~ News and Views ~
Call for work: REELpoetry/Houston TX 2020
I apologize for not sharing this back on August 15, the opening date, but videopoets and poetry filmmakers still have until December 9 to submit work for this Texas-based festival, now in its second year.
REELpoetry/Houston TX 2020 is an international poetry film festival screening cinepoetry, documentaries, performance video, plus panels, workshops & more JANUARY 24-26, 2020.
For complete guidelines and submissions:
Our first international poetry film festival took place March 22-24, 2019. You can read all about it HERE
It’s especially embarrassing that I forgot to share this earlier since I’ve agreed to be the judge. It’s a very exciting-sounding event, which filmmaker Pam Falkenberg attended last year and reviewed in these very virtual pages. She noted that “REELpoetry advocates a big-tent approach, preferring an expansive canon rather than a narrow one.” This year again
The Festival will also include workshops, live performances, talks, panel discussions, Q&A with poets and filmmakers. Come to meet international, national and local poets, film makers and artists, network and socialize, see and be seen. All screenings are centrally located and special hotel arrangements will be offered.
NOTE: Submissions in a language other than English must have an English translation of the poetry either presented in the film or as a written handout.
Awards & Prizes
Judges Award $225 Cinepoetry
Audience Award $225 CinepoetryJudges Award $225 Poetry Short Documentary
Audience Award $225 Poetry Short DocumentaryAudience Award $100 – Best Performance
Rules & Terms
REELpoetry 2020 is accepting film and video in three categories: (1) cinepoems (2) short poetry documentaries (3) spoken word videos. You are allowed up to 3 entries in each of the categories, each submitted separately, as follows:.
CINEPOEMS – 5 minutes max
Created by poets or filmmakers or artist collaborations.SHORT POETRY DOCUMENTARIES – 15 minutes max
May document the making of a poem, daily life of a poet, poetry event etc.All cinepoems and documentaries must include closing credits on the screen, and provide up to 3 stills max. You will also need to provide a short (75 word max) statement and brief bio for both the poet and filmmaker( (60 word max))
SPOKEN WORD VIDEO – 3 minutes max
Video of live performance, slam
NOTE: Attendance required. At the Festival you will perform live with your video in the background with the sound turned off.All submissions in a language other than English must have an English translation of the poetry either presented in the film or as a written handout.
By submitting to REELpoetry/Houston TX you acknowledge that work is yours, and that you have obtained permission(s) where required. You also agree to allow your work to be included in a curated series that will travel nationally and internationally.
NOTE: Public Poetry Members receive a 20% discount on the entry fee. Memberships start at $8/mo.
To join Public Poetry as a member go to: http://www.publicpoetry.net/membership-here/
Call for work: Visible Poetry Project 2020
Filmmaker applications and poetry submissions are open now through October 31 for the 2020 series of the Visible Poetry Project. As Marie noted just now in a post to the main site, VPP has been going since 2017, producing and publishing at least a video a day throughout the month of April. There’s also an off-line component to the project, with screenings in New York City and beyond. And in the first three years of its existence, more and more prominent poets and filmmakers have taken part, though as they say on the poetry submissions page, they “strive to emphasize the diversity of the global poetry community, and so encourage you to submit regardless of background or circumstance. Whether poetry is your hobby, profession, private outlet, or public expression, your work is welcome.” A similar statement occurs at the head of the filmmaker guidelines:
The Visible Poetry Project strives to emphasize the diversity of the global film community, and so encourage you to apply regardless of background or circumstance. Whether filmmaking is your hobby, profession, private outlet, or public expression, your work is welcome.
Within your application, please provide a reel and/or links to previous films you’ve created. All work samples must be original, and you must be one of the main contributors. You may submit up to three links. We recommend submitting samples that you believe to be representative of the greater styles and themes in your work. If you are accepted, this will help inform which poet you may get paired with.
You may apply as part of a team (up to two filmmakers). If you are applying as part of a team, please submit only one application. Please include links to reels for both collaborators, and send an email to visiblepoetryproject@gmail.com, CC’ing your co-director.
If you are a producer, director of photography, or editor, and are interested in being involved in the 2020 series, please email visiblepoetryproject@gmail.com.
Click through to apply. Or, if you write poetry, submit here.
Poetry and film: an essay in two voices
Marie Craven: If you have the time and inclination, Dave, I’m interested to hear your thoughts about the piece on Haunted Memory, by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin, that we published recently on the main Moving Poems side of the site.
Dave Bonta: It was an interesting essay, but I do feel that if its makers call something an essay film or an audiovisual essay, it’s not entirely fair to re-brand it as a film poem just because that’s what our site is about. I’m wary about a kind of hegemonic impulse that leads critics to expand the bounds of their favorite genre beyond a point that’s helpful for the average reader, listener or viewer. (I feel that TriQuarterly, for example, does this all too often for the pieces in their video section, branding them all as “video essays” even when they’re clearly adaptations of texts termed poems by their authors.)
Yes, Haunted Memory is very lyrical and resembles a lot of poetry films, but proponents of creative nonfiction would argue I think that it is a separate category distinct from journalism on the one hand and poetry on the other. So by the same token I’ve resisted the temptation to showcase especially poetic documentaries over the years, though there’s clearly plenty of overlap and mutual influence, and one can find examples of film-makers who work in both genres, such as Lori H. Ersolmaz and Roxana Vilk.
MC: Thanks for the feedback.
In one way, I see critical and theoretical writing about any art as inherently hegemonic, in that a position is adopted above the field it is mapping. But I take your point about re-branding, especially the part about stretching things to a point beyond what might be helpful to audiences.
About TriQuarterly: they published one of my videos in their current issue as a video essay. I have no problem with it. That piece, Kitsch Postcards, from a poem by Amanda Stewart, fits both categorisations, I think. Perhaps from a film-maker’s point of view, there is an element of pragmatism in how and why we may identify with certain genres or forms. The terminology may be more fluid for a film-maker than a critic or theorist.
DB: It’s not a bad thing to keep continuously challenging the rules, even one’s own rules. It’s entirely possible that I’ve gotten a little hide-bound about Moving Poems over the past ten years. And I can see where you’re coming from as a film-maker. But all categories are ultimately arbitrary and fluid; the question is, do they help or hinder our understanding? Poetry itself is notoriously hard to define, and I tend to side with those who simply say that a poem is whatever a poet says it is. So if a video artist declares themselves a poet and starts making what they call videopoems, I’ll consider their work for the site on that basis.
I’ve also somewhat arbitrarily ruled out films or videos lacking in anything that might be considered text, either in the soundtrack or on screen. I follow Tom Konyves in that regard. If I don’t also attempt to distinguish between poetry films and videopoems in a thoroughly Konyvesian fashion, that’s mainly because I see myself as a curator rather than a critic. It would simply be too confusing, and possibly off-putting, for general visitors to Moving Poems to try and navigate between separate videopoem, film poem, poetry film, and cinepoetry categories, for example, so I’ve treated all these things as roughly synonymous and let it go at that. I guess you could say I’m trying to respect the populist impulse of the avant-garde without succumbing to its more elitist tendencies, because I want the site to appeal to people from all kinds of educational and cultural backgrounds.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying yes, I agree with your pragmatic outlook, but I do feel that some distinctions are still useful.
MC: I like the idea that “a poem is whatever the poet says it is”. Artists are often not given that much power over their own work in the broader culture arising around them. I guess we have to leave something to the critics/theorists, who draw on our work to inspire what they do in their own distinct fields of endeavour. I wonder if what they do is a kind of appropriation? I might be less ambivalent about critical theory if I were to view it as a new creative work arising from one that came before it.
Another thing that may have prompted some of what I wrote about Haunted Memory, is an email I recently received from someone in the German-speaking world who is very dedicated to our area of interest. They mentioned how unhelpful they find the term “videopoetry”. As I understood this email, most of their dislike of the term seemed to be about funding policies in that part of the world, as they relate to staging festivals and events in our genre. But they consider the term old-fashioned too, belonging to the 1990s at the latest.
There was also a recent discussion in the Poetry Film Live group on Facebook, in response to a post about the terminology most acceptable within a PhD. Alongside responses from several others highly engaged in our field, I confessed that I tend to interchangeably use terms like poetry film, film poetry, poetry video, videopoetry, and any others in this vein. Part of that discussion was also about whether videopoetry (or whatever) is a “genre” or a “form”. I find this to be of little real consequence (except in the context of a PhD), and again tend to use the terms interchangeably.
DB: Well, there’s no doubt that the Germans, like the Brits, consider “film” the proper term, and are snobby about “video”. And I can well believe that funding organizations might be more impressed by applications using a term perceived to have more gravitas and prestige. But most of the rest of the world goes with some version of “video”.
The form vs. genre discussion is interesting I suppose, but to me a poetic form implies fairly strict rules, so for example a sonnet ought to fit or at least strongly suggest the received opinion of what constitutes a sonnet. What sorts of rules define a videopoem? Precious few. So videopoetry as I understand it is a genre of poetry, yes — as well as a genre of film/video. But not a form.
One could make the distinction that videopoetry or film poetry is a genre of poetry, whereas poetry film, including most animations, is a genre of film. And I think that can be a useful way of thinking about different tendencies or orientations in the work we see. But in reality, I think, many poetry videos emerge from collaborative partnerships between a writer and a film-maker, in which sometimes the text does not precede the project but arises in response to images or music. Or sometimes it might have had a separate life in print or as live performance, but becomes a new thing when adapted to film/video. So the question of whether to consider the final product a film adaptation or an original videpoem becomes fairly academic. They’re poles on a continuum, basically.
MC: Poles on a continuum, yes. I think that videopoetry is both a genre of poetry, and a genre of film. It is a hybrid embodying the histories of both art forms.
In terms of “the Germans” and “the Brits”, it could be argued that “video” is the term that should always be adopted, as it is the most accurate description of the technology we are using, i.e. digital video. The term “film” fundamentally describes moving images on celluloid. There are global subcultures that can be snobby about anything other than celluloid film, especially in the experimental film world. I was once one of them, back when video and film were more clearly different things, and video was recorded on magnetic tape.
DB: Not to beat a dead horse, but it’s worth remembering that the term “video” was invented decades before the advent of video cassettes, and deployed as early as 1937 to describe what was broadcast on television. Nobody talks about “film games” or “online film hosting”. So I do feel it’s a better, more neutral catch-all term for moving images in the era of mass communications.
I guess one thing I’ve learned over the years is that one can become a great videopoet or film poet without necessarily being a brilliant poet on the page or the stage. Just as Arthur Waley was a great poet with a distinctive voice only when he translated other people’s poems into English, so, for example, is someone like Marc Neys able to develop a distinctive and powerful poetic voice in videopoetry despite not being a page poet himself. Over the years, I’ve really grown to appreciate how rare a truly original eye is, and how a genuinely great poetry film-maker’s work might as well constitute a unique new genre.
And then there are all the poets I’ve come to know who learn how to make videos themselves and find that it revitalizes their writing, and sometimes also changes their whole perspective on publishing, simply because the way videos are hosted and shared online tends to make a hash of traditional, scarcity-based publication models.
Which brings me in a somewhat circuitous fashion back once more to the film vs. video distinction. To the extent that screening work in festivals (or in rare occasions in limited theater runs) may prevent it from being freely shared online, it might still make sense to distinguish between something shared as if it were a scarce artifact analogous to a celluloid film, versus something that can be shared as if it were an endlessly replicable composition analogous to a poem.
MC: You mentioned Marc Neys. I almost see videopoetry as revolving around his work. It embodies something unique in the contemporary genre. To me, what he has done represents a true expression of the avant-garde in our midst, opening ways forward that many of us haven’t yet seen. Much art is labelled avant-garde, but not so much fits the description. It’s not that I feel we all should emulate what he has done (on the contrary), but there is much to learn from the spirit of his approach.
Jumping on to another of your thoughts: it’s wonderful for me to think of video revitalising the work of poets. Poetry certainly has reinvigorated film-making to a huge degree for me. This give and take between the parts of the hybrid form is inspiring.
I like what you say about distribution as well. Online publishing is liberating in relation to the older models. Scarcity-based distribution seems so tied up with capitalism. I like things free.
DB: Amen to that. Thanks for the discussion.
Button Poetry 2019 Video Contest open through August 31
As usual, I missed the announcement and only remembered to search for it now, but you still have 11 days to submit to Button Poetry‘s annual video contest. The official guidelines are on Submittable:
We are thrilled to host our fourth annual open-submission video contest!
There are so many ways to record and present poetry, and we want to continue giving people around the world the chance to step up on the digital stage and share their work.
We are looking for brave work that crosses borders or effaces them completely, work that enters into larger social conversations, work that lives in the world, work with a strong, unique voice and palpable energy.
See our previous winners here and here for examples!
PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING CLOSELY
Submissions open on July 15th, 2019 and close on August 31st, 2019 at 11:59PM PST (US Time Zone).
PRIZE:
The winner’s video along with the videos of 5 runners-up will be featured across Button’s social media. The winner will receive a $500 honorarium. Additional entries may also be recognized and published.ENTRY FEE:
$8 per submission
$6 per submission for Young Writers (ages 18-21) and International Entrants (outside the U.S.)
Please, only one video per submission. Multiple submissions are welcome.
All entrants will receive 20% off any purchase from the Button Website.ELIGIBILITY:
- Age: You must be 18 years or older to enter (sorry!).
- Language: We welcome any poetry performance or poetry short film in any language, as long as non-English videos come with English subtitles.
- Previous Publication: Videos that have been previously published elsewhere are eligible, with the understanding that any selected video may need to be taken down from other locations on the internet.
RULES:
- Video Length: Videos must be 1-4 minutes in length.
- File Size: File size may not exceed 1GB.
- Submission Format: Videos must be submitted using the submission manager on this page. Most common video file-types are accepted.
- Rights: You MUST own the complete, transferable rights to ALL elements of the submission. This includes but is not limited to text, audio, video, and images.
- Collaborative Poems: Collaborative poems are fine!
- Video Quantity: Only one video per submission. Multiple submissions are welcomed.
Please note that submissions which do not meet these rules may be disqualified.
CONTEST PROCESS:
- Judges: Members of the Button Poetry staff and a carefully selected group of artists and judges will review all submissions to determine the winner, runners up, honorable mentions, and any other videos we may be interested in running.
- Notices: You will be notified of your submission status as the contest progress, via email to the address you used to make your submission(s) with. This will be done on a rolling basis as we move through the stages of the contest.
- Timeline: The duration of judging will depend on the quantity of entries we receive, so we’ll keep folks posted on our social media about the contest. Please expect it to take a few months, however, as we want to give your submissions the attention they deserve!
- Honorable Mentions: If you would like to be considered as an honorable mention in the following categories, please note your eligibility in your submission form. Categories include: International Entry (outside the United States) and Young Writers (ages 18-21).
- Contact: Due to the high volume of submissions and questions we receive, please refer to our Video Contest FAQ before reaching out. We cannot guarantee a timely response to all questions. Any questions not covered in the FAQ can be emailed to: contest@buttonpoetry.com
SOME TIPS & SUGGESTIONS:
- Contact Email: The email address and name you use for your submission are what we will use to contact you. This is how we will let you know the status of your submission as the contest progresses.
- Video Quality: While video and audio quality will be one factor in the judging process, the quality of the poem and performance themselves will be weighted much more heavily. That said, if possible, please use high-quality audio and video.
- Tip: If you’re filming this yourself on a smartphone or similar, then try to do it inside, somewhere that’s well-lit, and without background noise. Consider turning your phone horizontal while filming!
- Tip: If you’re using a video of a live performance, like an open mic or slam, take care with the audio. Try to be closer to the performer so they can still be heard over the audience.
We look forward to seeing your powerful and important work!
Click through to submit. Button Poetry has, among other things, the most popular poetry channel on YouTube, so winners have the chance to reach thousands of viewers/listeners. Here’s the 2018 winner, Sanam Sheriff’s “A Pulse, After Orlando”:
And here’s Elisabet Velasquez’s “Elephant”, which took top honors in 2017:
August 2019 Update on Videopoetry/Poetry Film Events
Credit: Daniel R. Strebe, 15 August 2011, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link
Wild Whispers project at La Rue et Toi Festival Artistes
Belgium, 10 August 2019
See wildwhispers.blog.
Women of West Wales Unearthed: Poetry, Prose and Film
UK, 10 August 2019
See llangwmlitfest.eventcube.io/events/18635/women-of-west-wales-unearthed-poetry-prose-and-film.
Call for entries, Carmarthen Bay Film Festival, Poetic Cinema section
Wales, UK
Early bird deadline: 31 August 2019
Fee US $35 standard / US $20 student
Awards given but not specified on web page for this BAFTA Cymru/Wales qualifying festival.
See filmfreeway.com/CarmarthenBayFilmFestival.
Call for entries, Maldito Festival de Videopoesía 2019
Albacete, Spain
Deadline 8 September 2019
No fee specified on the website. Prize money is awarded. Films need to have Spanish subtitles.
See malditofestival.com/plazo-de-inscripcion-iii-edicion19.
Call for entries, 8th International Video Poetry Festival
Athens, Greece
Deadline: 20 November 2019
The festival suggests a voluntary fee of 5 euros by bank deposit.
See movingpoems.com/2019/08/call-for-work-8th-international-video-poetry-festival-athens-2019.
Poetry + Video Project: July 2019 Update
Dave has kindly asked me to share news of the Poetry + Video Project, a touring program I have curated, including 25 video poems from around the world. Here is an adapted version of the latest update sent to contributors.
Our premiere screening event in Murwillumbah, Australia on 4 May went very well. It was a boutique gallery venue that held 50 people, and booked out a few days before the show. The live poets on the night, Matt Hetherington and Bronwen Manger, were awesome. It was especially great that they have both been involved in video poetry projects themselves, and were able to comment on this in the Q & A. The audience that arrived was open, curious and engaged about a form that almost none had encountered before. We couldn’t have asked for better. Here is a mini-doco of the event:
In other news, the Kathmandu screening I have been excited about will now be happening later in the year, with the exact date to be decided. Meanwhile, I will be sending the program by USB stick to Ball State University in Indiana very soon, for a screening there in the US Fall. Starting 1 November, the program will be exhibiting online as part of the huge global biennale of digital art and culture, The Wrong.
Other possible screening venues are in process of discussion. Thanks to Maria Vella, Caroline Rumley and Fiona Lam for sending through possible further leads. In other pleasing news, Jane Glennie has agreed to take on the role of UK Manager for the tour, and has very nearly secured a great venue there.
The brochure for venues now includes info on how the tour logistically works. All the videos, stills and promotional materials are ready to be sent by USB stick anywhere in the world, at a moment’s notice. As discussed previously, screening fees are entirely negotiable. For independent groups with little or no budget, fees are waived. The main thing is to share widely the fabulous films in the program.
The website has been updated with links to where all of the videos can be seen, from their individual website pages. Viewing is just one click away by hitting the film still at the top of each video’s info page. These can be accessed via the sidebar links, or from the page titled ‘The Program’.
Please contact poetryvideoproject (at) gmail (dot) com to express interest in bringing the hour-long program to your location.
Poetry film at the MIX 2019 conference
Over at Liberated Words, Sarah Tremlett has posted a detailed and fascinating report on what went down at MIX 2019, the conference on digital media held at the beginning of July at Bath Spa University in the UK. I considered attending myself, but like most such conferences it was way out of my budget as a non-academic dirtbag poet, so I’m grateful to Sarah for this erudite summary of the talks, screenings and panels. Check it out: “MIX 2019: Experiential Storytelling – poetry film meets profiling and the panoptic gaze“.
Visible Verse at the NYC Poetry Festival
For the third year in a row, the New York City Poetry Festival will be partnering with the Visible Poetry Project for a Poetry Film Festival within the festival.
Yet again PSNY is partnering with the Visible Poetry Project to bring you the third annual Poetry Film Festival at NYCPOFEST! The Visible Poetry Project pairs 30 filmmakers with 30 poets each April to create 30 videos that present poems as short films.
As usual, it’s the last weekend of July on Governor’s Island.
Every year on the last weekend of July, The New York City Poetry Festival invites poetry organizations and collectives of all shapes and sizes to bring their unique formats, aesthetics, and personalities to the festival grounds, which are ringed with a collection of beautiful Victorian houses and tucked beneath the wide, green canopies of dozens of century old trees. By uniting the largest community of poets in the country and offering a unique setting for literary activity, the New York City Poetry Festival electrifies arts and literature and brings poetry to new light in the public eye.
It’s great that such quality films will be reaching this kind of large, live audience of poetry fans. Though poetry film screenings have become almost an expected part of regional poetry festivals in the UK, I don’t think they’re too common in the US yet. And as far as I know, the nation’s largest poetry festival, the Geraldine R. Dodge Festival held every two years just outside NYC in Newark, has never screened films. (Poetry filmmaker Lori Ersolmaz attended in 2016 and wrote it up for Moving Poems.)
If you can’t make the festival, you can of course watch all the films on the VPP website. Not that that’s any substitute for the live experience.
How to start a major new videopoetry festival: an interview with the co-directors of Cadence
Dave Bonta: Seattle’s Cadence: Video Poetry Festival is one of the most exciting new poetry film festivals in North America. I love how many different activities you have, and the tie-in to Poetry Month, but most of all I like the way you present the genre, right at the top of the festival website: “Cadence approaches video poetry as a literary genre presented as visual media that makes new meaning from the combination of text and moving image.” This is especially striking coming from a group called Northwest Film Forum—one would expect the festival to take a more conservative, film-centric approach, foregrounding directors and treating the film adaptation of pre-existing poems as normative. So I’d like to know what’s behind this: How did each of you come to videopoetry, and what led you to want to put on a videopoetry festival like Cadence?
Rana San: The collaboration came about organically, as does much of the multidisciplinary programming staged at Northwest Film Forum, a film and arts space centering community programming. We first floated the idea of starting a video poetry festival in late 2017. It was my first week on the job and over Thai food Chelsea was lamenting the lack of outlets for exhibiting video poetry in our region and beyond. So the following week we began our research, brainstormed festival titles, and started reaching out to potential collaborators. Seattle is a UNESCO City of Literature with a tight-knit filmmaking community, it felt important to offer a space for this hybrid genre to shine on its own.
Chelsea Werner-Jatzke: As a literary artist, I was sort of confused about what to do with it once I had created a video poem. The video was presented at a couple visual art events, I submitted it to online journals and I wanted to present it at festivals. It became apparent rather quickly that the large majority of these festivals were international. I was excited by this different presentation format—not a reading but a screening. My piece was accepted at Video Bardo in Buenos Aires in 2016 but I was unable to find a translator for it in time and it wasn’t shown. At that time, I thought Seattle would be a great city to host a video poetry festival and Northwest Film Forum does so much interdisciplinary programming that it seemed a natural fit. It was a passing idea that started to take real shape once Rana began working at the Forum.
Dave: This is your second year for the festival, but I believe the first to open up the contest to poets and filmmakers from anywhere in the world. How did that transition go? Were you satisfied with the quantity and quality of submissions?
Rana: We honestly didn’t expect the volume of submissions we received in the festival’s first year from the Pacific Northwest alone. In fact we didn’t even use a submission platform and just invited interested parties to submit via email. Moving the application process to FilmFreeway both enhanced the festival’s visibility globally—we received works from 17 countries—and freed us up to do concentrated outreach to community partners. We were thrilled by the quality of submissions and had to make some tough choices to whittle down our final selections.
Dave: It’s always interesting to see what categories the organizers of a videopoetry or poetry film contest will come up with. Cadence has four categories, each with a different judge: Adaptations/Ekphrasis, Collaboration, Video by Poets, and Poetry by Video Artists. Why these four, and not, for example, style- or subject-based categories (Best Animation, Best Political Videopoem, etc.)?
Chelsea: The most common question we are asked is, what is video poetry? Over the last two years we found that using these categories as examples helped people better understand what we meant. I struggled with whether the categories were too restrictive or limiting and got a lot of differing feedback on this. One of our judges really liked the categories while one of artists felt like they really didn’t know where to place themselves. Like all things with the festival, we may handle this differently next year and see what we get back. There are a lot of people out there making weird poetic video work and we are hoping the categories will help the video poetry weirdos identify us as a place to submit.
Dave: A standard film festival can be a pretty passive experience for the attendees, with a hard and fast line between creators and viewers, but the 2019 Cadence program included two videopoem workshops, one for children and one for adults, with a screening for the results. How did that turn out? Were you able to convert some of the viewers into makers, and vice versa?
Rana: The workshops are one of my favorite parts of the festival, serving as an opportunity for seasoned and emerging artists alike to generate and exhibit new work. The youth workshop, designed to support the next generation of makers, was led by our first Cadence artist-in-residence Catherine Bresner and they had so much fun working with stop motion! Scholar, poet, and book artist Amaranth Borsuk led the adult workshop in which participants created a collaborative video poem—a triptych written, voiced, shot, and edited as a collective. Completing the creative process with a group of strangers was truly transformational and distinct from last year where each participant predominantly identified as either a poet or filmmaker and developed an individual piece. Our hope is that once participants get a taste of the possibilities that video poetry presents, they continue to make work on their own.
Dave: A lot of poetry film festivals kind of do their own thing, but one of the striking things about the Cadence program is just how many partnerships you’ve already formed, in your second year, with local publishers and arts organizations on one hand, and other international festivals on the other. Why is this important to you?
Chelsea: Building connections between organizations that might not otherwise overlap feels like a natural side effect of offering a festival in an artform that connects two seemingly disparate mediums. There are many people, publishers, and orgs in Seattle working in ways that connect to the art form of video poetry and Rana and I have worked to offer a wider interpretation of the form than just our perspectives since the festival started. This is why we had a panel discussion in 2018 to discuss the definition of video poetry. This year we asked other orgs to present mini-showcases as opportunities to share a larger diversity of work.
Rana: Partnerships are at the core of our work as a community-based organization, we consistently seek co-presentation opportunities with organizations whose missions align with NWFF programs, and this effort extends to Cadence as well. We have much to learn from each other. The more we build alliances to support each other’s work in meaningful ways, the better equipped we are to incite public dialogue and social change through the arts.
Dave: I’ve seen some poetry film/video festivals that exist entirely online, and others with barely any web presence whatsoever. On the one hand, it seems a shame not to take advantage of the nearly worldwide reach of video streaming platforms, but on the other hand, if everything is available online, many festival directors feel audiences won’t show up. What are your thoughts on the proper balance between web and IRL where festivals are concerned, and do you plan any additional online efforts to share the videos screened or produced at Cadence?
Chelsea: I think this is similar to watching a movie at a theater versus streaming it online. Or looking at a photo of a painting as opposed to standing in front of it at a museum. A lot of the audience at the screenings are the writers, filmmakers, their friends, and other artists. I don’t think that has to do with material being available online. You see this in the audience across media at gallery openings, literary readings, etc. What’s cool about a video poetry screening in comparison to a literary reading, is seeing more cross over between artists of varying media in attendance. I think there’s also value to experiencing the selection of works presented by a specific festival.
Rana: This is a delicate balance indeed and one that NWFF faces daily. Our preference has been for participating video poets to determine whether and when to make their work available online. In contrast with digital platforms for consumption, the festival is intended to bring people together for a shared cinematic and artistic experience under one roof. Nothing can really replace the gripping silence that befalls a crowd during a film without sound or the accumulative laughter that lingers long after the credits.
Dave: What’s next for Cadence? Will the 2019 program be touring anywhere? What if anything will likely change next time? And do you plan to keep it an annual event?
Rana: Selections from Cadence 2019 are already touring poetry and arts festivals in the region and will continue to as we lead into the 2020 edition. We’ll continue to pursue collaborations and resource-sharing with local organizations and international video poetry festivals, as our combined efforts are truly a service to the artists we represent. The generative workshops may take place the month prior to the festival next year, to allot sufficient time for getting pieces festival-ready.
Chelsea: So far we screened works from the festival at the Cascadia Poetry Festival in Anacortes, WA in May and just shared a showcase of video poems from the 2019 line-up at the Arts in Nature Festival in Seattle. Next year we are talking about shifting the screening schedule and allowing more time for the production of new work as part of the festival’s output. Talking with other festival directors has been very useful in looking at what we’re doing and how we can switch it up to the benefit of the artists involved.
Submissions for Cadence 2020 are scheduled to open in January via FilmFreeway: https://filmfreeway.com/CadenceVideoPoetryFestival
To be added to the contact list, please email rana@nwfilmforum.org. For more information about the festival, visit nwfilmforum.org/cadence.
Rana San is an artist and arts administrator who, prior to stepping into her role as Artistic Director, served as the Community Programmer at NWFF, co-creating programming driven by and for the community. Rana co-directs the annual Cadence: Video Poetry Festival, the only video poetry festival in the PNW and one of three nationally.
Drawing on her background in performing arts and cultural management, she has developed and produced cultural festivals, museum programs, and intimate creative salons in Seattle, Istanbul, and Barcelona. Her creative practice melds dreamwork, written word, body in motion, video poetry, and analog photography. She’s interested in the ways we relate to ourselves, each other, our surroundings, the unknown, and the new meanings that are made in spaces where artistic mediums meet.
Rana’s first stop motion animation short disarmed screened at Local Sightings in 2016 and she serves on the short film committee for the Seattle Turkish Film Festival.
Chelsea Werner-Jatzke is the author of Adventures in Property Management (Sibling Rivalry, 2017) and Thunder Lizard (H_NGM_N, 2016). She is co-founder and director of Till, a literary organization that offers an annual writing residency at Smoke Farm in Arlington, WA. She is outreach coordinator for Conium Review and was previously managing fiction editor at Pacifica Literary Review. She has received support from Jack Straw Cultural Center as a writing fellow, from Artist Trust as an EDGE participant, and from the Cornish College Arts Incubator. She’s received writing residencies from Vermont Studio Center and Ragdale Foundation. Werner-Jatzke has taught creative writing through Seattle Central Community College and served on the board of Lit Crawl Seattle. She received her MFA from Goddard College, during which she was editor-in-chief of Pitkin Review and founded Lit.mustest, a now-defunct reading series.
Bios copied from the NWFF website.
Resources page updated with links to free and affordable video-editing software
DaVinci Resolve: outstanding free video-editing for advanced users
Marie Craven sent along a list of video editing software that she’s checked out, and I’ve incorporated it into the Moving Poems page of web resources for videopoem makers. She recommends three video-editing programs available for a low price: Power Director, Magix Movie Edit Pro, and Adobe Premiere Elements, commenting that she had used a much earlier version of Power Director and loved it.
I still use Magix Movie Edit Pro myself, and find it adequate for most things except text animation. I previously used Premiere Elements and found it rather awkward and buggy, but part of that might’ve been the older computer I was using at the time. Now that I have a PC with an 8th-generation Core i5, everything is a lot whizzier. As Marie said in a covering note, always make sure to check tech specs before buying anything to ensure software will run on your computer.
Here’s the list of free video-editing software that Marie recommends:
- HitFilm Express
- OpenShot
- DaVinci Resolve (outstanding, for advanced users)
- VSDC (Windows only)
- Shotcut
- Videopad
- Blender (designed for 3D animation but with video editing too)
- Avidemux (simplest features)
I’ve also taken the opportunity to clean out dead links on the resources page, which I hadn’t done in two years. If anyone else has recommendations for things we should include, do let me know. Here’s the link again.
Call for poetry films: 2020 Newlyn PZ Festival
Submissions are open for the third Newlyn PZ International Film Festival, to be held April 24-26, 2020, with a Poetry Film category judged once again by Lucy English and Sarah Tremlett. There’s a submissions page on the website with the rules and guidelines.
Call for essays: Poetryfilm Magazine
Poetryfilm Magazine, the print and electronic annual comprised of articles first published at the Weimar-based Poetryfilmkanal website, has a new call-out for essays. This year’s theme: Das Kino der Poesie, The Cinema of Poetry.
Dear readers,
At the beginning of May Cinema, a new anthology about the history of cinema, was released by the publisher Elif. Gathering a wide range of texts, authors like José Oliver or Ulrike Almut Sandig express their fascination for cinema in a captivating way. The Poetryfilm Magazine’s new edition wants to address this matter, just in reverse: we would like to dig deeper into the fascination for poetry, addressing the filmmakers’ and directors’ point of view. This direction of looking at the relation between poetry and film seems to have gained significance lately.
We would be neglecting the influence that poetry had on the development of the visual language of film, if we reduced poetry film to a mere translation of a poem into a film. Since the beginning of the 20th century, filmmakers took inspiration from poets and poems, using them as an inspiration, guideline or challenge for creating moving image work.
This “Cinema of Poetry” – the title refers to an influential yet critical text from 1965 by Pier Paolo Pasolini – ranges from independent experimental film to commercially successful authors’ cinema productions, from Stan Brakhage to Jim Jarmusch.
In the endeavor to investigate film making and the film language from the perspective of poetry, directors as well as theoreticians pointed out the differences between the two art forms: the poeticity of written poetry does not in itself make the poetry film poetic. The latter gains its poetic value not only through the simple fact that a poem is part of it or that it refers to or illustrates a poem.
Poetry films can acquire poetic texts by referring closely to or operating far from the text they work with. Films which work close to the text reach their limits once the visual illustration of it seems to double its meaning, making the visuals seem redundant. Films which are inspired by poems lose touch when the reference to the text is too vague or completely absent and the filmmaker’s final aim seems solely to be aimed at creating a poetic visual language.
Our current edition can be understood as a plea to direct our attention to those films inspired by poetry which do not declare a 1:1 translation from the written text to the moving image as their goal. The poetry film is on a quest for its own poeticity. The poetic author’s cinema should be seen as a guidance in this field.
CALL FOR ESSAYS
For our next magazine’s edition, we are looking for contributions which might ask: Which impact do the language of film and author’s cinema aesthetics have on the poetry film? Which elements or strategies of using the visual language of film can be adapted to the recitation of a poem? What is the relation between filmic and poetic poeticity? In this regard, are there specific differences between live action and animated films to be found? When does the poetry film reach an original, independent form of poeticity and when is it just a sum of different poeticities? We also encourage studies that examine the importance of written poetry for parts of film history or a certain filmmaker/director and describe the complex transformation process(es) which happen while aquiring a poem in conjunction with moving image making.
We cordially invite any contributions in written form (10.000 characters long, including blanks, avoiding footnotes wherever possible) until Oct 31st.
We are very much looking forward to interesting and inspiring submissions!
Aline Helmcke, Guido Naschert
It appears as if they’ve already posted the first new essay in this vein: “From The Cinema of Poetry to The Poetry of Cinema” by none other than Tom Konyves. Check it out.
