~ Author-made videopoems ~
I Am A Woman by Jade Anouka
Inspired by Maya Angelou’s “Phenomenal Woman,” actress and poet Jade Anouka enlisted the help of a huge cast to recite her text for the camera, resulting in a uniquely polyphonic presentation. See YouTube for the text and complete list of contributors. The music is by Grace Savage.
L’ Inventario / The Inventory by Francesca Bonfatti
https://vimeo.com/216243053
Venice-based photographer and video artist Francesca Bonfatti notes on Vimeo that
“The inventory” is inspired by a film from the repertory of mute cinema of 1917, inspired by the novel by Antonio Fogazzaro of 1881, in which a woman experiences a deep state of disturbance perhaps due to a personality duplication that is the cause of strange memories that emerge as ghosts of the past…
This is among the latest featured videos at Poetry Film Live. Go there for much more about Bonfatti and the multimedia project of which this is a part.
Years After You Die by Simone Savannah
A highly personal, author-made videopoem by writer and doctoral student Simone Savannah. Like yesterday’s video, this was recently featured at The Continental Review.
In a 2015 interview with the Phoenix Rising Collective, Savannah discussed some of the family history that she also drew upon in this poem.
Translations (from The End of Something) by Kate Greenstreet
A fascinating experiment in bilingual videopoetry from the always inventive Kate Greenstreet. Here’s the description on Vimeo, with italics and links added:
Based on early versions of poems from The End of Something translated into French by Alexander Dickow for the anthology Ligatures: Poets of France and America (Catala Press, 2017). Featuring the voice of Virginia Konchan speaking the French lines and a short video clip of Amaranth Borsuk (“the girls are gone”). This video first appeared in The Continental Review (thecontinentalreview.com).
It’s good to see The Continental Review, one of the oldest online poetry video journals, still putting out issues. Browse their latest material here. And be sure to visit Kate Greenstreet’s webpage for The End of Something to download a free music EP and watch three more videopoems based on texts in the forthcoming book. Ahsahta Press’s description begins:
In curating cartography together with lyric, poly-vocality with loneliness, and even the unspeakable with common speech, poet and artist Kate Greenstreet has created a surprising hybrid with The End of Something. The intimacy in Greenstreet’s partial narratives and slow admissions contrasts with much of what we consume as Americans, which is fleeting and feigns being “factual.”
Body With No Windows by Annelyse Gelman
A film written and directed by Annelyse Gelman, who also composed the music in the soundtrack. Her description on Vimeo:
Body With No Windows explores death and embodiment through a collage of faceless sequences from public-domain home video footage of a Pennsylvania family in the 1950s.
It was featured in Issue 152 of TriQuarterly, where video editor Sarah Minor wrote:
In “Body With No Windows” by Annelyse Gelman, “human faces have been elided,” first found and then lost. Here, the tensions between vocal annunciation and the sharp timing of archival clips showcase Gelman’s practiced hand at working in collage. A woman on camera walking alone becomes a mother holding a child’s hand just as suddenly as “the feeling that your body belongs to you” might go away. Gelman’s opening soundscape signals a kind of dread or apprehension. This tone is quickly disrupted by quotidian footage of sunbathers in crabgrass, yard dogs, and tandem swimmers curated from the Prelinger Archives. In a particular fleeting style that intermedia texts seem to capture best, Gelman asks us to recognize the uncanny that we only witness in the daily lives of others, that particular waiting “to be carried from what you cannot remember to what you cannot forsee.”
Washing Day by Cactus “Cathy” Chilly
A haunting, incantatory videopoem from U.K. poet-filmmaker Cactus “Cathy” Chilly that raises disturbing questions about what we accept as normal and ordinary.
Small Things Bind the World by Erica Goss
This author-made videopoem by Erica Goss presents haiku in a really innovative way that I haven’t seen before. It was a Showcase Selection at the 2017 Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival. Erica writes:
I made this video last summer in my backyard. It’s a selection of haiku that seemed to tell a story, with big letters imposed over a glitter globe I bought at the MOMA-San Francisco gift shop. It’s somewhat nostalgic for me to watch this, as it’s one of the last art projects I did before moving from California to my new home in Eugene, Oregon.
Body Talk by Amy Bobeda
“A video poem about the relationship between film, the body, and Lyme Disease,” Body Talk was written and directed by Amy Bobeda. It was one of the films screened last Saturday in Ashland, Oregon as part of Cinema Poetica.
RED by Salena Godden
Anything you can do we can do bleeding
We can do anything dripping with blood
Salena Godden released this poem and video back in September in collaboration with Nasty Women UK, a London art show that raised money to combat violence against women and girls, according to a blog post.
Salena Godden, one of the UK’s most iconic poets, has stepped forward to donate her latest poem RED in a collaboration with Nasty Women UK.
“RED is a poem about periods. RED is about stigma. This is about women’s autonomy over their own bodies and their own choices. RED is a protest poem against the tampon tax, anger that sanitary products have been considered a luxury item and therefore taxable. RED is a fury that money from the UK tampon tax is funding anti-abortion charities. I have great admiration for the work of the Nasty Women’s global movement and donate this work as an endorsement. We must end all violence against all women in all its forms. We must end the tampon tax. I wish all women to have a bloody safe and bloody healthy period. Period!”
Nasty Women is a global art movement that serves to demonstrate solidarity among artists who identify with being a Nasty Woman in the face of threats to roll back women’s rights, individual rights, and abortion rights. With over 40 events across the globe Nasty Women Exhibitions also serve to support organizations defending these rights and to be a platform for organization and resistance.
Click through for the text of the poem.
The video was screened as part of Godden’s headlining performance at this past weekend’s Filmpoem Festival in Lewes.
Blue by Erica Goss
The latest author-made film from Erica Goss, who included these process notes in the description:
During the summer of 2017, my brother visited me from New York City. He wanted to get a tattoo, so we found High Priestess in Eugene, where I had just moved. I asked my brother and the tattoo artist if I could film the procedure, and they agreed. I had a poem, titled “Blue,” that I wrote in 2014 after listening to the Joni Mitchell song of the same name. The poem mentions tattoos, so I thought it would be a good fit with the subject of the video. A technical note: I did no color correction on the video except for the last scene, where I increased the light and contrast slightly. The room was fairly dark, so the spotlights show up as a bit blown out. I like the effect and didn’t want to change it.
The music is by Kevin MacLeod.
Repeated by Dani Salvadori
I’m not sure why all the disparate elements of this haiku videopoem should hold together so well, but they do. Text, video and sound design are all the work of Dani Salvadori, who notes on Vimeo that the “Footage [was] shot during 2016 and combined to commemorate too many business trips.” The music is by Troy Holder.
I like Salvadori’s about page:
Video poetry, for the smallest screen. Made by mobile for mobile viewing.
Check out her other videos.
12 Sights of the Sea by Ian Gibbins
A new version of a videopoem by Ian Gibbins, transferring the majority of the text, which had been entirely on-screen on an earlier version, into a voice-over. I find this approach much more effective, though the earlier version is undoubtedly more accessible to the deaf (and possibly also to the dyslexic). Here’s the Vimeo description:
… the rippling enfoldment, across the ebb, failure below deck, only By-the-Wind-Sailors … text originally published in Cordite 45: Silence (2014)… images and sounds recorded from the seas and islands around the Fleurieu Peninsula, South Australia.
Be sure to follow Ian’s blog to keep up with all his video- and music-making. He claims to be retired, but the evidence strongly suggests otherwise.
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