~ Nationality: United States ~

Fairytale Romance & Fear of Monsters by R.A. Briggs

On 5 December, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
Poet: | Nationality: | Filmmaker:

A new videopoem by Marc Neys A.K.A. Swoon uses text and voiceover from the American poet and philosopher R.A. Briggs. Other credits include:

Concept, editing, grading & Music: Marc Neys
Field recordings and footage: Jan Eerala
Extra Footage: FKY (from ‘The Sea Also Rises’)
webpage: vimeo.com/fky – Licence: ATTRIBUTION LICENSE 3.0
Thanks to Mazwai & Ray Hsu

Song for a Lady by Anne Sexton

On 29 November, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation
Poet: | Nationality: | Filmmaker:

A simple but perfect animation of an Anne Sexton poem by Montreal-based multi-disciplinary artist Ohara Hale, with Maria Popova of the venerable Brain Pickings blog supplying the voiceover. It’s been viewed 136,000 times since Hale posted it to Vimeo in May of 2015. Popova blogged about their collaboration — a great post, too long to reproduce here. A snippet:

Hale’s concept, predicated on the mesmerism of angles, was inspired by legendary neurologist Oliver Sacks and his work on how the blind see the world. It sparked in her a fascination with how they construct a kaleidoscope of angularity, which led her to imagine how a dog is perceived not as a single dog but as a million dogs, each “seen” from a different angle. Many of the angles don’t resemble a “dog” in the pictorial sense but still contribute to the understanding of what a dog is.

This way of deconstructing the world into fragments and reconstructing them into a wholeness of understanding is so different from how we see via regular vision that, as Dr. Sacks so movingly wrote in The Mind’s Eye, the newly sighted are often utterly overwhelmed by having to process information in this new way and revert to “blindness,” closing their eyes and continuing to navigate the world scanning for angles.

Read the rest.

,

Years After You Die by Simone Savannah

On 15 November, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
Poet: | Nationality: | Filmmaker:

A highly personal, author-made videopoem by writer and doctoral student Simone Savannah. Like yesterday’s video, this was recently featured at The Continental Review.

In a 2015 interview with the Phoenix Rising Collective, Savannah discussed some of the family history that she also drew upon in this poem.

Translations (from The End of Something) by Kate Greenstreet

On 14 November, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Author-made videopoems
Poet: | Nationality: | Filmmaker:

A fascinating experiment in bilingual videopoetry from the always inventive Kate Greenstreet. Here’s the description on Vimeo, with italics and links added:

Based on early versions of poems from The End of Something translated into French by Alexander Dickow for the anthology Ligatures: Poets of France and America (Catala Press, 2017). Featuring the voice of Virginia Konchan speaking the French lines and a short video clip of Amaranth Borsuk (“the girls are gone”). This video first appeared in The Continental Review (thecontinentalreview.com).

It’s good to see The Continental Review, one of the oldest online poetry video journals, still putting out issues. Browse their latest material here. And be sure to visit Kate Greenstreet’s webpage for The End of Something to download a free music EP and watch three more videopoems based on texts in the forthcoming book. Ahsahta Press’s description begins:

In curating cartography together with lyric, poly-vocality with loneliness, and even the unspeakable with common speech, poet and artist Kate Greenstreet has created a surprising hybrid with The End of Something. The intimacy in Greenstreet’s partial narratives and slow admissions contrasts with much of what we consume as Americans, which is fleeting and feigns being “factual.”

, , ,

Body With No Windows by Annelyse Gelman

On 10 November, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
Poet: | Nationality: | Filmmaker:

A film written and directed by Annelyse Gelman, who also composed the music in the soundtrack. Her description on Vimeo:

Body With No Windows explores death and embodiment through a collage of faceless sequences from public-domain home video footage of a Pennsylvania family in the 1950s.

It was featured in Issue 152 of TriQuarterly, where video editor Sarah Minor wrote:

In “Body With No Windows” by Annelyse Gelman, “human faces have been elided,” first found and then lost. Here, the tensions between vocal annunciation and the sharp timing of archival clips showcase Gelman’s practiced hand at working in collage. A woman on camera walking alone becomes a mother holding a child’s hand just as suddenly as “the feeling that your body belongs to you” might go away. Gelman’s opening soundscape signals a kind of dread or apprehension. This tone is quickly disrupted by quotidian footage of sunbathers in crabgrass, yard dogs, and tandem swimmers curated from the Prelinger Archives. In a particular fleeting style that intermedia texts seem to capture best, Gelman asks us to recognize the uncanny that we only witness in the daily lives of others, that particular waiting “to be carried from what you cannot remember to what you cannot forsee.”

Small Things Bind the World by Erica Goss

On 7 November, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
Poet: | Nationality: | Filmmaker:

This author-made videopoem by Erica Goss presents haiku in a really innovative way that I haven’t seen before. It was a Showcase Selection at the 2017 Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival. Erica writes:

I made this video last summer in my backyard. It’s a selection of haiku that seemed to tell a story, with big letters imposed over a glitter globe I bought at the MOMA-San Francisco gift shop. It’s somewhat nostalgic for me to watch this, as it’s one of the last art projects I did before moving from California to my new home in Eugene, Oregon.

Apartment Living by Meghan O’Rourke

On 3 November, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
Poet: | Nationality: | Filmmaker:

Elizabeth Masucci directs and stars in this adaptation of “Apartment Living” by Meghan O’Rourke — the second installment in Masucci’s ambitious poetry short film anthology series (Maya Angelou’s “Phenomenal Woman” was the first).

It’s always great to see professionally made, narrative cinema-style poetry films that seek to inhabit a poem and take it in new directions rather than just using it as a jumping-off point. Apartment Living compares very favorably with other recent, stand-out films of this type such as Lotus Hannon’s The Expiration (based on John Donne) and Laura Scrivano’s A Lovesong (based on Prufrock).

Body Talk by Amy Bobeda

On 1 November, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Author-made videopoems
Poet: | Nationality: | Filmmaker:

“A video poem about the relationship between film, the body, and Lyme Disease,” Body Talk was written and directed by Amy Bobeda. It was one of the films screened last Saturday in Ashland, Oregon as part of Cinema Poetica.

Stolen Moments by Luz Emma Cañas

On 29 October, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
Poet: | Nationality: | Filmmaker:

Ella Quinn was 17 years old when she directed this film written by Luz Emma Cañas. It’s the winner of the Shoots! Youth Prize and finalist for Best Overall Production at Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival 2017. A new addition to the festival this year, the Shoots! Youth Prize was sponsored by the Worcester County Poetry Association and, judging from the finalists, received some very high-quality submissions.

See the PARTICL3 blog for more about all the members of the production team for Stolen Moments. Ella Quinn’s bio gives some background:

Ella is part of the family production team, PARTICL3, along with her brother Adrian Miles and mother Luz Emma. She served as Creative Director on their first short film, Pas de Deux, which was “Official Selection” at four international film festivals. She also contributed to the fine details of production from script editing to wardrobe selection. Stolen Moments is Ella’s directorial debut and is “Official Selection” at two film festivals for young filmmakers, Young Filmmakers Film Festival and Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival.

And here’s the synopsis:

Stolen Moments is the third in a series of four dance shorts that tell stories of women of color, relationships and intimacy. This story takes place during the Roaring Twenties. From fashion to sexuality, Evelyn is breaking free from societal norms established by the Victorian Era. She is the center of a love triangle with two ladies, Harper and Lily. One love is repressed while the other is realized but not publicly. Like Pas de Deux, our debut film, there is no dialogue in this short. It relies on poetry and visuals to tell the story. The film features three Sufi poems from the book, “Stolen Moments: A Lover’s Recourse,” by Luz Emma Cañas Madrigal who also produced and acts in both films.

Black Woman by Olufunke Adeniyi

On 26 October, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
Poet: | Nationality: , | Filmmaker:

“Shot with a 16mm film Bolex, this film depicts an identity that has always existed, but rarely acknowledged,” notes poet-filmmaker Olufunke Adeniyi on her Tumblr blog. Black Woman won Best Production 1 Minute or Under at Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival 2017, and was a finalist in both the Best Sound/Music and Best Overall Production categories. Toks Adeniyi is the actress and Faith Osunde provided the voiceover; the score is by Olufunke Adeniyi and Jay Moh Productions.

Dancing Lesson by Rachel Kann

On 24 October, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Dance, Videopoems
Poet: | Nationality: | Filmmaker:

I’ve been championing the dance category of videopoetry for years, so I was pleased to see this worthy representative of it take the top honors at last weekend’s Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival. Written and performed by “modern-day mystic” Rachel Kann, with choreography by her and Jhon Gonzalez, and directed by Brad (Bradford L.) Cooper, it won Best Overall Production and Best Sound/Music (the work of Cooper and Atom Smith). See YouTube for the complete credits and Hevria for the text.

, ,

Blue by Erica Goss

On 20 October, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
Poet: | Nationality: | Filmmaker:

The latest author-made film from Erica Goss, who included these process notes in the description:

During the summer of 2017, my brother visited me from New York City. He wanted to get a tattoo, so we found High Priestess in Eugene, where I had just moved. I asked my brother and the tattoo artist if I could film the procedure, and they agreed. I had a poem, titled “Blue,” that I wrote in 2014 after listening to the Joni Mitchell song of the same name. The poem mentions tattoos, so I thought it would be a good fit with the subject of the video. A technical note: I did no color correction on the video except for the last scene, where I increased the light and contrast slightly. The room was fairly dark, so the spotlights show up as a bit blown out. I like the effect and didn’t want to change it.

The music is by Kevin MacLeod.