Woodstock.
Citizen Poetry by Lisa Robertson and Mike Hoolboom
The edited stream of ‘found’ moving images writes its own wordless poem in Mike Hoolboom‘s Citizen Poetry. Meticulous sound design brings another rich texture of poetry to this film. Text-on-screen offers reading of words without voice, the content adapted from Lisa Robertson’s collection of poetic-prose essays, Nilling.
There is a a difficulty in crediting Mike’s films for cataloguing purposes. For some years they have shown conscious effort to subvert authorship. Citizen Poetry’s final credit gives only a stark list of names, with Mike somewhere around the middle:
Samuel Boudier
Murasaki Encho
Jeanette Groenendaal
Mike Hoolboom
Lucia Martinez
Olivier Provily
Susanne Ohmann
Jean Perret
Liz Straitman
Leslie Supnet
Ana Taran
And yet this piece bears the indelible mark of his film-making style over the decades of a prolific and esteemed artistic life. There’s a breathtaking, dynamic and moving quality to the choice and editing of images from multiple sources, a subtle euphoria, dark and light, deftly woven through all elements of this film.
It could well be that the other names in the credits are artists who created the disparate fragments of ‘found’ media in Citizen Poetry. I wonder if Mike directly knows any of his listed collaborators or contributors. As a fellow maker of films that assemble ‘found’ media, I relate to indirect and virtual creative connections.
However Lisa Robertson is given her own solo credit as the source of Mike’s radically condensed text for the film. As its own piece of writing, Citizen Poetry could be loosely described as prose poetry. From the film’s synopsis:
This retake on belonging and boundaries imagines poetry as a capitalist salve.
The first half of the film sets context and describes mechanisms of how life is objectified in capitalism, people and all. The second half speaks beautifully about the ‘citizen poetry’ that brings hope and liberating connections below the radar.
Borders inspire crossings.
Poetry is the speech of citizenship. It keeps escaping and follows language towards an ear that could belong to anyone.
The final line – I won’t spoil it – brings inspired closure.
Vimeo shows the title of the film as Citizen Poet but I have chosen to adhere to Citizen Poetry, as it appears on the screen.
Moving Poems has before featured three other films from Mike Hoolboom.
six feet by Danielle Legros Georges
A poem by Danielle Legros Georges from the anthology Voices Amidst the Virus: Poets Respond to the Pandemic (Eilenn Cleary and Christine Jones, eds., Lily Poetry Review, 2012), adapted by Michigan State University-based filmmaker Pete Johnston for last year’s Filmetry festival.
Dream 1, 2 & 3 (video series) by Valerie LeBlanc & Daniel Dugas
A trilogy of videopoems by long-time collaborators Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel Dugas in Canada, the Dream series was realised as part of an artist residency at the historic Deering Estate in Miami, USA. From the synopsis for Dream 1:
In September 1925, on board the steamship SS City of Paris, en route back to the United States, James Deering suffered a heart attack and died. After the deaths of both James Deering and his brother Charles, their houses became museums bequeathed for public enjoyment.
In this fictional account of three imagined dreams, Charles Deering addresses the death of his younger brother James.
The synopsis for Dream 2:
Charles awakes from a premonitory dream in which many strangers visit their homes but neither he nor James lives there. The letter is almost a question to his brother about his health.
Each of the videos makes use of a split screen, bringing two different image streams into play with each other, and with repeated visual elements across the trilogy. The layered images are haunting and poetic in conveying the fictional dreams, an interesting concept. I find the mood across all three videos somehow reminiscent of La Jetée by Chris Marker.
Valerie LeBlanc narrates the imagined letters from Charles to his brother.
The Dream 3 synopsis:
Charles has a dream within a dream in which he is overcome by a great sadness. He is relieved that the visions dissipate in his waking reality.
Aside from this Dream trilogy, the artists’ time at The Deering Estate gave rise to a number of other videopoems, photographs, audioworks and installations. All together they make up a larger, overall residency project called Oasis. The artists’ wrote a journal of their experiences and creativity during the residency at the project website.
Back Up Quick, They’re Hippies by Lani O’Hanlon
Irish filmmaker Fiona Aryan‘s latest collaboration with poet Lani O’Hanlon, “an author, poet, dancer and somatic movement therapist living in South East Ireland near the sea,” as her website puts it. The poem first appeared in Poetry magazine in 2018.
The Firth by John Glenday
The Firth is the most recent piece from the renowned moving image and poetry project, Filmpoem, founded in 2010 by artist, editor and director, Alastair Cook. As with so much of the work from Filmpoem, The Firth is a moving and beautiful piece of work. The film-making team here also includes regular collaborators, Luca Nasciuti (composer) and James William Norton (cinematographer). All three are based in Edinburgh.
The film draws on two poems by Scottish writer John Glenday, who also voices them for the film. They are from his collection, The Firth (Mariscat Press, 2020). His comments on them:
salve regina is a rebirth poem, of course, but based on the story of my brother almost getting washed out to sea on a home made raft when he was about ten or twelve. The coastguard found his raft, with his clothes on it, in the middle of the estuary, and assumed he had drowned. It’s also a poem of escape from the family, in a way. Some part of him walked home naked, another part never went home again.
dune grass in january is a portrait of my mother, who appears and reappears in The Firth, and I suppose by extension, a portrait of that typical, restrained, self-sufficient Scottish personality. Troubled, but untroubling. Approachable but prickly at times.
Moving Poems has previously shared more than 50 films from Alastair Cook, a major figure in poetry film world-wide.
This is My Letter to the World by Emily Dickinson
This film by Shanghai-based director Luu Anh Laporte brings Dickinson’s famous words into the 21st century, hitting a bit differently in a hyper-modern context where isolation and alienation have become the norm.
Soy Tierra Desgajandome / I Am Soil Breaking Off by Paloma Sierra
A videopoem exploring Puerto Ricans immigrants’ feelings of belonging and alienation by Pittsburgh-based poet and director Paloma Sierra, animated by L.A. artist Andrew Edwards (click though to view storyboards from the animation). Grants from the City of Asylum and Carnegie Mellon University helped underwrite the production, including music by Dusty Sanders and audio engineering by Sebastian Gutierrez. The English translation in titling is the work of Abigail Salmon.
This is our second post of a Paloma Sierra video. Marie Craven shared Every Word I Say to You back on August 2.
Dear David by Elaine Equi and Joanna Fuhrman
Two of my favorite artists, poet Elaine Equi and composer Alban Berg, in one videopoem! This 2019 film directed by Joanna Fuhrman, who co-wrote the poem with Equi, has a wonderful, scrapbook-like feel thanks to collages by David Shapiro, the poet to whom the videopoem is dedicated, as Fuhrman explained in an essay at Fence. Here’s the conclusion:
In the era of #MeToo, when more and more women are sharing their horror stories of male mentors, I am increasingly grateful (and aware of how rare it is) to have found a male mentor who was always generous, respectful, loving and never inappropriate. I remember David complaining about the sexism of his generation and how often after dinner the male poets would sit in one room while the wives, some of whom were poets themselves, would go off to the kitchen to clean up. He would often ask if I thought a line of his was sexist or objectifying, and I felt comfortable enough to say if I did. He was always supportive of me as a poet and a person. We spent hours on the phone talking, because, as David said, “Gossip is a form of protection.” His friendship gave me permission to be a poet even when devoting my life to poetry felt like a completely crazy thing to do.
Elaine Equi is also a close friend of David’s, so we thought it would be meaningful to write a collaboration as a tribute to him and his most recent collection. David is well known for the beautiful collages he makes out of postcards and stickers. If you visit my Brooklyn apartment, you’ll see them all over the walls. For our poem, Elaine and I emailed each other photographs of the collages we owned and found other images of them online. We picked images we felt inspired by and wrote lines (or two or three) for each one. As we worked, we emailed lines to each other, and each riffed on what the other had written. We were inspired by David’s own poetry as much as by the images. At the end, I pieced the lines together of our poem “Dear David” and made a video out of it. I wanted to use a piece of music by the Viennese composer Alban Berg, because the title of David’s most recent book is a reference to the composer’s Violin Concerto. David would probably find it funny that I wanted to pay tribute to Berg, because I kept telling him that I liked his manuscript’s original title, Cardboard and Gold, better than the title he ultimately chose. David says Cardboard and Gold sounds “too New York School,” but as a devotee of the New York School and a music novice, I love it.
I was honored to be able to work with one of my other poetry heroes, Elaine Equi, on this project. I hope that our poem will be seen as a tribute to David’s work as a poet and collage artist, as well as a great person and friend.
