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.
Update: this video is no longer online.
I know hardly a word of French, yet I still enjoyed the hell out of this. It’s a remix of some public-domain footage from the Prelinger Archives by Fabrice Aussel, A.K.A. DJ Spooky. The reading by Artaud was recorded for radio broadcast in 1946.
Directed by David Hambridge and David Sherrill. The poem appears in Millar’s book Overtime.
Geoff Tarulli made this one. It’s kind of slow-moving, but maybe that’s the point.
Gotta love film students for keeping the medium irreverent. This is by Kurt Snyder. Here’s the text of the poem:
As the cat
climbed over
the top ofthe jamcloset
first the right
forefootcarefully
then the hind
stepped down
into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot
http://www.vimeo.com/10534508
An exceptionally fine videopoem by Nicole Prowell.
Shot at Pleasure Beach in Bridgeport/Stratford, CT March 2010. Music by Harold Budd and Brian Eno.
Filmed on the Sony EX3, 1080 24p.
A delightful experiment in machine translation by Michelle Phillips.
A conversation between two computers. One read a verse aloud and the other transcribed it through voice recognition and vice versa. The process was repeated until Andrew Marvell’s poem “A Dialogue between the Soul and Body” had been completely re-written.
I am thinking we could dub the result a meta-metaphysical poem.
There’s a video of Simic reading this poem, but it’s not as interesting as the two videos included here. About the musical performance above I could gather nothing, though it appears from the one comment that it may have been uploaded by one of the performers. I love the interpretation of the poem as a Sufi teaching, though I’m not sure how Simic would feel about it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JG7F9dDnAA
Brian Watterson is the filmmaker here.
http://www.vimeo.com/10287177
Ginnetta Correli directs. The poem is #65 in This Collection’s Top 100 poems about Edinburgh, and is read by Alastair Cook.
I’m rarely satisfied with my own efforts, but I do like this one. (Which is not to say it couldn’t be improved.) I blogged a bit about the poem at Via Negativa last month.
Susanne Stich is the filmmaker, and she used a translation by Cal Kinnear for the English subtitles. I found this a very effective film.
If there’s a non-controversial way to use a classic poem in a commercial, this might be it. The line from cummings (a fragment of #35 from 100 Selected Poems) is read and “un-read” by four very different voices in a way meant to dramatize the variations in a reading voice, unlining the audiobook publisher’s slogan: “Giving literature a personality.” My immediate reaction is, “Wow. There’s a market for audio books of poetry!?” Since the product being advertised here is so close to the poet’s own characteristic production, the use of his words seems entirely appropriate. And freed from the kind of angst evoked by the Levi’s Whitman ads, we can see that in fact the ingredients of a successful short videopoem — simplicity, quirk, surprise — are not too different from the ingredients of a successful television spot.
“Levi’s drops their pioneer posturing and tries a poet better suited to this time of collapse.” Nice parody by The Midnight Show. (See YouTube for the complete credits.)