~ reviews ~
The Art of Poetry Film with Cheryl Gross: “Ballad of The Skeletons”
This historic collaboration between Allen Ginsberg (1926-2007), Philip Glass and Paul McCartney was a low budget venture. Gus Van Sant who had ties to the Beat Generation directed it. I happen to love Van Sant’s work, which includes Drugstore Cowboy, Good Will Hunting and Milk. It aired on MTV making Ginsberg one of the oldest artists on the network at the time. This in and of itself is an accomplishment since MTV is primarily youth-oriented. It’s also a good way to acquaint an audience not necessarily familiar with a very important part of our culture.
Glass and McCartney carry the music and Ginsberg the poetry. The recording was produced by Lenny Kaye (Patti Smith group) along with an array of musicians.
The poem was first published in 1995, two years before Ginsberg’s death. The footage of Ginsberg reminds me of the time I saw him at the old Chelsea Hotel picking up his mail. We nodded to each other. I could see he was in pretty bad shape. To approach him would have been an intrusion. As far as I was concerned the acknowledgement was as good as an autograph. This was a special moment for me, and probably an everyday occurrence for him. Such is the price one has to pay for being a celebrity. I’ve also had the pleasure to see him read. Needless to say I’m a big fan.
I love and admire all three artists, but their collaboration created a bomb. To begin with, I adore the use of old footage but the interlooping of Ginsberg’s image in my opinion doesn’t work. I know it’s Ginsberg’s poem, I know, I know. So use Ginsberg as a weave. His image feels too disconnected. It’s as if Van Sant threw him in from time to time just to remind us this is Allen Ginsberg and how important he is. Even if it was low-budget, I think he could have done a better job. The vintage material Van Sant used is pretty powerful on its own. I would have liked to see it used as a backdrop with just Ginsberg’s voice. Another thing I would like to point out is the fact that in the so-called Vietnam Era we had the first war that was televised on a daily basis, thereby desensitizing us as a generation along with generations to come. Perhaps seeing this on a larger screen would have more of an effect, but for the small screen it’s almost dismissible.
The point of the poem as I understand it references the Mexican Day Of The Dead and refers to our figureheads and society as no more than skeletons that are posed, thus leading us to think they are doing something that will improve our lives. I would have liked to see more skeleton and Dead references used. It comes in only at the beginning and if you haven’t noticed by now, I’m a stickler for continuity. This is a very significant piece. If it were revisited today, perhaps it would have more of an impact on me personally. It hits me intellectually but not emotionally. Again, I love Ginsberg with his fuck-you attitude. Although dated I would have liked to be punched in the gut, where it really hurts, making me puke, rather than leaving me feeling detached.
There are two versions. The second is Ginsberg reading and McCartney playing guitar, filmed by one of McCartney’s daughters (which one I don’t know). This poetry video is a performance. I think I like it better than Van Sant’s attempt, which seems to have everything thrown in including the kitchen sink. This to their credit is pure and unpretentious.
Special thanks to Open Culture.
The Art of Poetry Film with Cheryl Gross: “Affects of Gravity”
Poet Chris Tonelli sent me this article regarding his collaboration with Boston-based performance artist/activist Andi Sutton.
A brief explanation of the video poem: Tonelli and Sutton collaborated on a piece that involved replacing a voiceover on a ride in an amusement park. They substituted Chris’ poem for music that is ordinarily played over loudspeakers. The ride chosen was the Gravitron, which is based on centrifugal force. “The Sculpture In The Memory” is the name of the poem.
Chris recorded the voiceover, which substituted for the music normally used to attract customers and sell tickets. This was a three-day event.
Affects Of Gravity allows the masses to experience high art without the stigma or fear of appearing ignorant. The fact that music is usually played on rides in amusement parks is indeed part of the attraction to the ride, but when replaced by Chris’ poetry, a third aspect is created. This reaches a population that would ordinarily shy away from anything highbrow such as installation art, therefore allowing the average person to gain an elite cultural understanding at least for a brief moment. I’m sure if people were listening, they would realize that the poem is about the Gravitron experience. But for most people the original intent was to enjoy the actual ride. This is the reason why people frequent amusement parks. The sound continues to remain a backdrop.
Sutton’s video in my opinion is perfect. It captures the gritty atmosphere of a seedy amusement park. There is an air of sleaze and perversion that is amplified, which personally leads me to a place my parents warned me about. For me it is nostalgia at its creepiest. I suppose some people would equate this to a fear of clowns.
This is a wonderful performance piece and I love it when artists think outside of the box. By incorporating the two genres, poetry and installation, they have created a fresh experience and perhaps gained a new audience as well.
I emailed Chris and asked him to further explain the project. These are his words:
I was giving a reading at the Plough & Stars (I think) in Cambridge and Andi was in the audience. And she approached me after the reading wondering if I wanted to collaborate on something based on the poems that I had read…13 weird poems (a chapbook called FOR PEOPLE WHO LIKE GRAVITY AND OTHER PEOPLE, Rope-A-Dope Press) told in the voice of Gravitron, the carnival ride. The bizarre thing about that is, the poems were based on an art installation I’d experienced at MASSMoCA, not an experience I had at a carnival.
Anyway, what we settled on was replacing the typical pop music that would be played inside the Gravitron with a recording of me reading the poems. This was at the Topsfield Fair…Massachusetts’ big state fair. So we asked the operators how much we’d need to pay them to do this (how much they thought it might cost them in ticket sales), we priced the cost of a bus to get people we knew out to the fair (in case NO ONE at the fair wanted to ride it), and applied for a grant from MIT for like 3K and got it! So I had the poems recorded, we went to the fair and made the switcheroo, and Andi filmed it…capturing the responses of the riders, etc. Her thing as an artist is confronting people with art, not in a typical art setting, but when they aren’t necessarily expecting it, out in public.
Here’s a review of the project. An excerpt:
[W]e were prepared to pay more attention to the poetry than the kids around us. And they were all kids, talking loudly, full of sugar and giddy with a day at the fair. They could not have cared less about the poetry and sound recordings, and Colin even noted how they seemed to be trying to drown out the sounds by stamping their feet.
Yet, when the ride started to spin and there was nothing but the whir of the motors, the sound of the recordings and the pull of gravity, something seemed to change. Tonelli’s voice, the voice of the Gravitron, spoke with authority. The machine demanded our attention, pulled at us and spoke to us at the same time. For that brief period, the length of one midway ride, our small group of artists and children understood the Gravitron in a way that I doubt any of us will understand any other carnival ride.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Belgian literary magazine Deus Ex Machina’s Filmpoem Album
I’ve long been interested in exploring different delivery systems for poetry films. Though videos on the web are Moving Poems’ bread and butter, and are clearly going to remain the dominant delivery system for years to come, that doesn’t mean we should ignore other media and venues, such as mobile apps, exhibition spaces, festivals and DVDs. And as Deus Ex Machina #149, Filmpoem Album, demonstrates, there’s no reason why literary magazines have to confine their video publications to the web. Poetry editor Michael Vandebril called upon guest editors Willem Bongers-Deck and Judith Dekker to develop this collection in time for Filmpoem‘s program at the Felix Poetry Festival in Antwerp this past June.
The DVD and accompanying print journal are also available from their website, and they were kind enough to send me a review copy. The poets are all from Belgium and Netherlands and I don’t know Dutch or French, so of course I can’t fully evaluate the films as videopoems. But based on what I do understand, I think that other print literary journals should pay close attention to what they’ve done here — it’s an example well worth emulating, with a couple of possible exceptions which I’ll discuss below.
The above trailer includes snippets of all but one of the 11 short films included in the DVD. As these snippets perhaps suggest, many of the films are watchable on account of their imagery alone, which speaks to the expertise of the filmmakers. For what it’s worth, I was especially taken with the imagery in films directed by Philippe Werkers, Reyer Boxem, Anton Coene, Jeroen Sebrecht, and Dimitri van Zeebroeck. The absence of Marc Neys from the line-up seemed a little odd, but perhaps they wanted to show that there was more to Belgian filmmaking than the otherwise nearly inescapable Swoon. The branding by Deus Ex Machina was minimal — just enough to provide a thread of continuity to an otherwise diverse mix of aspect ratios and approaches, including a few animations, color as well as black-and-white, etc. All the directors chose to include the poems as voiceovers — as opposed to via text — which also helped unify the collection. The longest (7:07) and most experimental poetry film came at the end, which was probably a wise programming choice.
I should stress that overall this is a really high-quality product. The journal issue is perfect-bound with printing on the spine and the DVD tucked securely into the flap of the back cover. The poems appear in the same order as they do in the DVD, so one can read along. Oddly, though, the information about who directed the film made for each poem is not included alongside, but only in the table of the contents, and fuller credits only appear on the DVD. Instead, opposite each poem on the left-hand page is a full-color photo of the poet, and while this makes for a very elegant design, and it may be the way other issues of Deus Ex Machina are set up, it struck me as an odd fit for this issue. I would’ve preferred stills from the films, accompanied by the credits; the author photos could have been relegated to the bios at the back. And the fact that the directors don’t also have photos in the magazine bothered me a little bit. Why should poets get all the glory?
These minor quibbles aside, I’m very impressed with the obvious care and attention that went into DEM’s Filmpoem Album, and I hope other literary magazines will consider following suit. Also, I’m flattered that the Foreword (also on the website) cites Moving Poems as (according to Google Translate) “authoritative,” though it must be said that my nearly exclusive focus on English-language videos, or videos with English subtitles, does make the site a bit less inclusive than it might otherwise be. But that’s precisely why we need projects like DEM 149 to help pick up the slack.
Review of Filmpoem 2014, Antwerp in Huffington Post blog
Poet and filmmaker Robert Peake has posted a handy summary of last weekend’s Filmpoem 2014 Festival—part of the Felix Poetry Festival in Antwerp—by way of sharing the seven videos that constituted the first part of the program: “An Introduction to the Film-Poem.”
Poets, musicians and filmmakers from all over the world converged on a converted packing house in Antwerp, Belgium last Saturday for a day of gorging on film-poems. It was glorious.
While last year in Dunbar, Scotland had an element of novelty on its side, this year was carefully structured to up the ante. A group of Dutch and Flemish film-poem artists presented their work, along with the debut screening of the UK National Poetry Competition film-poems, Absent Voices films, conversations with poets in response film-poems of their work that they had just seen, and even live performances of voice and music in accompaniment to film. The scope, variety, and innovation was impressive, not to mention the roster of heavy-hitters in both the poetry and film genres.
Organiser Alastair Cook emphasised the point that the film-poem genre is an inclusive and encouraging one–suggesting that we all start somewhere, even if with the video facility on our smart phones, and start making film-poems. Particularly helpful in that regard was the first screening, an introduction to the film-poem. Luckily, most of the works that Alastair picked to illustrate the depth and range of this genre are also available online. What follows, below, are those films (recommended to view in full-screen mode).
Watch. Enjoy. Make film-poems. Perhaps I’ll see you at a film-poem festival soon.
Click through to watch the films.
