~ Author-made videopoems ~
Interiorismo by Hernán Talavera and Chema Araque
First of all, let me make it clear that the director/producers of this film, Hernán Talavera and Chema Araque (A.K.A. Chema Arake) do not claim that it’s a poetry film; that’s my contention. Talavera, also credited as writer, has made films for his own poetry and for poems by Alfonsina Storni and Alejandra Pizarnik, all of which I’ve shared here, and Araque too has made videopoems. But this is a much more ambitious project, a nearly 12-minute portrait of a derelict palace in Spain. It has garnered numerous awards. The directors say:
The corpse of a palace in ruins turns into its own mausoleum.
Interiorism searchs for a Zen vision in which man is totally integrated into his surroundings. That is why Hernán Talavera and Chema Araque highlighted the most organic part of the building, and they watch as nature recovers its primitive space: the light, water, plants, birds, insects… break the barrier between what is natural and what is artificial, by invading a space built for people. Part of the entire process is much like a documentary. The directors walked around the palace many times totally open to any suggestions forthcoming from the place itself. The process took them three years.
What makes it a poetry film, in my estimation, is the inclusion of a text in the soundtrack, a medical diagnosis voiced by Luis Fernando Ríos—or rather, the evocative interplay between that very clinical text and the lyrical montage of images.
The Blockade by Ross Sutherland
https://vimeo.com/125705759
It’s time to check in on the progress of Ross Sutherland‘s “30 Videos/30 Poems” digital residency at The Poetry School. He’s uploaded 27 videos so far, and intends to finish by the end of this week. As promised, the videopoems in the series have been highly diverse, “exploring the different ways that the two mediums can shape and influence the other” in a wonderfully witty and experimental spirit—which means that even the ones that don’t wholly succeed are still instructive. I’d count this one as a success, a remix of a newscast from Irish television that offers one answer to the question: How the hell do you make a videopoem with a text describing another work of art? I’m not saying that’s quite what he’s done here, but that’s the pretense. The viewer is rewarded with a kind of double seeing, trying to picture the painting described by the museum-docent narrator while simultaneously re-evaluating the newscast in light of it.
To see Sutherland’s picks of his four favorite videos from the series so far, check out his April 29 blog post. He’s also archiving the videos on a Tumblr site.
Pre-Occupied by Heid E. Erdrich
A masterpiece of collage/remix videopoetry co-directed by the author of the text, poet Heid E. Erdrich, with R. Vincent Moniz, Jr. Art direction, animation and effects are by Jonathan Thunder. The excellent audio track is the work of Gabriel Siert, and additional visual art is credited to Carolyn Lee Anderson, Andrea Carlson, and Angie Erdrich. The synopsis on Erdrich’s website reads:
“Pre-Occupied” is a new and experimental form, the poem-film. Originally written for the website 99 Poems for the 99%, poet Heid E. Erdrich created a visual landscape of associations and references that match the tremendous irony of how the word “occupy” can be meant. The film version of this poem is a collaborative collage that means to reveal the distracted human mind at a particular point in history. Released in early 2013, the film inadvertently anticipated the Idle No More Movement. [link added]
Erdrich has made several other poetry films as well, including a new one that should be released shortly, according to Saara Myrene Raappana of Motionpoems, who kindly emailed me after attending an AWP panel at which Erdrich shared her films.
Adam and Eve by Denise Newman
A text-on-screen, author-made videopoem by Denise Newman, a multi-media poet and translator who teaches at the California College of the Arts. Her films have shown at the Southern Exposure Gallery in San Francisco and at the Whitney Museum in New York City, and she’s been collaborating with composers for the past decade, in addition to writing books of poetry and translating fiction from the Danish—a perfect skill-set for videopoetry.
The credits at the end note that this was “filmed at Juniper Lake in 2014 by Denise Newman” with “voice/sound by Ania Samborska.”
Namesake by Robert Peake
A witty animated poem by American-British poet Robert Peake that begins with a Google image search and gets progressively more surreal. It’s based on what he calls “a poem for my nemesis“—the 17th-century court painter Robert Peake the Elder. That original posting included links to the referenced paintings which appear as pop-ups on hover, so a visual component was part of the poem from the beginning, as Peake acknowledged in a more recent blog post about the video:
Having already enhanced this ekphrastic poem with imagery, I decided that a film-poem seemed like an obvious next step. Visually, the film follows the poem’s concerns about different kinds of reality — personal, virtual, and historical — by playing with dimensionality.
It gave me the opportunity to try out parallax 2.5d animation using all open-source tools (Gimp and Blender), which I found both painstaking and enjoyable. I also mocked up flat animations in HTML and Javascript — such as the opening search scene and ending Matrix-style text, using screen capture to convert it to video. Valerie Kampmeier wrote and performed the score, inspired by courtly dances and the D-minor feel of a dial-up modem sequence.
It’s interesting to compare this with Ross Sutherland’s “Poem Looked Up On Google Streetview.” Google has more to offer videopoets than just search-query poems, it seems.
No Table Anymore Wankers by Ross Sutherland
Another of Ross Sutherland‘s quick-and-dirty videopoems for his “30 Videos/30 Poems” digital residency at The Poetry School. I love his process here. This is videopoeming at its purest:
A piece of graffiti I found on the side of the law courts in Newcastle (just around the corner from my hotel). I have no idea why anyone would write this (which automatically makes me want to write it myself). I quickly wrote down some notes in my jotter & tried to extend the moment a little bit longer.
I recorded image first, then sound after, then put the two back together.
Poem Looked Up On Google Streetview by Ross Sutherland
Here’s an approach to videopoetry that I’ve never seen before: using Google Street View as a poetry prompt, then turning screen grabs of the prompt location into a visual accompaniment to a recitation of the poem. Or, as Ross Sutherland rather more eloquently explains it in the description on Vimeo:
Few years ago, I was commissioned to write a poem about “living in London and being a Londoner”.
I don’t live in London. But I also don’t like to disappoint people.I took the little Google Streetview man, dropped him into London, then wrote about the street he landed in. The result was this poem, which ended up in my 2012 collection, Emergency Window.
The video was uploaded by The Poetry School, where Sutherland is currently the digital poet in residence.
For his residency – ’30 Videos / 30 Poems’ – Ross will create thirty new films over March to April 2015, while he tours across the UK with his show Standby For Tape Backup. Each new film will be a synthesis of poetry and video, exploring the different ways that the two mediums can shape and influence the other. Ross will use his residency to respond to the places he visits and the people he meets while on tour, hence, the project also doubles as a video diary of a working poet in the world.
This is the 10th (and latest) of these videos. (Watch the others on Vimeo.) In three additional videos, Sutherland “answers questions about his ’30 Poems / 30 Videos’ project, the distinctions between film poetry and poetry film, and what all this writing lark is about anyway.”
For more on Ross Sutherland, see his page at The Poetry Archive.
Situation 6 (Stop And Frisk) by Claudia Rankine
One of a series of “Situation” videos created by Jamaican-American poet Claudia Rankine in collaboration with her husband, the photographer John Lucas, using texts from her award-winning, genre-bending poetry collection Citizen: An American Lyric (2014). This one employs a technique I find very effective in maintaining viewer interest during longer videopoems: interweaving separate stories in the footage and voiceover to create a kind of dialectical tension. What doesn’t happen, or might happen, becomes as important as what does.
Thanks to PBS NewsHour for this upload. For more on Rankine’s collaboration with Lucas, see the interview at BOMB Magazine that I quoted from last September when I posted “Situation 5.” All six Situation videos may be viewed on Rankine’s website (Flash required).
Late by Keith Sargent
An author-made videopoem by the creative director of the British design company immprint. It was nominated for best editing at the Liberated Words Poetry Film Festival 2014. Keith Sargent gave this background:
My father was dying of cancer, I was in London and he was in Kent, a 45 mile distance; this would normally take one and a half hours. On the 8th of August at 8.30 a.m. I received a call from my Mum who passed the phone to my Dad, he said “I love you. Night, night.” At 10 a.m. I received a call from his nurse saying he was very close (to dying). I set off. I arrived at 1.15. I was late. He had gone. I held his still warm hand (Mum had wrapped him in duvet to keep his body warm). I missed him. I miss him.
Liberated Words’ Vimeo upload description goes on to say:
Keith Sargent is creative director of multi-disciplinary design company immprint ltd and has worked as an educator, illustrator, filmmaker and graphic designer since graduating from the RCA in 1988. His films have been commissioned for commercial projects and screened at Bath Mix, Zebra, Athens and Visible Verse poetry film festivals.
director / scriptwriter / editor / music: Keith Sargent
cast: Keith Sargent, Stan Sargent, Rebecca Sargent, Stanley Sargent
Since my friend Rachel Rawlins saw this film at Liberated Words’ March 5 screening at The Little Theatre in Bath and really liked it, I asked her if she’d be willing to write a short review. We don’t get to hear very often from fans of poetry film who are neither poets nor filmmakers. Here’s what she sent along:
I love the way this video poem manages in a deceptively simple way to juxtapose so many of the profound dualities around life and death. There’s the physical rootedness of warmth and cold as well as our subjective experience of time, both forwards and backwards. The soundtrack and film unite to give a sense of slow, almost underwater/otherworldliness whilst narrating an experience of considerable tension and stress where the need for speed is central. The use of text on the screen is something I often have great difficulty with (perhaps as a result of a dyslexia-like inability to process letters easily) but its use here—slow, deliberate and carefully planted within the physical visual environment of the film—really works for me. I find the overall experience utterly immersive.
What I don’t like (and actually makes my toes curl) is the addition, one by one, of crosses above the heads of the three adults in the family photograph. I’m happy there wasn’t the usual slow focusing in on the child’s face or suchlike but I feel there’s no need to use any device to underscore the fact that he’s the last one left. We’ve already been told that.
An Affair by Tia Dunn
https://vimeo.com/76771182
“Exploring the relationship we have (she has) with alcohol,” says the brief description on Vimeo of this videopoem by Tia Dunn, a British-American artist, photographer, filmmaker and poet currently based in Brooklyn. Mariette Papic supplied the voiceover, the music is by Grand Union Hijack, and the footage comes from a variety of sources including liquor ads.
This is a Self Portrait by Shea Fitzpatrick
https://vimeo.com/120425679
An interesting, somewhat meta student film in which collage techniques were used to generate the text. Shea Fitzpatrick has been making poetry films for more than a year. Here’s her description for this one:
FILM441: Video Art with Janne Hoeltermann. Assignment 3: Manipulate time.
Text is comprised of individual lines and fragments of lines taken from 2 years worth of personal journal entries, rearranged into a disjointed poem. The piece is conceptually aimed to embody that a mind does not exist chronologically, and that it creates chronology to form meaning. It is also very much a self-portrait of hyper-self-criticism in the artistic process. Libraries are giant brains.
Music is an excerpt from “Available Forms I,” by Earle Brown.
When They Came for Us by Johanna DeBiase
It’s always great to see an author-made animation. This one has a delightfully down-home, improvisational feel, but it’s obviously very carefully thought-out; the sudden intrusion of the animator’s hands is genius. The Taos, New Mexico-based writer Johanna DiBiase specializes in fiction, but judging from her website bio is something of a Renaissance woman.
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