~ Videopoems ~
Videopoetry, filmpoetry, cinepoetry, poetry-film… the label doesn’t matter. What matters is that text and images enter into dialogue, creating a new, poetic whole.
The 2nd annual International Film Poetry Festival will take place in Athens in November 2013
The +Institute [for Experimental Arts] and Void Network organize the International Film Poetry Festival that will take place in Athens in November 2013.
The yearly International Film Poetry Festival will be held for a second time in Greece. Approximately 1000 people attended the festival in 2012.
There will be two different zones of the festival. The first zone will include video poetry shows by artists from all over the world (America, Asia, Europe, Africa). The second zone will include cross-platform collaborations of sound producers and music groups with poets and visual artists in live improvisations.
It is very important to notice that this festival is a part of the counter-culture activities of Void Network and +the Institute [for Experimental Arts] and will be non-sponsored, free entrance, non-commercial and non-profit event. The festival will cover the costs (2000 posters, 15.000 flyers, high quality technical equipment, etc.) from the incomes of the bar of the festival.
All the participating artists and the organizing groups will participate voluntary to the festival.
We would like to inform you that The International Film Poetry Festival is under negotiations for the production of the festival and the presentation of the same video poetry programme in other countries, among them in India, in Switzerland, in Brasil and in U.S.A. After the end of the negotiations, the participators will be informed for several other international presentations.
Void Network started organizing multi-media poetry nights in 1990. Void Network and +the Institute [for Experimental Arts] believe that multi media Poetry Nights and Video Poetry shows can vibrate the heart of Metropolis, bring new audiences in contact with contemporary poetry and open new creative dimensions for this ancient art. To achieve this, we respect the aspirations and the objectives of the artists, create high quality self organized exhibition areas and show rooms, we work with professional technicians and we offer to the artists and the people meeting points that can stand antagonistically to the mainstream culture.
See photos of the International Film Poetry Festival 2012.
You can look here for some photos of previous poetry nights organized by Void Network and +the Institute [for Experimental Arts]:
voidnetwork.blogspot.gr/2007/12/void-history-words-environment.html
voidnetwork.blogspot.gr/2011/06/insurrectionary-poetry-poetry-night-in.html
voidnetwork.blogspot.gr/2007/12/words-environments-multi-media-poetry.html
For more photos from Void Network art, events and actions: flickr.com/photos/voidnetwork
We look forward to your participation. For more info in Greek and English language, and an APPLICATION FORM, visit: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8wa5RElmHB8Z0VZblE0NXlMSTQ/edit?usp=sharing
La Casina Rossa / The Red House by Michaël Vandebril
A film by Dutch photographer and filmmaker Judith Dekker with words by Belgian poet Michaël Vandebril. The English translation for this version of the film is by Will Stone; there’s also a version without any text in the soundtrack at all, which Vandebril uses for live performances. The poem appears in his book Het Vertrek van Maeterlinck.
This was Dekker’s very first filmpoem, and it won the 2013 Filmpoem Festival Prize in Dunbar, Scotland.
Casina Rossa is the name of the house in Rome where John Keats died.
The Pioneer Wife Speaks in Tongues by Donna Vorreyer
Swoon‘s latest film features Donna Vorreyer reading a poem from her new collection The Imagined Life of the Pioneer Wife. The footage is from a public-domain documentary. As Swoon says in a blog post:
Sometimes I collect images, keep them with me until the right poem comes along.
The same with certain tracks I create.
‘And So They Live’ (John Ferno, Julian Roffman, 1940) is a piece of archive showing poorly educated “mountain peoples” living in poverty and stricken with disease, it’s a public-domain documentary about life in the Appalachian mountains with some great looking shots but a typical and very patronizing narration.
I used some parts before more than a year ago in ‘Odds and Ends’. The images stayed on my ‘shelf’ since then…In came Donna Vorreyer. We worked together before and I think she’s a very fine poet.
Donna has got a new collection out: ‘The Imagined Life of the Pioneer Wife’ (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2013)
Almost every poem in that collection could have been used for this videopoem. Not because they’re all the same. Because they’re all so good![…]
There was one sequence in the film I really loved. Can’t explain why, but the feet in the snow worked on a whole other level. When I placed that sequence on the basis, the rest came naturally.
Roadtrip by Joshua Stewart
http://vimeo.com/67852968
A Vimeo find. The description reads:
Poem by Joshua Stewart.
Video by Fraser Jones.
Scenic views by The United States of America.
Sometimes by Tony Walsh/Longfella
http://vimeo.com/37075020
David Wharton directed this film for a poem by UK performance poet Tony Walsh, A.K.A. Longfella. Videopoetry critic Erica Goss writes,
Actor James Foster delivers an emotional punch you won’t forget: This is one of the few video poems I’ve seen that features the talents of a professional actor, and the results are striking. Foster tells the story of the devastation of divorce with his facial expressions and body language, increasing the tension with repetitions of the word, “Sometimes:” “When I’m eating it cold from a tin in the kitchen / and sometimes, when I’ve stood in a line to collect my prescription.” Watching him break apart is at once humbling and terrifying.
from the Travelogue of Weather-Beaten Bones by Matsuo Basho
http://vimeo.com/67875626
This is Basho by Babak Gray, starring Yoshi Oida and Dai Tabuchi, with haiga-style illustrations by Graham High (who also, believe it or not, built the animatronics for Aliens). It’s actually one of the first things I ever posted to this site, but the original upload was taken down, so I unpublished the post. Let’s hope the film stays online this time.
The English translation of the travelogue and haiku included in the film is mostly from Sam Hamill. Here’s the description at Vimeo (minus the credits):
The legacy of Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), famous Japanese poet, is his elevation of haiku to the realm of high poetry. This film, an adaptation of Basho’s ‘Travelogue of Weather-Beaten Bones’, reveals a glimpse into an account of one of Basho’s journeys in the company of confidante and disciple, Chiri.
An interview with director, Babak Gray is available here.
My favorite quote from that interview:
It’s the lightness and ease with which [Basho] treated a subject which we would imagine could only be treated by recourse to tragedy, or something altogether darker and heavier than the language of haiku. That’s what I find so striking—and ultimately so brave. It produces an effect which is at once beautiful, noble and serene. At times more than that, the effect seems deliberately, teasingly ironic, or provocative at least, something like a koan.
That’s the effect I wanted to reproduce in this film.
But do read the whole interview. Fascinating stuff.
Nozarashi Kikô, also translated as Record of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton, was published in 1684, the first of four haibun travelogues Basho wrote (the most famous being Oku no Hosomichi — The Narrow Road to the Far North). As the Wikipedia puts it,
Traveling in medieval Japan was immensely dangerous, and at first Bashô expected to simply die in the middle of nowhere or be killed by bandits. As the trip progressed, his mood improved and he became comfortable on the road. He met many friends and grew to enjoy the changing scenery and the seasons. His poems took on a less introspective and more striking tone as he observed the world around him. […] The trip took him from Edo to Mount Fuji, Ueno, and Kyoto.
Ve znaku (In the Sign) by Jaromír Typlt
Swoon‘s latest videopoem is a testimony to the way the web can break down differences of geography and language. He writes,
If there’s one thing I really like about the internet, it got to be the possibility and speed in how we can ‘meet’ and collaborate with people everywhere.
Throught the fiber I ‘met’ Jaromír Typlt.
At a certain point we started to write about poetry and videopoems and the possibility of working together.
On his website there were English translations of some of his poems.
We decided on one of them …
The translator is David Vichnar, and the poem is dedicated to the late poet and translator Ludvík Kundera. See Swoon’s blog post for the complete text in Czech and English, as well as the rest of his process notes.
