~ 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.
To Make a Dadaist Poem by Tristan Tzara
A literal illustration of Tristan Tzara’s technique by Yeju Choi. An alternate translation of the 1920 text appears on Red Studio’s page for an online equivalent of this technique. I love the closing lines:
The poem will resemble you.
And there you are—an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.
Night Flight Turbulence by Franz Wright
Pete Shanel is the videographer for this track, released as a promo for the CD Readings From Wheeling Motel, a collaboration between Franz Wright and the folk-pop group Ill Lit.
Room in Brooklyn by Anne Carson
Expand this to full screen and turn the sound up: this is Hopper Confessions: Room in Brooklyn for cello, interactive electronics and interactive video. The music is by Joseph Butch Rovan, and the video is by Rovan and Katherine Bergeron. The page on Vimeo includes a rather academic disquisition from which I’ll quote only the opening paragraph:
This multimedia work draws its inspiration from “Room in Brooklyn,” a poem by Anne Carson, published in her collection Men in the Off Hours (New York: Knopf, 2000). Carson’s poem is itself polyphonic, exposing two different voices that speak to the condition of passing time: a painting by Edward Hopper (the 1932 canvas “Room in Brooklyn”) and a passage from St. Augustine’s Confessions. Carson measures the nostalgia of Hopper’s Americana with a tiny thread of verse that hangs on Augustine’s temporal philosophy like a second melodic voice over a stolid cantus firmus.
“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” by Emily Dickinson
The first two stanzas of Dickinson’s poem as animated by Laura O’Brien and some collaborators (full credits at the end). The complete poem may be read at Poets.org.
Note to regular readers: I’m scaling back from five to four posts a week here (though some weeks I may still publish five posts if I happen to have the material). Locating good poetry videos is becoming a little more difficult now, and I am wary of turning what should be a joy into a chore.
Two Meters of this Land by Mahmoud Darwish
http://www.vimeo.com/7857751
I guess I betray my fondness for minimalism by posting this very spare, not terribly illuminating trailer for “A film by Ahmad Natche … shot in Ramallah (Palestinian Territories) in the Summer of 2009, inspired by a Mahmoud Darwish poem.” Here’s the film’s website.
If You Were… by Julian Daniel
Tamzin Forster’s animation for what she calls a love poem by Julian Daniel. This was the winner in the Best Poem Film category at the 2009 Version Film Fest in Manchester, UK.
A Broadway Pageant, Mannahatta, and Crossing Brooklyn Ferry by Walt Whitman
This is Manhatta, a proto-filmpoem from the silent film era, now residing in the Internet Archive. This was a collaboration between painter Charles Sheeler and photographer Paul Strand. Pour a drink, put on some music, and expand this to full screen.
A page at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website helps place it in historical context:
In 1920 [Charles Sheeler] worked with Paul Strand on Manhatta, a short expressive film about New York City based on portions of Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.” The six-minute film spans an imaginary day in the life of New York City, beginning with footage of Staten Island ferry commuters and culminating with the sun setting over the Hudson River. It has been described as the first avant-garde film made in America. Its many brief shots and dramatic camera angles emphasize New York’s photographic nature. Sheeler exhibited Manhatta as both projected film (as seen in this section) as well as prints made from the film strips that he used like photographic negatives.
(“New York’s photographic nature”? I guess they mean photogenic. Whatever. It’s a great film.)
I Heard a … When I Died
“A contemporary interpretation of a poem written by Emily Dickinson on life/death from the perspective of the fly,” says the filmmaker, Sasha Sumner. A brilliant little short which shows that sometimes a great soundtrack is almost all you need to make your point. (For a video of the complete poem, see Lynn Tomlinson’s clay-on-glass animation.)
Akka Mahadevi eight centuries later
I don’t often share videos uploaded by someone other than the copyright holder, because chances are eventually they’ll get taken down and I’ll have a dead post. But these are too good to miss: five selections from Scribbles on Akka, a 60-minute film in Hindi and Kannada with English subtitles directed by Madhusree Dutta, with music by Ilayaraja, and starring Seema Biswas, Sabitri Heisnam, and Harish Khanna. Here’s a synopsis from Upperstall.com:
Scribbles on Akka is a short film on the life and work of the 12th century saint poet, Mahadevi Akka. Her radical poems, written with the female body as a metaphor, have been composed and picturised in contemporary musical language. Mahadevi, famed as Akka — elder sister, while leaving the domestic arena in search of God, also abandoned modesty and clothing. The film explores the meaning of this denial through the work of contemporary artists and writers and testimonies of ordinary folks who nurtured her image through centuries in their folklores and oral literature. A celebration of rebellion, feminity and legacy down nine hundred years.
The female director writes,
The film is an exercise in building a bridge across eight hundred years. Mahadevi Akka, the poet, still influences the contemporary poets and painters. Mahadevi Akka, the deity, graces the packets of pickles and papads — prepared by ladies’ co-operatives. Mahadevi Akka, the legendary nude saint, adorns pinup posters and music cassette covers. The bridge is already there. But how did it happen?
Why women poets of feminist era obsessively write pieces of dialogues with Akka? Why a painter in Baroda incessantly paints various images of Akka? Why is she still marketable as a brand name? Who is she?
I don’t know, but I will say that the Indian filmmaking style seems tailor-made for videopoetry.
