~ 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.
Bring Me My Sky-Canoe by Al Rempel
Al Rempel’s description on YouTube is so thorough, I’m just going to reproduce it in its entirety, minus the text of the poem (click through to read).
The Sky Canoe is a collaboration between four artists: Phil Morrison, Al Rempel, Steph St Laurent, and Jeremy Stewart. Phil is a sculptor who works mainly in concrete & metal, and often incorporates text into his work. Al is a poet and teacher; his first book is understories. The poem in this piece is from This Isn’t the Apocalypse We Hoped For, which is forthcoming with Caitlin Press in spring, 2013. Please visit http://alrempel.com for more info. Steph is a filmmaker as well as an actor. His site is http://www.videonexus.ca. Jeremy is a musician and a poet; his first book of poetry is called (flood basement and he can be found at http://www.jeremystewartmusic.bandcamp.com
The Sky Canoe has been accepted into the Visible Verse festival, 2012! Details can be found here: http://www.cinematheque.bc.ca/visible-verse-festival-2012
The festival’s coming up on October 13 — that’s this coming Saturday! So if you live anywhere in the Pacific Northwest, be sure not to miss it.
A Woman by Jillian Brall
Jillian Brall is responsible for the still images of street art as well as the text and reading in this experimental video by VIV G. It’s interesting to contrast this with the way Pablo Lópes Jordán used graffiti in “I-poem 6.”
Edge by Sylvia Plath
UPDATE (3 October 2019): According to a comment (see below) from the maker of the video,
The Poem is from Sylvia Plath and the video making is from Lina Gaitán. The video was made for a film screening in Cali, Colombia, of the movie “Sylvia” by Christine Jeffs.
ORIGINAL POST: According to the description at Vimeo, this videopoem was the opening clip to a 2003 film by New Zealand director Christine Jeffs called Sylvia. Lina Gaitán supplied both the reading in English and the Spanish translation for the subtitles. The introductory text in Spanish points out that this was Plath’s last poem, written four days before her suicide (though other sources claim it was written six days earlier, on the same day as another poem, “Balloons”).
On the stars outside by Dena Rash Guzman
Dena Rash Guzman supplies the words and voice for a Swoon video that includes footage from a 1915 version of Alice in Wonderland by W.W. Young. Guzman “wrote the poem inspired by raw footage and sounds send to her by Swoon,” according to the description on Vimeo, following which he re-edited the footage and added the silent film images.
It’s always interesting to see the results of such close collaborations between filmmaker and poet. Swoon goes into much more detail in a post at his blog. At one point in the process, he emailed Guzman:
I chose ‘Alice in Wonderland’ footage to layer with the ‘dirt-video’ you knew.
The images do not glide or work together, they seem to ‘interfere’
(Wikipedia: “The phenomenon of retroactive interference is highly significant in the study of memory as it has sparked a historical and ongoing debate in regards to whether the process of forgetting is due to the interference of other competing stimuli, or rather the unlearning of the forgotten material.”)Your poem is full of warm memories on one side (though nobody loves to have lice, I guess) but I wanted to use some kind of ‘luring danger’ (the rabit) as a kind of visual ‘counterpoint’ with the darker music as guide to the unknown that is outside…
Swoon also quotes Guzman’s summary of the experience:
I love writing from prompts and so when you sent me the video and sound samples I sat down to ingest them like a glass of wine. I kind of meditated on the titles of the samples and the content itself and began firing off poem after poem. Dirt was the inspiration for the poem you selected. Dirt makes me think of earth, soil, dust, decay. It’s not dirty, though it can impose itself to make things so. For me, dirt is a host for the living, and that brought me to a childhood experience: I got lice at school when I was 8.
It was exciting to take your work, give you mine, and get your work back. I’m a fan of Poem films and yours in particular and it was a great experience.
The Altruist by T. Carmi
A moving tribute to the power of poetry from Israeli filmmaker Avi Dabach and PTSD-sufferer Micha Shalvi, who describes how the poem by T. Carmi — which he reads at the end — saved his life.
The Herrin’ Trail by Rita Bradd
Alastair Cook writes about his 24th filmpoem:
The Herring Trail was commissioned by North Light, based on the poem The Herrin’ Trail by Rita Bradd as part of my summer residency at McArthur’s Store in Dunbar. I spent 3 months there over the summer, working with the fishermen using wet plate collodion (a photographic process from 1851), 120 film and shooting with 8mm and 16mm. This film has scant relation to that, as I’ve used film given to me by the British Council, which is deliberately digitally extrapolated.
To be able to find such a wonderful poet in Rita was inspiring and I asked her to compose for the filmpoem on the Clarsach (or Lever Harp, if you’re not in Scotland) and I read the poem so that she might play. We premiered this at Sally Evan’s Callander poetry weekend in early September 2012 to a full house, with Rita playing live while i read over the film. Lovely to read in my native Scots, though not quite in my natural Galloway Irish/ Ulster Scots brogue!
Judging by North Light Dunbar’s news blog, Alastair has been very busy there indeed. They also have a page about his residency. I like the bio:
Alastair works predominantly with lens-based media as an analogue photographer concentrating on antique technologies and as a filmmaker using 8mm and 16mm film, combining these with digital technology to great effect. His award winning film and photography is driven by his knowledge, skill and experience as an architect: this mercurial work is rooted in place and the intrinsic connections between people, land and the sea. Alastair trained at the Glasgow School of Art then fled the country, returning after a dutiful spell in London and a more relaxed time in Amsterdam; he now lives and works in Edinburgh.
(Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find a good webpage for Rita Bradd.)
I-poem 6 by Vangelis Skouras
http://vimeo.com/49758673
Pablo Lópes Jordán directed, filmed and composed the soundtrack for a text by Vangelis Skouras. Jordán noted at Vimeo:
Daily thoughts can be a form of poetry even if, or assisted by the fact that, they are not expressed face to face. Images of real life help these words gain further substance and depth.
I like the leisurely pace at which the text fragments are shared, and how well that contrasts with the more frenetic image-stream and (excellent) soundtrack.
Walking Around (excerpt) by Pablo Neruda
http://vimeo.com/49642786
If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you know how much I appreciate unlikely combinations of text and moving image. In this case, I think the filmmakers may have gone a bit too far. But the result is so entertaining, I had to share it anyway. This is the Samuel L. Jackson reading of Neruda’s poem from Il Postino. Alessio Cuomo and Sander de Nooij of ColdSun Productions, a Dutch production company specializing in documentaries, indicate on Vimeo that this was
a little video we made just to celebrate the end of summer.
We came across this footage while doing some hard disk cleaning.
For a more serious take on the poem, see Four Seasons Productions’ interpretation of “Walking Around”, which uses footage from classic silent horror films. Unfortunately, though, the reading there (by Robert Bly, I think) isn’t as good as Jackson’s here.
Ithaka by C. P. Cavafy
http://vimeo.com/49801616
A video by VIV G (Vivian Giourousis), using a reading from YouTube by Charles Bryant.
Compare with the interpretations of the poem shared here three years ago, the first in the original Greek from a movie-length biopic. (The second one is pretty god-awful, but a good example of a very common approach to poetry film. I was a little less picky about what I posted in the early days of this site.)
