~ News and Views ~

Call for work: Art Visual & Poetry, 14-17 November 2023, Vienna

A call for work is now open for this biennial Austrian festival, with live screenings in Vienna in November. The main poetry film competition is for German-speaking countries, Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Supporting this are two supporting awards: the Poetry Performance Film award for international shorts of up to 7 minutes of performance films from poetry slam, visual arts, dance and drama; and the Special Award which is for films based on the festival poem La Luna by Manfred Chobot.

More information about all the competitions is on the website: https://www.poetryfilm-vienna.com/en/opencall-2023

Top Ten: Poetry, Dance and Song

Dancing, music and singing have been key aspects of my life over the decades since my childhood, and I am naturally drawn to them as ways of exploring and expressing poetry in film.

This collection of ten is made up of pieces that move me in different ways. The order I have given them is not a ranking, but simply designed to be seen and heard in a flow from start to end.

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ODE TO MY BITCHFACE
Film-maker: Tim Davis
Writer & Voice: Olivia Gatwood
Choreography & Performance: Rebecca Björling & Rebecca Rosier
USA/Sweden

A marvelous response in dance to a powerful poem, Ode To My Bitchface was written by Olivia Gatwood in the US, who also voices the piece. The rhythm of the film, directed by Tim Davis, follows closely the choreography and dancing by Swedish artists Rebecca Björling and Rebecca Rosier. The dance is timed to the rhythms of phrases in the poem, and the movements literally matched to the meanings of the words. The fast-paced precision is exhilarating. The absence of music highlights instead the strength of the words, voice and bodies in motion. The poem can be read on the page here.

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DEAF BROWN GURL (LA MORENA SORDA)
Film-maker, Writer & Performer: Sabina England
Voice & Sound Design: Micropixie
Music: Om/Off (Paco Seren and Pablo Alvarez)
India/UK/USA

Sabina England makes beautiful expressive dance from American Sign Language in this film about identity. In her own words…

It’s based on a poem of the same name that I wrote, which I performed in San Francisco, Washington DC and at Pride Fest. It’s about exploring my identity as a deaf brown girl growing up feeling isolated, lonely and different, and learning to accept who I was and coming to love myself.

I shot beautiful scenes of various places all over Bihar, including the ancient Buddhist site at Mahabodi Temple in Bodh Gaya, Bihar. I also went to a deaf girls school in Patna and I was so proud and impressed with these little girls because they could write in Hindi, English, and they were also fluent in Indian Sign Language! (source)

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MORE THAN ONE
Film-maker & Writer: Amang
Composer & Singer: Lo Sirong
Taiwan

A musical videopoem from Taiwan, More Than One features the exquisite voice of Lo Sirong singing a poem by the writer known as Amang, who is also the film-maker. The image streams in Amang’s videos are distinctly poetic in themselves, with a quality of mystery going far beyond literal illustration of the words. The wonderful music and voice of Lo Sirong features in some videos by other film-makers here. More videos from Amang are here.

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BETWEEN BEFORE AND AFTER /WAR/
Film-makers: Marichka Lukianchuk & Elena Baronnikova
Writer: Marichka Lukianchuk
Dancer: Angelina Andriushina
Music: DakhaBrakha
Ukraine

This profoundly moving video from Marichka Lukianchuk and Elena Baronnikova features a brief dance sequence as part of an ensemble of poetic image and sound. The subject is the experience of living in Ukraine at this time of war. I find unimaginable serenity and bravery in this film. The simple beauty of the dance performed by Angelina Andriushina is an important part of the vulnerability and hope expressed. The music that further graces the piece is by DakhaBrakha. Marichka Lukianchuk writes eloquently and at more length about the film here.

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SHADOWS
Film-maker: Tal Rosner
Writer: Langston Hughes
Composer: Lior Rosner
Singer: Janai Brugger
Dancers: Cameron McMillan & Fiona Merz
USA

The poem Shadows by Langston Hughes (1901-1967) is expressed in this film in exquisite music by Lior Rosner, so beautifully sung by Janai Brugger. Visually it begins as an abstract animation that graphically responds to the music, later morphing into fragmented moments of dance performed by Cameron McMillan and Fiona Merz. The film-maker bringing all elements together is Tal Rosner. The poem can be read on the page at poets.org. More information and stills can be found at Tal Rosner’s website.

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HALLOWEEN
Film-maker: Marc Neys
Writer & Voice: Hugo Claus
Choreography & Performance: Nadia Vadori-Gauthier
Belgium/France

Central to this haunting film by influential Belgian artist Marc Neys, is an extraordinary dance piece created and performed by Nadia Vadori-Gauthier, artistic director of the French dance company Le Prix de l’essence. The piece for this film is from her amazing project titled One minute of dance a day. For this she has posted inventive short dance videos every single day since 2015. Marc Neys has been a prolific maker of distinctive videopoetry for over a decade. His slow motion treatment of the dance, and his selection of moments from it are mesmerising. The dark ambient music is also his creation. The poem is read in Dutch by its well-known Flemish author, Hugo Claus (1929-2008), in a recording from the German Lyrikline website, where it can be read in a number of different translations.

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T.I.A. (THIS IS AFRICA)
Film-makers: Matthieu Maunier-Rossi & Ronan Cheneau
Writer: Ronan Cheneau
Choreographer & Performer: Aïpeur Foundou
France/Congo

Congolese dancer Aïpeur Foundou is a graceful and compelling presence in this film, a collaboration between director Matthieu Maunier-Rossi and poet Ronan Cheneau, both in France. The poem is a reverie about the freedom that can be found within, in simple experiences and places, when it cannot be found in the wider world. The film-maker writes about the process of making the piece here.

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ROLLING FRAMES
Film-maker: Katie Garrett
Writer: Ella Jane Chappell
Voices: Katie Garrett & Nicholas Herrmann
Choreography: Anna-Lise Marie Hearn
Performers: Laura Boulter, KJ Clarke-Davis, Lydia Costello, Jennifer Jones, Nathalia Lillehagen & Ella Mackinder
UK/Norway

Film-maker Katie Garrett and writer Ella Jane Chappell, both in the UK, teamed up with Norwegian choreographer Anna-Lise Marie Hearn to create this affecting dance film that won the Southbank Poetry Film Festival in 2014. From the film’s notes at Vimeo:

At the heart of Rolling Frames are a series of shifting voices and characters that inhabit three very different relationships. These relationships are linked by the role that dependency plays in each. To some extent, every relationship involves a yielding of independence. The poem dissects this manner of yielding: the manifestation of greed in desire, the vulnerability in love, the loneliness in lust. The physicality and inner rhythms of the words are translated once over by the expressive movements of dance, and once again through the gaze of the camera’s eyes.

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BECAUSE GODDESS IS NEVER ENOUGH
Film-maker: Jane Glennie
Writer: Rosie Garland
Voice: Rosie Garland & Alison Glennie
Dancer: Natasha Jervis
UK

This film about a dancer draws inspiration from the life of Austrian-born Tilly Losch (1903-1975), also a choreographer, actor and painter. It is a collaboration between film-maker Jane Glennie and writer/performer Rosie Garland, both award-winning artists in the UK. The subject is the representation of women artists in history, especially the ways their stories have been footnoted in relation to famous men. Jane Glennie animates thousands of her photographs in a rapid stream, meticulously layered with contrasting rhythms that underscore voice and text. Rosie Garland’s expressive narration of her own poem is highly effective, alternating with that of Alison Glennie, equally as affecting in the sections that evoke Losch speaking for herself. Jane Glennie writes about the process of making the film here.

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HUMAN CONDITION
Film-maker: Mark Wilkinson
Writer and Performer: Rich Ferguson
Singer: Stella Ademiluyi
USA

Compared to most poetry videos, Human Condition is an action-packed blockbuster. It was written and performed by Rich Ferguson, the beat poet laureate of California 2020-2022. For this satirical, sometimes scathing, yet ultimately uplifting musical, he teamed up with director Mark Wilkinson and an ensemble of performers and musicians, including singer Stella Ademiluyi and James Morrison from the cast of Twin Peaks. The text of the poem is posted at YouTube in the video notes.

New online series ‘Poetry Film in Conversation’ debuts February 9

Poetry Film Live and Lyra Bristol Poetry Festival are holding an online series of events, ‘Poetry Film in Conversation’. The events kick off on February 9th 19.30 (GMT) with Animation, Motion Graphics and Text on Screen. Diek Grobler, Suzie Hanna and Jane Glennie will each give a presentation (Suzie’s will be pre-recorded) followed by a panel discussion chaired by Lucy English, and finishing up with an audience Q&A.

Diek Grobler is an artist working in various media and disciplines. Since 2010 his creative and theoretical focus has been on animated poetry-film. His films have been widely exhibited on international animation festivals, and his work has been shortlisted twice for the Weimar Poetry-film Award. He was awarded a PhD in Art from the University of South Africa and is an independent researcher on Poetry-film and experimental forms of animation.

Diek Grobler – Mon Pays – screenshot

Jane Glennie is a filmmaker, typographer, and founder of Peculiarity Press. Her films have screened worldwide, featured on www.shondaland.com, and received awards at competitions in the UK, Germany, and USA. Her poetry film with Rosie Garland, funded by Arts Council England, has now been published as a ‘book of the film with extras’.

Suzie Hanna is Emerita Professor of Animation at Norwich University of the Arts. She was Chair of NAHEMI, the National Association for Higher Education in the Moving Image from 2016 – 2019, and remains an honorary member of the executive. As an animator who collaborates with other academics and artists, her research interests include animation, poetry, puppetry and sound design. She has made numerous short films all of which have been selected for international festival screenings, TV broadcast or exhibited in curated shows. She also creates improvised animated projections for live performances of music and poetry. Recent commissions include short films for BBC Ideas and Cambridge University Creative Encounters Programme. She contributes to journals, books and conferences, and has led several innovative projects including online international student collaborations and digital exhibitions of art and poetry on what was Europe’s largest public HiDef screen. She works as a production consultant and as an international academic examiner, and she was a member of the AHRC Peer Review College from 2009-2014.

To book tickets please go to Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/poetry-film-in-conversation-animation-motion-graphics-and-text-on-screen-tickets-516766210647

Festival: Reel Poetry 2023

The Reel Poetry Festival programme for 2023 is now online.

The organisers say:

REELpoetry/HoustonTX 2023 is a four day international, curated, hybrid poetry film/video festival taking place online and in person FEBRUARY 23-26, 2023.  In addition to juried open submissions, we also feature programs by invited guest curators & presenters, ASL poetry and performances, craft triads, networking, panels and more.

Moving Poems and Haiku North America welcome submissions for haibun film festival

Haiku North America Cincinnati 2023 logo
Film submissions open January 1 for a screening of haibun poetry films at the biennial Haiku North America conference, to be held in Cincinnati, Ohio from June 28-July 2, 2023. Moving Poems is an official co-sponsor, and we’ll be the ones selecting the films. Winning films will be screened at the conference and published at Moving Poems.

What is haibun?

“Haibun” means “haiku prose” in Japanese. It’s a hybrid genre combining one or more haiku with lyrical prose, and it’s this juxtaposition, we believe, that makes it such a good fit with videopoetry or poetry film, where the artful juxtaposition of disparate parts is so central. Michael Dylan Welch, who organized the first English-language haibun contest in 1996, notes that “The key to the art of haibun is the graceful pairing of poem and prose, where the poem links to the prose yet shifts away from it, in much the same way that verses relate to each other in a renku [linked verse sequence] by linking and leaping.” (Click through to his website for examples and links.)

There aren’t a whole lot of good examples of haibun videos to point to yet, but that’s one of the things we’re hoping to change with this contest.

Rules and guidelines

Films/videos must use one of the ten provided haibun, which were selected by HNA from a separate, earlier contest that had 229 submissions. Visit this page https://movingpoems.com/2023-haibun-film-festival-texts-for-filmmakers/ and input the password: haibun. These are all unpublished poems whose authors have given permission for this contest only.*

Please include the haibun author’s name in the description to help us screen out spam submissions. The author’s name should also be included in on-screen credits.

Filmmakers may opt to use some rather than all of the text, if the author is OK with it. (We are happy to put them in touch with each other. Use the Contact form.) But the result should still look and sound like a haibun.

It’s entirely up to the filmmakers how to present the prose and poetry—as text on screen or voiceover, or some combination of the two. We also don’t want to discourage more experimental approaches, such as attempting to translate some of the prose portion of a haibun into wordless film poetry or narrative filmmaking, though that does of course come with a higher risk of rejection.

Films may be as long as seven minutes, but we encourage run times of 3-5 minutes.

Films must be submitted through FilmFreeway.

Submissions open January 1, 2023 and close March 15.

Selections will be announced on May 1.

 

*Password protection helps preserve the unpublished status of the texts, so that those not chosen for films may be submitted for publication elsewhere.

Call for Work: Já Poetry Film Competition 2023

JÁFEST poetry film competition graphic

An international theater festival in Lisbon has added a poetry film competition, with award-winning UK filmpoet Janet Lees as judge. Here’s the call.

Venue: CASA FERNANDO PESSOA: Rua Coelho da Rocha, 16-18 Campo de Ourique, 1250-088 Lisboa, Portugal

This international Poetry Film happening at Casa Fernando Pessoa is part of JÁ FEST, organized 11 – 16 April 2023 by Já International Theatre.

It is open to emerging and experienced artists, first-time videographers, filmmakers and poets. JÁFEST is supported by the Europa Criativa Program so we welcome POETRY FILM submissions from emerging European artists. […]

The festival offers a platform for sharing visual narratives through two In-Competition sections:

THEME 1: SEPARATION & BELONGING

In our turbulent world Separation and Belonging raises the question of where and to whom we belong. To ourselves, perhaps? To nature, to memories, to family, to love, to dreams fulfilled and unfulfilled? Until we parted we did not know we could feel so strongly, we did not know that our good memories could shrivel and vanish, that we may no longer find comfort in them. Through separation we learn a lot about ourselves and our world, don’t we?

Jury President Janet Lees: “Separation and Belonging is a nuanced theme which gives poets and filmmakers a myriad of ways to respond. Separation can remind us of and bring us back to what’s truly important. As for belonging, who, what and where do we belong to – and what, if anything, truly belongs to us? Is belonging always a positive thing, or can it be something that precipitates separation, as in belonging in the sense of ownership? I love this theme because it’s so broad, and gives people freedom within a framework. There is the focus, the ‘container’, of having a specific theme, and there is the freedom of having almost limitless ways to respond to it.”

Inspirations and poems can come from any time period, or it can be your own vers libre.

THEME 2: DISQUIET! said PESSOA, or DESASSOSSEGO COM FERNANDO PESSOA

We invite filmmakers inspired by Pessoa’s work to submit a poetry film base on one of his poems or quotations to the Disquiet! said Pessoa, or Desassossego com Fernando Pessoa section in the competition.

For more details and to submit, visit FilmFreeway.

The Cosmic Sea of Video Poetry: A Top Ten List

The world of video poetry is a cosmic sea where seeds of poems grow in a vast fluid of cinematic possibilities. You can meet enthusiastic amateur art projects where an amazing poem is the real protagonist. You can experience works by professional directors or amazing narrators, an attractive deep voice to guide you into the mind of a world known poet or to see for first time images blossom from an unknown poem. You can be touched and even cry watching heroes of a poem come alive on the screen or be overwhelmed with awe watching a dance performance or animation inspired by poetry. The creative collaborations among directors, poets and musicians around the world establish a new art genre, video poetry, as a new way to experience poetry today.

I don’t know from where to start. From the beginning or from the end. From the past or from the present. I will choose to take a trip from future to past. I will base my top ten list in the outstanding and awarded films that captured our souls in the ten last years of the International Video Poetry Festival and I will end up with some glamsy memories from the international digital platform http://filmpoetry.org – both projects organized and curated by the Institute for Experimental Arts.

Let’s start!

THEY PROMISED US A FUTURE (Mexico)
Director & Poet: Laura R. Tolentino

An amazing experimental film poem. Laura R. Tolentino created a very strong performance video poem that brings together technology, psychedelic intimate visions and ceremonial community futuristic lifestyles. The video offers strong comments about the social and environmental issues of our era with unique, extraordinary way. Premiered and awarded at the 10th International Video Poetry Festival in Athens.

HEBEERIN (Russia)
Director & Poet: Inga Shepeleva

Hebeerin or The Bear Festival is an art project inspired by the world of spirits from the mythology of the Yakut people. It is a fragile celebration on the remains of a slain animal. An extraordinary atmosphere worships the forces of nature. Watching the film poem we understand that we are small, we are all children inside the palm of the universe.

Inga Shepeleva was born and raised in an academic town near Yakutsk, the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in a family of scientists who have dedicated their lives to studying permafrost. In 2017, she produced her first cycle of videos based on her poetry work called ​Hebeerin​, dedicated to Yakut mythology. The video art cycle received awards and nominations at Russian and European video poetry and experimental film festivals, such as the video poetry festival​ ​Fifth Leg​ (Saint-Petersburg), ​The International Video Poetry​ ​Festival​ (Athens) and International Experimental Film Festival Zebra​ (Berlin).

View on Vimeo

CHAMADA GERAL (Portugal)
Director: Manuel Vilarinho
Poet: Mário-Henrique Leiria (1923–1980)

Mário-Henrique Leiria was a Portuguese surrealist poet. Born in Lisbon, he studied at the Escola de Belas Artes. He and his fellow surrealists were involved in an absurdist plot to overthrow the dictatorship of Antonio Salazar. The performance in this video poem is very strong. It fits perfectly with the thematic of the poem.

THE LIFE WE LIVE IS NOT LIFE ITSELF (Australia / Greece)
Director: Ian Gibbins
Poetry: Tasos Sagris
Music: Whodoes

A production of the Institute for Experimental Arts, this video is a collaboration of the Greek spoken word / multi media duet Tasos Sagris & Whodoes with the Australian experimental director Ian Gibbins. Tasos Sagris’s poem, with its haunting soundtrack by Whodoes, offers us an extended exploration of lives lived in parallel worlds, at cross-purposes, in and out of love, around the world. The video, awarded and presented in more than 45 festivals around the world, invite us to observe deep inside us for a real reason to live today. But what is the reality? What is mere illusion? Can there be more to life than simply living?

WHITMAN ILLUSTRATED: Song of Myself (USA)
Director: Allen Crawford
Poetry: Walt Witman

Illustrator Allen Crawford has turned Whitman’s poem Song of Myself into a sprawling, 256-page work of art. The densely-handwritten text and illustrations intermingle in a way that’s both surprising and wholly in tune with the spirit of the poem—exuberant, rough, and wild. “Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself” is a sensational reading experience, an artifact in its own right, and a masterful tribute to the Good Gray Poet.

IF I GO OUT WALKING WITH MY DEAD FRIENDS (Germany / Greece)
Directors: Aleksandra Corovic and Alkistis Kafetzi
Poet:  Ritta Boumi-Pappa

The poem If I go out walking with my dead friends belongs to the book A Thousand Murdered Girls which was published in 1964 by the communist poet Ritta Boumi-Pappa . The book consists of 65 poems, each named after a woman who was sentenced to death for participating in the Greek Resistance against the Nazis. The film, produced by the Institute for Experimental Arts, is a humble memorial for the female heroines mentioned in Papa’s verses but also for today’s freedom fighters. It rings the bell in the consciences of people, pointing out the risk of suppression of freedom within a decaying social system. The past and the present are connected through a visualized dramaturgy of associative patterns. The human body becomes a canvas on which mankind paints its struggles and battles. Its reality is caught in confrontation between projected values and societal demands. How do society’s proceedings reflect on the individual experience?

iRONY (Australia)
Director: Radheya Jegatheva

An Oscar qualified and AACTA nominated filmmaker based in Perth, Australia and born in Johor, Malaysia to parents of South Korean, Japanese, Indian and Malaysian ancestry, the poet and filmmaker Radheya Jegatheva inspects a wide range of elements through a critical lens and bring awareness to terrible issues such as cyberbullying and teen suicide. The animated video poem causes discussion or at least contemplation about these issues in a creative way, and make people reconsider the overconsumption of social media or the ways in which it can be harmful.

MULTISPECIES OFFLINE (UK)
Director: mmmmmfilms

mmmmmfilms is a collaboration between Adrian Fisher, Luna Montenegro and Gines Olivares. Since 2003 they have been making art films that show in festivals, biennials and galleries in Europe and Latin America. The Multispecies Offline is an intelligent video poetry that combines performance and spoken word and cinematic video poetry. Exploring different modalities of social media, theatre, film noir, photography and overlay ‘multispecies offline’ is a film that considers our relations with the human and the non-human.

View on Vimeo

THE HUMAN CHILD (Ukraine)
Director: Lika Nadir

Our life balances between internal freedom and belonging to others. The inner measure of truth never lies, like the human body. Try to live your life so as to penetrate through it the truth for those who will come to this world after you. Lika Nadir was born in the Crimea. At the age of 14, she began writing: short scripts and stories. An art historian by training. In 2019 she got accepted to the Moscow School of New Cinema (workshop of Dmitry Mamulia). In her works Lika raises social themes, and also seeks the aesthetics of naturalness and realistic existence of actors. Notable works: video for La Priest, collaboration with L’Officiel Russia.

I DON’T OWN ANXIETY (Australia)
Filmmaker: Marie Craven
Poetry: Kelli Russell Agodon

A film poem that is outstanding in content and form, in lyrics and photography, in atmosphere and meaning. The poem is strong and the voice over grabs your attention from the first moment.

Call for work: Cadence Video Poetry Festival 2023

The sixth Cadence Video Poetry Festival in Seattle (USA), will take place in person and online in April and May 2023. It is presented by Northwest Film Forum and programmed in collaboration with Seattle author Chelsea Werner-Jatzke and artist Rana San.

The organisers say:

“Over the last five years the festival has screened 272 video poems from 38 countries in 24 languages, and hosted annual youth and adult workshops, touring programs, and artist talks. All selected works at Cadence receive an honorarium, which NWFF began offering artists in 2021 to support the generation and exhibition of their work.

This year’s festival continues as a hybrid program, offering international audiences access to showcases, workshops, and artist talks both in-person and online. Cadence approaches video poetry as a literary genre presented as visual media, cultivating new meaning from the combination of text and moving image. The 2023 call for submissions and Artist-in-Residence applications are now open.”

Submissions are open until 1st March 2023 via FilmFreeway in five categories of video poetry:

  • Adaptations/Ekphrasis: Videos created to bring new meaning and dimension to pre-existing poetry. Any poems used for this purpose must be in the public domain or else used with written consent of the author.
  • Collaboration: Video poems created in collaboration between a video artist and writer.
  • Video by Poets: Poets creating video from, or as, their writing.
  • Poetry by Video Artists: Video artists using text visually or through audio intrinsic to the poetic meaning.
  • Wild Card: Video work that’s poetically informed or poetry that’s visually informed that doesn’t neatly fit into one of the other categories.

Review: 10th Ó Bhéal Poetry Film Competition & Winner

Still image: James E Kenward – Borne

Lockdown and pandemic experiences have thoroughly honed and expanded Ó Bhéal’s experience of presenting events online (helped by their growing collection of technical kit that they have been fortunate to acquire over the last few years). The 10th International Poetry-Film Competition, and the wider Winter Warmer Festival it is now part of, was fully hybrid with all events running in-person at the beautiful Nano Nagle Place in Cork (Ireland), and simultaneously live-streamed. All events are available to watch indefinitely online.

The competition selected 30 films shown in two screenings. I left each screening with excitement, and a variety of films and filmmakers that I wanted to watch again or know more about. These are some of my personal highlights:

Selkie (Director Marry Waterson) had an unusual approach to image repetition. Rockin’ Bus Driver (Directors Mary Tighe and Cormac Culkeen) had a very satisfying, meaty voice in the soundtrack and a simple but effective graphic treatment of the visual material, while Borne by James E. Kenward had an incredible delivery of the voice – the pace and the pairing with the music were brilliant. The success of this partnership is perhaps explained by a YouTube of the recording session where you can watch James performing the text alongside the pianist. A brilliant way to create the soundtrack if feasible for a project. I particularly liked the lettering in There’s a Certain Slant of light (Director Susan McCann) – text cut from leaves and cast by shadows, and the words accompanied by just music. And as a final contrast to the varied treatments of sound in the selected films, there was Janet Lees’ powerful but silent film Descent.

Still image: Susan McCann – There’s a Certain Slant of light )

The effort involved in putting together a festival can never be underestimated, and Paul Casey and Colm Scully have done a brilliant job of making the selections as well as organising the event and keeping everything running smoothly and technically well throughout the day. My only desire as an in-person attendee is to be able to have more awareness of who in the room were filmmakers (name badges, stickers, or something more imaginative perhaps?) and little bit more time specifically programmed in to be able to meet and chat to them. Filmmakers were introduced and invited to stand at the end of the screening, but it is difficult to register everyone’s face (especially in a semi-dark room) and I think attendees do need the reward of interaction to make the in-person experience special. I noticed that the finalists of the All-Ireland Poetry Slam later in the day had the opportunity for a group photograph, and I think this would be an appreciated chance for the film competition too, for those that were there on the day.

Still image: Jelle Meys – La luna asoma

The winner of the competition was announced as La luna asoma (The moon appears), an animation by Jelle Meys of a poem by Federico García Lorca. I contacted Jelle to congratulate him on his win and ask him a few questions …

ME: The poem is read in Spanish, was subtitled in English, and you are Belgian. How fluent are you in Spanish? Were you aware of Federico García Lorca’s poem in a translation in your mother tongue, or in English? Which language version of the poem did you go to in your mind when you were thinking about the imagery for your animation?

JELLE: My mother tongue is Dutch, as I’m from the Flemish part of Belgium. When I decided to animate a poem, as a kind of practice, I hadn’t chosen a specific poem yet. So I just browsed through the poetry collections I own. One of those is an anthology of Federico García Lorca, with both the original poems in Spanish and their Dutch translations on the opposite pages. It was necessary to have the Dutch translation to ‘get the meaning’ (which is obviously relative with such metaphoric poetry), but I also wanted to stay true to the rhythm and the sounds of the original Spanish version. I can grasp quite a bit of Spanish, especially when written, because of my knowledge of French.

ME: In a YouTube video I saw, where you talk about your work (for another festival I think?), you mention that you are relatively new to animation but you have long been an illustrator … the sequence with the sea and the swimmers was just beautiful. Did you have a clear idea of how you wanted the movement of the bodies to happen before you began the animation?

JELLE: That YouTube talk was indeed for another festival, in Mumbai. Before getting into the animation, I drew a simple storyboard. So I did have some idea of what I wanted it to look like. But in the making of this film I learned a lot about animating, technically, which altered and influenced the final look. The swimmers sequence was a particularly tough one, because for that part I did have a clear vision in mind, and I didn’t want to compromise on it.

ME: What was your thought process on the colour palette that you chose?

JELLE: The colour palette was also very clear to me, pretty much right from the start. I’ve always loved the combination of brown and blue and considered it fitting for the somewhat melancholic tone of the poem. I also thought that a limited colour palette wouldn’t distract the viewer too much from the actual poem.

ME: The music is a perfect accompaniment. Was this pre-existing and if so, how difficult was it to find? Or was the music written or adapted for the film?

JELLE: My cousin, Michiel De Malsche, happens to be a composer and sound artist. He used samples and recordings from music workshops he had done in the past (hence why he didn’t ask for his name in the credits) and puzzled them together into a mesmerizing soundscape, which perfectly blends with that deep and warm voice of Joaquin Muñoz Benitez (a Spanish man living in Gent, Belgium).

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Biography: Jelle Meys lives and works in Sint-Niklaas, Belgium. He studied Illustration and Graphic Design at School of Arts Ghent (2005-2009), where he also got his Teacher’s degree (2010). He currently teaches graphic design and illustration in high school, and works as a freelance illustrator, graphic designer and visual artist. He started taking film and animation classes in 2017, and has been infected with the animation bug ever since.

New Art Emerging: Notes from a Symposium on Videopoetry

Editors’ note: the symposium titled New Art Emerging: Two or Three Things One Should Know About Videopoetry took place on 5 November 2022 in Surrey, BC, Canada. It was convened by the renowned theorist of videopoetry, Tom Konyves, who also curated a related exhibition program, Poets with a Video Camera: Videopoetry 1980-2022. Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel H. Dugas were guest speakers at the symposium and kindly accepted our invitation to write an account to appear here at Moving Poems Magazine…

To start, instead of cutting the information down to fit, it might be easier to just start a new videopoetry blog. That is not a serious proposal, it is just that every videopoet holds the potential to write a book in a conversation and each videopoem is a complete story in itself. Writing a report from within is new for us and to begin, we admit that our comments must be somewhat biased.

The exhibition Poets with a Video Camera: Videopoetry 1980-2022 at the Surrey Art Gallery formed the base for the Symposium, as well as providing the impetus for Poems by Poetry Filmmakers, readings at Vancouver’s People’s Co-op Bookstore that were organized by Fiona Tinwei Lam, Vancouver’s Poet Laureate, 2022-2024 and the Symposium’s keynote speaker, Sarah Tremlett.

On Friday night, November 4, a major windstorm blew through the Lower Mainland with the City of Surrey being one of the hardest hit in the area. Large trees, weakened by months of drought, had been toppled, and on Saturday morning scores of BC Hydro customers were affected. Surrey was at the epicenter of the storm and the Gallery was without power but not powerless. Thanks to the quick action of Jordan Strom, Surrey Art Gallery’s Curator of Exhibitions and Collections, Rhys Edwards, Assistant Curator, and Zoe Yang, Curatorial Assistant, the symposium was efficiently moved to the Surrey Public Library, a stunning building in the City Centre. The schedule had to be retooled into a shorter program, but the room was packed and ready to see all the facets of this videopoetic diamond.

The symposium audience

To contextualize the place of the smposium it might be useful to have some information about the exhibition. From the gallery’s website:

Poets with a Video Camera presents the largest retrospective of videopoetry in Canada to date. The exhibition features over twenty-five works by some of the world’s leading practitioners. It is organized around five categories of videopoetry: kinetic text, visual text, sound text, performance, cin(e)poetry.

The title is a reference to Dziga Vertov’s 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera that has become iconic in experimental film discussions in advocating for a complete separation between the language of theatre and literature. Similarly, Konyves argues for videopoetry to be thought of as outside of poetry and video art. Instead, Konyves states that it is a form that is in its “early days . . . still in a process of redefining poetry for future generations.” This exhibition shows the humorous next to the serious, the experimental alongside the genre bending, the ironic with the sincere, and the timely together with the timeless expressions of this new form.

Jordan Strom opened the Symposium and introduced Guest Curator, Tom Konyves.

Tom Konyves

Tom stated his intention to provoke dialogue and to challenge perspectives. While developing a course in visual poetry for the University of the Fraser Valley, Abbotsford (2006), he had come to realize that he needed more sources for videopoetry than his own work. After contacting Heather Haley, she sent him 76 examples. From there, he came up with a definition of videopoetry that proposed a triptych of text, image, and sound in a poetic juxtaposition. He was able to further clarify his research findings in Buenos Aires when he met Argentinian artist Fernando García Delgado. Finally, Tom arrived at the idea that the role of the videopoet was that of juggler, visual artist, filmmaker, sound artist, and poet. He concluded that, within that mix, the videopoem as an art object, poetic experience, and metaphor, is created.

Sarah Tremlett

UK-based videopoet Sarah Tremlett delivered the symposium’s keynote speech in which she spoke about her definitive volume The Poetics of Poetry Film, as well as the importance of sound and subjectivity in an artist’s experimental audiovisual journey. Through her own work, as well as her contributions to the examination of poetry film, film poetry, and videopoetry, Sarah occupies a central place in the videopoetry world. While addressing the symposium, she also introduced her current work: research into a complex family history, spanning several centuries.

Heather Haley and Kurt Heintz spoke of their individual activities and collaborations in what is recognized as their history in the world of videopoetry. Their presentation, titled Entangled Threads: How One Canadian and One American Poet Took on Technology and Charted a Genre, proposed an engaging exchange on the shared commonality of early events linking not only poets in different geographic locations, but also text/voice to technologies. Among these commonalities was the early 1990’s Telepoetics project, a series of events using videophones to connect poets. As noted by Heather Haley on her website: “[…] before Skype or Zoom poets were using videophones to connect, to exchange verse, despite a myriad of limitations and challenges. […]”

Kurt Heintz and Heather Haley
Adeena Karasick

Poet, performer, essayist, media artist, professor, thinker Adeena Karasick, and artist-programmer, visual poet and essayist Jim Andrews delivered a high-powered and mesmerizing performance of Checking In, a work about our insatiable appetite for information. Jim’s coding meshed seamlessly with Adeena’s texts and her high-level acrobatics of spoken word and movement. Through the fusing of voice, text, and image, Jim’s video, and Adeena’s recitations/movements, the two delivered a performance that never missed a beat!

Founder and Director of the VideoBardo Festival, Javier Robledo (in absentia), planted himself onto a sofa and placed a bird cage on his head to present a playful performance/poetry mix. Reminiscent of early 20th-century Dada performances, he closed the performance when he blew a whistle that mimicked a caged bird. In his video presentation, and speaking about his work P-O-E-S-I-A, Javier spoke about the importance of the performative gesture and its repercussions in articulating meanings.

Javier Robledo
Matt Mullins

As Matt Mullins was also in absentia from the symposium, Tom provided an introduction to his work in the exhibition, as well as Matt’s own pre-recorded intervention about his creative process and the decisions made in the making of the three videos: Our Bodies (A Sinner’s Prayer), 2012; Semi Automatic Pantoum, a collaboration between Mullins and the Poetic Justice League of Chicago, 2019; and america, (i wanted to make you something beautiful but i failed), 2022.

When we spoke with Annie Frazier Henry a few days following the Symposium, she felt energized by taking part in the event. She is a writer with roots in theatre, music and film. In her presentation, she mentioned the influence that E. Pauline Johnson had on her growth. She generously expressed that the warm and safe space created by the meeting was about all of us. Grounded in her perspective, Annie talked about encouragement and relevancy. The words from her 1995 poem Visions resonate forward to the contemporary platform of videopoetry:

I don’t want to see stars in my eyes
I want to see stars in the sky,
Where they belong

When you enter a room
There’s invisible war paint on your face
And it looks good

Annie Frazier Henry

Fiona Tinwei Lam, the Vancouver Poet Laureate (2022-2024), presented The Plasticity of Poetry, a series of videopoems based on the dilemma of plastic pollution and its dizzying accumulation. Many of Fiona’s works are collaborative endeavours with animators. She also screened the work Neighborhood by Pamela Falkenberg and Jack Cochran which they state “is a look at modern life in the suburbs as the world courts climate disaster.” Neighborhood juxtaposes a poem by Fiona over live-action and animated scenes of suburbia. At the root of all of these works resides a deep desire to make a difference in the world.

Fiona Tinwei Lam

As for us, we presented Rust Never Sleeps: Nuances in Collaborative Creation, a talk on collaborations and the diverse ways that we have collaborated while continuing to each work on our own individual projects. Collaboration begins with a discussion, and that exchange frames the outcome of any project. It is a shared authorship and to work in such a way, one must be ready to let go of preconceived ideas and to be ready for whatever might arise.

Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel H. Dugas

Conclusions

To accommodate the time frame for the venue afforded by the library, the Q&A was pushed to the end of the day. One member of the audience, Surrey-based poet Brian Mohr, has a story worth mentioning. When he showed up at the gallery to see the exhibition on Saturday morning after the storm, he was redirected to the library. He knew about the exhibition but not about the symposium. Brian, who is in the process of making his first videopoem, went with the flow and ended up participating in the event. He had a question for the panel about using video games as source locations for videopoetry. Several presenters addressed his question and according to discussions we had with him later, the symposium gathering was of utmost importance to his development as a videopoet.

Just as Jordan Strom finished his closing remarks, a loudspeaker announcement resonated through the building: “The library will be closing in five minutes!” Videopoetry is all about timing, and so was the conclusion of the symposium.

A symposium is designed to bring together, a group of people with common interests. When they come away from the meeting, they should have learned something new, made new connections, and should have possibly established the grounds for future collaborations. The Surrey Symposium made visible a complex web of relations and affinities between videopoets. It revealed the contour of a community of artists/poets, and affirmed that we are not isolated, that we are not living in a vacuum; that we have a place in the world. This sentiment was echoed in a comment that Kurt Heintz wrote on an email thread after the Symposium:

While I have long been aware that I’m not the only person doing what I do, I’ve often felt quite solitary. And so, one of the biggest takeaways for me is simply having experienced a critical mass of minds, if only for a weekend. Certainly, we’re all very different people with different perspectives on the art we make and/or study. Our critical languages often differ. And we’re far-flung; the exhibit plainly speaks to the international origins for poetry in cinematic form. And yet, that very mix is what actually pointed to a body politic.

This symposium answered some questions surrounding the creation of videopoetry. It also made it clear that videopoetry operates on many different levels of consciousness. The event accomplished its mission, and if there might be an idea to improve upon the gatherings, it might be to increase the meeting to a full day, which would allow more time for Q&A as well as informal discussions. A dream would be to have a bi-annual videopoetry symposium.

From the art gallery to the library, this symposium managed to bridge two of the fundamental sites of videopoetry: visuals and words. The voices that we heard on that afternoon were the third element — a perfect poetic juxtaposition.

Seated left to right: Adeena Karasick, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Jim Andrews, Annie Frazier Henry, Jordan Strom
Second row: Kurt Heintz, Sarah Tremlett, Heather Haley, Valerie LeBlanc, Daniel H. Dugas, Tom Konyves

Photos: Pardeep Singh

Top Ten: winners of Ó Bhéal Poetry Film Competition

Ó Bhéal winners 2013–2021

Paul Casey and Colm Scully, the judges of the  10th Ó Bhéal Poetry Film Competition hosted a very successful hybrid event on Sunday 27th November. For Moving Poems they are also kindly working on their top ten films of classic poems, as part of a fresh series of Top Tens that will be coming to the site soon (see previous top tens). Until then, here is a top ten to celebrate 10 years of the Ó Bhéal competition with the newly crowned 10th winner included in the list with the nine previous winners.

2022 Winner

Jelle Meys – Belgium – La Luna Asoma (The moon appears) (3:37)

Past winners

2013 Winner

Manuel Vilarinho – Portugal – No País Dos Sacanas (In the Land of Bastards) (3:50)

2014 Winner

Marleen van der Werf – Netherlands – Wadland (9:19)

(the full-length film is not available on the web)

2015 Winner

Cheryl Gross – USA – In The Circus Of You (6:07)

2016 Winner

Marie Craven – Australia Dictionary Illustrations (2:13)

2017 Winner

Kayla Jeanson – Canada – Descrambled Eggs (4:14)

2018 Winner

Álvaro Martín – Spain – Accident de Personne (3:35)

2019 Winner

Fiona Aryan – Ireland – Virginia gave me Roses (2:05)

2020 Winner

Peta-Maria Tunui, Waitahi Aniwaniwa McGee, Shania Bailey-Edmonds, Jesse-Ana Harris, Lilián Pallares, Charles Olsen – Māori, Pākehā and Colombian – Noho Mai (5:33)

2021 Winner

Janet Lees – Isle of Man/England – What I fear most is becoming ‘a poet’ (6:10)

ZEBRA 2022: The Cannes of Poetry Film Turns 20

Award ceremony – Zebra Poetry Film Festival 2022. Photo: Jane Glennie

Four days of events, readings and film screenings in one of the cultural hearts of Berlin was completed with the awards ceremony on Sunday 6 November 2022. In the fabulous venue of the Kino in der Kulturbrauerei, filmmakers and poets attended ZEBRA from far and wide – from Brazil to Ukraine by way of Ireland, UK and Switzerland to name but a few.

A wide-ranging and well-attended festival dedicated to poetry film is a marvelous thing. ZEBRA is the largest and longest-running festival of its kind, and the hosts were delighted to be fully in-person and without restrictions again. The event is welcoming, friendly and in a brilliant venue in a great part of a great city.

Film is often the first impression we get of a city in the world, and being from the UK, it took me a couple of days to get over the feeling of being in every Cold War spy movie I’ve ever seen that has passed through East Berlin. But I was lucky enough to be able to attend ZEBRA throughout the four days and soon felt relaxed and at home in this exciting, culturally rich city. It’s not physically possible to see all that ZEBRA has to offer because there are often events or screenings that take place simultaneously, but the film selection I enjoyed included animations, documentaries, spoken word films, and sign language poetry film. The programme committee want to represent the world in the films they choose for the International Competition, as well as a range of genres within films connected by the common thread of poetry or a poetic approach. They chose to have a focus on Ukraine with both films and poetry readings, and a retrospective of Maya Deren (born in Kyiv), but beyond the dreadful situation faced by Ukrainians, ZEBRA seem keen to use their platform to screen films that have pertinent and important messages to convey.

In the programme, the new director of ZEBRA, Katharina Schultens, said:

“Poetry and poetry films do not have a lot in common with the escapism of the entertainment industry and the consolation its products may offer. They reach much further than that. Yes, they can offer us comfort, too, but while doing so, they also pose the difficult questions we have to face… [such as] war and displacement … exclusion in societies … climate catastrophe…”

At this point in the week afterwards, reflecting on the films I have seen and the films I have missed, or been forced to miss because of simultaneous programming – this is where an online component would be hugely valuable, and I urge ZEBRA and all other festivals to consider the approach taken by the Women Over 50 Film Festival (WOFFF) in Lewes (UK) this year.  WOFFF took place in a hybrid format. All films could be watched in the online festival leading up to the in-person event. But the really valuable bit is that attendees of the in-person event were offered a voucher to watch more of the films throughout the week AFTER the in-person event. Talking to people during the in-person event, and through the connections you make, you meet or discover writers and filmmakers whose work you have missed, hear recommendations for someone else’s favourite film, see a film of a type that you didn’t know you were going to love and you want to explore more of, or recall something that sticks in your mind and you want to watch again to appreciate fully. Or simply your appetite has been awakened for the very first time and you want to see more than you thought you would …

Kino in der Kulturbrauerei, Zebra Poetry Film Festival 2022. Photo: Jane Glennie.

The winners of Zebra 2022 seem to reflect an overall philosophy of championing weighty subject matter. Or perhaps they reflect an understandable mood of seriousness in the world. (The list of winners and judges’ comments are available on the ZEBRA website and in their press release.) Personally, I was disappointed by the choice of both Black. British. Muslim. Other. and Terra Dei Padri (Fathers’ Land). While each had a very strong story to tell, one through a very immediate approach in the poet’s performance and direction, and the other through the use of archive images, I did not think either was a great example of their type. Far stronger in the use of language, image and filmmaking technique was the film given a special mention, Zyclus (Cycle).

The strongest film receiving an award was Imaginings. Written and performed by a collective of deaf poets, the film is poetry in sign language. The direction of the film by Anja Hiddinga and the energy given to it by the poet performers themselves made this an extremely compelling film to watch. I give a personal special mention to the typographic choices made for the subtitling. The words were placed over the centre of the chest of each performer as they signed. This meant that you did not need to take your eyes away from their hands and their signing. At times the type could be slightly difficult to read because it bobbed about as the poet’s body moved, but this added to the physicality of the language because their bodies moved more in, for example, moments of frustration.

The most interesting poetry film I saw was one of the selected three best interpretations of the festival poem Anderkat by Georg Leß. The poem is fascinating but very oblique. I personally found it impenetrable when I tried to imagine a treatment. At the Festival Poem event, when Georg Leß was introduced and he talked about his poem, his fascination and work with horror films came to light which then made a lot of sense in relation to his writing. I could let myself off the hook a little because I can rarely find a connection with horror in film. One of the filmmakers talked about expressing the uncanny and I think this was the key to this poem. The longlisted films shown before the three best failed to do this and, as a result, felt very unsatisfactory and weak in their choice of images. But I thought the film by Beate Gördes was stunning. Notable because it used no words, only very peculiar, uncanny images, it is one of the films I really want to watch several times over to appreciate its subtleties.

Two very enjoyable films in the event were documentaries. Spatzen und Spaziergänge (Sparrows and Strolls) was the beautifully shot and framed film by Maria Mohr with the poet Marko Pogačar, and the other was The Last Cuckoo by Mark Chaudoir about the poet Dennis Gould which managed to capture the personality of the poet’s life in a hugely engaging way. Also pleasing was the community project from Dublin, Dance till Dán which fused choreography with collectively created poetry.

Overall however, I would have liked to have seen more films that interpreted poems of the very highest quality with visual results that are more intrinsically a fused filmic/poetic experience in themselves than they are illustrative or performative. Perhaps those are the ones I happened to miss? On that note, I reiterate, please ZEBRA, do consider an online offering that extends after the in-person event.