~ Nationality: South Africa ~
Watershed by Tania Haberland
Watershed is a fusion of abstract music video and poetic text. Its maker, Carine Iriarte, calls this electropoetry. As with ambient electronic music, the piece is minimal, with mantric repetition of a fragment of a poem by Tania Haberland, whose spoken voice within the music is lush and lulling to the ear. The images meet the sound in fluid digital layers. The hypnotic experience of the video is like a trance meditation.
The Torrid Zone is another video from these artists featured before at Moving Poems, in that instance from a complete poem by Haberland.
Music and film are credited to Poetics of Reverie, a collaborative project of Iriarte.
The Torrid Zone by Tania Haberland
The Torrid Zone is a strong and beautiful video, the first one up in my Vimeo feed today.
The poem is by Tania Haberland. It can be read on the page below the video at Vimeo. Her voicing of it is marvelous: slow in rhythm, minimal, richly-toned, and affecting. From a bio for her:
…a tri-national poet (German-South African-Mauritian)… born in Africa, raised in Arabia and matured in Europe. She publishes, performs and exhibits her poetry and multi-media collaborations across the globe.
The abstract moving images and the soundtrack are credited to Poetics of Reverie. This is French artist Carine Iriarte and her collaborators in various media. She describes this project in her bio:
…a collaborative artistic project mixing poetry, electro music, painting, short films, movement and nature…
Blood Constellations by Malika Ndlovu
Blood Constellations is a beautifully made example of a poetry dance film, a genre showcased many times over the years at Moving Poems.
Boldly directed by Jim Demuth, based in London and China, the film is part of a broader, multi-disciplinary arts collaboration called Singing My Mother’s Song, which explores family and lineage. The overall director of the project is Bristol-based Rebecca Tantony.
The poet is Durban-born Malika Ndlovu, whose rich and passionate voice rings out in word and song on the soundtrack. It is compellingly danced by Nyaniso Dzedze, also in South Africa.
I was lucky enough to see the film in Athens earlier in December, where it screened at the International Video Poetry Festival.
‘n Gewone blou Maandagoggend / An Ordinary Blue Monday by Ronelda Kamfer
Naomi van Niekerk‘s animation of a poem by Ronelda Kamfer. Like the Grand Prize winner What about the law, this was on the shortlist for the 2016 Weimar Poetry Film Awards. Both films were produced as part of a series of animated poetry shorts in Afrikaans called Filmverse, headed up by Diek Grobler under the aegis of the ATKV (Afrikaans Language and Culture Association). Here’s how Google Translate renders the website’s description of the project:
Classical poetry and the work of contemporary poets are used to create a “visual anthology” in which a dialogue is created between word and image. Each animation film is accompanied by its own soundtrack in which the poem is read among others. The end product is a DVD of about 30 minutes with the twelve animation films on which are displayed as a separate production. The DVD playback is accompanied by an exhibition of posters of each of the twelve animation films.
What abou’ de lô (What about the law) by Adam Small
This animation by Charles Badenhorst of a poem in Afrikaans by Adam Small is the Grand Prize winner of the first Weimar Poetry Film Awards.
Die Jury des 1. Weimarer Poetryfilm-Preises, bestehend aus der Erfurter Dichterin Nancy Hünger, dem Leiter des ZEBRA Poetryfilm-Festivals (Berlin/Münster) Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel sowie dem Wiener Filmemacher Hubert Sielecki wählte den südafrikanischen Beitrag WHAT ABOUT THE LAW (2014, 3:14 min) zum Sieger des mit 1000,- € dotierten Jurypreises. Regie führte der südafrikanische Animationskünstler Charles Badenhorst; das dem Film zugrundeliegende Gedicht verfasste der südafrikanische Autor Adam Small.
The Audience Award went to Steel and Air, a film based on a poem by John Ashbery directed by Chris and Nick Libbey and commissioned by Motionpoems, which I shared back in March. The full list of nominees is on the Poetryfilmkanal website.
Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared) by Alastair Cook
This is Filmpoem 50, a collaboration between Scottish filmpoet Alastair Cook and 20 other poets hailing from Scotland, England, Ireland, the U.S., South Africa and Belgium. I have a rule against posting films containing my own poetry to Moving Poems, but in this case my lines account for only 1/20th of the poem, so I decided not to be precious about it. Besides, it’s too important a poetry film not to feature. The composition process involved Alastair sending each writer a snippet of found film. To quote his original email:
You can be trite, erudite, short or shorter (no more than three or four lines) but the brief is this—Americana, the 1950s, travel.
All the clips are from the same batch of film and the artistic conceit is that a narrative will thread through these. This batch of film has this family move through America over the years, these boys grow up and some of the footage I have is heart-wrenching, always tinged with the salient and sombre fact that I source these from house-clearances, that the death of the filmmaker releases this footage to me.
The official description, from Vimeo and the Filmpoem website, reads:
Watch Alastair Cook’s brand new film, three years in the making, with new writing by twenty of the world’s best poets, sountracked by composer Luca Nasciutia and read by poet Rachel McCrum – screens worldwide from Autumn 2016. New ekphrasis work by poets John Glenday, Vicki Feaver, Stevie Ronnie, Janie McKie, Brian Johnstone, Jo Bell, Andrew Philip, Linda France, Dave Bonta, Angela Readman, Michael Vandebril, Gerard Rudolf, George Szirtes, Emily Dodd, Ian Duhig, Rachel McCrum, Robert Peake, Polly Rowena Atkin, Pippa Little and Vona Groarke.
This was originally planned as Filmpoem 40, but got delayed for a number of reasons, during which I believe the concept changed and matured a bit. I list Alastair as the chief poet here because it was his concept from start to finish, and he edited and moved around the submissions after they all came in. The decision to have a single narrator was, I think, a good one, but it’s amazing how well the conjoined text holds together on its own. Clearly, this is an approach to filmpoetry/videopoetry composition deserving of further experimentation. Alastair had been building on what he learned in making his Twenty Second Filmpoem back in 2012, which also involved 20 poets and some found footage.
In other Filmpoem-related news, I see that there will be a fourth Filmpoem Festival, or series of festivals, dubbed Filmpoem Sixteen, though it doesn’t sound as if we can expect an open call:
Filmpoem Sixteen will focus on a series of invited curated events. The first of these is at the Hauge Centre in Ulvik in Norway, where Alastair is artist in residence in May. Alastair has directed The Sword, a new film working with Hauge’s incredible landscape poetry, alongside readings by John Glenday, cinematography by James Norton and sound by Luca Nasciuti; the film will premier on May 12th. Alongside this new film, the Hauge Centre will screen a Scottih retrospective of Alastair’s work and selected works by others from the Filmpoem Festival submission archive.
Check back for further announcements as our new director Helmie Stil brings her own flavour to Filmpoem.
Hi Jack by Thabiso Nkoana
A brilliant South African videopoem about homelessness from filmmakers Lesiba Mabitsela and TAUNYANE (Mandlakatixo Shonhiwa) and poet Thabiso Nkoana, AKA Wordsmith, adapting Nkoana’s poem “Hi Jack.” Mabitsela notes that
The idea of perspex over cloth came during flashbacks of visits to my grandmother. The need to display but at the same time protect that which is valuable. It forces us all to reflect on our value systems and which of those systems benefit the people of Cape Town.
Foresight by Roche “Roach” Du Plessis
A well-produced performance poetry video from Emote Record Company, “a record label dedicated entirely to the recording, distribution, promotion, and support of spoken word artists and the spoken word community.” Du Plessis is one of several artists recorded in what appears to be someone’s living room in Johannesburg. (View more at Emote’s YouTube channel.)
Scoring and Additional Recording by Paul Elliott
Edited, Mixed and Mastered by Simon Strehler
Videographers: Ett Venter, Bernard BrandSpecial Thanks to Clive Thomson and the Thomson family, the greatest hosts on Earth.
It’s no secret that I’m not the biggest fan of spoken word and slam-style poetry. But the outrageous rhymes on “Orwell” sold me on this one. Plus I applaud the emphasis on audio and video production. Emote’s website, spokenwordcollective.com, was just launched last month, so they’re obviously just getting off the ground. I hope they go far.
Twenty Second Filmpoem: 20 poets, 20 seconds each
Alastair Cook‘s 22nd filmpoem is both playful and profound, a lovely demonstration of the magic that can happen when poets write ekphrastically in response to film clips.
Twenty Second Filmpoem (the 22nd Filmpoem) is twenty 20 second Filmpoems; it was conceived when I was asked to do a pecha-kucha.org night. An interesting concept, you present 20 slides for 20 seconds; I thought I’d do something a little different, actually create some work for the event. I commissioned 20 writers, all listed below, to write flash fiction against some 1960s found footage I’d edited. It’s ambitious and inevitably some bits work much better than others, but for me it is imperative to push this a little, to leave my comfort zone. And invariable, all the writing is superb, and for that I am thankful.
I also took the opportunity of using Vladimir Kryutchev’s binaural field recordings, for which I thank him. His amazing binaural map of Sergiyev Posad in Russia is here: oontz.ru/en
See the rest of the description on Vimeo to read all 20 short poems. The poets are: Andrew McCallum Crawford, Mary McDonough Clark, Al Innes, Guinevere Glasfurd-Brown, Elspeth Murray, Janette Ayachi, Jane McCance, Donna Campbell, Ewan Morrison, Angela Readman, Gérard Rudolf, Zoe Venditozzi, Jo Bell, Sally Evans, Pippa Little, Tony Williams, Robert Peake, Stevie Ronnie, Sheree Mack and Emily Dodd. Dodd blogged about her part in the production. A couple of excerpts:
I received a link with a password for my film, it was number twenty (password twenty). The film was 1960s found footage and it was beautiful. Alastair had edited it to tell a 1 minute story.
I watched a woman in a white dress on her wedding day. She kept looking at the Best Man. I wrote my initial thoughts down and came back to watch it again, two days later.
My brief was to respond with a piece of flash fiction that could be read aloud within 10 seconds. Alastair wanted it to be short, two or three lines maximum, he said just a haiku in length.
[…]
When I was first commissioned I’d thought along the same lines as the bride… is this really me?
- What if I watch the film and have no emotional response?
- What if I can’t do flash fiction?
- What if my piece ruins the whole presentation?
And all of this ran through my head while waiting for a response from Alastair.
Thankfully, I had this reply within a couple of minutes:
No it’s bloody perfect x Baci x
14th Avenue Tshwane (née Pretoria) by Gérard Rudolf
Alastair Cook‘s 16th filmpoem is also his third collaboration with South African poet and actor Gérard Rudolf. Alastair writes,
14th Avenue Tshwane (née Pretoria) is a poem by Gérard Rudolf from his collection Orphaned Latitudes. It is my first work of 2012 and illustrates the year’s intent: it is made from tangible film, not digital recordings, and 2012 is the year of using the digital to edit the analogue. I cannot edit without digital, I cannot make film without analogue. The year of Rollei, Bolex and Collodion. See you soon and Happy New Year!
This film contains Standard 8, Super 8, 16mm and miniDV, edited digitally.
The text of the poem appears on the publisher’s page for Orphaned Latitudes.
Walking in Plastic by Bandile Gumbi
Another unique video collaboration from South African artist, poet and filmmaker Kai Lossgott, who sets it up for us as follows:
Slums are rapidly becoming the defining landscape of the twenty-first century, both in the developed as well as the developing world. One out of every three city dwellers worldwide nearly a billion people lives in a slum. Performance artist Mduduzi Nyembe presents a memory of a wounded woman, a dream for an absent father, and a dance in a street market for survival. They are ritual stories of the heartache of the slums substance abuse, violence, gender inequalities, chronic unemployment, families incapacity to provide for and protect their children. Each of Nyembe’s characters, taken from his daily interactions in the township, is left, in the words of poet Bandile Gumbi, “a constant wanderer / always at the beginning of complete circles”, trapped in the existential cycle of poverty.
For more on Bandile Gumbi, see her page on the Creative Africa Network.
