~ Author-made videopoems ~
Stopping is Prohibited by Dale Wisely
Alabama-based poet, publisher and psychologist Dale Wisely continues his experiments with videopoetry, here contributing his own text and music and using public-domain footage from Pond5. He credits a story on Radiolab for inspiring some of the text, which is not the first time a film-poet has been inspired by that show.
Indefinite Animals by Martha McCollough
Massachusetts-based artist Martha McCollough shows why she’s at or near the top of many people’s lists of the most innovative videopoets out there today. Until now she’s worked mainly with animation and collage techniques, but for this film she directed a troupe of seven actors wearing masks and enlisted the help of three videographers (Katie Valovcin, Cameron Morton and Joe Nervous) and two “animal wranglers.”
Indefinite Animals is featured in Issue 147 – Winter/Spring 2015 of TriQuarterly, McCollough’s fourth videopoem to appear in that most prestigious of all journals that currently publish poetry films. Go there to watch the other three. Her bio there reads:
Martha McCollough is a member of Atlantic Works, a coop gallery in Boston. Her work has been exhibited at festivals and conferences in Greece, Canada, the U.K. and the United States, and published in Rattapallax, Gone Lawn and Small Po[r]tions. She lives in Chelsea, Massachusetts.
Song for Awe & Dread by Tommy Becker
Tommy Becker is “A poet trapped in a camcorder [who] continues to feed video, music and poems into his never-ending saga, ‘TAPE NUMBER ONE’. Often Becker’s single channel works are translated to live performance.” Discovering new-to-me videopoets of such originality is what makes all the work of publishing Moving Poems worthwhile. Here’s the Vimeo description:
Song for Awe & Dread is a contemporary take on the vanitas paintings of the 17th century and an investigation into the emotional duality of our existence. It is AWEsome to be human and to be alive, but the evolution of human intelligence has also burdened our species with a self-awareness of life’s impermanence. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard called these two uniquely human emotions, awe and dread. Through its symbolic meditation on mortality, this work attempts to find meaning between the fleeting flavors of bubblegum and cultural programming that entrenches us in our denial of death.
Music & Text & Video: written, recorded, performed and edited by Tommy Becker ©2015
instructional poetry read by – Don Johnson
skeleton characters performed by – Billy Mark
backing vocals – Rosie Harald
public domain footage – collected from the Prelinger Archives.A huge THANK YOU!!! to all my students for their enthusiastic participation.
soundcloud.com/tapenumberone/song-for-awe-dread
Kobe by Chaucer Cameron
A film about the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995 from Elephant’s Footprint—the collaborative team of Chaucer Cameron and Helen Dewbery, with Cameron contributing the poem and the two of them co-directing.
Deaf Brown Gurl (La Morena Sorda) by Sabina England
This is
a film written, directed, shot, performed, and edited by Sabina England.
-Voice Over & Sound Design by Micropixie.
-Music by Om/Off (Paco Seren and Pablo Alvarez)
-V.O Recording by Elliott Peltzman.Filmed in India (Old Delhi, India and Patna, Bihar, India)
Though England grew up in the UK, the sign language here is ASL. She notes in her bio (which is so interesting, I almost hate to excerpt it):
I use a combination of American Sign Language, mime, poetry, voice-over, multimedia, and/or music in my stage performances. I am always looking for more opportunities to expand my works, and I love meeting new people from different cultures. I believe that art and culture can bring people together in spite of differences and issues.
I have been profoundly deaf since I was two years old. I am fluent in English, Spanish, and American Sign Language.
Click through and scroll down to the Long Biography to read about some of England’s other films. In a blog post announcing this film’s release, she wrote:
After one year in the making, it’s here for public viewing. ENGLISH & SPANISH subtitles are available for your watching. My film shows the diversity of Indian society (in Patna) and I wanted to show a variety of Indian groups (Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists), including Deaf Indians (and myself as a Deaf Indian).
(Hat-tip: Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel at the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival group page on Facebook)
Monster Movie by Matt Mullins
A new author-made videopoem from Matt Mullins. Poet as Godzilla (rather than poet as god, à la Vicente Huidobro) is definitely a concept I can get behind. For the first couple of minutes, I was puzzled by all the different screen arrangements, but it eventually made sense… in fact, using videopoetry to critique movie making and movie watching is something that should happen more often, I think.
when by Ottar Ormstad
Experimental poetry can sometimes seem excessively cerebral and lacking in emotion, but Norwegian visual poet Ottar Ormstad escapes that trap here with the help of terrific still images and a compelling score. The description from Ormstad’s upload to Vimeo is worth quoting at length:
In the film “when” Ottar Ormstad is transferring his practice as concrete poet to the realm of a programmable networked space, blending his poetry with specially composed modern music and electronic elements. His photographs are presented in combination with words in different languages, most of them presented as “letter-carpets”. Some sentences are from well known songs or films, other letter-combinations are invented by the author.
The film is telling a story about life and death, basically from the standpoint of cars, rotten in a field in Sweden. The narrative is open, and each viewer may experience the film very differently. It is also dependent upon the viewer’s language background, any translation is – intentionally – not given.
This experimental film cannot be translated in a traditional way. The words in different languages are integrated in the poetic expression. Subtitles are irrelevant.The music and the animation was created in close cooperation with the author.
Music: Hagen & Nilsen from Xploding Plastix
Animation: Ina Pillat
Script, photographs, visual poetry by director & producer: Ottar Ormstad
Mule & Pear: two videopoems by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Rachel Eliza Griffiths has made poetry book trailer-style videopoems for a couple of other poets, but this one from 2011 was for her own collection, and Roxane Gay, writing at HTML Giant, was impressed:
Mule & Pear is a new book of poetry by Rachel Eliza Griffiths and has a book trailer I really love which is saying something because I do not care for book trailers.
This Dust Road: Self Portrait is an excerpt from the final poem in Mule & Pear. According to the publisher’s description,
These poems speak to us with voices borrowed from the pages of novels of Alice Walker, Jean Toomer, and Toni Morrison—voices that still have more to say, things to discuss. Each struggles beneath a yoke of dreaming, loving, and suffering. These characters converse not just with the reader but also with each other, talking amongst themselves, offering up their secrets and hard-won words of wisdom, an everlasting conversation through which these poems voice a shared human experience.
Three haiku by Angie Werren
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These are three, seven and twelve from Angie Werren‘s “twenty seconds of haiku” series, a deliberately low-tech approach to videohaiku that’s brilliant when it works. One big advantage Werren has over most other filmmakers, amateur or professional, who attempt videohaiku: she understands what English-language haiku — and micropoetry in general — is all about. Spend some time at her blog Feathers and you’ll see what I mean.
Watch all 13 videos in the “twenty seconds” series on Vimeo. Six also appeared in the new online literary journal Gnarled Oak (which is very videopoetry-friendly, by the way).
Liberté by Maciej Piatek
A concrete videopoem by the UK-based Polish video artist Maciej Piatek that alludes to a text by Paul Eluard and an historic, public use of that text, as the write-up on Vimeo explains:
The film was screened at Liberté during the ArtsBridge Festival 2014. Liberté was a multi-discipline performance featuring collaborations in poetry, music, film, dance, prose, performance and visual arts, that used Paul Éluard’s “Liberté” poem as a starting point. The poem was famously dropped from aeroplanes during WWII by the British Air force over occupied France.
2014 was a year of the centenary of the start of WWI and the 75th Anniversary of the start of WWII, and in an age where we see almost perpetual war, we are told that it is all necessary “for our freedom”. The performance attempted to analyse what liberty/freedom meant to each contributor.
Featured work by Lianne Brown, Gillie Carpenter, Isolde Davey, Holly Hero, Gaia Holmes, Tallulah Holmes, Cliff James, Alice Mill, Paul Mill, Steve Nash, Maciej Piatek, Winston Plowes
ArtsBridge Festival 2014 at Christchurch, Sowerby Bridge, UK
drift by Martha McCollough
Let’s start the New Year with a brand-new piece by one of our best and most unique videopoets, Martha McCollough. (That link went to her page at TriQuarterly. Her website seems a little out-of-date.) Only those who create films entirely by themselves have the luxury of leaving out all credits as McCollough does. The free-and-easy motion of the fish through the word-water seems all the freer as a result.
Afterlight by Timothy David Orme
I question how much where I am is who I am
and am immediately struck by the fact that the entire world’s moving,
that every time I ask where I am, the answer’s changed by the end of the question.
This week’s theme at Moving Poems is shaping up to be “Oh my god, I can’t believe I didn’t post that already!” This author-made animation from Timothy David Orme may be his most ambitious yet.
Afterlight is a short hand made film that explores both one’s inherent darkness and one’s inherent lightness. Every frame was made with charcoal on paper (sometimes each frame was drawn up to eight times) and then composited digitally.
Lincoln Greenhaw is credited with the voiceover and Stephen Baldassarre with the sound design.
Afterlight has been getting lots of exposure on the film-festival circuit.
Winner, 2013 Toronto Urban Film Festival (one minute edit)
Winner, Best Animation, Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival
Winner, Cammy Maximus Award (CSU Media Festival)
Third Place, Headwaters Film FestivalOfficial Selection:
2013 Body Electric Poetry Film Festival
Breadline Poetry Reading, Seattle, WA., May 2013
2013 Toronto Urban Film Festival
2013 Bradford Animation Festival
2013 Giraf Animation Festival (Calgary)
2013 Underexposed Film Festival, 2013
Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition (Cork, Ireland)
2013 Free Form Film Festival (Salt Lake City)
NewFilmmakers NYC
2014 Toronto Silent Film Festival
2014 Boise Film Underground
2014 Indiegrits Film Festival
2014 America Online Film Awards Spring Showcase
2014 Headwaters Film Festival
2014 Experimental Film Festival Portland
2014 Zebra Poetry Film festival (Berlin)
2014 Landlocked Film Festival
2014 Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival
2014 Film Streams Local Filmmaker Showcase
2014 Idaho Horror Film Festival
2014 Cyclop Video Poetry Festival (Ukraine)
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