~ News and Views ~
Videopoetry makers Swoon and David Tomaloff featured at CoronationPress.com
Check out this terrific interview with Belgian filmmaker Swoon and American poet David Tomaloff about their recent collaboration on a triptych of videopoems. I loved learning about their collaborative process and how they thought of each other’s work, and as an amateur maker of videopoems I was especially impressed by some of Swoon’s thoughts about his approach, such as:
I love working with found material. Trying to give images, shot for a whole other purpose by someone you don’t know in a place you’ve never been, a new life and, more important so, a new meaning, is very liberating. It gives you a weird sense of power. Even the material I shoot myself is often not shot directly for a specific film. I try to build a library of images, shot by me and found footage, where I can wander around in when making a new film. On the other hand, it’s also very nice if I can shoot images the way I want them to be for a specific idea and poem.
Read the rest (and watch the triptych).
Martin Earle on Tranströmer and the Making of “A Galaxy Over There”
Juliane Otto interviewed Martin Earle, creator of “A Galaxy Over There” — a filmpoem for Tomas Tranströmer’s “Schubertiana” — for the lyrikline.org blog. A couple of snips:
LB: Do you think poetic images are of another quality than images in film?
ME: There is this very obvious difference that we normally read poems in books and always watch videos or films on some kind of screen. And in our culture the screen has become the all pervasive and restless mediator of information and entertainment – most of which we consume inattentively and forget after a few minutes. I don’t know if we’ve found a way to use the screen or the internet to take things in slowly and chew over them… as we can when we read a poem in a book.
LB: Does Tranströmer know your film? Did he let you know if he likes it?
ME: I was in contact with Monica Tranströmer who was very generous with her time and in arranging contracts and things. They both seemed to like the animation although Tomas Tranströmer wasn’t keen on the translation of the last word ‘djupen’, which we’d translated as ‘abyss’. He thought that ‘the depths’ would have been much more appropriate… and this seems to me very revealing of the attitude to the world that permeates his work. There is very little sense of alienation or existential tragedy that the world ‘abyss’ might suggest and which is not hard to detect in much modern poetry (and in much ancient poetry too). No, for Tranströmer behind and in everything there is a tremendously positive ‘something’, a great ‘yes’ – ‘the depths’. It’s really a shame that it was too late to rerecord the audio track.
Submissions are open for the 6th ZEBRA film festival
Poetry-filmmakers have until May 2 to submit works to be screened at the world’s premiere poetry film festival, held biannually in Berlin. The guidelines and entry forms are now online in English and German.
The ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival is calling for entries for the 6th competition to find the best poetry films! Entries should be short films based on poems. Prizes in the competition will be awarded to a total value of €10,000. From all films submitted, a Programme Commission will nominate the films for the competition and select the programme contributions. The winners will be selected by an international jury.
The prizes that will be awarded are:
– ZEBRA Prize for the Best Poetry Film, donated by the Literaturwerkstatt Berlin
– Goethe Film Prize, donated by the Goethe Institute
– Ritter Sport Film Prize, donated by Alfred Ritter GmbH & Co KG
– Audience Prize awarded by the radioeins juryThis year, for the first time, the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival will also be making awards for poetry films in the categories »Best First Film«, »Best Film for Tolerance« and »Best Poem Performance on Film«.
The festival is also for the first time inviting everyone to make a film based on the poem [meine heimat] ([my home]) by Ulrike Almut Sandig. The directors of the three best film versions will be invited to Berlin to meet the poet and have the opportunity to present and discuss their films. You can find the poem with audio and translations here.
ZEBRINO – the prize for the best film for children and young people: Children and young people award their own prize. The young viewers will be deciding on the winner of the ZEBRINO, the best poetry film for eight-to-twelve-year-olds.
Closing date for entries for all competitions is 2 May 2012.
All films that are submitted will automatically be entered for all selection procedures!
The 6th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival will be held from 18 to 21 October 2012 in the Babylon Cinema in Berlin.
Pondering the audence for filmpoems and videopoems
Please see my latest post at Via Negativa, “Do poetry videos reach larger audiences than poems on the page?”
“Video & Film Poetry” group on Vimeo
The video sharing site Vimeo tends to get a higher proportion of well-made videos than YouTube, but even still, many poetry-related videos uploaded to the site are not terribly impressive as examples of the filmmaker’s art. I know, because one of the primary ways I find new material for Moving Poems is by searching new Vimeo uploads for anything with the word “poem” in the title, tags or description. I see a lot of dreck.
So I’m very impressed with the new Vimeo group devoted to Video & Film Poetry, which was founded by Brenda Clews just a couple months ago. She had tried to convince me to start such a group, but I declined on the grounds that I was already doing enough here, so she went ahead and founded the group herself — and I think the results so far speak for themselves: a lot of interesting and innovative videopoets have joined the group now, and are adding their new uploads as well as other people’s videos that they might happen to know about. There’s some commenting, but so far it’s been mainly a place to share and discover new work.
This isn’t the first Vimeo group to welcome poetry videos, but I believe it’s the first to take curating seriously. The problem with completely open poetry-sharing sites is that the bad poetry (or videopoetry, in this case) tends to drive out the good. The crucial difference with the Video & Film Poetry group is that, though anyone can comment or participate in the (so-far-unused) forums, only members can add videos or invite new members. If you’re on Vimeo and you’d like an invitation, let me know.
Introducing VidPoFilm
I am announcing the birth of a new online journal: VidPoFilm.
VidPoFilm explores the poetics of video and film poetry and offers critiques of works in this genre.
I am both curating and editing the material at VidPoFilm. So far, I’m posting my Video and Film Poem Fridays articles.
VidPoFilm is open to submissions — only articles on other video and film poems, this is not a self-promotion site for me or any other video or film poets — but I won’t have a description of my requirements ready for another month or two. Articles can be pre- or co-published in your own blogs, this is preferable in fact. My only rule, so far, is one article per year per video or film poet. Brilliant work is being produced world-wide in this field and I do not foresee running out of material. I’ve put up a loose “About” page and welcome comments and questions, which will help me to articulate what the journal is and seeks.
Subscribe by RSS feed to the site. Blogger offers a state-of-the-art blog that enables you to watch the videos in your Readers. VidPoFilm is about disseminating video and film poems far and wide while offering a way to ‘read’ them. The stats on the videos and films discussed is more important than the stats on the journal site, so please watch the films — they are ‘top notch’! These flicks are the crème de la crème.
Feature films announced for the NYC episode of the International Literary Film Festival
Day 1 of the International Literary Film Festival
On Monday Nov 14, 60 Writers / 60 Places will be screened on the first evening of the International Literary Film Festival, a festival I founded a few months ago. According to our festival’s website:
60 Writers / 60 Places, a film by Luca Dipierro and Michael Kimball, is about writers and their writing occupying untraditional spaces, everyday life, everywhere. It begins with the idea of the tableaux vivant, a living picture where the camera never moves, but the writers read a short excerpt of their work instead of silently holding their poses. There is Blake Butler reading in a subway, Deb Olin Unferth in a Laundromat, Jamie Gaughran-Perez in a beauty salon, Tita Chico in a dressing room, Gary Lutz at the botantical gardens, Will Eno in a park, Tao Lin next to a hot dog cart, and Rick Moody on a baseball field. The writer and the writing go on no matter what is going on around them.
Watch a trailer for 60 Writers / 60 Places on YouTube
Watch another trailer for 60 Writers / 60 Places on YouTube
Day 2 of the International Literary Film Festival
On Tuesday Nov 15, Doc will be screened on the festival’s second evening. According to our festival’s website:
Doc, a film by Immy Humes, presents a portrait of her father, the legendary forgotten novelist and counterculture icon Harold Louis “Doc” Humes. Doc’s friends and family—including Norman Mailer, George Plimpton, Timothy Leary, William Stryon, Peter Matthiessen, Paul Auster, and Jonas Mekas—weave together a story of politics, literature, protest and mental illness, shedding light on an original mind as well as the cultural history of postwar America.
Watch a trailer for “Doc” on YouTube
Watch another trailer for “Doc” on YouTube
Short Literary Films
Several short literary films will also be screened on the two evenings of the festival. The program for short lit films will be announced soon on www.LiteraryFilmFestival.com.
Videopoetry discussions elsewhere: text vs. voice, art or entertainment, and a new weekly column
Several interesting discussions of videopoetry theory and practice have popped up around the blogosphere over the past several weeks, initiated by videopoets whose names should be familiar to followers of Moving Poems.
1. Using text vs voice in videopoems
Nic S.’s thoughtful blog post responded to a point in Tom Konyves’ Videopoetry: A Manifesto about the use of visual text, and Tom stopped by to clarify what he meant in the comments. A fascinating conversation ensued.
2. Visible Verse Festival 2011 • Art or Entertainment; do I really have to choose?
Heather Haley, organizer of the Visible Verse festival in Vancouver (which I hope all Moving Poems followers from the Pacific northwest will be attending this weekend!), shares a bit of her thinking behind the festival in particular and the genre in general at her blog One Life.
Videopoetry or poetry video. Film or video? And then there is cinema to consider. I find semantics tedious. My reaction to the insistence there be a formal definition of the genre, is, why? Don’t we have enough divides? We live in the age of the mashup. Isn’t that merging? Fusion? Transformation? In any case, I have faith in the poet’s ability to render his or her poem. Via video or film, a poet will explore, push the boundaries of image, language and sound. Whether it’s illustrative or conceptual, I trust the poet to make choices, to create a work according to his individual style and sensibilities. Vision. While I can’t abide cliché or literal translations, surely there’s room for both narrative and non-narrative treatments. One man’s execution is another man’s experiment. One man’s amusement is another man’s pith.
3. “Friday Film and Video Poem” series at Rubies in Crystal
Aside from a scattering of brief, general essays and blog posts, plus occasional process notes from videopoets, there’s been an almost total lack of meaningful literary/film criticism of videopoetry and related genres focusing on individual films and artists. Brenda Clews has begun to fill this void with a weekly series at her blog.
- A Hundred and Forty Suns by Jonathan Blair
After the Kafkaesque beginning with insect-like noises that become a mechanical factory of looped wheels and cogs, the organic sound of drumming as the light increases is warm, comforting. And the light is shining, shining into the perception of the animated character who responds with joy, and into the screen where we as viewers feel that pleasure. Ultimately this film imparts joy, beauty, forgiveness, transcendence, the pulse of life renewed anew.
- ‘immersion /2’ by Sheila Packa and Kathy McTavish
Unlike traditional Bokeh, there is no foreground subject. Rather we are immersed in an ever-shifting slow-moving background. It is as if she composes abstract expressionist artwork before our eyes, painting with light and colour.
- ‘Ground’ by Ginnetta Correli
Ground is hauntingly beautiful, in a disturbing way. In the embracing mindfulness, a poetry of poison, death, loss, and beauty, all of which is natural, found in the natural world, amidst a surreality. We feel cross-currents, disambiguations, and yet the over-arching journey metaphor of Cook’s minimalist poetry, and the bond of love he speaks of, yes, living is like this. Simply a superb film.
- ‘SHED’ by Christina McPhee
I consider SHED a genre-crossing piece that brings together a poetry of drawing and video editing. It is a multiplicity, a place of vectors. The nodes and intensities are democratic, without hierarchy; they are nomads drawn into being by the brush of India and acrylic ink and red paint encrusted on the paper by the artist.
New addition to web resources list: Free Music Archive
How is it I’d never heard of Free Music Archive before? It’s the newest addition to the Free and Creative Commons-licensed sounds and music section of our Web resources for videopoem makers page. According to FMA’s FAQ page,
The Free Music Archive … is an interactive library of legal audio downloads directed by legendary freeform radio station WFMU.
The Archive revolves around our Curators, who select and upload all the music you’ll find here. Curators come from all over the world and have a wide range of experience with good music. They include freeform radio stations, netlabels, artist collectives, performance spaces, and concert organizers. If FMA were a radio station, the curators would be our awesomely obsessive DJs.
In addition to enjoying and downloading free music, site visitors can set up their own accounts on the Archive, make profiles, become friends with other listeners, create and share mixes of FMA music, and write posts on a their personal blogs. Listeners can also show their appreciation to FMA artists by adding them as Favorites or even “tipping” them directly through the site.
Together, our Curator-driven library and our distinctly social architecture create a platform that both guides and is guided by listeners.
I’ve had good luck finding Creative Commons-licenced music for videopoem soundtracks at SoundCloud, Jamendo, ccMixter and the Internet Archive, but it’d great to have one more option — especially one so tightly curated. I’m also impressed by how well the above-linked FAQ page explains the different Creative Commons licenses. If you’re still unclear on that, check it out.
We’re back!
My apologies for the outage over the past 24 hours. Moving Poems is now on a new server, where I hope things will be a little faster and more dependable than on the old server (where the rest of my sites still reside, for now).
Tomas Tranströmer
This new film from Bloodaxe Books, one of Tranströmer’s English-language publishers, incorporates footage of the Nobel Prize announcement and the Tranströmers’ reaction, as well as footage of Tranströmer playing the piano which Pamela Robertson-Pearce had just shot in August. Robin Fulton’s translations appear as subtitles for the Swedish-language readings, which include “The Nightingale in Badelunda,” “Allegro,” “From the Thaw on 1966,” “The Half-Finished Heaven,” “April and Silence,” “From March 1979,” and “Tracks.” This is of course something that the film/video medium is particularly well suited for: it’s wonderful to hear the poet reading in Swedish and know (more or less) what he is saying.
Do read the extensive notes on the Vimeo page. The detail that “Swedish composers have written several left-hand piano pieces especially for him to play” speaks volumes about his status in his homeland. (Hat-tip: Teju Cole on Twitter)
