~ Author-made videopoems ~
Word: Association by Michelle Fisher and Fiona Stirling
This was the winner of CinePoem’s 48-hour filmpoem challenge held in Glasgow back in December. According to the YouTube description, it was “Written, directed, voiced & edited by Michelle Fisher and Fiona Stirling.”
In Kisii by Daniel Dugas
Canadian videopoet Daniel Dugas has hit upon a novel way to use footage shot from the window of a moving vehicle in the first of this video’s three parts, “The paths.” “The lake” and “Diamonds floating” continue the juxtaposition of moving images with a single static image of a delivery truck being unloaded by the side of a road, which makes me think of how limited and constrained any visitor’s perspective on a place must inevitably be. The whole thing makes for a very satisfying, brief travelogue.
The Multi-Storey Car Park at Trenchard Street by Damon Moore
A good place-based videopoem by Damon Moore (words) and Kate Moore (film). The YouTube description reads:
In recovery after cancer treatment at Bristol Royal Infirmary, I attended a one-to-one counselling session. Despite being given an all clear, I had entered a prolonged state of sadness that was proving difficult to shake off. My scheduled meeting with the psychiatrist fell flat but returning after the session to Trenchard Street multi-storey car-park, noticing how Bristol streetscapes combined in archaic patterns, I realised how we can unconsciously link long-lost events from the past into a continuous mindscape. This is the ‘Bristol’ referred to at the conclusion of the poem, a metaphor for our tendancy to internalise ‘cities’ of sadness.
Damon indicated in an email that he and Kate have just begun to get into making poetry films. I asked him about their process, and he answered:
Our departure point is the location and we tend to fix where we are going with the edit at an early stage after reviewing the footage. For example, with Trenchard Street, we decided to go with the final long shot so parked that in the last half of the film and then designed speeded-up and staccato sections in the first half to complement. I know there are filmmakers who work out all the details beforehand and I am a big fan of the Billy Collins films which must take a great deal of time to plan, but both Kate and I like to plunge in and get all nitty and gritty.
View more of their films on YouTube.
Inner Flamingo by Sandra Beasley
The D.C.-based poet Sandra Beasley has made three new videos in support of the paperback edition of her book Count the Waves, due out next week from Norton. This was my favorite of the three, but you can check out the others and read all about her process in a very thorough post at her blog (I love how her ideas to promote the book include “promoting the new and forthcoming books I love by others–because I believe that to give to a community is to get a community”), concluding with a number of annotated links to other poetry films and videos she admires.
The music is “Raidenaick” by Marceau. Beasley’s comments about her use of music were especially interesting to me:
I keep my videos short, under two minutes, but that’s just a personal preference. Also, I feel strongly that the best results come when you can find a piece of music whose length genuinely matches your voiceover, versus cropping something down. There’s a magic to how the crescendos and shifts in pacing–of an artwork created independently of your poem–can accent the turns in the text. (Somewhere in there lies a theory of the organic volta.)
Ted by Jon Constantinou
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hos228swHU
This author-made filmpoem by British filmmaker Jon Constantinou, co-directed by Jake Balfour-Lynn with actor Rick Stupple, was my favorite finalist from this year’s Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival, where it won Best Sound/Music. Michele Caruso was the sound designer. As Rabbit Heart organizer Sou MacMillan noted at Moving Poems Magazine, “You could hear every crackle of the fire, the scrape of the blade against whetstone, and grind of pencils being sharpened, all under a gentle and moving score.” For my part, I thought it was a great example of a film-poetic whole that’s much more than the sum of its parts.
What Leslie Meant to Say by Cindy St. Onge
A brief, author-made videopoem by Cindy St. Onge, responding to a voicemail which she’s included at the beginning of the video. This is the the sort of simple, straight-forward video remix that, to my mind, any working poet these days should learn how to make as a matter of course, because sometimes a poem needs to be more than just words on a page. As St. Onge noted on Vimeo:
The video, not the poem, is my response to the much-too-chipper voicemail notifying me that my best friend’s ashes are ready to retrieve. The title gave me the idea for the video, so I changed the first person confessional poem to second person, and achieved a bit of satisfaction.
Orbit by Arturo Cubacub
A classic videopoem by Arturo Cubacub, this took First Prize in the 1987 Poetry Film Festival in San Francisco. Here’s the complete description from Vimeo:
Completed in 1986, “Orbit” is the seventh video of my “Unity Gain Series.”
Choreographed by Jan Heyn-Cubacub.
Danced by Jan Heyn-Cubacub, Denise McIntosh and Arturo Cubacub.
Direction, Poetry, Editing, Special Effects, Computer Animation and Music by Arturo Cubacub.Description: Poetry, dance, computer animation and digital video effects are used to juxtapose constructive possibilities within our destructive tendencies. “The most important challenge of our time is to create on the same scale as we can destroy.” – Gene Youngblood, 2007.
“Orbit” has received the following awards:
First Prize, Festival International de Video Do Algarve/ 1988, Algarve, Portugal, November, 1988.
First Prize, The 12th Poetry Film Festival, San Francisco, December, 1987.
Honorable Mention, Performance/Stage Category, Dance on Camera Festival ‘87, New York, December, 1987.
Certificate of Merit, Suffolk County Film & Video Competition 1987, Suffolk County Motion Picture & TV Commission, New York, 1987.
Best Video Award, PSA-VMPD American International Video and Film Festival, August, 1987.
Best Experimental Film Award, PSA-VMPD American International Video and Film Festival, August, 1987.
VMPD Bronze Medal, PSA-VMPD American International Video and Film Festival, August, 1987.
Best of Fest Award, Art Category, 1987 Columbus Video Festival, Ohio, July, 1987.
Certificate of Merit, Festival of Illinois Film and Video Artists, May, 1987.
Second Place, Athens International Video Festival, March, 1987.
Certificate of Merit, The Chicago International Film Festival, October, 1986.
Regional Fellowship Award, The National Endowment for the Arts, March, 1984 (project funding).
Artists Grant Award, The Illinois Arts Council, Illinois, March, 1984 (project funding).
Vögel auf Stromleitungen / Birds on Wires by Dean Ruddock
A nearly perfect author-made filmpoem by Dean Ruddock. (After hitting Play, be sure to click the CC icon for English subtitles.) Vögel auf Stromleitungen took the audience prize in the NRW (Nordrhein-Westphalia) competition at ZEBRA. The description on its page at the ZEBRA website reads:
Our understanding of the world seem to disintegrate, making us lose our minds. Is this sudden incomprehension normal, or have our senses decided to dismiss an alien entity, which has just landed on earth, as a trick of the eye?
Primera magnitud / First magnitude by Josep Porcar
An author-made, bilingual videopoem by the Catalan poet Josep Porcar, using as a text the first poem from his new collection, Nectari. (There are also versions in German and Spanish, as well as the original.) Porcar has been making video remixes for other people’s poems for years now; this is the first I can remember with one of his own poems. The translation here is by Isabel Prieto, the music by Max Richter, and the footage by Uzay Sezen. (As a plant geek, I was pleased that the passion flower is identified in the credits, including the Latin binomial.)
It Was Cloudy: Aabjito’ikidowinan 2 / Used Words 2 by Heid E. Erdrich
This is
A poemeo animated by Jonathan Thunder, written in English by Heid E. Erdrich, translated to Ojibwe language by Margaret Noodin. This poem began when Heid was reading the Nichols and Nylhom Ojibwe language dictionary and practicing her pronunciation, which is always a challenge. The dictionary page is almost entirely made of Ojibwe words for clouds. It ends with “club” which is how winter starts.
Miigwech!
Visit Heid E. Erdrich and Jonathan Thunder on the web.
Telegenic by Erica Goss
It’s Long War week at Moving Poems, and (appropriately perhaps) it’s going to be an unusually long week, with videos right through the weekend. That is in part because so far we’ve heard only from men, which doesn’t seem right, given that wars disproportionately impact women. Today, the California poet and videopoetry critic Erica Goss helps us right the balance with her first author-made videopoem. But according to the description on Vimeo, it won’t be her last:
This is the first in a series of three videos based on poems I’ve written about the subject of war. The word “telegenic” was given to me from a radio broadcast I heard during the 2014 attack on Gaza. Much of the poem was influenced by an encounter I had with an Iraq war veteran at a poetry writing event in San Jose, California. The images of children, sunrise and the woman are different from the usual images one associates with war: they are intended to remind us of what is lost to violence.
The music is guitarist Sam Eigen’s interpretation of the Rite of Spring theme. Sam composed the music specifically for this video, with my guidance. The music was recorded at Keith Holland Studio in Los Gatos, California. Don Peters, my husband, is the narrator; it took us many recordings to get his voice right for the video. I wanted someone with a “normal” voice – i.e., not a “poetry voice” – to tell the story.
To find footage, I searched Video Blocks for images that seemed to create associations. The clips I chose came together in an intuitive way.
I am grateful for the feedback I received from Dave Bonta and Marc Neys (Swoon), two artists whose work I greatly respect and who have influenced me in creating my first video poem.
The poem “telegenic” was first published at New Verse News: newversenews.blogspot.com/2014/11/telegenic.html
Black Hands by Robert Minhinnick
From the Welsh environmental campaigner, essayist and poet Robert Minhinnick comes this searing example of what might be called photojournalistic poetry film, as the Vimeo description explains:
A poem by Robert Minhinnick illustrated with unique footage taken during his visit to Iraq. Visiting the notorious Amiriya bunker. Harrowing, moving and dark.
Peter Thorp edited, and the audio samples and loops were created by Peter Morgan. The film was produced (by Sonicsustain and Subjective Realities) in 2005, but refers to a horrific incident from the earlier Gulf War of 1991 — and a propaganda line about “smart bombs” that also debuted during that earlier invasion, and which went largely unchallenged by mainstream journalists in the US and UK. In fairness to them, it was difficult to gain accurate information because of the way the Pentagon severely restricted the movements of journalists on the ground, part of an ultimately successful attempt to mute public opposition to military aggression which would later find full expression during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when it was formalized under the Orwellian label embedded journalism. Reporters who refused to cooperate with the Pentagon were targeted by US missiles and tank fire. Given how dangerous the whole region has now become for journalists, and how mendacious the official justifications for warfare have always been, our need for the prophetic witness of poets is greater than ever.
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