~ News and Views ~
“Östersjöar – A Poem by Tomas Tranströmer” available at Vimeo On Demand
http://vimeo.com/ondemand/ostersjoar
This is the trailer for Östersjöar (The Baltic Sea), a 31-minute film based on a long poem by Tomas Tranströmer (translated as “Baltics” by Robin Fulton). Directed by James Wine with score, performance and sound design by Charlie Wine, it’s a re-make of a 1993 film broadcast on Swedish television in 1994, for which there are a bunch of glowing burbs on the Longwalks Productions website, including one by former U.S. poet laureate Rita Dove: “What a marvelous piece! The production is fabulous — it almost manages to bring the smell of the sea into the living room.”
The version in Swedish with English subtitling is now available through Vimeo On Demand at USD $5.00 for 48-hour streaming or $10 for download or streaming any time. The description promises “more languages to follow soon.”
This isn’t the first poetry film to be sold through online streaming or download. James Franco’s Howl, for example, is available through Amazon Instant Video and Hulu, and I’ve heard of publishers experimenting with paid apps for shorter poetry videos. But I’d be willing to bet that this is the first poetry film for sale at Vimeo On Demand. The price strikes me as reasonable, but then I’m a huge Tranströmer fan — I’d probably buy it no matter what they charged. I’ll be interested to see if other poetry-film production companies follow Longwalks’ lead. Vimeo On Demand features include a 90/10 revenue split, availability in HD on all devices including mobile, and the ability to sell work at any price and from any location. It does, however, require the purchase of a Vimeo PRO membership ($200/year). Ordinary Plus members can only collect money through a tip jar, which is only visible on Vimeo, not on embeds.
Videopoesía: Un Manifiesto por Tom Konyves
La videopoesía es un género de poesía ilustrado en una pantalla, que se distingue por su yuxtaposición de imágenes, texto y sonido basada en un tiempo específico. La mezcla medida de los tres elementos, producen en el espectador la realización de la experiencia poética.
El famoso manifiesto por el pionero de videopoesía Tom Konyves acaba de ser traducido al español por Jorge A. Lucarini Sanz. Léalo en Issuu o descargue el PDF.
The Art of Poetry Film with Cheryl Gross: “Poem of the Spanish Poet”
The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mark Strand (1934-2014) gives an amazing delivery of the reading of his poem, Poem of the Spanish Poet, caught on film by director Juan Delcan and animated by Delcan and Yun Wang.
Let me begin by saying that overall this is a stunning piece. It is beautifully shot and captures the intensity of Strand’s persona while he reads and dreams of a more romantic existence as a Spanish poet, rather than an American one. Again handsomely shot and exquisitely designed, the animation is without question a wonderful addition. Within its simplicity, Poem of the Spanish Poet evokes a feeling of melancholy we so often dwell in and fall in love with.
I really love the piece as it is but I feel it’s divided. Starting with the animated title, I wanted the drawings/animation to be the backdrop of the video. At first I was a bit disappointed but because the cinematography is so stunning, I readily accepted the switch. Then suddenly halfway through we are back to watching an animation. The question is do we need both, or should the artist just have chosen one or the other? In using both, can the video be blended in a way where the switch isn’t as abrupt? I have watched this several times and I want the director to tell me what aspect of the piece is more important, film, animation or both?
Another question is: do we need to switch back to film and see the poet at the end, or can we just be satisfied with his voiceover flowing across the illustration? When combining film and animation, one runs the risk of it being a crap-shoot—it can be wonderfully woven or a complete disaster. Needless to say it is not an easy task to accomplish. Delcan chose to give equal time to both art forms. This in my opinion breaks the continuity of the piece.
However, upon further interpretation, perhaps this division was part of the overall game plan. According to the poem, the poet moves into writing a poem, giving us a poem within a poem. This may be the reason why the video is deliberately divided. It’s as if the poet is a time traveler stepping from reality into the abstract. In which case this would make perfect sense. As I said before, combining genres can be very tricky. I for one would like to see a smoother transition.
Juan Delcan is best known in poetry-film circles for his animation of The Dead by Billy Collins, which has over 800,000 views on YouTube and won the main prize at ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival, Berlin, 2008.
The Dead possesses a certain charm that is lacking in Poem of the Spanish Poet. Again, this may be due to the way video and animation were combined in the latter. In The Dead, Delcan fully employs movement and camera angles, whereas Poem of the Spanish Poet feels a bit stiff and contrived.
I suggest watching Poem of the Spanish Poet more than once. You be the judge.
Thanks to Motionpoems.
For the love of poetry film, support the Internet Archive!
Ceramic Archivists by sculptor Nuala Creed at the Internet Archive building (photo: Jason Scott)
‘Tis the season for end-of-year charity drives, and I’m sure almost everyone reading this has already done their share of donating to worthy causes. But if you love poetry film, please try to find it in your hearts and wallets to donate to the one and only Internet Archive, home of the invaluable Prelinger Archives and many other collections of free-to-use film materials. By now, I’d say many hundreds of videopoems and poetry films have been made with footage from the Internet Archive; I’ve probably featured at least a hundred here at Moving Poems. In fact, without the easy availability of public-domain films at the Internet Archive, I’m not sure we be in the midst of a videopoetry renaissance right now. And for people just getting into digital video remixing, it’s always the best place to start looking for evocative material.
Which is not to downplay the sheer educational and entertainment value of the massive website’s many offerings, from independent radio shows to vlogs, digitized books and other texts, live music, and the NASA Images Archive. And let’s not forget the Wayback Machine, which, with more than 150 billion web captures, truly is an archive of the internet.
As an idealistic nonprofit, the Internet Archive’s mission to preserve and share knowledge should arouse little of the unease that Google’s similar (and vastly better funded) efforts tend to provoke. Its servers house more than 10 petabytes of data, it employs 200 people, and its annual budget tops $10 million, with a significant portion coming from donations by users. It has hosted the Prelinger Archives since 1999 — the first expansion of its collections beyond the core web archive.
So my advice is to give till it hurts. (Or, if you’re a masochist, give till it feels great!) The payment options include Amazon, Paypal and Bitcoin. Visit any page at the Internet Archive to make a donation. Let me just paste in the current text of their appeal:
Dear Internet Archivists, We are a non-profit with a huge mission: to give everyone free access to all knowledge—the books, web pages, audio, tv and software of our shared human culture. Forever. Together we are building the digital library of the future. A place we can go to learn and explore. The key is to keep improving—and to keep it free. That’s where you can help us. The Internet Archive is a non-profit library. We don’t run ads, but we still need to pay for servers, staff and bandwidth. Right now, a Philadelphia supporter will match your donations for 72 hours—dollar for dollar—so your impact will be doubled. Help us meet this challenge! If you find the Archive useful, we hope you’ll give what you can now. Thank you.
For background, see the relevant Wikipedia article. Among other nuggets of information, I was especially charmed to learn that the Internet Archive also archives itself, in an artistic way (whence the above photo):
The Great Room of the Internet Archive features a collection of over 200 ceramic figures by Nuala Creed representing employees of the Internet Archive. This collection, commissioned by Brewster Kahle and sculpted by Nuala Creed, is ongoing.
C. K. Williams bio pic “The Color of Time” panned by Vogue
A film critic at Vogue, Nathan Heller, didn’t think much of the latest feature-length poetry film starring James Franco. It sounds as if it suffers from some of the same defects that mar poetry shorts made by conventionally minded directors. One of the poems interpreted in the film is “My Mother’s Lips“:
The subject of the poem—the transmission of language—is nowhere evident, and neither is the poem’s supple specificity. Whichever of the film’s many writers and directors was responsible for “My Mother’s Lips” gives us, instead, lots of banalities: a mother and child in a field, a mother and child in a wartime kitchen, a mother and child in what appears to be a bathhouse. […] The Color of Time is less a transmutation of Williams’s poems than the illustration of a vague and naïve idea about what Poetry means—dreamy, moody people murmuring tender lines out of their hearts as treacly music plays. The effect is of a Vermeer reproduced with crayon: It’s all there (kind of), and yet everything that makes Williams’s work surprising and distinctive has been blurred, effaced, and smeared over in Goldenrod.
Heller ends on a prescriptive note for poetry film in general:
Many people say that poetry today gets too little attention. They are right. And yet the way to honor poetry seems not to dumb it down or dress it up. The strength of the art is its powerful exactitude of language and perception. The finest tribute to work like Williams’s—sadly, one the makers of The Color of Time missed—is just to let the poem be itself.
I enjoyed Howl, but I’m not sure I’ll go to this one. Its rating so far on Rotten Tomatoes, with 16 reviews, is an abysmal 6 percent. On the other hand, a Hollywood movie based on the works of a poet as austere as C. K. Williams is a pretty unique cultural occurrence. It might be worth getting a bunch of poetry friends together to see it in the theater, especially if everyone stops at a bar first. Hilarity would likely ensue.
At any rate, here’s the trailer:
(Hat-tip: Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel on Facebook.)
Why can’t I buffer an entire video on YouTube any more? (Yet another reason why videopoets should use Vimeo)
YouTube’s message to users with slow internet connections
Among those people fortunate enough to have a connection to the internet, many — like me — who live in the U.S. or other disadvantaged countries are forced to make do with DSL or 3G connections of 1M/sec or slower. What happens when, against the expectations of ISPs and certain large video hosting platforms, we choose to watch a video in higher resolution? If it’s hosted by Vimeo, no problem: select the HD option if provided (and if not, the resolution is still probably pretty high, depending on what the video owner uploaded), click play and then pause, and wait. Most poetry videos are less than five minutes long, so it’s not going to take forever, and in any case, if you’re accustomed to this speed, you know the drill: find something else to work on. Multi-tasking, for better or worse, is how most of us operate now anyway.
But sometime in 2013, YouTube stopped letting me do that. I’d select 360p (because anything less is unwatchable), and it would sometimes resume, sometimes not, but the buffering wouldn’t continue for more than another 30 seconds or so before stopping, no matter how long I waited. To add insult to injury, a little banner often appears below the video: “Experiencing interruptions? Find out why.” I’d click the link, and it would take me to a page telling me this was my ISP’s fault. Which was entirely unhelpful, because like most Americans, I don’t have any alternatives to the semi-monopolistic provider I already use, and they’re not about to invest in faster internet service until the government forces them to.
My preference, at least as far as videopoetry goes, would be to just stick with Vimeo, but unfortunately, many videopoets still only upload to YouTube. Today, I finally decided to do a little research and find out why YouTube sucks so hard these days.
It turns out that they’ve implemented a kind of daddy-knows-best strategy to video streaming, implementing a technique known as DASH, which stands for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP. It sounds really good on paper.
Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH), also known as MPEG-DASH, is an adaptive bitrate streaming technique that enables high quality streaming of media content over the Internet delivered from conventional HTTP web servers. Similar to Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) solution, MPEG-DASH works by breaking the content into a sequence of small HTTP-based file segments, each segment containing a short interval of playback time of a content that is potentially many hours in duration, such as a movie or the live broadcast of a sports event. The content is made available at a variety of different bit rates, i.e., alternative segments encoded at different bit rates covering aligned short intervals of play back time are made available. As the content is played back by an MPEG-DASH client, the client automatically selects from the alternatives the next segment to download and play back based on current network conditions. The client selects the segment with the highest bit rate possible that can be downloaded in time for play back without causing stalls or rebuffering events in the playback. Thus, an MPEG-DASH client can seamlessly adapt to changing network conditions, and provide high quality play back without stalls or rebuffering events.
MPEG-DASH is the first adaptive bit-rate HTTP-based streaming solution that is an international standard. MPEG-DASH should not be confused with a protocol — the protocol that MPEG-DASH uses is HTTP, hence the “H” in the name.
MPEG-DASH uses the previously existing HTTP web server infrastructure that is used for delivery of essentially all World Wide Web content. It allows devices such as Internet connected televisions, TV set-top boxes, desktop computers, smartphones, tablets, etc. to consume multimedia content (video, TV, radio…) delivered via the Internet, coping with variable Internet receiving conditions, thanks to its adaptive streaming technology. Standardizing an adaptive streaming solution is meant to provide confidence to the market that the solution can be adopted for universal deployment, compared to similar but more proprietary solutions such as Smooth Streaming by Microsoft, or HDS by Adobe.
What worries me about this, and the reason I’ve quoted the entire introduction to the Wikipedia article, is that it sounds like something Vimeo might eventually adopt, too. Maybe they will implement it better, though, and still provide an alternative for those who want it.
There is apparently a work-around for DASH on YouTube that might work for some — a browser add-on for Firefox, Opera, and (with some installation difficulty) Chrome — but I wasn’t able to get it working with my own Firefox installation, possibly due to a conflict with some other add-on. If you’d like to give it a try, see the instructions in PC World, “Force YouTube to buffer your entire video.”
As for that annoying “Experiencing interruptions?” banner at the bottom of YouTube videos, tech writer Christina Warren at Mashable puts it into context. Apparently, the lack of tech-savvy among many YouTube visitors may be partly to blame.
When quality fails, users are quick to blame the content source — especially if other websites seem to work just fine.
If a user experiences downtime and buffering from a service or site too many times, he or she will be less likely to use it. Content services want to be shielded from some of that blame, and pass it off to what they see as the ultimate gatekeeper: the ISP.
The real question is: Does this naming and shaming really have any impact? It would be one thing if users could pick and choose their ISP, but most of us have one choice and one choice only (the same is true for cable TV).
Indeed. The one thing Warren doesn’t point out, however, is that the message is a bit disingenuous. Yes, my service is slow, but I’m experiencing interruptions because you lot decided you knew what was best for me and stopped letting me choose to buffer an entire video.
There is one easy, low-cost way YouTube could fix things, though. Instead of an unhelpful page about ISPs, the “Experiencing interruptions?” link could go directly to Vimeo.
First installment of The Nantucket Poetry Project debuts at The New Yorker
A poetry film made earlier this year by media and video production company TNP Labs has just been posted to the web by The New Yorker, which hosts its own video (including six previous examples of “poetry and such“). The poem, Robert Pinsky’s “Shirt,” was first published by The New Yorker in 1989.
Twenty-five years later, “Shirt” has been brought to the medium of film, as the first installment of The Nantucket Poetry Project, an initiative by the Harvard professor Elisa New and the Nantucket Project to disseminate poetry through video and other multimedia platforms. In this visualization of the poem, several people read the text—including Kate Burton, Nas, and Pinsky himself—while the camera captures the details of stitching and fabric, spinning and sewing, and nods to the poem’s account of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in Manhattan. New said, “ ‘Shirt’ is neither short nor simple, but I knew it had the power to reach anyone who heard it, to live in every voice that lends itself to the text.”
The link goes to a blog post from last June announcing the collaboration. What makes this especially noteworthy, aside from the involvement of elite institutions such as Harvard and The New Yorker, is the promise of more to come.
Our vision is simple. We believe that great poetry is meant to be read aloud, and whenever we gather together to do this, our culture is enriched. We also believe that poetry lends itself to multiple interpretations and can find exciting expressions through various forms of media – from music to dance to video art. And so we are assembling a group of world-class artists, thinkers and performers whose interpretations will bring to life the many diverse textures in “Shirt,” in the form of a short film.
So six months later, we can see the results. The poem was already available on YouTube in a reading by the poet at the 2014 Dodge Poetry Festival, but the audio there is a little, uh, dodgy, so this film is already a big improvement in that regard. Also, the production quality overall is excellent, as one would expect — TNP Labs have had “more than 50 Emmy Award nominations (and 16 wins),” they tell us. I liked the use of different readers and the blend of reading footage with other imagery. I’m guessing that the filmmakers were not well versed in the poetry-film/videopoetry tradition and were feeling their way — which is not always a bad thing, because completely original approaches are what keep the genre fresh. Here, we see a bit of that freshness with the innovative use of multiple readers. But otherwise the film struggles to escape the gravitational pull of narrative filmmaking, though I did like the use of mannequins as ironic stand-ins for faceless workers.
I’m indebted to Ruben Quesada for bringing this to my attention. At my request, he shared his own impressions via IM:
I found the inclusion of readers from different cultural backgrounds exciting, at first, but it didn’t go beyond simply having them read to the camera, and the literal images were too on-the-nose. I expect video poems to offer a figurative interpretation of a written poem instead of a literal, linear narrative translation. The use of a Latina woman made me a little uncomfortable and not in a good way—the way an image challenges us to learn something new about others or about ourselves. Perhaps it was my own personal experience of growing up in Los Angeles and being aware of the many women of color, mothers of many of my peers, who would ride the bus into Beverly Hills to work as housekeepers or nannies at the start of the week and not return again until the week was over. This woman of color in the video who appears to work in a dry cleaning business echoed this memory—it reinforced the idea of a woman of color as a domestic worker. An image seen many times and caricatured more recently as Seth McFarlane’s animated character Consuela in Family Guy.
In any case, it was a pleasant surprise to come across the video and I’m very glad to see The New Yorker making space for video poems.
It will be interesting to see how many more poetry films The Nantucket Poetry Project produces; this can’t have been cheap to make. I hope it gets plenty of exposure at film festivals and on TV. The poem is compelling and certainly deserves a large audience. Also, big ups to The New Yorker for making their videos fully shareable and embeddable. I hope they continue to publish poetry films, whether through a partnership with The Nantucket Poetry Project and/or through an open call for submissions. (Needless to say, we’d be sure to publicize the latter.)
Now if someone would just make a feature-length film with Chris Llewellyn’s harrowing collection of persona poems about the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, Fragments from the Fire…
The Art of Poetry Film with Cheryl Gross: “We Are The Parents of L.A. (for Harvey Kubernik)”
https://vimeo.com/113601304
Watch at Nowness.com.
I first visited L.A. in 1986 with the intent of moving there. I stayed in Laurel Canyon and enjoyed the gigantic billboards on Sunset and what the city had to offer. When I finally did move in 1987 it was a different story. I lived in Silver Lake. At that time it was one of those forgotten neighborhoods teeming with bodegas, Mexicans and of course artists. Silver Lake sits between two, then-seedy neighborhoods, Hollywood and Echo Park. At the time, gentrification was slow going east towards Downtown and you took your life in your hands walking or riding through. This was my L.A. back in the 80s and I loved every aspect of it. A façade of glitz against the graffiti sun baked streets where people struggled to stay one step ahead of the landlord and/or worked as waiters, anticipating the next audition and perhaps their chance at stardom.
We Are The Parents Of L.A. (for Harvey Kubernik) captures my existence in the city of angels. Film trio T. Gerike, R. Koval, S. Raphael (also known as Facts), did an awesome job creating the film. The cinematography is beautifully framed and captures every aspect of the city, from the Pacific Ocean, to the oil fields and flavorless shopping malls. The people on the street selling Mylar balloons and clothing add to the tone of the entire piece, revealing the reality of how most people live and not what you see on T.V. The poem grew out of a spoken word piece by Henry Rollins (one of my favorite commentators on pop and counter culture). See “Thank You America: Punk prayers old and new fuel a Thanksgiving message” at NOWNESS.
Nic S.: Ten Fabulous Videopoems
It turns out
Martha McCollough, 2012
Several things about Martha McCollough’s work delight me. Her voice and reading style for one. Voice, where it is used, is almost overridingly important for me, and if vocals are off, the whole film is off. Martha’s voice and reading style carry her work superbly. I also love her double- or triple- (or more) narration style, where you frequently have the voice carrying one narrative thread, the kinetic text carrying another, and the visuals a third. You feel that text is an actual character in her films. I also enjoy how she plays around with vocals, using repetition, chorus, and other vocal effects. She has a great sense of humor! Check out Mr Lucky’s Jackpot for a more straightforward combination of her different techniques.
The Polish Language
Alice Lyons and Orla Mc Hardy, 2009
At eight minutes, this is far longer than my usual optimum video poem length (ideally, less than two minutes, three approaches a stretch…), but is so finely and imaginatively made that one instantly forgives. Again, kinetic text as character and dynamic role-player/narrator, but presented here in a truly fantastic variety of form. Background vocals only (as a separate non-English narration track — nothing obviously duplicating the text) and a wonderful mix of individual/chorus vocals, intermittent sound effect, intermittent tuneful piano, and (most of all) intermittent silence. So beautiful and moving.
Rain
Maria Elena Doyle, 2011
All my favorite elements here: kinetic text that plays as a dynamic character in the overall audio-visual story, marvelous visuals that combine regular video footage with animation, and nice vocals towards the end. Based on the poem “Rain” by Maori poet Hone Tuwhare. Poem text here.
https://vimeo.com/25072181
Sonnet 44
Thomas Freundlich, Lumikinos Production & Art Slow, 2012
This short dance film is based on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 44. It’s an imaginative remix of a classic, and one that assumes audience familiarity with the original text. So rather than presenting the text in the usual linear, pedestrian format, the film-maker incorporates it in a dynamic, fragmentary fashion, so that it participates by inference, almost, and again, as a live character in the piece.
A Word Made Flesh
Eliza Fitzhugh, 2010
As Dave Bonta said at Moving Poems, this is “a fascinating linguistic deconstruction of the poet’s lines … The multiple accents should remind us that now more than ever, with the advent of the web, Dickinson’s poetry belongs to the world.” Poem text here. No particular visuals or film-making talent to admire in this one, but what pleases me is the word play, in every sense of the phrase, where both text and vocal versions of the word are presented and re-presented in shifting and re-shifting form. A sort of philological Greek chorus, moving the overall narrative forward with clever diversions and rest stops.
Tongue of the Hidden
David Alexander Anderson, 2007
Mysterious and beautiful, love poems of Hafez read in the original Persian, with illustration and animation based in Persian calligraphy. This is over five minutes in length, and as far as I can tell contains two poems, one that starts about 40 seconds in and a second that starts around the three-minute mark. I’m including the Persian version below. If you prefer to hear the same narrator read the poems in English, go here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUhaF1JI5r8
Instructions to Hearing Persons Desiring a Deaf Man
Raymond Luczak, 2014
I find this video extraordinarily moving. Again, no film-making virtuosity to admire, just a very talented and convincing poem performance by Raymond Luczak. I frequently rant on about reading poetry aloud for an audience at Voice Alpha, and for me, what is transformative about that act — what makes a poem and your relationship to it qualitatively different — is the act of putting the poem into your body, the physicalization of the poem in preparation for presenting it to an audience. This video gets at the same idea from a different perspective altogether — just beautiful to watch. And if you have a minute, take a look at this video from Sarah Rushford. The subjects close their eyes and recite lines from memory, to intriguing and convincing effect. Once more, I see the transformative effect of putting a poem into the body.
The Woods
Kristian Pedersen, 2012
Over at Voice Alpha I am building a collection of readers I call ‘musical readers.’ People who, while they read poetry aloud for an audience, appear to hear an internal music which both guides and manifests itself in their reading. Cin Salach and Carl Sandburg are my favorite examples of this phenomenon. It manifests itself charmingly here in the voice of the Norwegian poet, Aina Villanger, who does the reading for this delightful videopoem. I love the spare imaginative use of simple abstract shapes and a minimal color palette to play out the action in the poem, marching perfectly along with the reading.
Karl
Scott Wenner (animation) and Motionpoems, 2011
I am not usually intrigued by or particularly drawn to Motionpoems‘ poetry films, as they generally tend, in my view, to be fairly literal visual interpretations of the text poem they engage. I also find their vocal tracks are often not quite ‘there.’ Not this one though — it’s pretty much perfect in every way. A dissonance that somehow really works between the text narrative by Dag Straumsåg and the visual narrative. That moth, that spider. The drum, the piano, the synthesizer. And that wonderful voice with its fabulous reading. Each element spare and solitary, but somehow they are all necessarily attached to each other. (Maybe the one thing I would have changed had I been in charge would have been to not snap the spider web at the very end…)
Montserrat
Fernando Lazzari, 2013
Kinetic text once more (this time in celebration of an actual specific typeface). I really like the reliance on text alone as the narrator and the fact that the film-maker does not feel the need to run duplicative vocal narration alongside the text presentation, as too often happens in kinetic text productions. Wonderful graphics. Very clever idea to present a city as the ‘stage’ for this segment of a Jorge Luis Borges poem, upon and across which the text ‘actor’ performs its dynamic role.
See five more poetry videos that didn’t quite make this list at Nic’s blog, Very Like a Whale. —Ed.
ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Malaysia reviewed by George Szirtes
Though ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival‘s main event in Berlin only happens once every two years, they are regularly invited to screen selections of poetry films from their archives at festivals all over the world. I was pleased to see a review of one of these events by noted UK poet and translator George Szirtes, in his always interesting blog. He happened to have been in Malaysia for ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Penang and Kuala Lumpur, where, according to Goethe-Institut Malaysia on Facebook:
In conjunction [with] Georgetown Literary Festival in Penang and with collaboration of Obscura-Kala and Art Printing Works in Kuala Lumpur, Dr. Thomas Wohlfahrt, Director of the Literaturwerkstatt Berlin and founder of ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival Berlin screened a selection of films all over the world as a part to promote poetry films in Malaysia.
Szirtes’ review deserves mention and excerpting not just because of his own prominence, but because any coverage of poetry film screenings by bloggers or journalists is unfortunately still quite rare. I liked Szirtes’ swerve into audience analysis and self-reflection—just the sort of personal take one expects from a good blog post—and I was fascinated to see which film-poet he thought was the stand-out. See if you agree. Here’s some of what he wrote:
The film show is in the evening at APW a converted printing works complete with auditorium, bar and much else. Slowly the hall fills up and, eventually, overfills. The idea of poetry-film is not films that may be poetic but rather the interpretation of an actual poetic text, often through computer work. We see about a dozen short films including a relatively early but ingenious version of Austrian sound poet Ernst Jandl created on an Amiga computer, move on to a snappy rhythmic interpretation of a Peter Reading poem and many others involving drawing, reading, performance, stop-frame animation, abstraction, grotesque and mixtures of them all. The one that takes my breath away is by one by Taiwanese poet, Ye Mimi, They Are There But I Am Not. Here is the link to it. Its timing, its restraint, its depth, its spare lyricism, the quality of its feeling and thought and its sheer simple precision seemed far beyond the rest to me. There was a fine comic-grotesque version of a poem by Ingeborg Bachman, an excellent rap performance by an exiled American Cambodian poet, versions of Billy Collins (his ‘Budapest’) and Mahmoud Darwish at the end reading one of his to simple figure images and arabic script in motion. Everything was pretty good and some excellent. The ones that dealt with issues might be most effective in moving emotions but their intentions are clear from the start. They set out to do something and do it. Sometimes they collapse into a kind of bathos (I don’t blame them, their cause is great and drives them into grander forms of rhetoric) before recovering. There are extraneous reasons for admiring these and indeed people do admire them. John Giorno speaks a fine comic poem against family values. Everyone laughs and claps loudly in approval of the message before returning to their family values. Another poem rhapsodises about freedom and jazz, and all the good things one might rhapsodise about and everyone claps. Sure we clap. It’s easy.
We like to be told we are free spirits laughing at convention. It help us to go on with our conventions. We have businesses to run, deals to clinch, jobs to go to, articles to write. I don’t think this is precisely hypocrisy but a kind of social behaviour, like people who want to be thought interesting at parties and declare, ‘I am mad, me, quite mad!’ You can bet your bottom dollar they are saner than you are.
But I love Ye Mimi’s film and I love her poem. The two together are a bringing out of the poem not by illustrating it or referring to it, but by realising it at quite another level. I shall be looking out for her work.
Read the whole post. And watch Ye Mimi’s films on Moving Poems here.
The Art of Poetry Film with Cheryl Gross: Motionpoems’ “Antique Sound”
I have been searching for collaborations to write about. Yes, I need material, so all you video poets who are starving for publicity, please send me the links to your work. I would love see what you are up to and possibly review it.
In my quest to find the perfect partnership I stumbled upon (via a Motionpoems email) a piece called Antique Sound written by W.S. Merwin, installation and film by Evan Holm:
This particular collaboration in my opinion is exceptional. It incorporates installation with motion poetry. In the beginning of the work there is the voiceover by the poet himself, W.S. Merwin, coupled with the sound of scratches one would hear on an old L.P. The video/film is an installation of a turntable in a pool of black ink set in a forest. The L.P. seems as if it has been played to death, but is still in the process of living its life. I suppose the piece is saying just that. There is no getting away from age so let’s just continue.
I find the imagery haunting and beautiful. Holm completely engages us with his cinematographic design and then continues to captivate with the way he incorporates words, sounds and then music. There is a fair amount of noise but ironically it’s a quiet piece. This allows the viewer to be walked through and slip into a time when life was simpler. Not just to visit, but to stay. At least for a while and listen to the needle, the crickets and enjoy life as we want to remember it. This is indeed nostalgia at its best.
News roundup: Read Our Lips Filmpoem Competition, Rabbit Heart DVD, animated poetry film screening in Leipzig
Spoken-word poets from the north of England are invited to submit films to the Read Our Lips Filmpoem Competition 2015.
Read Our Lips is a unique digital project that aims to give poets and spoken word artists the skills to make their own filmpoems, from storyboarding through to editing.
We believe that a filmpoem is not a recording of a performance to camera, but is instead a layering of visual elements on to a spoken poem in such a way as to create a new, coherent work of art. We are looking for films that do more than simply illustrate the featured poem in a literal way, but which seek to surprise, enhance or subvert by their choice of additional imagery.
Click through to the Facebook event listing for the competition terms and conditions. The deadline is February 23, 2015. Prizes total £225. (I especially liked this bit: “All poems will be screened online during March 2015 for entry into the viewer’s choice prize category.”)
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Here’s a cool thing: just in time for the holidays, a Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival 2014 DVD from Doublebunny Press.
All the best video from the 2014 Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival collected in one place, including category reels, and the Best of What Not to Submit Monday.
Films by:
Yves Bommenel, Greg Brisendine, John Mortara, Sarah Guimond, Aisha Naseem & Chris Markman, Josh Lefkowitz and Chris Follmer, David Richardson, Timothy David Orme, Meriel Lland, Megan Falley and Rachel Rae Gausp, Malt Schlitzman, Cheryl Maddalena, Sou MacMillan, Jenith Charpentier, Laura EJ Moran, Scott Woods, Michael Medeiros, Cassidy Parker Knight & Jeff Knight, and Allan & the Nieces
To sample some of the films included on the DVD, see their YouTube page.
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Here’s an upcoming screening that sounds kind of intriguing: Leipzig-Präsentation von LAB/P – poetry in motion.
Wir präsentieren 9 Animationsfilme, die in der interdisziplinären Zusammenarbeit von AutorInnen und FilmemacherInnen aus der Region entstanden sind. Die Werke ermöglichen einen spannenden Einblick in zeitgenössische Lyrik und Animationsästhetik und geben Gelegenheit, neue künstlerische Positionen zu entdecken.
Which Google Translate renders as:
We present 9 animated films that have arisen in the interdisciplinary collaboration between authors and filmmakers from the region. The works provide a fascinating insight into contemporary poetry and animation aesthetics and given the opportunity to discover new artistic positions.
Here are the details:
Donnerstag, 11. Dezember 2014
Kleiner Empfang ab 19:30 Uhr, Vorführungsbeginn 20:00 Uhr
UT Connewitz, Wolfgang-Heinze-Straße 12, 04277 Leipzig, www.utconnewitz.deProgramm:
KANTEN DEINER AUGEN (Melissa Harms & Yevgeniy Breyger)
ROSTOCK, GRAND CAFÉ (Susann Arnold & Moritz Gause)
DAS BILD IN DEM BILD IN DEM BILD IN DEM BILD (Catalina G. Veléz & Marlen Pelny)
ECHO (Damaris Zielke & Peter Thiers)
AUSGEBRANNTES HAUS (Eva-Maria Arndt & Antje Kersten)
OHNE TITEL (Meng Chang & Daniel Schmidt)
VIVA VIOLENCE (Johanna Maxl & Katharina Merten)
DIE ANGST DES WOLFS VOR DEM WOLF (Juliane Jaschnow & Stefan Petermann)
KASPAR HAUSERIN (Nelly Chernetskaya & Katia S. Ditzler)
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Thanks for all three of these news items to the fabulous Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel, who seems to know about everything related to poetry film going on anywhere on the world, and posts it all to the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival group page on Facebook.
