~ Author-made videopoems ~
Isn’t It Time We… by John Siddique
http://vimeo.com/23682194
This is “Hawthorne Moon,” the one installment in John Siddique‘s Thirteen Moons video series which isn’t an animation. It was shot and directed by the poet himself with final editing by Walter Santucci.
Piece Work by Robert Peake
Poet Robert Peake’s first venture into the genre arose spontaneously and in collaboration with his wife, Valerie Kampmeier, who provided the music and the idea, as she describes on her blog:
This afternoon was the last day of the Christmas holidays, unexpectedly sunny, crisp and breezy. After the departure of some visitors, Robert and I were about to go out for a walk and some tea and cake, when he suddenly pointed to a patch of light on the wall behind me. The reflections from the garden of waving branches and the wrought iron of a clothes post were casting flickering shadows onto the wall in an astonishing fashion, almost like a silent movie. Robert grabbed his iPhone and captured some video. “You could use that for a poem-film, “ I remarked, thinking about the beautiful short videos some friends had made recently.
When we got home from our walk, I began improvising to the footage on the piano, while Robert listened and wrote. Within twenty minutes we both had something. Remarkably, when Robert read his poem aloud, it was exactly the right length. He recorded it, synchronized it with the video, and then I recorded my part on top onto a different track so that we could experiment with individual volume and colour.
Read the rest (and visit Robert’s blog for the text). It’s always exciting to see a new poet entering the videopoem/film-poem genre, and the high quality and organic process here bodes well for Peake and Kampmeier’s future efforts.
Boys Like You by Michelle Bitting
Michelle Bitting‘s latest film was just featured at Cheek Teeth.
Departure by Cynthia Cox
Texas-based poet Cynthia Cox drew on a couple of public-domain films for this piece, which she blogged about at mareymercy.
Finding the footage for this one was a bit of a bear, as it always is at the Internet Archives because their method of categorizing and organizing material doesn’t work with my brain. I found the video of Saunders dancing first, and “Romance Sentimentale” came along a few days later. Once I had those two pieces it was just a matter of splicing them together. Music was another matter, as I changed my mind twice when putting the visuals together, then two more times when I layered the poem audio over that.
Read the rest (includes the full text of the poem).
Nachtfahrt / Night-Drive by Ruedi Bind
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnKvSJRjQKA
This delightfully strange videopoem has “Monday” written all over it. Let me just paste in the credits and description from YouTube:
videopoem by Hansjörg Palm + Ruedi Bind
7:10 min, 2010, D + CH
Concept, camera, performers, speakers: Hansjörg Palm, Ruedi Bind
Editing, sound, music, costumes: Hansjörg Palm
Poem: Ruedi Bind
nominated:
2011 Internationales Kurzfilm Festival, Hamburg
2010 ZEBRA, poetry film festival, Berlin / La.Meko, kurzfilmfestival, LandauEin alter Mann taucht ab in eine Nachtfahrt.
Dort begegnet er überraschenden Gestalten und Landschaften.
Er taucht gänzlich verwandelt wieder auf, mit neuem Blick auf sein Leben.An old man dives into the night.
He meets surprising figures and landscapes.
Ascending he finds himself completely changed.
I should note that I found this via ZEBRA Poetry Festival’s Twitter account, @ZebraFestival, which is currently the most useful filmpoetry/videopoetry-related Twitter feed of which I’m aware.
On Any Day Like Alice by Michelle Bitting
Of all of Michell Bitting‘s “poem films” online so far, this is my favorite, I think. Her husband and collaborator Phil Abrams proves as good at reading as he is at editing.
outside my black hole by Steven McCabe
This film offers more proof that Steven McCabe is one of the most accomplished videopoets out there. Here’s the description on Youtube:
outside my black hole (2011) is a visual poetry film juxtaposing urban traffic, ink drawings, and dance.
Screened at Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts (Toronto) in Oct./Nov. 2011 as the installation component of Steven McCabe’s exhibition A Cathartic Document showing 66 new ink drawings created during 2010-2011.
Video editing & technical support @ A Cathartic Document by Konrad Skręta
outside my black hole
A film by Steven McCabePoetry/drawings/narration
Steven McCabeDance
Paula SkiminMusic composed and performed by
William Beauvais & Barry ProphetDirector of Photography
Eric GerardEditing
Konrad Skręta
enough by Kai Lossgott and Mbali Vilakazi
A marvellous video collaboration produced for a 2009 poetry festival in Cape Town called Badilsha Poetry Exchange, sponsored by Africa Centre, whose description of the film at YouTube is worth quoting in full:
Sometimes you’ve had enough. And sometimes you have enough. A fusion of sound and light, video poet Kai Lossgott’s and performance poet Mbali Vilakazi’s authentic and intimate multimedia poetry performance enough takes you into the dream cycles of obsessive behaviour and uncomfortable truths in the search for wholeness. It is about the breakdown of society, and people at breaking point.
In a lyrical conversation of experimental music and cinema, the poets draw their self-portraits only to erase them, through testimonies that become ciphers in the round-trip between abundance and gratitude, lack and self-pity. Through spoken word, dance, and gesture, they journey with the audience through breathing rhythms of take and give, where insecurity comes up for air and we open like blossoms.
For more about the poets, see their websites: Mbali Vilakazi and Kai Lossgott.
I Will Make an Exquisite Corpse by Matt Mullins
A terrific new video from Matt Mullins. I’ll just quote his emailed description of how this came about:
This evolved from a video loop that is one facet of a piece of electronic/interactive literature currently under development (also titled “I Will Make an Exquisite Corpse”). This piece of e-lit will be the third installment in a triptych of pieces I’m creating for lit-digital.com. (The first two are already up there.) The poem and this particular video both play off the concept of the surrealist exquisite corpse [see the Wikipedia article —ed.]. As such, I’m working with the notion of three sections/elements that flow together while remaining singular/disconnected. The poem strives to do this on the page with three sections that stand alone while also flowing together to create a larger whole. Those who want to see the poem in its original form can find it here: http://killauthor.com/issueeight/matt-mullins-2/
The poem and video mean that title line in two ways (i.e., the speaker of the poem is about to create, before your eyes, the surrealist idea of an exquisite corpse; and, the speaker, treading the self-destructive path of the poem, is telling the reader “I know where I’m headed and I’m gonna look damn good dead”).
The motionpoem seeks to do the same through repetition/evolution of its primary elements and its three image specific sections. It’s all footage I shot myself, with the exception of two stills I found online (the anatomy mannequin and the doll’s leg). I did my visual and audio edits/effects/etc in iMovie and Garage Band.
In Praise of My Brother, the Painter by Michelle Bitting
Another film directed by Michelle Bitting for one of her own poems, with editing by Phil Abrams. Great use of found material, I thought, suggesting quite a bit more than the text itself says about the narrator’s brother.
Prison Hounds by Cynthia Cox
A new video for an old poem by Cynthia Cox, using found footage from the Prelinger Archives. Cynthia writes,
The footage is from an excruciatingly bad ‘scary’ film I found in the Prelinger Archives written by John Parker called “Daughter of Horror.” The howling hounds I downloaded from iTunes and ran through the iPhone VoiceChanger app, because on its own the howling sounded too low and kinda dopey. Honestly, there is a prison right behind my neighborhood, and when they run the dogs there’s a much higher, keening sort of sound that I couldn’t get VoiceChanger to duplicate, so I went with an effect called “Haunting.” Then I recorded my voice with VoiceChanger as well, using an echo effect mostly to try and disguise the pops I made on “prison” and “quiet” (didn’t really work, but I timed everything else about the reading out so well I chose not to re-record. I’m far from a perfectionist.)
Commands by Dana Heise
http://vimeo.com/17160224
In the description at Vimeo, multimedia artist and poet Dana Heise writes,
Commands is a performance video and sound poem that addresses desire and the boundaries of consensual relationships.
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