~ festivals and other screening events ~
News about any and all events in which poetry films/videos are prominently featured, whether or not they include an open competition. Please let us know about any we might miss. And don’t forget to check out our page of links to poetry film festivals. All festivals, events and calls for work are mentioned by MovingPoems with our best efforts and in good faith. However, do check all details yourself as we cannot guarantee accuracy, and make your own judgements because we cannot verify the things that we share. Events may fail for a variety of genuine reasons, or may be a scam to elicit fees.
Program for Vienna Poetry Film Festival on November 5-6 takes shape
The Austrian artists’ collective Art Visuals & Poetry have released some additional information about their upcoming festival via their occasional email newsletter, which includes this summary in English:
The Vienna Poetry Filmfestival will take place from November 5-6, in Vienna at Schikaneder Kino, Margaretenstraße 24, 1040 Wien. We have set up a curated international film program around the competition program with films from Germany, Georgia and Norway on the 5th of November. Best of and the winners will be presented on the 6th of November together with the live visualized poetry performance Rhea Krcmarova / 4youreye. All participants are invited to join the festival for free! Please follow the festival informations on our website regarding reduced accomodations in Vienna. The winners of the competition and other selected films will be presented again on December 2, 2014 at the cinema Künstlerhaus, Vienna. More details coming soon!
Clicking on the latter link reminds me to add a reminder that their film competition is still open for entries through September 30.
Belgian literary magazine Deus Ex Machina’s Filmpoem Album
I’ve long been interested in exploring different delivery systems for poetry films. Though videos on the web are Moving Poems’ bread and butter, and are clearly going to remain the dominant delivery system for years to come, that doesn’t mean we should ignore other media and venues, such as mobile apps, exhibition spaces, festivals and DVDs. And as Deus Ex Machina #149, Filmpoem Album, demonstrates, there’s no reason why literary magazines have to confine their video publications to the web. Poetry editor Michael Vandebril called upon guest editors Willem Bongers-Deck and Judith Dekker to develop this collection in time for Filmpoem‘s program at the Felix Poetry Festival in Antwerp this past June.
The DVD and accompanying print journal are also available from their website, and they were kind enough to send me a review copy. The poets are all from Belgium and Netherlands and I don’t know Dutch or French, so of course I can’t fully evaluate the films as videopoems. But based on what I do understand, I think that other print literary journals should pay close attention to what they’ve done here — it’s an example well worth emulating, with a couple of possible exceptions which I’ll discuss below.
The above trailer includes snippets of all but one of the 11 short films included in the DVD. As these snippets perhaps suggest, many of the films are watchable on account of their imagery alone, which speaks to the expertise of the filmmakers. For what it’s worth, I was especially taken with the imagery in films directed by Philippe Werkers, Reyer Boxem, Anton Coene, Jeroen Sebrecht, and Dimitri van Zeebroeck. The absence of Marc Neys from the line-up seemed a little odd, but perhaps they wanted to show that there was more to Belgian filmmaking than the otherwise nearly inescapable Swoon. The branding by Deus Ex Machina was minimal — just enough to provide a thread of continuity to an otherwise diverse mix of aspect ratios and approaches, including a few animations, color as well as black-and-white, etc. All the directors chose to include the poems as voiceovers — as opposed to via text — which also helped unify the collection. The longest (7:07) and most experimental poetry film came at the end, which was probably a wise programming choice.
I should stress that overall this is a really high-quality product. The journal issue is perfect-bound with printing on the spine and the DVD tucked securely into the flap of the back cover. The poems appear in the same order as they do in the DVD, so one can read along. Oddly, though, the information about who directed the film made for each poem is not included alongside, but only in the table of the contents, and fuller credits only appear on the DVD. Instead, opposite each poem on the left-hand page is a full-color photo of the poet, and while this makes for a very elegant design, and it may be the way other issues of Deus Ex Machina are set up, it struck me as an odd fit for this issue. I would’ve preferred stills from the films, accompanied by the credits; the author photos could have been relegated to the bios at the back. And the fact that the directors don’t also have photos in the magazine bothered me a little bit. Why should poets get all the glory?
These minor quibbles aside, I’m very impressed with the obvious care and attention that went into DEM’s Filmpoem Album, and I hope other literary magazines will consider following suit. Also, I’m flattered that the Foreword (also on the website) cites Moving Poems as (according to Google Translate) “authoritative,” though it must be said that my nearly exclusive focus on English-language videos, or videos with English subtitles, does make the site a bit less inclusive than it might otherwise be. But that’s precisely why we need projects like DEM 149 to help pick up the slack.
Filmpoem at Southbank Centre in July — full schedule of events
Those who weren’t able to make it to Antwerp for the Felix Poetry Festival a couple of weeks ago will have another chance to see this year’s, traveling version of the Filmpoem Festival at London’s Southbank Centre in mid-July. Let me just paste in the description from the Filmpoem website:
Filmpoem will be partnering up with Southbank Centre to bring our own unique blend of artists films, workshops and events to the Poetry International, held from Thursday 17 July 2014 – Monday 21 July 2014. Poetry International is part of Southbank Centre’s Festival of Love – the festival features an exciting programme of free events, differently- themed weekends, performances, poetry, talks and pop-ups. Poetry International is a bold and inspiring festival of poetry, film and spoken word as part of our summer Festival of Love. For, after all, ‘at the touch of love everyone becomes a poet’ (Plato).
– Filmpoem will showcase on rotation on the screens throughout the Foyer for the entire festival! Friday 18 – Monday 21 July/ 10am to 11pm/ Presented on screen in the Foyers at Royal Festival Hall. This is a FREE event.
– Filmpoem will be judging and presenting the prizes for the SHOT THROUGH THE HEART Poetry Film Competition on Friday 18 July 2014 at 6.45pm.
– Alastair Cook will be delving a Filmpoem children’s workshop with poet Carolyn Jess-Cooke and composer Luca Nasciuti – the resulting film will be screened at 4.30pm on Saturday 19th July. This is a FREE event.
– Poetry Society director Judith Palmer and Filmpoem director Alastair Cook will present a screening of new films commissioned by Filmpoem and Felix Poetry Society in association with the Poetry Society, including the National Poetry Competition commissions and commissions from David Harsent, Michael Symmons Roberts, Helen Mort and John Glenday/ Saturday 19 Jul 2014 6.30pm. This is a FREE event.
Phew! See y’all there.
Since I’m in the U.K. this summer, I’ll be able to attend some of this myself, including the Saturday evening program, and I hope to get a chance to meet some Moving Poems readers and contributors. Come over and say hi if you see me. I’ll be the guy with the beard and the ball cap scribbling things into a pocket notebook (because, you know, I’m still too technophobic to own a mobile device).
Review of Filmpoem 2014, Antwerp in Huffington Post blog
Poet and filmmaker Robert Peake has posted a handy summary of last weekend’s Filmpoem 2014 Festival—part of the Felix Poetry Festival in Antwerp—by way of sharing the seven videos that constituted the first part of the program: “An Introduction to the Film-Poem.”
Poets, musicians and filmmakers from all over the world converged on a converted packing house in Antwerp, Belgium last Saturday for a day of gorging on film-poems. It was glorious.
While last year in Dunbar, Scotland had an element of novelty on its side, this year was carefully structured to up the ante. A group of Dutch and Flemish film-poem artists presented their work, along with the debut screening of the UK National Poetry Competition film-poems, Absent Voices films, conversations with poets in response film-poems of their work that they had just seen, and even live performances of voice and music in accompaniment to film. The scope, variety, and innovation was impressive, not to mention the roster of heavy-hitters in both the poetry and film genres.
Organiser Alastair Cook emphasised the point that the film-poem genre is an inclusive and encouraging one–suggesting that we all start somewhere, even if with the video facility on our smart phones, and start making film-poems. Particularly helpful in that regard was the first screening, an introduction to the film-poem. Luckily, most of the works that Alastair picked to illustrate the depth and range of this genre are also available online. What follows, below, are those films (recommended to view in full-screen mode).
Watch. Enjoy. Make film-poems. Perhaps I’ll see you at a film-poem festival soon.
Click through to watch the films.
Ó Bhéal poetry-film competition is open for submissions
I’ve just learned that the 2nd Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition 2014 is open for submissions. I’m sure they won’t mind if I reproduce their call.
Ó Bhéal is pleased to continue its association with the IndieCork festival of independent cinema (www.indiecork.com). This is Ó Bhéal’s fifth year of screening poetry-films (or video-poems), and the second year featuring an International competition.
Thirty films will be shortlisted and screened during the festival from 12th-19th October 2014. One winner will be selected by the Ó Bhéal jury.
Deadline for submissions is the 15th of September 2014.
Guidelines
Entry is free to anyone, and should be made via email (after May 12th 2014) to poetryfilm [at] obheal.ie – including the following in an attached word document:
- Name and duration of Film
- Name of director
- Country of origin
- Contact details
- Name of Poet
- Name of Poem
- Synopsis
- Filmmaker biography
- and a Link to download a high-resolution version of the film.
Films must interpret or be based on a poem, and have been completed no earlier than the 1st August 2012. They may not exceed 10 minutes in duration. Non-English language films will require subtitles.
The final programme (shortlist) will be available via both the Ó Bhéal and IndieCork websites as of the 30th of September 2014.
Hope to see you there!
OLE festival extends deadline, age limit for youth prize
OLE.01 International Festival of Electronic Literature organizer Roberta Iadevaia wrote to inform me of two major changes in their call for submissions: “deadline is now July 15 (instead of May) and the limit of age is 40 (instead of 35).”
Sharing poetry film festivals and exhibitions on the web: “Poems, Places & Soundscapes” points the way
All the work exhibited at the Poems, Places & Soundscapes audiopoetry and videopoetry exhibition is now on their website, for the benefit of anyone who couldn’t make it to Leicester in April. It would be great if more poetry-film screening events followed their lead. They’re even promising to post feedback and appreciation from the comments book and audio recording from an informal panel discussion held in conjunction with the exhibition.
As an exhibition rather than a festival, though, this may be something of a special case. Off-hand I can only think of three poetry film festivals whose websites archive a significant percentage of the films they’ve screened: Liberated Words (Bristol, UK), Co-Kisser (Minneapolis, US) and The Body Electric (Fort Collins, US). A more common approach is to share a list of the winning films, sometimes accompanied by screenshots. A few festivals have let their websites lapse altogether… and of course some never had a website to begin with, which is puzzling, to say the least.
It’s interesting to think about the different mind-sets that people bring to the poetry film genre(s). My own background as an online magazine editor and a poet for the page leads me to prioritize viewing videopoems/filmpoems on the web, because in part it’s so strongly parallel to the reader’s experience: it’s generally solitary, and one can go back and re-watch (re-read) as often as one likes. By contrast, people with a background in film tend to think in terms of festivals, theater runs and TV broadcasts: one-time or serial events, in connection with which the creators’ rights must be scrupulously protected. It’s to be expected, therefore, that to festival organizers, sharing screened works online must seem like a decidedly secondary affair, and potentially a bit of a hassle. But I would suggest that:
- you can reach a larger and more diverse audience online, and at the same time generate interest in attending future events by encouraging social-media sharing of the best films;
- many filmmakers these days are already uploading their works to video-hosting platforms as a matter of course, and in some cases only delay in posting them because film festival organizers have asked them to;
- sharing videos online is as easy as signing up for a free WordPress.com site, posting a Vimeo or YouTube link on a line by itself (thanks to the magic of oEmbed), and enabling Twitter and Facebook sharing icons at the bottom of the post.
There is a third, major stream of influence on videopoetry, however: video art, which strikes me as uniquely well-adapted to the web since the emphasis has always been on multiple plays for a maximum number of visitors. The difference I think lies in the quality of attention we bring to exhibitions in a physical as opposed to an online gallery. But in any case, the appeal of this approach is reflected in its near ubiquity now. Video screens have spread out of the art galleries and into all kinds of other museums and exhibition spaces, even leading to hybrid festival/exhibitions where multiple screens display suites of films in continuous loops. There are of course trade-offs involved in every decision on how to present filmic work, but given that videopoetry/filmpoetry is itself a hybrid genre, doesn’t it make sense to think in terms of multiple approaches to presentation, with no single outlet—web, festival, TV broadcast, art gallery—becoming the standard?
***
Returning to the Poems, Places & Soundscapes exhibition, I was interested to hear that it may have succeeded in doing something that a lot of poets claim as motivation for making videos of their work: reaching a broader audience than the usual poetry scenesters and academics. In an email, co-organizer Mark Goodwin wrote:
Overall the exhibition was received very well. There is a very positive and attentive review here: http://siobhanlogan.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/word-cubes-in-wild-place.html
The final exhibition gate-count was 1026. The Phoenix said that such a count was average to good for an exhibition in the Cube Gallery in April – they had estimated that the count would be around 700. So, considering this was essentially a poetry exhibition, I feel very pleased, and would suggest that for the presentation of poetry this is a long way above the average. […]
I saw quite a few folks who otherwise wouldn’t usually take time to engage with poetry, simply become poetically sucked into elsewhere via headphones! It really doesn’t get much better than that!
Address to the Amsterdam ReVersed Poetry Film Festival Symposium, April 4, 2014
Here’s the full transcript of Tom Konyves’ address; see the main site for the video shot by Alex Konyves. Tom gives a very personal introduction to the concept of videopoetry, using examples of his own work as a videopoet to illustrate some of the points he’s long been making as a critic and theorist. I have added just a few links. —Dave
Thank you Yan, Linda, Anne for the opportunity to address the ReVersed Poetry Film Festival Symposium.
I was asked to introduce the genre of videopoetry with my own work.
I won’t be able to talk about the meaning of my videopoems, as it’s always subjective, always in the eye of the beholder. What I can talk about is their structural form and how I came to discover the process of assembling, the strategies I employed, specifically in my early works.
You may not be able to tell, but I wear two hats. The first is for the poet who can mix text, image and sound and design a new condition for the poetic experience. The other is for the observer-critic who reflects on what is being seen and can tell us about these works, how they relate to the world they are presenting as a new world. It is the critic who asks, What makes this work different from a really good printed poem? or Will you always associate the images on the screen with the words you heard or read? and Where is the poetry in this work?
Call for entries: Liberated Words III poetry film festival
Somehow I missed this back on April 1 (I blame my feed reader), but the deadline isn’t until July 30th, so there’s plenty of time to get a submission in:
Liberated Words III poetry film festival
September 2014, Bristol Poetry Festival
Call for poetry films
MEMORY
Following the success of Liberated Words Poetry Film Festival at Bristol Poetry Festival in October 2013 festival organisers poetry filmmaker and writer Sarah Tremlett and performance poet Lucy English welcome poetry films of 3 minutes or less to be screened at Arnolfini, Bristol as part of Bristol Poetry Festival 2014 (15–21 September 2014), with a projected further two screenings at Komedia and The Little Theatre Cinema in Bath in February 2015.
Whilst still in the process of finalising the programme (including a surprise international guest) we are pleased to announce that this year, as well as welcoming our returning US music judges Rich Ferguson and Mark Wilkinson and screening the best films from Argentina and Vancouver from our partners VideoBardo and Visible Verse, some of the events we will be showcasing are: a groundbreaking poetry film from Action on Hearing Loss and the best of young local talent through a schools’ poetry film project with last year’s prize winners Helen Moore and Howard Vause – currently featuring St Gregory’s Catholic College in Bath and St Brendan’s Sixth Form College in Bristol; providing a workshop with the international poetry filmmaker Marc Neys, and supporting commemorative events for the 1914–18 war we will also be hosting a panel discussion on the legacy of Dada and Surrealism in poetry film today.
We will also be requesting submissions for two categories:
1 Open Call on the theme of Memory
2 Commemorating the anniversary of the 1914–1918 war we are also requesting poems in response to a poet of the time – to be announced.
All accepted entries will be screened and archived on Liberated Words website. We will be presenting awards for the best editing for poetic effect and best music throughout the festival.
Submission deadline 30th July 2013. Please send to l.english@bathspa.ac.uk
Entry forms
To enter your films please download and read the Rules and Regulations then download and fill in the Entry Form and Release Form and email your submission to l.english@bathspa.ac.uk
Liberated Words CIC Rules and Regulations 2014 (click to download)
Liberated Words CIC poetry film festival release form 2014 (click to download)
Liberated Words CIC open call memory entry form 2014 (click to download)
Visit the Liberated Words website for more, including examples of films screened at last year’s festival.
Sheila Packa on creating live, moving poems at an exhibition of transmedia art
This sounds as if it must’ve been absolutely delightful:
At the art opening last Friday, I was one of the writers who could “input” text into the film generator. [Kathy McTavish’s] art was the “origin of birds.” This posting is about my experience with it, a meditation on the “origin of words.” Entering words was addictive. My text was not the only text on the wall– the generator was randomly combining live twitter feed, climate reports, data, and other phrases. A few other poets were entering phrases as well. The effect was similar to spraying graffiti on a wall, only to have it drift away and replaced by other graffiti.
On my computer, at her web-page, whatever I entered in the text box would appear in the projection on the walls. This was new! wild! Generally as a writer, I do my work in solitude at my desk. In the film, the text was performing live. It was me performing live, actually, but because I was at a table in the corner, I was not visibly part of the exhibit. My words appeared whenever I pressed ‘enter.’ I noticed interesting juxtapositions and flows. I had surprises and sudden flashes of inspiration. It occurred to music (her compositions in cello were also part of the film).
Sometimes, I’d share my text box with friends. Cecilia Ramón sat down at my computer and translated the text she watched on the projection into Spanish for our viewing pleasure. The other designated poets showed some of their friends how to access the text entry point, so a number of people were participating at the same time. Some of the writing sparked material I intend to go back to when I’m at my desk. Some was silly or forgettable. It cascaded or even precipitated on the screen, like the live tweets. My writing evaporated (much like the way that ‘too much information’ is ignored or disregarded in other settings). I did walk away with the appreciation of how poetry, with its concentrated form and powerful image and sound elements, makes an ideal text for video work.
Motionpoems’ Season 5 premiere set for May 22 in Minneapolis
Mark your calendars for the 2014 world premiere of the latest crop of Motionpoems.
Motionpoems will unveil Season 5 in the luxurious cinema at The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis on May 22, 2014, at 6:30 and 8pm.
[…]
Both screenings are free! Our emcee: MPR movie maven Stephanie Curtis! Meet the poets and filmmakers, and join the after-party!
Here’s the trailer, courtesy of Ditch Edit:
https://vimeo.com/90584427
(Note that Motionpoems’ use of the phrase “moving poems” in the trailer and on their website is not meant to imply any connection to this website. We’re very separate entities.)
