~ 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.
On Your ‘A 1940 Memory’ by Daljit Nagra
This is Across Fields, a film by Tim Davies incorporating British poet Daljit Nagra‘s tribute to the great World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon, who fought in the Battle of the Somme, paired with “Site-responsive video recorded in and around the Bois de Mametz in the Somme Valley,” as the credits inform us. The poem and film were commissioned by a poetry project called Fierce Light:
Perhaps no art form captured the complexity and terror of the First World War more acutely than poetry. Drawing on their experiences, poets used their art to reflect on the war’s impact: from the horrors of the battlefield to the ways in which the conflict rendered a familiar world unrecognisable to those left living in it.
Fierce Light brought together leading poets from countries that participated in the First World War, including Yrsa Daley-Ward, Jackie Kay, Bill Manhire, Paul Muldoon and Daljit Nagra, to create new works that endeavour to understand the incomprehensible; exploring contemporary events while also contemplating the First World War. These works were presented alongside a series of specially commissioned short films, each made in response to the new poems and themes raised within them. […]
Launching with an exhibition and a special live event, Fierce Light featured the poets during the City of Literature programme at Norfolk & Norwich Festival, before the poems and films were presented on radio, at other literary festivals and online.
I have stolen everything by Abeer Hoque
This is one of three short films by the New York-based filmmaker Josh Steinbauer based on poems by Nigerian-born Bangladeshi American writer and photographer Abeer Hoque, all from her book of linked stories, The Lovers and the Leavers (HarperCollins India, 2015). The third partner in this collaboration was the band Dragon Turtle Music, which supplied the soundtrack for each of these deceptively simple videopoems. Watch all three at Scroll.in (but be careful: it’s one of those annoying sites that sends you off into a new article if you scroll down too far).
The Damascene Collar of the Dove by Mahmoud Darwish
This is In Damascus (في دمشق), a stunningly beautiful film by the Syrian filmmaker and motion graphic designer Waref Abu Quba. Here’s the description from Vimeo:
Winner | Outstanding Cinematography in the Autumn Shorts Film Festival, Somerset, Kentucky USA 2015.
Official Selection:
• ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival Münster|Berlin – 2016
• Arab Film Festival, San Francisco, CA – 2016
• 9th Annual Houston Palestine Film Festival – 2015
• Autumn Shorts Film Festival, Somerset, Kentucky USA – 2015Watch In Damascus VFX Breakdown and read the description for technical Information about the film on this link.
This film is about Damascus, an 11,000 years old city, the most ancient & precious of cities, set to the poetry of the world famous Palestinian poet / author Mahmoud Darwish.
More than three years have passed since the idea inception up to this moment. This project was my companion during my staying abroad, it was like a friend and an enemy at the same time, sometimes I spend hours working on it, and sometimes I leave it for months.
Now after two months of heavy work, I’ve finished it, and I would like to present it to you … I hope you like it.
Be sure to watch it on the largest screen you have.
Subterranean Homesick Blues by Bob Dylan
This clip from D. A. Pennebaker‘s 1967 documentary Don’t Look Back remains an innovative, proto music video. Poetry-film expert Alice Lyons included it in her list of “Ten Films to Look at When You Want to Think About Poetry and Film.”
Hoover by Trevor Meaney
This is the first of a four-part series of film poems called The Meaning of Lemon, based on the poetry of UK performance poet Trevor Meaney and directed by Bryan Dickinson of the Lancaster Film Makers’ Co-op. Each of the films in the series uses a similar device: a nonplussed or phlegmatic person listening to a unexpected poem delivered through improbable means. In “Hoover,” actor Philip Cowles’ eyebrow action really makes the film for me.
White Sound by bpNichol
This is an excerpt from The Complete Works, a 41-minute film directed and animated by Justin Stephenson based on the work of the late Canadian avant-garde poet bpNichol. Here, a poet-friend of Nichol’s, Steven Ross Smith, performs a virtuosic translation of visual poetry into sound poetry. Stephenson wrote about this and another sound-poetry segment from The Complete Works in an essay published in Poetryfilm Magazine last weekend, “Seeing the Said“:
Both segments start with visual texts as the source for a sound performance. Using digital algorithms to create and modify animations based on audio, a method called audio reactive animation, I inverted the optophonetic see-and-say strategy. In both pieces, the sounds of the performances are algorithmically connected to various visual parameters to generate resemblances between the performance and the visuals.
[…]
The white noise of technological media is the focus of Nichol’s visual text, White Sound. It’s a chap-book that contains pages filled with layers of the rubber stamped words »white sound« set against the backdrop of degraded photocopies of images created by printing blank mimeo plates, stamping empty sort rails, and pressing entire ink pads against the page.
Interspersed within the pages are sheets of semi-transparent colour tissue that act as a filter through which the background text can be viewed. The artefacts and noise introduced through the photocopy process are recorded on the pages of the book.
In The Complete Works, Steven Ross Smith performs White Sound as sound poetry. The performance enacts the organic »generation loss« depicted in the text. The term generation loss is used to describe the noise introduced by duplicating content in analog media – each successive copy (generation) introduces more noise, decreasing the quality, or signal to noise ratio. In the case of White Sound, however, signal to noise is inverted so that the noise is the signal. Accordingly, the text gains quality in each successive generation.
Do read the rest, which goes into detail about the tools Stephenson used as well as his guiding philosophy. His conclusion gives some strong hints about what makes filmmaking like this so compelling, even to those of us who might otherwise remain unmoved by such experimental poetry on the page:
Nichol’s notion of notation is saying what can be seen. This seeing and the saying, though, require participation on the part of reader. They involve diving into the uncertain foggy region between representation by sign and representation by resemblance – this unstable space – and working to locate and read compressions and rarefactions, stresses, tensions that can be recreated in a different medium. In the work of the film, letting the ear lead is a choice that became the foundation for the entire film. It provided the methods and permission to see-and-say in a way that honoured the methods of the texts, but allowed them to take new forms. Visualizing bpNichol’s sound poetry provided an important entry point (which became a crevasse) to the myriad of translations of his work that make up the film.
I should add that Stephenson was kind enough to let me have a sneak peak of the complete film, and I was blown away. It’s a masterpiece. Neither a documentary nor a standard poetry film, The Complete Works focuses resolutely on the poetry, giving just enough biographical information to let viewers know where Nichol was coming from and what he was up to. The interweaving of poems and animation techniques contributes to a really propulsive energy that I sense Nichol would’ve appreciated, and using his friends and colleagues as interpreters gives the film a feeling of accessibility without dumbing down the content in the least.
You can watch other excerpts, and check out reviews and other material on the film’s excellent website, but if you’re able to get to a screening, don’t miss it. There are at least two more coming up: one at the Niagara Artists Centre in Saint Catharines, Ontario on November 23 at 8:00 p.m. (where it will be paired with the launch of Christian Bök’s The Xenotext), and another at the Close-Up Film Centre in London, UK sometime in March.
El caballo ahogado / The Drowned Horse by Pablo Antonio Cuadra
A poem by the late Nicaraguan poet Pablo Antonio Cuadra (1912-2002), as recited by various Nicaraguans in a video filmed, directed and edited by NYC-based artist Miah Artola, part of her “far away” multi-platform project on Nicaragua, which includes “installation, experimental documentary, drawing, and expanded cinema.”
Why Poetry? Despite Nicaragua’s travails, the quality and influence of its literature, and its poetic output in particular, has earned it the epithet ‘Land of the Poets.’ The poets of Nicaragua have created works that have influenced every facet of cultural, political and social life and is a center of creativity in the Spanish-speaking world. Poets have tremendous influence in Nicaragua as politicians, revolutionaries and cultural leaders.
Background: I am of Nicaraguan descent and visited relatives there for the first time in 2013. “far away” was conceived then, and I returned in November 2015 to shoot. It is my intention to raise funds for local education based Nicaraguan organizations and charities.
The music is by Ken Engel, and the actors include Harry Torrez Sandinez, Esmeralda Sos, Anita Arralano, the children of Puedo Leer Library, and school children in Granada Masayac.
Meters by Carol Ann Duffy
For the UK’s National Poetry Day, here’s a poem by the UK’s national poet on a matter of some national interest. It was commissioned by the NGO Smart Energy GB, who say on their website:
Inspired by the passing of traditional gas and electricity meters and the coming of smart meters, Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy has published a new poem.
The 300-word elegy to the “whirring wheels” of “artefacts” that are making way for smart meters has been set to an accompanying short film by BAFTA-nominated director Gary Tarn, immortalising traditional meters while looking to an inspiring, digital, green future.
Click through for the text. They include a quote from Duffy:
Household meters are one of the most unusual topics I’ve written about.
I hope people enjoy the poem and film, and take a moment to think about the boxes under the stairs and in hallway cupboards, which have been silently recording household life for so long.
水调歌头 (Water Music Song) by Su Shi / Su Tung-P’o
The great Song Dynasty poet, statesman and intellectual Su Shi or Su Dongpo (Wade-Giles: Su Shih, Su Tung-P’o) wrote this poem in the song-like ci form in 1076, one of several poems about the autumn moon that remain among his most often anthologized works. Beijing artist Hong Huo, currently a student in the Department of Kinetic Imaging at VCUarts in Virginia, notes on Vimeo that this is
A video poem I made recently that is related to the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival couple weeks ago. I chose this Chinese poem that describes the nostalgic feeling of a person that is away from home and family during this time for family and friends to get together and celebrate. Poem written by Su Shi from the Song Dynasty, which still remains popular today. I want to address not just my passion for my culture but also the sense of belonging and loneliness in part of me about how I have passed a journey to become who I am today. Special thanks to my dearest friend Jiaxin Zeng as she has been such a great model for this project.
The English translation in the subtitles is certainly adequate, and it’s a pleasure to hear the poem in Mandarin while reading it. I found another translation online included as apart of an essay by A. R. Davis, “On Such a Night: A Consideration of the Antecedents of the Moon in Su Shih’s Writings,” which is worth reading to learn about the greater cultural milieu as well as the direct influences and allusions at play here. (The translation itself is rather wooden and not worth reproducing here.)
The Walk by Bharath Divakar
https://vimeo.com/183251946
Bangalore-based spoken word poet Bharath Divakar meditates on the meaning of slam culture in this film by Krishna Prasad Raveendran, who notes:
The film tries to capture the thought process of a poet as he/she walks up on stage. The film was shot and edited for Airplane Poetry Movement, a project to give spoken word poets in India a platform to showcase their work and get discovered […] Shot on Sony A6300 (The portions of the walk) The rest of the clips were curated. Filmed and Edited by Krishna Prasad Raveendran
Human by Meghann Plunkett
Andrés Fernández Cordón of the Buenos Aires-based studio Sloop animated and directed this adaptation of a charming poem by U.S. poet Meghann Plunkett. The Vimeo description notes that “We approached the production much in the same way the poem reads, step by step, drawing one frame after the other without knowing before hand where it would take us.” Plunkett provided the voiceover, and the music is by Shayfer James.
The video was featured at Luna Luna Magazine on August 30, with an accompanying appreciation by Aja Monet, a fellow poet and friend of Plunkett’s since college, as she recounts. Check it out.
