~ 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 Lake Isle of Innisfree by William Butler Yeats
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey…
By situating the action of this animated short in the “pavements grey” rather than the “bee-loud glade,” director, scriptwriter and editor Don Carey was able to avoid the trap of too-literal illustration while drawing attention to the poem’s longing and suggestion of despair. The ending is brilliantly ambiguous.
According to the Vimeo description, Innisfree was “produced by the students of the animation department at the Irish School of Animation, Ballyfermot College of Further Education, 2013.” It won best animation at the 2014 Royal Television Society awards, and has been screened at several festivals, including the Cork Spring Poetry Festival, the 7th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin, and the Liberated Words Poetry Film Festival 2014 in Bristol (and again last week at their “Reflections” screening in Bath).
mimes in hi-fi by Howie Good
https://vimeo.com/120554706
Dale Wisely has been making videopoems at a great rate, playing with a variety of techniques and approaches. Here, a Babel of voices and text gradually gives way to a poem in the soundtrack and (partially) on the screen. Howie Good is one of the hardest working and most widely published poets on the internet; it’s always a pleasure to add to his archive here.
The Golden Bird by Helen Moore
My friend Rachel attended Liberated Words‘ “Reflections” screening at Bath last week, and this film, directed by Howard Vause of Frome Media Arts, was one of her favorites. I agree it’s a marvelous blend of live and animated sequences, and the back-story—the way it grew out of creative sessions with adults with dementia—is compelling, too. Here’s the description from Vimeo:
‘Babka and The Golden Bird’ is a Russian folktale in which the heroine, Babka, an elderly woman rescues a dying bird. When the forest is threatened, the bird grants her three wishes…
The Golden Bird Project invited patients on the RUH [Royal United Hospitals] Older People’s Units to take part in a series of interactive storytelling workshops with poet, Helen Moore and film-maker Howard Vause. With music by Frankie Simpkins and models by Edwina Bridgeman (Art At The Heart Musician and Artist in Residence respectively), the project was initiated by Sarah Tremlett (Liberated Words), funded by BaNES and supported by Art at the Heart’s Hetty Dupays and Diane Samways (Arts Programme Manager and Marketing, respectively).
This film features an original poem by Helen Moore based on both the folktale and contributions from workshop participants. It premieres at Liberated Words Poetry Film Festival (Arnolfini, Bristol) in September 2014.
See the page 12 of the programme on Issuu for a much fuller description of the project from Helen Moore. (See also the website for Art at the Heart of the RUH.) Moore writes, in part:
Drawing on my experience of running story sessions with older adults with dementia, I’ve seen how tactile objects can offer a stimulating opener for group work. Handling the objects provides the participants with sensory engagement, which helps ground them in the present moment. And by choosing things that connect with the story I’m about to tell, there’s a ‘bridge’ into what will follow. … Encouraging participants to express associations that arise with the objects can also facilitate self-expression in new/unexpected areas, mining memories and experiences, which were perhaps long forgotten.
Culoarul vagonului e liber/The coach’s aisle is clear by Doina Ioanid and Teniet/Undone by Jan H. Mysjkin
For some reason, poetry filmmakers don’t tend to combine texts by different authors very often. With Undone, Marc Neys AKA Swoon shows just how well that can work, even with multiple language barriers to cross. Doina Ioanid‘s Romanian text meets Jan H. Mysjkin‘s Dutch text in the soundtrack, with an English translation by Mysjkin in subtitles. As if that weren’t enough, Marc made a second version with the poets reading their work in French translation, also subtitled in English:
And a version of that version with subtitles in German and supertitles in Turkish:
Marc wrote about how he came to make the film in a recent blog post:
Such a fun one, this.
2 poems, by 2 different writers in different languages with different subtitles.
I have worked with Doina Ioanid and Jan H. Mysjkin before.This time I picked out Culoarul vagonului e liber/ The coach’s aisle is clear by Doina and combined it with Teniet/ Undone by Jan for obvious reasons.
They both read the poem in French, Doina also read hers in Romanian, Jan his one in Dutch. They also gave me English, German and Turkish translations. So much blocks to work with.
[…]
German, English and French translation: Jan H. Mysjkin
Turkish translation: Burak Sengir
[…]Working with a split screen came natural. I combined 2 sets of visuals for each poem. Empty <-> crowded, abstract <-> concrete, nature <-> urban, black&white <-> colour.
Shifting between those during the readings and in between…
In the final editing I made some minor cuts to fit the footage with the reading (different languages, different pace), but nothing major. They all ‘feel’ the same.
I guess that last bit answers my question: Why not put all the translations into Vimeo’s own subtitling system and just serve up a single video? Because Swoon’s an insane perfectionist, that’s why.
Spilled Milk on Banjo by Lisa Williams
A poetry film by the Michigan-based conceptual artist and educator Adriane Little, the latest of at least three she’s made for different poets. This one features a text by Lisa Williams from Gazelle in the House (New Issues Poetry & Prose). According to a note in the Vimeo description, “This video was made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.”
Adriane Little also teaches videopoetry to undergraduates, and nosing around on Vimeo, I discovered a few of their student films.
Trein by Astrid Haerens
Flemish poet Astrid Haerens‘ poem “Trein” in a film by American animators Annelyse Gelman and Auden Lincoln-Vogel, commissioned last year by Filmpoem and included in Deus ex Machina‘s “Filmpoem Album” DVD (which I reviewed here). Now it’s available with English subtitling.
Eggheads by John Koethe
This is Talking Points, a film by Rob Perez for Motionpoems, based on the poem “Eggheads” by John Koethe. Perez tells a separate story in the film that intersects with the text in an interesting fashion. “Citizen journalist” Will Campbell writes about the poem and the film in some bonus materials on the Motionpoems website. Here’s an excerpt:
What drew Rob Perez to work on “Eggheads” was the challenge that came with adaptation. “I was interested in the idea and challenge of lifting a poem off the page and putting it on the screen” Perez said. That meant more than simply giving face to Koethe’s words. The film’s biggest challenge came in finding a way to preserve the quality of Koethe’s language while still making a film that uplifted the poem itself.
Perez’s solution to this dilemma was ambitious to say the least: let the poem speak for itself—supported, that is, by a narrative. His film adaptation of “Eggheads” combines a cool, crisp reading of the poem with jazz-tracked footage of a couple moving through the charmed humdrum of ordinary life. Their words are muted, leaving only their actions and something like “Take Five” to tell what they’re up to while in the background “Eggheads,” read by a separate narrator, gives meaning to the pair and their everyday world.
For Perez, the challenge of the film became finding just the right amount of narrative to support the poem without overburdening it. After all, “the poem is good enough to stand alone—otherwise it wouldn’t live like that. Therefore, my job is to find a story—of moving pictures—that allow the poem to say the same thing in a new medium. The screenplay, the actors, the frame, the score, sound effects, etc. are all tools to lift the poem off the page and onto the screen.”
For Zachary by Mary Jo Balistreri
A black-and-white film by Marc Neys AKA Swoon for a poem by Mary Jo Balistreri in The Poetry Storehouse. Marc posted some process notes to his blog:
A very beautiful poem. Heartfelt.
Nic S. did a poignant reading that led to this track;The visuals for this one are a combination of footage I shot during a hiking weekend last december (moody shots of trees, reflections, shadows…) alternated with the repetition of a boy falling (carefully edited out from a very lively action video by Justin Kauffman (under the Attribution license CC BY 3.0)
I think the ‘endless’ falling of the boy works well with the rest of the footage. Creating the right atmosphere for the poem and the soundtrack. There’s some comfort in this one I think.
A reminder, for any poets who might be reading this: the deadline for submissions to The Poetry Storehouse is coming up on February 28. After that it will transition to archive mode, adding new remixes (including videos) only up through September.
After Love by Roger Reeves
https://vimeo.com/119716922
A mirrored field turns into layered images of a church interior in this new videopoem from Ruben Quesada for
A poem by Roger Reeves from his debut collection of poetry, KING ME (Copper Canyon Press, 2013).
Music: “Symphony No. 5” by Gustav Mahler
For more on Reeves, see the Poetry Foundation website. Here’s King Me.
