~ Video Library ~

What Leslie Meant to Say by Cindy St. Onge

A brief, author-made videopoem by Cindy St. Onge, responding to a voicemail which she’s included at the beginning of the video. This is the the sort of simple, straight-forward video remix that, to my mind, any working poet these days should learn how to make as a matter of course, because sometimes a poem needs to be more than just words on a page. As St. Onge noted on Vimeo:

The video, not the poem, is my response to the much-too-chipper voicemail notifying me that my best friend’s ashes are ready to retrieve. The title gave me the idea for the video, so I changed the first person confessional poem to second person, and achieved a bit of satisfaction.

Wake Up by Tolu Agbelusi

https://vimeo.com/138338473

A poetry-film collaboration between London-based Nigerian poet Tolu Agbelusi and director HKB FiNN of JustJazz Visuals. Somehow the poem’s story of an interpersonal cycle of abuse seems appropriate to the political moment.

Check out a couple of additional films on the Video & Audio section of Agbelusi’s website.

What is Love? by Lucy English

This latest addition to Lucy English’s Book of Hours poetry-film project was directed by Lori H. Ersolmaz, with English reading her poem in the soundtrack.

The Art of Poetry Film with Cheryl Gross: “It turns out”

It turns out
poem and film by Martha McCollough
2012

Martha McCollough is one of my absolute favorite artists. It turns out is another one of her pieces that is over the top.

She combines one voiceover that uses echo with another that is just plain-spoken. And she gives us two formats in one, the written work and spoken word. It’s as if they are two separate poems. Could it be one is imagined and the other based in reality? What is the message? We ask for help, but does it exist?

There’s a nice collage effect, interlacing texture with line animation and design. I love the voiceover. Images of a floor plan are juxtaposed with talk about no help from a help desk. I often feel that way. Are we to assume that we must venture on alone? Could she be talking about immigration? Electing Trump? Trying to escape from the horrors of war and reality? We are left to fend for ourselves, applying her words however we can to assist us on our journey. Have technology and the media impaired our senses and way of being? Or am I reading too deeply into what has been in front of us all along?

We see imagery of people running, wolves running towards them — a metaphor. There are so many questions to be asked in such uncertain times.

So how does one go about critiquing a work that is perfect in its imperfection? It turns out does seem somehow very fitting for the post-election funk we are feeling. Can we call it prophetic? Is this what people have been trying to say all along? It makes me wonder what is real and what has been manipulated to appear so.

Off the Trail: poetry by Michael McClure and Gary Snyder

This film, a selection from the longer experimental documentary Headlands Lookout by Jacob Cartwright and Nick Jordan, was awarded the prize for Best Poetry Film at this year’s ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival “For a pre-apocalyptic journey [with] a perfect guide in a stitched uniform into a world that’s going to unravel itself.” Here’s how Jordan describes it on his website:

Walk the path, sit the rains, grind the ink, wet the brush, unroll the broad white space….Lead out and tip the moist, black line.

Gary Snyder’s invocation to the muse of a Chinese scroll painter sets the tone in a short film adapted from Cartwright and Jordan’s longer work, Headlands Lookout.

Filmed in former US military barracks, and in the long-abandoned homes and circular library of Gary Snyder and Zen philosopher Alan Watts, Off the Trail follows a central protagonist, a soldier from another era, as he performs a series of actions and rituals. The uniformed figure paints Chinese nature symbols, chants, meditates and wanders dreamlike through a rolling Californian landscape of fog-shrouded hills, coastal defences and dense woodland valleys. Scenes are accompanied by haiku and poetry readings from Michael McClure and Gary Snyder, and the disembodied voice of Alan Watts, ruminating upon the passage of time and our perception of the ‘wild’.

As someone who studied Japanese and Chinese literature at university, there were parts of this that made me wince — the inept brush calligraphy, for example, and occasionally simplistic or misleading characterizations of Daoist and Buddhist thought — but I do recognize the historical importance of mid-20th-century writers such as Watts and Snyder in bringing East Asian thinking to a Western audience, however colored by Orientalism their versions of it may have been. And there’s no denying the beautiful cinematography and intriguing almost-narrative here, not to mention the innate fascination of the ruins where it was shot.

Orbit by Arturo Cubacub

A classic videopoem by Arturo Cubacub, this took First Prize in the 1987 Poetry Film Festival in San Francisco. Here’s the complete description from Vimeo:

Completed in 1986, “Orbit” is the seventh video of my “Unity Gain Series.”

Choreographed by Jan Heyn-Cubacub.
Danced by Jan Heyn-Cubacub, Denise McIntosh and Arturo Cubacub.
Direction, Poetry, Editing, Special Effects, Computer Animation and Music by Arturo Cubacub.

Description: Poetry, dance, computer animation and digital video effects are used to juxtapose constructive possibilities within our destructive tendencies. “The most important challenge of our time is to create on the same scale as we can destroy.” – Gene Youngblood, 2007.

“Orbit” has received the following awards:
First Prize, Festival International de Video Do Algarve/ 1988, Algarve, Portugal, November, 1988.
First Prize, The 12th Poetry Film Festival, San Francisco, December, 1987.
Honorable Mention, Performance/Stage Category, Dance on Camera Festival ‘87, New York, December, 1987.
Certificate of Merit, Suffolk County Film & Video Competition 1987, Suffolk County Motion Picture & TV Commission, New York, 1987.
Best Video Award, PSA-VMPD American International Video and Film Festival, August, 1987.
Best Experimental Film Award, PSA-VMPD American International Video and Film Festival, August, 1987.
VMPD Bronze Medal, PSA-VMPD American International Video and Film Festival, August, 1987.
Best of Fest Award, Art Category, 1987 Columbus Video Festival, Ohio, July, 1987.
Certificate of Merit, Festival of Illinois Film and Video Artists, May, 1987.
Second Place, Athens International Video Festival, March, 1987.
Certificate of Merit, The Chicago International Film Festival, October, 1986.
Regional Fellowship Award, The National Endowment for the Arts, March, 1984 (project funding).
Artists Grant Award, The Illinois Arts Council, Illinois, March, 1984 (project funding).

На заре – наимедленнейшая кровь / At dawn – quiet blood by Marina Tsvetaeva

A poem by the great Marina Tsvetaeva in a film directed by Natalia Alfutova. Be sure to click the CC icon for the English translation by Tony Brinkey. Anastasia Somova (Anastasia Somique) and Artem Tkachenko are the actors, Valeria Ordinartseva co-wrote the script with Alfutova, and Mikael Hamzyan was the cameraman.

The President’s Address by Ivan Stanev

Ivan Stanev‘s Totleben TV project presents “news from yesterday,” but this is avant-garde remix videopoetry at its most relevant. The latest episode features fragments of footage of Mussolini, and it seemed appropriate for this day after the US election, for some reason.

Here’s the complete description of this video from the website:

Livestream from Todessa

Camera: Tman
Cast: Totleb & Co.
Editor: Todito
Soundmix: Todonsky Junior
Directed by: T.L.

©Ivan Stanev. All Rights Reserved

Acknowledgements
archive.org; freesound.org; Benito Mussolini

There’s an equally facetious About page. According to a Google translation of a German-language biography, Ivan Stanev was

Born in 1959 in Varna (Bulgaria). Author. Director. Stanev grew up bilingual, attending a German boarding school. He has been writing poetry, prose, plays and aesthetic treatises since his childhood, which could never be published in Bulgaria. From 1978 to 1980 he was in military service, then studied directing at the Academy of Drama, Directing and Theater Science in Sofia, at the same time studying philosophy.

Bun Stop by Paul Summers

https://vimeo.com/189766748

This oddly compelling film from photographer Dan Douglas, poet Paul Summers, and composer Roma Yagnik “sets out to discover beauty in even the darkest parts of Newcastle upon Tyne,” according the Vimeo description. So many online poetry videos deploy slowly moving still images — the “Ken Burns effect” — but this does the exact opposite, using a stationary camera to frame beautifully composed shots through which people, cars, and pigeons move, an approach which seems to mirror the score’s minimalism and Summers’ poetic strategy: an understated yet expressive recitation of a praise-poem full of interesting juxtapositions and word music.

Douglas posted the video to his website, where it has attracted some revealing comments from Newcastle residents and natives. He notes that

we hope [Bun Stop] is the first of a few short poetry films about the North East. We want to work with other local composers and actors, the overall project will be called Confluence.

Chamada Geral / Calling All by Mário-Henrique Leiria

“Calling all! A man walks free,” reads the description at ZEBRA, where this film by Manuel Vilarinho of a poem by Mário-Henrique Leiria was awarded Special Mention in the Prize for the Best Film for Tolerance. The ZEBRA website also has a short bio for Manuel Vilarinho:

Born in Portugal, 1974. Graduated in Tecnologia da Comunicação Audiovisual by IPP, Instituto Politécnico do Porto in 2004. He won several awards at video film festivals and currently works on TVI, Independent Television in Portugal.

The English Wikipedia entry for the poet is similarly brief:

Mário-Henrique Leiria (1923–1980) was a Portuguese surrealist poet. Born in Lisbon, he studied at the Escola de Belas Artes. He and his fellow surrealists were involved in an absurdist plot to overthrow the dictatorship of Antonio Salazar. He is best known for his books Contos do Gin-Tonic (Gin and Tonic Tales, 1973) and Novos Contos do Gin (More Gin Tales, 1974). He died in 1980.

Music is Made Out of Smoke by Tanya Shirley

Iranian-British filmmaker Roxana Vilk with a poem by Jamaican poet Tanya Shirley. It’s described on the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival website as a “tribute to Jamaican reggae artist Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and an elegy to the sultry fields of the American South.” The Vimeo description notes that it was “Commissioned for Commonwealth Games 2014 by Scottish Poetry Library, British Council and Creative Scotland and executive produced by Scottish Poetry Library & United Creations Collective.” According to Vilk’s website, it was one of eight short films she directed and produced for her Composing the Commonwealth series in 2014 featuring four different poets, the camera work of Ian Dodds, sound and music by Peter Vilk, and editing by Ling Lee and Maryam Ghorbankarimi. Go watch.

Vögel auf Stromleitungen / Birds on Wires by Dean Ruddock

A nearly perfect author-made filmpoem by Dean Ruddock. (After hitting Play, be sure to click the CC icon for English subtitles.) Vögel auf Stromleitungen took the audience prize in the NRW (Nordrhein-Westphalia) competition at ZEBRA. The description on its page at the ZEBRA website reads:

Our understanding of the world seem to disintegrate, making us lose our minds. Is this sudden incomprehension normal, or have our senses decided to dismiss an alien entity, which has just landed on earth, as a trick of the eye?