Latest video reviews
The hours of darkness by Janet Lees
“Written & filmed by Janet Lees. Edited by Glenn Whorrall.” Thus the Vimeo description. But there’s much more information on the British poet and artist (plus her regular partner in videopoetry collaborations, Terry Rooney) in the new “Swoon’s View” column up at Moving Poems Magazine. Marc Neys describes their films as “short and sharp as a razor … a breath of fresh air in these times of cultural abundance and profusion of advertising.” And Lees provides some background on each of the four films Neys has selected. About this one, she writes:
‘The hours of darkness’ features footage of flamingos that I took in a wildlife park in the middle of winter. I found the sight of the flamingos in this big gloomy shed electrifying – there was something both prehistoric and post-apocalyptic about it. In my mind, I knew there was only one poem for this film – ‘The hours of darkness’, which I’d written about a year before, inspired by the anodyne yet always to my ear potentially sinister messages contained within in-flight announcements and other forms of mass communication. Here, the repeated phrase ‘May we remind you’ assumes an increasingly dark, Orwellian tone.
Go read the rest (and check out the other three films).
Grandmother is a Crab by Rosemary Norman
The collaborative partnership between London-based experimental filmmaker Stuart Pound and poet Rosemary Norman dates back to 1995, and nearly twenty years later, they’re still going strong. I saw “Grandmother is a Crab” at ZEBRA. The description on Vimeo reads:
Grandmother is a Crab borrows from an earlier digital video, made fifteen years ago, that itself used footage captured from a travel advertisement on television. Black and white, and mirror effects, take the image out of time, giving it both vividness and distance. The music is played in reverse. And the voice-over and under-titles are a poem that re-enters the magic world of a child on a beach.
Simple yet ingenious. It’s not just the kids who excel at digital remix these days.
Interni / Interiors by Azzurra D’Agostino
I had the pleasure of seeing this film, from Italian director Gianmaria Sortino, on the big screen at ZEBRA. Like Sina Seiler’s Elephant, it prompts us to consider the interior spaces of women’s lives from a new perspective.
Sortino describes it at Vimeo as
Video poetry based on a piece by a young talented poet, Azzurra D’Agostino.
A special thank to Marina Spada, who inspired this work.
Azzurra D’Agostino’s own reading is in the soundtrack. Jeff Abshear is the translator. (There’s also a version without the subtitles.) I see that Abshear has translated a collection of D’Agostino’s poetry, Canti di un luogo abbandonato/Songs of an Abandoned Place, for a small, letterpress edition from the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center.
Elephant by Sina Seiler
Sina Seiler of sinasan Film und Medienkunst (sinasan Film & Mediaart) is both filmmaker and author here. According to her description on Vimeo,
The Poetry Film is based on the poem “Elephant” by Sina Seiler and visualizing inner rooms, what the poem is expressing by words metaphorically. “Elephant” expresses an inner transformation of the protagonist caused by the encounter of love. The self as a house, every room representing feelings and moods of subconsciousness.
The protagonist is dancing through inner rooms, illustrating sequences of dream, expressing feelings and moods.
It was screened at ZEBRA last month (among other screenings, listed on the sinasan website) as part of the Dreiklang Dimensionen/Triadic Dimensions program of poetry films that incorporate dance and music, and it fits nicely into the Dance category here. I didn’t get to meet Seiler in person, but her bio is an interesting one:
Sina Seiler studied Media and Journalism with focus on documentary filmmaking & TV at international University of Tuebingen, Germany with a stipend in Film at DAMS / University of the Arts, Theatre and Film at Bologna, Italy. She graduated with a Diploma/Master and a Oral History Documentary about the Saxons in Romania.
She works as a writer, filmmaker, lecturer and artist.
The dancer is Soraya Schulthess.
Joining the Lotus Eaters by Laura M Kaminski
https://vimeo.com/108625030
Today again I’d like to present two very different videopoems made with the same text—and even the same reading. This time the poem comes from The Poetry Storehouse, and is the work of the Missouri-based poet and editor Laura M Kaminski. The voiceover in both is by Nic S., who is also the maker of the first video remix (her preferred term). Nic sourced her music from David Mackey on SoundCloud.
Australian artist Marie Craven puts the “kinesis” back in “kinestatic” here. I didn’t even notice that the film was made entirely of still images the first time I watched it; the uptempo music by anunusualleopard probably had something to do with that. Click through to Vimeo for the full list of credits and links.
Read the just-published interview with Laura M Kaminski at Moving Poems Magazine to learn why Nic’s film brought her to tears, and how a friend who doesn’t usually read poetry reacted to Marie’s film.
