~ 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.
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.
At the time to set the table, we were five, by José Luís Peixoto
Update: this video is on longer online.
A simple yet affecting video for the poem “Na hora de pôr a mesa, éramos cinco” by the contemporary Portuguese novelist and poet José Luís Peixoto. Gustavo Santos has uploaded two versions, the other without English subtitles.
Ram’s Head by George Anderson
George Anderson, a Canadian living in Australia, reads his poem in this video by Laww Media, filmmakers from Wollongong, Australia.
Mutability by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Just your standard Shelley zombie flick. Rather heavy on the bogus production company credits but otherwise a memorable addition to the videopoetry corpus, I thought. Joseph Blackwell directs and narrates. Oh, and here’s the poem in case you need a refresher:
We are the clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly!–yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost forever:Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
One mood or modulation like the last.We rest.–A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise.–One wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;
Embrace fond foe, or cast our cares away:It is the same!–For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free:
Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability.
At the Qunite Hotel by Al Purdy
http://www.vimeo.com/7857979
An excerpt from the poem by Al Purdy, brought to life by Bruce Alcock and Global Mechanic.
A fluid, vibrant and kinetic riff on one of Al Purdy’s best-known poems, recalling the experimental, interpretive work of Norman McLaren. It’s not a literal adaptation, but something more free-associative that visually accompanies the text while staying true to the playful, erudite spirit of the poem and Al Purdy’s imagination. We used oil paint, acrylics, graphite, charcoal, wire, cut paper, a beer mug, linoleum, bottlecaps… you name it, we art-worked and animated it. Almost all the animation was done in-camera, except for a bit of compositing after the fact.
What Bee Did by Julie Larios
Update: video may be watched on Vimeo.
An animation by Jessica Lawheed. The text of the poem is available at The Cortland Review. Julie Larios blogs at The Drift Record.
My one criticism of the animation is that it shows a honeybee entering a paper wasp nest — why not a hive box or a skep? Then again, it also depicts a bee making love to a human being, so perhaps I shouldn’t get too literal.
No Road by Philip Larkin
A piece called “Type in motion,”
designed by Joseph Allison and Sophie Tanat-Jones. The piece is inspired by the design ethos of Lazlo Moholy Nagy. The work features a poem by Philip Larkin called ‘No Road’.
This is just the first stanza of the poem, which may be read in its entirety at ilikethispoem.
The Dead by Billy Collins (McDonalds remix)
Lauren Adolfsen spliced together some footage from old McDonald’s commercials to make a new video for Billy Collins’ poem. This uses the same audio as the animation by Juan Delcan, which was one of the 11 videopoems authorized by the poet. I am not sure he’d approve of this one, but it definitely changes the way I think of the poem.
Currach by Tony Curtis
Animation by Ronan Horan of a short piece by the Irish poet Tony Curtis.
The New Vestments by Edward Lear
This is “Verse Versus…” by Australian artist Anna Glynn. Though marred a bit by her watermark, it still seemed worth sharing for the extent to which it captured the oddness of the Lear poem — and oddly, won first prize from a local historic preservation group.
Anna Glynn was awarded first prize in the Historic Houses Trust’s 2009 Meroogal Women’s Arts Prize for her work ‘Verse Versus…’, a digital video art work which brings characters from Edward Lear’s poem ‘The New Vestments’ to life against a backdrop of images of the Historic Houses Trust property, Meroogal.
Contemporary Australian artist Anna Glynn works in a variety of media – this evocative short film features her original artwork: drawing, painting, photography, sound, animation and video/film SFX. Glynn’s main interest is in narrative works, in expressing this essence of “place”, either physical or temporal.
Family Group Day by Radames Ortiz
“Video Poem written and performed by poet Radames Ortiz featuring music by Trills, graphic design artist Alberto Capetillo and videographer Gilbert Camargo.” See the rest of the YouTube info bar for the text of the poem.
Ortiz blogs as the amplified bard.
Ozymandius by Percy Bysshe Shelley
This video is the work of Tasmanian “freelance visualisation consultant” Peter Morse. The music was composed by Glenn Rogers and performed by Alistair Foote, Penelope Reynolds and Samantha Podeu. Morse describes the project as follows:
The Video & Text
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s classic poem (1818) is used in the video in relation to romantic and Neoclassical architecture, with particular reference to Boullée and Speer, as a kind of critique of the ideology of power articulated by these architectures. The poem ‘Ozymandias’ is a vivid portrayal of the vanity of demagoguery and monumentalism, explored here as a trope for the moral ambiguities of these unbuilt architectures, that stand as fascinating historical symbols of the folly of certain types of power, albeit from varying political persuasions. The strong counterpoint of the ‘modernity’ of the score with the inflated Neoclassicism of the architecures is an attempt to dramatise the counterpoint of these different aesthetics, both of which have struggled for power in this last century. Ironically, these buildings will ever be as virtual as they are here: fictions of history re-imagined via computer simulation.
The Music
Ozymandias is mostly based on the enigmatic minor and the enigmatic major scales. These are rather unusual and obscure scales not generally associated with Western music. In the more polyrhythmic and densely orchestrated sections the inversions of both these scales are used. In some sections notes from the enigmatic scales act as pedal points (tonal centres). From these pedal points are used their associated harmonic series and their inversions to generate a palindromic type of effect. These techniques were largely employed as formal compositional methodologies and may not be obviously audible in the music.
Note: This was the ‘blurb’ from the “Liminal” interactive CD-ROM (2000). The video was made on a Mac in 1998, using 3D animation and compositing, with footage shot in Berlin.
