~ News and Views ~

Open Call: VideoBardo Videopoetry Festival

VideoBardo logo with outline of videocassette

VideoBardo is a bridge to the videocassette era.

I’m not quite sure how I missed this till now (possibly because they’re based mainly on Facebook these days, and I don’t spend much time there), but Buenos Aires-based VideoBardo, currently the world’s longest-running videopoetry festival, is gearing up for 2020. You still have plenty of time to submit: the deadline is 30 August.

VideoBardo, founded in 1996, call artists to participate in the International Videopoetry Festival – VideoBardo 2020, which will be realizated throughout 2020 in different cities and venues around the world and at a CENTRAL WEEK in Buenos Aires, Argentina; on dates to be defined.

We understand as Videopoetry to those audiovisual works in that the poetic verbal language (word, letter, speech, writing, sign) has a leading role or a special transforming treatment. Therefore the three fields: Image in movement, Sound, and Verbal language are in a dialogue to create a fourth reality that is the Videopoetic Work. Then the verbal language in video poetry is experienced in its meanings by visual, sound, corporal and physical dimensions.

Note that Spanish subtitling is generally required for works in other languages. Click through for all the rules, and then submit here.

Poetry Film Live relaunches

s reenshot of Poetry Film Live home page

Poetry film Live relaunched last Wednesday with new content and a slightly new focus. Published and edited by the poetry film-making duo Helen Dewbery and Chaucer Cameron, it has a new tagline, “A New Way with Poetry,” and is described as “a UK based webzine which publishes poetry film, performances, readings, essays and reviews. It is also the platform for Elephant’s Footprint online poetry film training.” A welcome message currently at the top of the home page goes into more detail:

Poetry Film Live has made some changes!

Following a brief furlough from the end of last year, Poetry Film Live has come back with a renewed focus on the work of poets and the type of poetry film that is a literary form. A form of poetry that is visual, not solely textual, that moves rather than stays put on a page.

Poetry Film Live has responded to the changes that have developed during the Covid19 pandemic. The future of poetry gatherings, reading series and open mics is uncertain both in the short and longer term, therefore, Poetry Film Live is including performances and readings of poetry.

These are new and exciting times and we hope you will consider participating and supporting Poetry Film Live by sending us your submissions, we look forward to seeing your work.

Start by watching the two videos below: ‘How to Make Voice Recordings from Home Better’ and ‘Top Tip for filming yourself reading a poem from a smartphone’.

We have also announced the launch of online poetry film training for poets – see the link for more details.

Learn Poetry Film Making

The course is only £75 and I’m not aware of anyone else offering this right now, so I’m glad they’re featuring it. It’s a real service to the community.

The submission guidelines are mostly sensible, though it’s too bad the maximum duration is so short (six minutes). My only other criticism of the site is the large sticky header, which reduces screen real estate significantly. Viewers not in the habit of expanding videos to full screen, or clicking F11 on a PC to push the website to full screen, are sure to be frustrated.

But these are minor quibbles. It’s great to be able welcome Poetry Film Live back to active duty. (We at Moving Poems know all about unannounced brief furloughs!) Go visit.

Call for Entries: Midwest Video Poetry Fest

A new videopoetry festival has emerged in Madison, Wisconsin: Midwest Video Poetry Fest.

Arts + Literature Laboratory has brought creativity and community into the lives of thousands of people during our first four years in Madison through exhibitions, concerts, readings, and education programming for all ages. We bring together world-class artists, emerging and local artists, writers, musicians, and audiences for approximately two hundred events each year. In 2020, our programming and audiences will expand as we move into a new, more accessible, and larger location in the heart of Madison’s Capitol East District. At this new location, we will be hosting the first Midwest Video Poetry Fest (MVPF).

Video poetry gives creators an opportunity to use one of our newest art forms–film–to transform one of our oldest art forms—poetry. This emerging and exciting format is adding to the rapidly growing audience for poetry in America. Leading up to the screenings, which will be part of the Wisconsin Book Festival in October of this year, Arts + Literature Laboratory (ALL) will be hosting free poetry video making workshops, featuring video poetry on our ALL Review, and hosting discussions on the genre of video poetry.

MVPF will be the first of its kind in Wisconsin and will present the work of local, national, and international poets and filmmakers. All events will be free and open to the public.

Midwest Video Poetry Fest is made possible in part by a grant from Dane Arts. For sponsorship and volunteer opportunities, please genia@artlitlab.org.

Read the full Rules and Regulations here.

DEADLINE: August 1, 2020

Midwest Video Poetry Fest proudly accepts entries on FilmFreeway, the world’s #1 way to enter film festivals and creative contests.

Call for Entries: 8th Annual Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition

In case you missed the brief link in last week’s news round-up, here’s a press release from Ó Bhéal with the full call-out.

The 8th annual Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition

2020 is Ó Bhéal’s eleventh year screening International poetry-films, and the eighth year featuring this competition. Up to thirty films will be shortlisted and screened during the festival in November 2020. One winner will receive the Indie Cork / Ó Bhéal prize for best Poetry-Film.

Submissions are open from: 1st May – 31st August 2020. You may submit as many entries as you like. Films must interpret, or convey a poem which must be present in its entirety (audibly and/or visually), having been completed no earlier than 1st of May 2018.

Entries may not exceed 10 minutes in duration. Non-English language films will require English subtitles. The shortlist will be announced during October 2020.

One overall winner will receive the Ó Bhéal award for best poetry-film. Shortlisted films will be screened (and the winner announced) at the 8th Winter Warmer poetry festival (27th-29th Nov 2020).

Entry is free to anyone, and should be made via email to poetryfilm [at] obheal.ie – including the following info in an attached word document:

  • Name and duration of Film
  • Month & Year completed
  • 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.**

**If you are sending a vimeo or youtube link, etc, please ensure that the download button is enabled. All films not shortlisted by the judges are permanently deleted directly after the adjudication process.

The Judges for this years competition are poet/playwright/filmmaker Dairena Ní Chinnéide & poet/filmmaker Paul Casey

Follow the link for an outline of the submission details:
http://www.obheal.ie/blog/competition-poetry-film/

OBhealPoetryFilmFlyer2020

New Poetry Video Magazine: Blank Verse Films

I’m a little late with this news, but back on April 1, the poetry video producers Blank Verse Films expanded from their YouTube channel into what they’re calling a video magazine about poetry. I’m a firm believer that everyone who can afford to should establish their own, independent website and not be completely at the mercy of corporate hosting platforms, so this is really welcome news. Quoting their About page:

Blank Verse Films is a video magazine that produces poetry-related films. Our mission is to broaden the reach of poetry & literature by putting it on screens. We are operated by a few like-minded readers in Southern and Northern California.

Poems are selected largely through our own lonely impulse of delight. Commissions and partnerships are not our focus, but if you would like to reach out, we are receptive and you can email us with any inquiries. We operate as a non-profit through our fiscal sponsor Film Independent. You can support us through their donation page.

Our ambition is to establish ‘poetry videos’ as a recognized genre of film like music videos. If you want to post your own poetry video here, we encourage you to send it to us. Sign up for our newsletter to get updates on our films.

News Round-Up: Pandemic Edition

“Why Poetry?” Video Podcast Special on Poetry Film with Lucy English

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPti3riEkh0

This is such an excellent look at the role of collaboration in poetry film-making. A very well-edited and satisfying program, focusing on Lucy English’s Book of Hours project, it ought to work well as an introduction to the genre for poets and filmmakers alike.

Ó Bhéal Poetry-Film Competition Open for Submissions

Guidelines here.

Weimar Poetry Film Award: Festival Postponed, Deadline Extended

Guidelines here.

FVPS Deadline Extended and The Symposium Postponed until Fall 2020

“The Film and Video Poetry Society will postpone our 3rd annual symposium; we are hopeful, and are committed to rescheduling for fall 2020. Submissions remain open and our deadline extended to August 3, 2020.” More here.

Newlyn PZ Poetry Film Competition Winners Announced

The 2020 Newlyn PZ Film Festival was cancelled, but we still know the winners of the poetry film competition thanks to a post at the increasingly indispensable Liberated Words website.

Cadence Video Poetry Festival, Other Film Festivals Move Online

Rather than cancel entirely, the Cadence Video Poetry Festival made the choice of screening films online in five screenings on 15-19 April. A number of other film festivals are opting to screen films online for a few days as well. It’s a shame that so many film festivals bar submissions of films that are freely available online. Otherwise it might be possible for Cadence and others to post all competition films to the web on a permanent basis, and people with dodgier internet connections (including myself) would have an easier time watching them. If the pandemic makes meat-space festivals impossible for the next couple of years, as seems possible, some festivals might end up doing a 180 and requiring all submissions to be available on the web. That would certainly shake things up!

Visible Poetry Project Films All Online

The Visible Poetry Project is one web-first, festival-like thing that wasn’t hurt by the pandemic. A film went up each day in April, and you can watch them all on their website.

New Book on Videopoetry by Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel H. Dugas

Books on or about videopoetry are a rarity, and this one is available for free as a PDF, with a print version due out later this year. Here’s Sarah Tremlett’s mini review. It’s cool to be able to read about the making of a film and then click a live link to watch it. I’ll be interested to see whether the print edition includes QR codes allowing readers with mobile phones to watch the films as they read.

Online “Festival of Hope” Features Videopoetry

This is a cool festival. And it looks as if the films may remain live for a while.

Corona! Shut Down? Open Call and Ongoing Release of Videos

New Media 2020 Corona Festival banner

It’s not just for poetry videos, but this is well worth checking out — and submitting to. As they say, “Corona isn’t the plague, and not all infected people are gonna be dying. Probably, the crisis is a wake-up call – to rethink and change!?”

“Poetry and Climate” film screening at Lyra Bristol Poetry Festival

Lucy English and Sarah Tremlett of Liberated Words have organized a poetry film event focusing on poetry and climate on Saturday, March 14 in Bristol, UK. Tickets are free.

Curated by Liberated Words, these short poetry films will reflect on the current climate emergency as well as celebrate the natural world. Plus short discussion on the rising genre of poetry film and how artists and poets are responding to our changing environment. With Lucy English and Sarah Tremlett.

Arnolfini (Theatre)
Saturday 14th March 2020
1:00 – 2:00pm

There’s more information on the Liberated Words website, and it sounds like a really exciting event, with films from around the world and a panel discussion including Mark Smalley from Extinction Rebellion as well as UK ecopoets Helen Moore, Meriel Lland and Caleb Parkin. If you can’t make it to Bristol, Lucy and Sarah note that “We are also looking for further screening venues, and other poetry films on the subject, particularly including diversity within the makers.” For those who can attend, the whole festival looks pretty unmissable, with an overall theme of “climate, nature, and romantic Bristol.”

Winners of Atticus Review Videopoetry Contest

Congratulations to the Atticus Review Videopoetry Contest winners!

Top prize goes to Susanne Wiegner for Contemplation is Watching (below), from a poem by Robert Lax. Read comments from the judge, Marc Neys, and discover the three other prize winners here.

Unseen Forces and the Protagonist’s Point of View

presentation at ZEBRA 2019

Whilst subjectivity often lies in the hands of the poet, the film-maker can double the affect. This can be through their narrative use of the lens in relation to the position of the protagonist, or narrator, particularly in response to unseen forces; placing the viewer or camera in interesting and even culpable positions. I have selected three pairs of films that utilize contrasting approaches to this technique. The first two generate comic pathos; the second two focus on man’s inhumanity to man; and the final pair on the difficult dramatic technique of intimating freedom from negative forces beyond the screen (this world which is not that world).

The Desktop Metaphor (2017), by British poet Caleb Parkin, with filmic interpretation by Dutch film-maker Helmie Stil, centres in content and form on the subtly humorous juxtaposition of the prosaic with the profound and mythical in relation to man’s position in a desktop universe. The light from a steadily repetitive photocopier plays central stage in this film, accenting the repetitions in the poem, where office products alongside Stil’s photocopied face are interwoven with concepts of the infinite – ‘The Great Stapler which attaches the night to us’.

On Loop (2013), one of the funniest films in recent years by British film-maker and animator Christine Hooper, also focuses on the impotence of man’s condition in order to create humour. However, in this case the viewer is given the point of view of the invisible protagonist, who is in bed and tossing and turning with insomnia. In a short space of time we get to know exactly who the protagonist is, without ever seeing her, since an imagination in overdrive lets slip the jumbled contents of her thoughts. These are married with a visually fractured room, and a hyper-alert voice-over (Susan Calman) that is so well chosen to dramatically accentuate, through the sharply rising and falling tones of the melodic accent, a disjointed, racing imagination. Placing the viewer in the physical and mental position of the protagonist is a clever device, the comic pathos doubled in affect.

Two contrasting filmic approaches to man’s inhumanity to man are found in Numbers (English and Piatek, 2016) and Hopscotch (Vilk and Aisha 2017). Numbers begins with the film-maker and the footage itself. Maciej Piatek asked Lucy English to write a poem to the footage centering broadly on someone trying to find their way in society. Lucy arrived at the refugee survivor’s narrative, which Maciej paired with a voice-over by a survivor herself.

The black-and-white footage is from a laboratory, and I quote Maciej: ‘showing each stage of death of a human white blood cell, revealing the dying cells apparently trying to alert their immune system allies that they are dying’. He says he ‘looped and delayed in time the same piece of found footage to make it look like a disease outbreak. At the end of the film one can see in the left top corner the cell is actually disappearing’.

This film rests on the visual absence of the survivors themselves. The screen and the cells as human experiment are a surface to reflect upon, in the way that a tombstone in a graveyard focuses our thoughts. We are entirely tuned to the voice and its wholly credible narrative. However, the voice slowly disappears and the liquid vibrating aspect of the cells delicately suggests the negative role of water and the ocean in the stories. Although the survivor’s voice lets us know she survived, the screen tells us a different story. The film intimates what is not shown.

The next film, Hopscotch (2017), also intimates an insidious negative force, highlighting targeted, everyday abuse, particularly against Black Asian Minority Ethnic (BAME) women in Scotland. It is based on a poem by Nadine Aisha, and is directed by leading film-maker Roxana Vilk, with executive production by AMINA – Muslim Women’s Resource Centre with support from Rape Crisis Edinburgh.

We are immediately drawn into the centre of the conflict. An invisible stalker hisses suggestive remarks to a girl who then retorts ‘he says to me’ placing us, the viewer, as her third-party confidante. At the same time the camera focuses on a girl strolling across the screen on a cold evening. Through this clever filmic device, we see from dual points of view – as both her friend and her assailant – creating dramatic tension.

We cut to daytime, on a bus, and she continues: ‘Sat on the bus with a stranger’s hot breath’ and we are there again, but from the point of view of the abuser sitting right behind her, just as Christine Hooper placed us in the mind and physical position of the insomniac. ‘I want you’ he hisses. We follow our prey through the streets, and the abuse continues ‘stuck up bitch’ ‘what’s wrong, can’t you take this’, ‘Slut, slag’.

Standing alone in a railway station as everyone else speeds past, we recognize the victim’s frozen isolation, and how such abuse robs us of an authentic, relaxed interaction in public places. She is left with the fallout of the words and an ensuing alienation: ‘clenched them tight in fists that now mark the imprint of nameless men trying to name me’. The film continues for nearly five minutes, exposing us, the viewer, to a sense of an unending and unpredictable persecution. Ultimately the stalking camera reaches a climax where the victim turns, takes the camera, and starts filming herself. For a moment she, as in everywoman, triumphs; but through the majority of the narrative Vilk has expertly drawn us in, to inhabit the obsessive mind of the perpetrator.

Roxana told me (email 11 December 2019):

One of the reasons I was drawn to the style I used was also about reflecting on the “male gaze” in cinema in the sense that it is often male directors behind the lens; and I wanted to parallel that to this harassment of women in public spaces. Then to give the poet/ protagonist the chance at the end to grab the camera and turn the lens on herself… so she could speak to the audience without the male gaze and take back ownership of the story.

Freedom from unseen forces beyond the screen provides the central tenet in the final two films. In Quarry (2019) with poem by American poet Melissa Stein and animated line drawing by British artist animator Josh Saunders, a dramatic narrative is placed squarely in front of us. With a delicate and charming line illustration, a girl and boy swim naked in a quarry. However, through the concise and well-placed choice of words which indicate brooding danger – for example ‘a girl is swimming naked in dark water’ – an undercurrent of impending loss of innocence emerges.

The narrative is told as if in the third person, but as it reaches the denouement the narrator enters the first person. It is at this point that we sense that the earlier controlled use of language might indicate a personal psychological burial, now being exhumed. Within the developing drama, Saunders’ figures swim with innocence and a fragile, vibratory naivety; dipping into and below the surface – at one with the water, the rocks and each other. As we realize this event actually happened to the author, so we adjust, and mentally include the invasive eye of an intruder. Achieving delicacy and innocence in a film is a difficult feat; however, with such restraint, both visual and verbal, the result is powerful and memorable, and shows how animation can add to narrative in dramatic ways beyond live footage.

Storm Song (2019) by young British artist (and Central St Martins graduate) Rebecca Hilton is also set in water, but underwater, accompanied by two poems. On the surface, it appears to be a lyric, moving abstract painting where mermaid-like figures (some fully clothed and with long trailing fabric) unwind and intertwine, being both the ink and the brush. However, this film contains an underlying tension, and, rather than making a loud political statement, uses space, language and embodied gesture to subtly deny the constricts on the surface of enforced identities and ideologies from the powers that be – ‘for all we understand is power’.

Alongside an enigmatic voice-over, the viewer’s gaze finds itself broken by frequent black ‘rests’ – a technique I haven’t seen except with intertitles. These black spaces, in a ‘ma’-like way, inspire reflection on what has just been said. And just over halfway through the two poems interweave with each other. The themes in ‘Ghost Ribbon’ (2019) explore return from failure, whilst ‘Cataclysmic Storm’ (2019) investigates the weight of authoritarian power and control ‘Suspended up up up until you breathe’.

Whilst in Quarry we are taken on a developing narrative that intimates in its dramatic unselfconscious innocence a dark denouement, in Storm Song, the darkness gradually filters through, as a continuous invisible, quiescent force.


An earlier version of this essay appeared on Liberated Words.

Call for entries: ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival 2020

Adapted from a press release from the Haus für Poesie
ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival stage and audience

As of today, the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin is inviting entries for its competition for the best international poetry films. Eligible for entry are international short films produced since January 1, 2018 which are based on poems and are no more than 20 minutes in duration. All languages are allowed. The competition winners will be awarded prize money. A programme committee will select films for the international competition and for all the other festival programmes from among the entries. At the festival, the winning films will be selected by a jury comprising representatives from the worlds of poetry, film and media.

In addition, ZEBRA is inviting filmmakers to submit a film interpretation of this year’s festival poem “Lethe” by the poet TJ Dema.* Text and audio of the poem together with translations come from lyrikline.org, a leading online archive for poetry. The directors of the three best film interpretations will be chosen by the programme committee and invited to come to Berlin where they will have the opportunity to present their films at the festival and discuss them with the poet.

Entry deadline is the 1st of July 2020.

Conditions of participation and entry form are here. Please submit using FilmFreeway here.

The 11th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival will run from November 19-22, 2020 in Berlin’s Kino in der KulturBrauerei. It’s the largest international platform for poetry film worldwide. Since 2002 it has offered poets, film- and festival-makers from all over the world a platform for creative exchange, brainstorming and meeting with a broad audience. With a competition, film programmes, poetry readings, retrospectives, exhibitions, performances, workshops, colloquia, lectures and a children’s program, it showcases in various sections the diversity of the poetry film genre. In 2018, more than 1200 submissions from 97 countries were submitted for the international competition.

Follow ZEBRA at Haus für Poesie and on Vimeo, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
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*The Festival Poem may be used only for the purpose of film interpretation within the scope of this call for entries. For any other use at other festivals or on other platforms, etc. the film makers must obtain the rights from the rights holders.

Call for work: Cadence Video Poetry Festival 2020

Cadence 2020 poster

Cadence: Video Poetry Festival is open for submissions! This annual festival at the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle, Washington will host screenings on April 16 and 17 and is looking for work ranging from adaptations to collaboration to include in the festival. Cadence approaches video poetry as a literary genre presented as visual media that makes new meaning from the combination of text and moving image. Send Cadence your video poetry through March 1 via FilmFreeway.

The foregoing is the (slightly altered) text of a social-media-adapted press release that Chelsea Werner-Jatzke emailed me this week—a good indication, I suspect, of just how well organized this festival is generally. In case you missed it, I interviewed Chelsea and her co-conspirator Rana San last July. See “How to start a major new videopoetry festival: an interview with the co-directors of Cadence.”

Ground-breaking documentary about videopoetry now at Vimeo On Demand

At long last, the documentary Versogramas or Verses&Frames by Galician director Belén Montero—a unique, multicultural look at contemporary videopoetry through the eyes of 14 filmmakers—is available to watch on the web:

We have great news to share with you: Verses&Frames is now available at Vimeo On Demand. Watch it here!

Now you can enjoy the documentary at home, at any time, for a really low price. Moreover, we have released all the different linguistic versions of Verses&Frames, so you can choose five screening possibilities: original version in Galician with Galician subtitles, Spanish version with Spanish subtitles, English version with English subtitles, reduced Spanish and reduced English versions.

This is how it works: For 3€ you can “rent” the screening of the version you choose. It will be available for 24 hours so you can watch the documentary as many times as you want. You can reproduce it on iOS, Android, Apple TV, Roku and Chromecast.

One of our main objectives when producing Verses&Frames has always been to contribute to the knowledge, research, enjoyment and diffusion of videopoetry. As well as the screenings conducted at festivals, museums and television, we believe that this is a good way to deliver the content of the documentary directly to the public, and to share with you all the emotions that videopoetry arises.

So, just a click away: Verses&Frames On Demand.

That rental price in US dollars is just $3.32. The Vimeo description doesn’t include links to the videopoets interviewed in the film, but you can find that on the project’s website (also available in three languages). I wrote a somewhat critical but generally positive review of Versogramas for Poetryfilm Magazine in 2018. I wrote, in part, that

The interviews are creatively shot and well edited, and the interviewees all come across as fascinating people with uniquely unconventional approaches to making poetry and art. There wasn’t one of them whom I didn’t want to immediately track down on the web and watch every one of their videos, and I was pleased by how many of them were new to me, either because their work had never been translated into English, or because they just hadn’t happened to have crossed my radar.

This is testimony to the sheer breadth of the international videopoetry community, I think. It’s impressive that the producers can focus on just one part of the world—Spain, especially the Galician region—add a handful of filmmakers and videopoets from outside that region, and still end up with a highly varied, complete-feeling snapshot of the state of videopoetry in the 21st century.

So go check it out! I know I for one will definitely be watching it again.