~ Author-made videopoems ~
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)
Embroidered by Andy Bonjour
Andy Bonjour‘s brief, deceptively simple videopoem about his wife’s embroidery was selected for Visible Verse 2014 and the “Parallel Worlds” programme at ZEBRA. Videopoetry critic Erica Goss included it in a list of ten stand-out films from the 7th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival. It’s a gem of a video, and demonstrates that sometimes closely aligned footage and text can really work together, producing not a feeling of redundancy but something more like gestalt.
I Can’t Breathe: poems for Eric Garner by Daniel J. Watts and Bettina Judd
From WalkRunFly Productions, here’s a unique performance poem by Daniel J. Watts which took the form of a well-coordinated, flash-mob-like demonstration four months ago, in response to the choking death of Eric Garner at the hands of police. In light of the recent failure of a grand jury to indict the officer who killed Garner, and the growing, nation-wide movement against racist police behavior, it is sadly more relevant than ever. Here’s the description from Vimeo:
On July 17, 2014, Eric Garner, a 43-year-old Staten Island man died after being placed in a choke hold by police. His death sparked national outrage.
More than 100 Broadway stars, directors, choreographers, designers, and technicians gathered at the police precinct in Times Square to express their thoughts on the killing of Eric Garner.
WalkRunFly Productions (Warren Adams & Brandon Victor Dixon) partnered with poet Daniel J. Watts, MSNBC’s David Wilson from thegrio and more than 100 Broadway stars, directors, choreographers, designers and technicians in Times Square, to express their thoughts on the killing of Eric Garner.
WalkRunFly Productions
Produced By
Warren Adams & Brandon Victor DixonPoem written and performed by
Daniel J. WattsEdited by
Darryl Harrison
Visual ArchitectVideographers
Lowell Freedman, Antonio Thompson, Darryl Harrison, And Jesse Guma
The whole incident was captured on video by a bystander, and at least one poet — Bettina Judd — has remixed the footage into a videopoem. Judd is no stranger to innovative videopoetry, and it shows: she uses contrast and layering to good effect, including verses from the Bible (where breath is often equated to the soul and to the breath of God), preparing the viewer/listener for a sardonic, unsettling conclusion.
Пізнаєш мене (Myself Known) by Zaza Paualishvili
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFVD1i4tXK0
An author-made videopoem from Ukraine. See YouTube for the text of the poem. Here are the credits:
text Zaza Paualishvili
music Khrystyna Khalimonova
video Zaza Paualishvili
editing Valeriy Puzik
translator Dmytro Shostak
This was screened at the CYCLOP videopoetry festival in Kiev on November 23 as part of a competition called “The Way” (До слова).
What are the next three letters by Sarah Rushford
Like watching the performance of a shape-shifting blind bard, this videopoem by interdisciplinary artist, writer and designer Sarah Rushford has more than a little of the epic about it. Here’s her description at Vimeo:
In What are the next three letters, metaphoric images are intercut with footage of women whose eyes are closed, saying Rushford’s script of original poetic compositions. The script is a collection of idiosyncratic dialogs between adult and child family members, disabled, confused or challenged individuals, and their caregivers. The women narrators seem mysteriously in possession of the words they say. Their recitation does not seem memorized, neither are they reading the words. This mystery regarding their knowledge of the writing, charges the work. The women narrators are ordinary women of varied ages and races, they are unadorned, uncommon, yet ordinary women. The eyes of the viewer are drawn to the sincere, and spontaneous expressions on the faces of these women, whose eyes are closed. They seem vulnerable, prone to their own emotional reaction to the words they are saying.
On Loop by Christine Hooper
Struggling with insomnia last night, I kept thinking of this film by Christine Hooper—a Royal College of Art graduation film that’s gone on to win a whole raft of awards and screenings (I saw it at ZEBRA). The voice is provided by British comedian and actress Susan Calman, and the sound design is by Tom Lock Griffiths. As Michael Fukushima, the Executive Producer of the National Film Board of Canada, says:
The animation and cinematography are beautifully executed with spontaneity and verve that complements the liveliness of the monologue, and the Hockney-esque composition and playing with time sequencing is such an apt visual metaphor. An exceptional graduate film, showing enormous potential for a successful future.
The hours of darkness by Janet Lees
“Written & filmed by Janet Lees. Edited by Glenn Whorrall.” Thus the Vimeo description. But there’s much more information on the British poet and artist (plus her regular partner in videopoetry collaborations, Terry Rooney) in the new “Swoon’s View” column up at Moving Poems Magazine. Marc Neys describes their films as “short and sharp as a razor … a breath of fresh air in these times of cultural abundance and profusion of advertising.” And Lees provides some background on each of the four films Neys has selected. About this one, she writes:
‘The hours of darkness’ features footage of flamingos that I took in a wildlife park in the middle of winter. I found the sight of the flamingos in this big gloomy shed electrifying – there was something both prehistoric and post-apocalyptic about it. In my mind, I knew there was only one poem for this film – ‘The hours of darkness’, which I’d written about a year before, inspired by the anodyne yet always to my ear potentially sinister messages contained within in-flight announcements and other forms of mass communication. Here, the repeated phrase ‘May we remind you’ assumes an increasingly dark, Orwellian tone.
Go read the rest (and check out the other three films).
Elephant by Sina Seiler
Sina Seiler of sinasan Film und Medienkunst (sinasan Film & Mediaart) is both filmmaker and author here. According to her description on Vimeo,
The Poetry Film is based on the poem “Elephant” by Sina Seiler and visualizing inner rooms, what the poem is expressing by words metaphorically. “Elephant” expresses an inner transformation of the protagonist caused by the encounter of love. The self as a house, every room representing feelings and moods of subconsciousness.
The protagonist is dancing through inner rooms, illustrating sequences of dream, expressing feelings and moods.
It was screened at ZEBRA last month (among other screenings, listed on the sinasan website) as part of the Dreiklang Dimensionen/Triadic Dimensions program of poetry films that incorporate dance and music, and it fits nicely into the Dance category here. I didn’t get to meet Seiler in person, but her bio is an interesting one:
Sina Seiler studied Media and Journalism with focus on documentary filmmaking & TV at international University of Tuebingen, Germany with a stipend in Film at DAMS / University of the Arts, Theatre and Film at Bologna, Italy. She graduated with a Diploma/Master and a Oral History Documentary about the Saxons in Romania.
She works as a writer, filmmaker, lecturer and artist.
The dancer is Soraya Schulthess.
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