~ Author-made videopoems ~
The Carpet by Ana Pantić
This video poem is The Carpet, from Belgrade artist Ana Pantić. Ana wrote, voiced and performed in this personal piece, a film-making collaboration with Maja Djordjević, with music by Milan Bogdanović. Watching the film on high volume gave me the best experience of it.
Ana and I were at the Athens International Video Poetry Festival in Greece last December, where we met. The festival brought each of us in contact with other artists from around the world. Ana compellingly performed her work live on the last night.
She is an artist in a number of related creative modes, as well as a public speaker. Recently Ana appeared on Serbian TV, talking at length about international video poetry.
Haiku Time by Lisi Prada
Haiku Time screened at the Athens International Video Poetry Festival in December, along with two other videos written and directed by Madrid artist Lisi Prada. For me, Prada’s videos were the best discovery of the festival’s screening night, which went from 6:00 pm until about 1:00 am in a continuous stream.
The film-maker is boldly experimental in her approach. Her videos screened in Athens were all multilingual. She also wrote the text for Haiku Time, and has this to say on her website:
“Presented as a video-haiga, the images accompany … poetic text that is recited simultaneously in English and German. Some verses are heard as a chorus also in Japanese, Norwegian, Italian, Portuguese or Spanish, emphasizing that what is said happens to anyone, anywhere.”
The translations were gathered via the internet from different parts of the world. Of the two main voices, the German is translated and spoken by Thomas Topp, and the English by Susan Nash. Nash performs in a style that sounds like the automated voices heard on train platforms or when waiting in phone queues. This is in accord with Prada’s statement about the content of the text and images:
“(the video)… proposes to abolish the borders of what separates us from the other… and questions the alienation of current life in the cities, where we get lost… a world in which speed, pollution, stress… make us move like pawns on chess boards, forgetting what really matters, what makes sense.”
The soundtrack is made up mostly of the different voices in different languages, that are layered in their timing and accompanied by subtitles. This on-screen text is well-placed, forming part of the overall structure and framing of the images. The music, heard only a few times for the film’s duration, is dramatic and highly effective, echoing the edgy quality of the editing.
The film goes for 5 minutes, 7 seconds, 5 milliseconds – mirroring the 5-7-5 syllables of the popular version of the haiku form in writing. This is explained on Prada’s web page for the film, where she describes the images as being…
“…based on simple and deep observations of everyday life, and poetic images among which the moon frequently appears…”
Prada blurs the boundaries between video and poetic text, uniting them into one form, in which the text feels incomplete without the images, the images without the words.
* Quotations from the artist are translated from Spanish to English with the assistance of Google Translate.
2 birds by Martha McCollough
2 birds by Martha McCollough first appeared several years ago and is still well worth sharing now. Martha is an artist, writer and animator whose sustained work in video poetry is compelling and unique.
The text is an adaption of a verse from the Upanishads. Martha speaks this herself in a many-layered vocal soundtrack. She also created the melodically unusual music, minimal and haunting.
Visually the piece displays a strong relation to experimental film forms. Text on screen is shown in layers, echoing the treatment of the voice. Some lines of verse move very quickly, less like comprehensible words, more an abstract texture of the moving images. Other textual layers appear more legibly. Phrases also appear and disappear at different moments like brief little messages underscoring levels of the voice.
The central visual motif anchoring the different elements reflects the title. Two birds are seen in semi-photographic images and in line drawings. Here we see that the two birds might really be one bird. This is thematically linked to the final couplet that resolves the swirling poetic resonances of the whole.
In the Future by Mike Hoolboom
The history of poetry in film can be seen to have two main branches: the cinematic and the classically poetic. In cinematic history, the two were brought together almost from the start, with the avant garde and experimental movements of the early 20th century.
This genre of film was first explored in the 1920s by French Impressionists Germaine Dulac, Louis Delluc, Man Ray, Hans Richter, and others. In the mid-1960s and early 1970s this genre was further explored by the Beat Generation poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, and Herman Berlandt, and developed into a festival held annually at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, California. (Wikipedia)
Poetry itself has its origins in the oral forms of ancient times, adapting and evolving over the last millennium with the arrival of the new technology of the printing press. It has been combined over time with art and music. Poetry film now marries audio and time-based visual media with the printed and spoken forms of poetry. There seems little doubt there are other emerging manifestations of poetry happening now.
In the Future, written and directed by Canadian experimental film-maker Mike Hoolboom, is from 1998. It is a piece complete in itself, but also part of a longer feature film, Imitations of Life, that is made up of several parts.
In a recent bio, Mike describes himself this way:
Born: Korean War, the pill, hydrogen bomb, playboy mansion. 1980s: Film emulsion fetish and diary salvos. Schooling at the Funnel: collective avant-geek cine utopia. 1990s: failed features, transgressive psychodramas, questions of nationalism. 2000s: Seroconversion cyborg (life after death), video conversion: feature-length, found footage bios. Fringe media archaeologist: author of 7 books, editor/co-editor 12 books. Curator: 30 programs. Copyleft yes. Occasional employments: artistic director Images Fest, fringe distribution Canadian Filmmakers. 80 film/vids, most redacted. 9 features. 30 awards, 12 international retrospectives. 2 lifetime achievement awards. 24 books, 15 mags, 40 interviews, 100+ essays, 40 sound clips.
Indeed, his contribution to the contemporary field of experimental film is substantial. He is deservedly considered by many to be one of its greatest living artists.
In the Future draws its sublime image stream from moments in films from many sources. Most of these are unrecognisable from their original context. Its text is given visually on screen, a deep poetic meditation on photographic media and its relation to human identity. The film is prophetic in its vision of a world in which every moment will be photographed, until at last our identities become indistinguishable from photographs themselves. Prophetic again is its apocalyptic sense of where this might take us. This film from over 20 years ago seems even more relevant today.
Found by Susannah Ramsay
A 2018 filmpoem by poet, filmmaker and scholar of poetry film Susannah Ramsay. She calls it
An experimental filmpoem about side-stepping death. The style of filmmaking was inspired by the Materialist/Structural elements of Peter Gidal’s experimental film, Key (1968).
Huntress by Janet Lees
Huntress is by Isle of Man poet and artist Janet Lees, who also shot and animated the images.
The piece encourages us towards a wider-awake vision, towards more sensitive ears, with attention facing both inwards and outwards, and on the perceptual spaces in between. True to the soul of our times, it is deeply moving and beautifully well-realised.
George Simpson is the creator of the soundtrack, providing a track called “Artemis”, from his album Still Points In The Turning World. Emotionally affecting, with an elegant and simple extended first movement, followed by expansion into expressive drama, the music coherently accompanies the visual and textual elements in an organic way.
All the elements of this video merge to become an audio-visual experience far more than any sum of its parts.
Floodtide by Ian Gibbins
Fellow Australian film-maker and poet Ian Gibbins asks in Floodtide how a city copes, and what does it look like, after years of drought, rising sea levels, relentless storms.
The video was shot around Adelaide, the Fleurieu Peninsula, Inner Suburban Melbourne, the Western Highway, and Far North Queensland. An only-slightly futuristic vision of a flooded urban landscape was achieved through the use of video compositing.
After The Incoming, The Overflow, our future lay within the tides, no turning back, no neap, no ebb, an undertow of uncertainty and doubt… Taunting us, an illusion of normality… We have run out of options, we are battling for breath…
It received the Honorable Mention at the Experimental Forum Film and Video Art Festival (Los Angeles, July, 2019).
Open Season by Caroline Rumley
From Caroline Rumley, a film-maker/poet I admire greatly, this is Open Season, a melancholy response to living in the USA since 9/11. Rumley’s description on Vimeo:
After reading Albert Samaha’s powerful reporting on the first hate crime after 9/11 in the United States, I was inspired to make this found footage retelling of a glimpse of his story.
Here’s the Buzzfeed article she drew upon for her information and some of the text.
City Swans by Bernard O’Rourke
Bernard O’Rourke is an Irish writer, film-maker, and spoken word artist, new to Moving Poems. Filmed along Dublin’s Grand Canal, his City Swans reflects discontent and restlessness within the enclosures of city life. The poem is richly voiced by Bernard himself, woven into the melancholy whimsy of Brendan Carvill’s guitar chords. As an ensemble, the piece evokes a sense of sky-born hope glimpsed in lowly places. It was a finalist in 2018 for the Ó Bhéal Poetry Film Prize at the IndieCork Film Festival, Ireland.
Alphonso’s Jaw by Sarahjane Swan and Roger Simian
Recently I became part of an international collective of artists called Agitate:21C. In its short existence, it has attracted about 300 outstanding experimental, avant-garde, and generally ‘other’ artists from around the world, including film-makers, poets, curators, critics, lovers of the arts, and just about any kind of alternative creator, focused on any medium, genre, style or form.
Originally part of a larger art installation created for Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Alphonso’s Jaw was the first poetry film I found via A21C. It is written and directed by Scottish artists Sarahjane Swan and Roger Simian, also known as Avant Kinema. Sarahjane appears in the film and voices the piece in English and French. I find it virtuosic in its fusing of word, soundscape and image, as well as deeply moving in its meditation on the timeless horrors of war in the lives of individuals.
This is an excerpt from what the artists have to say on the film’s page at Vimeo:
The installation, and our subsequent short film, were inspired by our fascination for two objects we discovered amongst Edinburgh University’s Anatomy Collection: (1) the cast of a disfigured face; (2) a prosthetic jaw constructed on an early nineteenth century battlefield.
Through some research we unearthed the story of Alphonse Luis, a young French gunner struck by shrapnel at the Siege of Antwerp, 1832. Having suffered horrific facial injuries, losing his lower face, Alphonse’s quality of life was eventually improved when the Surgeon-Major and a local Belgian artist collaborated on the construction of a silver prosthetic jaw, painted in flesh tones and adorned with whiskers.
We uncovered historical accounts of Alphonse Luis’ injury, surgery, recuperation and rehabilitation in medical journals of the day, and drew on these for an exploration of identity, disfigurement and reconstruction.
In Alphonso’s Jaw we imagine that Alphonse Luis has become dislocated from history to exist outside of any specific time or place, trapped in eternal convalescence, soothed by the dreams of his Battlefield Muse, who is equal parts Night Nurse, Scheherazade and Beauty from Beauty and the Beast. Luis’ Battlefield Muse is, in turn, both horrified and fascinated by her patient.
The poem, titled “Beauty and the Silver Mask,” can be read at Avant Kinema’s blog, in both its full English version and the short fragment of it spoken in French, which was translated by Raymond Meyer.
Snow Memory by Brendan Bonsack
Fellow Australian film-maker Brendan Bonsack is one of the finest of the lyrical video poets I have encountered. Multi-talented, skilled and prolific in film, poetry, photography, performance, and music, he is also a generous supporter of poets and their culture in this country, especially in Melbourne, where he is co-producer of a community radio show devoted to the spoken word.
Snow Memory is a wordless video poem, alluding to its themes in beautifully composed images and music. There are suggestions of fragmented narrative to be found in the precisely rhythmic editing between images, some shot by Brendan, others drawn from archival and alternative sources.
Whether finding expression in videos, poems, or any of his other chosen forms, Brendan’s work is inspiring to say the least, its effect on audiences well described here:
“Bonsack has one of those voices that fills a room with golden light…”
Nkechi Anele, Triple J Radio, Australia
In the case of this film, it’s a snowy silver.
Write Out: A Scribe’s Haiku #3 by Kathryn Darnell
In my first post as a contributor to Moving Poems, I am delighted to introduce to the site the work of Kathryn Darnell. Her Write Out: A Scribe’s Haiku #3 is part of a series of animations of original haiku about her work as a calligrapher. Music is by Elden Kelly.
Kathryn has been a professional illustrator and calligrapher for over 30 years, dividing her time between commercial art and fine art practice. Her “animated calligraphics” are an extension of her passion for letters. Her personal artwork is regularly exhibited in galleries, and she is an adjunct professor of art at Lansing Community College.
In 2018, her video, Things I Found in the Hedge, in collaboration with UK poet Lucy English, was the winner of the inaugural edition of the Atticus Review Videopoem Contest, which I judged and discussed in Moving Poems Magazine.
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