~ Author-made videopoems ~
sex & violence #4 : what’s inside a girl? by Kristy Bowen
I’ve featured a few of Chicago-based poet and publisher Kristy Bowen’s video poetry book trailers, but not this one yet, which was made in support of her 2020 collection with Black Lawrence Press, sex & violence. It might be my favorite of hers to date. Nobody knows better that the poet herself what kind of mood she was trying to create, and if she happens to have the graphic design skills and technical know-how to bring that to life in video form, as Bowen does, the results can be wonderful (even if, as here, also super creepy). She resurfaced the video recently on her blog as part of an annual #31daysofhalloween series.
As always, visit her YouTube channel for more. The latest trailers are in support of a collection due out on Halloween called Automagic.
Remnants by Valerie LeBlanc & Daniel Dugas
A few weeks ago I shared a trilogy of videopoems from Canadian film-makers Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel Dugas, made during their time as artists in residence at the historic Deering Estate in Florida. This video, Remnants, is another of several made during their time at the Estate.
From a film-making view, I particularly like in Remnants the simple effectiveness of writing the poem on the spine of books. There is as well a quiet, contemplative quality that often arises in videopoems without voice, just text on screen and sound design from natural ambiences. The twin-screen of this film then calls for attention to two panels of adjacent text, the poem on one side and old book titles on the other.
Most if not all of the videopoems I have seen from Valerie and Daniel are author-made films arising from their long-time collaboration as artists. More from their Deering Estate residency are here.
La Caracola / The Conch by María Papi
This film by Argentinian María Papi had its premiere at the 2015 Berlin Feminist Film Week. The description on Vimeo notes that it
explores the movement of intrinsic relations between two presences that give rise to life: Water and Vulva. By exposing what is hidden, the harmony of femininity is restored.
It is powerful, as well as vulnerable and touching, to see genitalia on screen without pornographic intent. That said, this is probably not content suitable for classroom use in public school.
Papi’s approach seems personal and subjective most of all, with secondary thoughts about female gender and sexuality in general. We particularly liked the starkness of the text, just singular words. Marie felt that this underscores the film’s focus: more on body than intellect. The soundtrack is interesting as well, crafting different textures from the sound of water. These seem to speak to the visuals when they become purely abstract and textural themselves. The rhythm is slow, almost contemplative, possibly reflecting the pleasant feelings experienced while filming herself naked in a river, as described in an interview with Papi about the making of the film in CinéWomen, where it was the International Selection for 2015-2016. (We’d excerpt it, but Scribd doesn’t permit copy-and-paste, so you’ll just have to click through — or, if you read Spanish, check out the translation of the interview on Papi’s blog.)
See Vimeo for the full credits list.
Garden of Reason from Mythistoria by Chris O’Leary
This is the first in a series of five filmpoems, Mythistoria: An Archaeology of Shadows. Chris O’Leary is a fine artist based in Yorkshire, and the video is in my view a masterclass in how to make a filmpoem using still images (without going full kinestasis): the images are striking, utterly lacking in cliche, and are juxtaposed in interesting ways, sometimes illustrating and sometimes contrasting with the text on screen, and the soundtrack—”Erotokritos/Music of Crete” by Ross Daly—pushes the whole thing forward. My only criticism is that some of the longer passages of text fade out a second or two too soon.
Here’s how Chris describes the project on her website:
‘Mythistoria’ is a new body of work in development by Chris O’Leary. It is an Athens based project; Chris is a member of the ‘British School of Archaeology’; an institute for higher academic research and which accommodates post-doctoral and independent research work. ‘Mythistoria’ negotiates ideas of place, myth and history in aspects of classical and contemporary Greek culture. The work addresses the european tradition of women’s travel narratives dating back to the eighteenth century; women who came to Greece and experienced it as travellers, writers,artists and scholars. Such women challenged the prevailing romantic view of the ‘epic Greek journey’ as being a ‘Byronic’ idyll, pursued only by wealthy aristocratic antiquarians. The work, therefore, aims to engage with post-colonial/feminist analysis of Hellenism and Orientalism in relation to both women’s travel writing and the rendering of Greece through the collective imaginary
Disorderlily by Charles Putschkin
Disorderlily is an author-made videopoem by Charles Putschkin, a Swedish-Polish artist living in Bristol, UK.
The piece is written in the form of a letter from a socially isolated man, to a woman who seems to be his support worker. The literal quality of the text and the deadpan vocal delivery are effective and affecting, conveying more than what is said.
Putschkin’s creative work also includes visual poetry, sound poetry and podcasting, all with an experimental bent. More videos from him can be found at his YouTube channel.
Disorderlily was a finalist in the 2021 Ó Bhéal Poetry-Film Competition in Cork Ireland.
The one still bird by Janet Lees
A brief, eloquent video of a three-line poem expressed in a single image, The one still bird is an author-made piece by Janet Lees. Her personal statement about it:
On May Day it snowed, very briefly and in a tightly defined area – just a few hundred square yards. I saw a single starling on top of tree shaped like a child’s drawing of a hill. Later I swam in the sea and cut my leg on a fishing lure. It felt like a day full of omens and the echoes of emergencies.
Moving Poems has previously shared more than ten fine videopoems by Janet Lees.
The Rope by David Ian Bickley
This was the third place winner in the 2021 Deanna Tulley Multimedia Contest. David Ian Bickley is “an award-winning media artist whose body of work spans the primitive technological of the 1970s to the digital cutting edge of today.” We previously shared his film for a poem by Irish poet Paul Casey, Marsh. This time the text is his own, “based on a story told by Gerald O’Brien,” according to the credits.
It’s always interesting seeing how an accomplished filmmaker approaches the problem of creating a lyrical film for a narrative poem. In this case Bickley may well have crafted the poem with specific shots or images in mind. Regardless, it all adds up to a very affecting film.
Everything Is Radiant between the Hates by Rich Ferguson
I remember seeing this on social media when it came out in 2020, but forgot to share it here—better late than never, I guess! L.A.-based Beat poet Rich Ferguson is also an accomplished videopoet, resulting in an interesting hybrid between a spoken-word-style video and a regular videopoem. It took 3rd Place in the 2020 Deanna Tulley Multimedia Contest from Slippery Elm magazine. The camera work is by Ferguson, Christianne Ray, and Butch Norton, who’s also the drummer.
De Sluis / The Sluice by Marc Neys
As I said when I shared Eduardo Yagüe’s Oscura the other week, it’s always interesting to see a long-time poetry filmmaker stepping into the poet role himself. Especially one like Marc Neys (aka Swoon), whose style is in many ways closest to avant-garde videopoetry, where author-made films are the norm.
Poem, voice, music and film
Marc NeysText editor and translation
Willem GroenewegenFootage right panel
David Samiran’s ‘Mems First Steps’, 2011
Project Hazmatic: Score For Body As Cautionary Tale by Willa Carroll
Eco-ritual and apocalyptic pilgrimage, “Project Hazmatic: Score for Body as Cautionary Tale” follows an array of wayfarers through endangered landscapes. Scored by a dystopian poem cycle and an ambient sound collage, kinetic explorers don yellow hazmat suits as protective membranes and second skins.
(official description)
One of the most impressive author-made videopoems I’ve ever seen, Project Hazmatic: Score For Body As Cautionary Tale debuted in TriQuarterly in January 2021, and went on to win Best Poetry Film at the International Migration & Environmental Film Festival.
Willa Carroll is an up-and-coming, NYC-based poet whose 2018 collection, Nerve Chorus, was a small press bestseller. “Her poetry video and multimedia work has been featured in Interim Poetics, Narrative Outloud, TriQuarterly, Writers Resist, and other venues. […] Carroll has collaborated with numerous artists, performers, and filmmakers,” including cinematographer Andreas von Scheele and choreographer Susannah Keebler.
Here’s how Sarah Minor described Project Hazmatic at Triquarterly, in her typically lucid prose:
Combining poetry, performance art, and moving image, “Project Hazmatic: Score For Body As Cautionary Tale” reveals the yellow hazmat suit to be a sheath, a container, a figure, and an effigy that can move in surprising ways across landscapes. While two suits blow empty across a beach, inflating with wind to make ghost shapes, a voice recites: “Skin, a bridge, a porous equation, overworked for centuries, unhinge the jaws, swallow all, a black air.” This project features a long sound poem in eleven sections with titles like “Score for Body as Thirst Suit,” “Score for Body as Durational Performance,” and “Score for Body as Wild Processional.” Its images and language think together about the purported lines among human, animal, and landscape that are often delineated by porous skins, and about the environmental degradation across the strata of many beings: “We play a game with no score, down on all fours, call all ill animals to the yard, sweeten the debris you feed them, jump the electric fence, a species link.” Part object lesson, part evolutionary retelling (“Flowers precede the bees, whales flunk back into the oceans”), “Project Hazmatic” also demonstrates the shared goals of texts that stretch the possibilities of language and video performances that pose and re-pose questions through repeated shapes, colors, and horizon lines.
To see more of Carroll’s videos, browse the Multimedia page on her website. We’ll be following her work with keen interest.
Oscura (Dark) by Eduardo Yagüe
It’s always interesting to see a long-time poetry filmmaker like Eduardo Yagüe, used to working with poems from the canon, stepping into the poet role himself. There’s no English translation, but the text is so straightforward as to hardly need one. In any case, Google Translate’s rendition is more than adequate:
The persistent darkness.
The porous darkness.
The uncertain darkness.
The crushing darkness.
Darkness is a wild animal.
Darkness is a closed door.
The darkness of the flesh.
The whispering darkness.
The succulent scar.
The luminous darkness.
The music is sourced from a one-man band based in France, Hinterheim.
Solo duet by Janet Lees
The latest film poem from Manx artist and poet Janet Lees seems fitting for this week of scorching temperatures in so many places. I’m sure she won’t mind if we paste in the full text of her Vimeo description, because it’s interesting to see what she excerpted from her original page-poem, “Retreat,” to make the film poem:
Poem & video by Janet Lees
Music by Tonic Walter & Nina Nst
The full poem, originally published in Earthlines magazine:Retreat
1
I have hung out my clothes
on the washing line at the edge of the world.
Silhouetted arms and legs
give dumbstruck kicks and jerks,
stiff with salt and too much mending
by hands that have lost
the scent of naked,
eyes that can’t see
to thread a needle.2
Viewed through glass: peat,
pelt. Imagined song
of blood and stone
fattening my tongue until
it fills my mouth, stops
my throat.
Between inside
and outside,
the flame roar of the wind,
cauterising open sores
where men have dug out earth from me
to burn to warm their hands.3
My blood
runs cold and clear
My bones are made
of the world’s dried tears
There is wreckage
and resurgence in my heart
At dusk I drink the sun
and then dead stars
live again in my skin
which breaks
and is
unbroken
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