~ 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 Watcher of Vowels by Robert Bly
One of the new batch of films from MotionPoems, read by Todd Boss and designed and animated by Matt Van Ekeren. If you can get to Minneapolis this Friday, October 8, it will be part of a screening of new motionpoems.
The Neighbour Procedure by Rachel Zolf
The title poem of Rachel Zolf’s new book from Coach House Books, “a virtuoso polyvocal correspondence with the daily news, ancient scripture and contemporary theory that puts the ongoing conflict in Israel/Palestine firmly in the crosshairs.” Poetry blogger Joshua Corey calls it “A work of radical and rigorous empathy for Jew & Arab.”
I like the cut-up approach to a live-reading video here. Poet Laura Mullen is the filmmaker. For more on Rachel Zolf, see her author page at the Electronic Poetry Center.
Zucchini by Major Jackson
Animator Allison Alexander Westbrook IV says in the notes at YouTube,
This is a commissioned animation I did for the poet Major Jackson. It was created by using a combination of Adobe photoshop and after effects. It first debuted at the exhibition titled “More Than Bilingual: Major Jackson & William Cordova.” at the Fleming Museum located on the campus of the University of Vermont on January 27th, 2009.
The Briefcase Phenomenon by Libby Hart
Directed by Siena Stone and Jalen Lyle-Holmes, this is one of the 2010 finalists from the Poetry in Film Festival held in Melbourne, in which all contestants were challenged to make a 4- to 7-minute film based on the same poem by Australian poet Libby Hart. (See Vimeo for the full list of credits.)
No sooner had I posted about the festival at the Moving Poems forum than this video pops up on Vimeo. Here’s hoping some of the the other finalists appear, as well.
Victim by Nicole Blackman
A short film shot in Australia and based on a spoken-word poem by the New York-based poet Nicole Blackman. I found a review from 2005 in RealTime Arts Magazine. This was apparently Corrie Jones’ directorial debut. He persuaded Blackman to take an active role in adapting the poem for the film, and it is she doing the voiceover.
Victim was filmed and produced in Perth by a group of relative newcomers, but its local impact was immediate. The first screenings in Perth were controversial, where it was shown with Siddiq Barma’s Osama as part of the 2003 Perth International Arts Festival. With the serial killings of 3 young women in Perth’s northern suburbs still haunting the newspaper headlines, Victim hit a raw nerve. Although the film shows a bound and gagged woman at the mercy of an armed kidnapper, many viewers interpreted the film as being about a woman’s rape, which is not even indirectly implied.
Jones views the film’s real subject as self-empowerment rather than victimisation. His protagonist struggles to the end, and when she realises she may die, she attempts to live the last moments of her life with psychological strength and resolve, rather than annihilating terror. “I wanted to show an inner strength through the detachment of the narration”, Jones explains. “The film is about a woman confronting her fears, dealing with them as they hit her.”
Victim has already won a number of prestigious Australian awards, including an Early Career Award at the 2003 WA Screen Awards, the SBS Eat Carpet award, and Best New Director award at the 2004 St Kilda Film Festival.
Question by May Swenson
http://vimeo.com/31974260
Another video from Dara Elerath at the Art Center Design College in Albuquerque. The full poem includes an additional two stanzas at the end — read it on the Poetry Foundation website.
Rain by Hone Tuwhare
https://vimeo.com/25072181
This is actually the second time I’ve posted a video for this poem by the great Maori poet, and it might be worth looking at the other one — a fairly straight-forward kinetic text piece — before watching this one, where the text is whispered and fugitive. But this film is superlative in every way, an astonishingly gorgeous piece that must be watched with the volume up and the video expanded to full-screen. According to the notes at Vimeo,
Rain is the first of Maria-Elena films in which she explores our connection with Nature, human-nature and the idea that everything in the universe is interlinked……..Rain was made in 2006 as the final year project of the Graduate diploma in digital animation at Unitec Auckland…. Maria-Elena has just completed her next film Meniscus
New “motionpoems” to be unveiled October 8 in Minneapolis
“Motionpoems” is the term preferred by filmmaker Angella Kassube and poet Todd Boss at motionpoems.com for what the rest of us variously call videopoems, film poems, cinepoetry, etc. Kassube and Boss are responsible for a number of quite lovely films illustrating not only Boss’s own poems, but a growing number of others’ as well. They’re helping to raise the bar for mainstream poetry animation in the U.S.
Click through to their website for a description of the upcoming screening event (which I can’t copy-and-paste from or directly link to because it’s a Flash-based site). The list of films to be screened looks tantalizing — poems by Jane Hirshfield, Terese Svoboda, Alicia Ostriker, Thomas Lux, and Robert Bly are among those featured. I hope we can expect to see them at motionpoems.com and on YouTube after their Minneapolis debut.
(Update) Angella Kassube provided some additional detail about the event in an email. She wrote:
The really groovy thing about our screening is it is actually a great discussion about poetry and interpreting poetry. Everyone talks about how their piece came together, the audience is engaged and they ask great questions and have great comments. It’s an incredible evening—we expect about 150 people to be there.
“It is a lot of work,” she added about the motionpoems project in general, “but Todd and I just keep going.” I hope anyone in the upper Midwest who can make this screening will turn out and support them.
Peacock and Fish by Hafez
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUhaF1JI5r8
(English-dubbed excerpt)
This is Tongue of the Hidden, directed by David Alexander Anderson with calligraphy, translation and narration by Jila Peacock and animation by Florian Guibert, assisted by Jerome Dernoncourt. See the film’s webpage for complete credits, stills, storyboard, and more.
The poet Hafez, also known as the Teller of Secrets, used the language of human love and the metaphors of wine and drunkenness to describe his desire for the Divine and intoxication with the mysteries of the Universe. […]
Hand-drawn Farsi (Persian/Iranian) calligraphy is imported into the computer and forms the basis of constructed landscapes, and animals that move within landscapes. Software was Studio Max, Maya, XSI and After Effects.
According to a page on Jila Peacock’s website, “The film was premiered at the National Film Theatre in October 2007 as part of the London Film Festival and as part on Animate TV on C4 in December 2007.” See also the section of her site on her handmade artist’s book Ten Poems From Hafez.
Rush Hour by Thylias Moss
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdoZbbZfnFs
Moss writes,
A video poam that explores the simultaneous and related journeys of workers from two social strata whose need of each other does not include the exchange of essential aspects of identity.
She also uploaded another version, “Rush Hour (too).”
