Search Results for: What is LIfe
Singularity by Marissa Davis
Singularity is a wonderful animated film from UK artist Lottie Kingslake and US poet Marissa Davis. Featuring a marvelous spoken and musical voice performance by the multi-talented Toshi Reagon, the film is a touching ode to life’s interconnections.
Produced by the On Being Project, it was also a part of Maria Popova‘s project The Universe in Verse.
The poem can be read towards the bottom of this page at Popova’s website The Marginalian.
MIX 2023: Storytelling in immersive media
The seventh MIX conference was this year held in collaboration with the British Library to coincide with their exhibition on Digital Storytelling.
MIX describes itself as an innovative forum for the discussion and exploration of writing and technology, attracting an international cohort of contributors. I, for one, feel like it achieves this aim. I’d last attended in 2019, and this year the event was much bigger. In many ways, this is a great thing – more people interested and excited by what can happen with literature, stories and poetry in the digital world. But it is also a trade-off. There were multiple sessions that ran simultaneously throughout the day. Which can be good if you know exactly what you do and don’t want to hear about, and are interested in a particular niche. But I do like a smaller event where, largely, everyone attends every presentation because there is only one strand. You discover unexpected things, and in a break, everyone has heard everyone and it is easier to pick up on the points of connection and mutual interest, or debate, and to take that forward into later conversations or long-term collaborations.
In the exhibition there are a variety of approaches to digital literature that can be seen and experienced. I’m left feeling I’m still waiting for digital literature to find its own aesthetic. The game-based examples of digital storytelling look like games to me – which is fine, but I can’t really comment because I don’t know enough about games. However, in the area of digital literature that are not game-based (including short stories, poetry and longer literature) but are designed uniquely, the examples that I saw are very strongly tied to classic book aesthetics. Either with shades of William Morris and the private press movement, or with the clichéd scrapbook/photo album aesthetic. I really feel I want to see something that has more innovative design that is not signalling ‘yes, we know you might be unsure of digital literature … but it’s ok, don’t panic, it looks like an old-fashioned book/scrapbook/pop-up book’. Those examples might be out there but I didn’t see them in the exhibition. Having said that though, there are some interesting things to see.
Seed Story by Joanna Walsh is very beautiful to look at but as much as I can appreciate that there is a different way of navigating through the text in different orders, I wasn’t sure I felt I knew why I would want to. I can do that with a hard-copy book. I can read chapters out of sequence or flick through and dip in and out, and often do, and enjoy the artefact in my hands. I guess though, Seed Story creates something of that experience and it needs to be compared to reading on an e-book reader where there are no cues to read in a different way, dipping in and out, reading in a different order or skimming are actually quite difficult. The navigational approach of Seed Story could be really interesting in connection with a collection of poetry or poetry films.
Poetry is represented by This is a Picture of Wind – a weather poem for phones by J.R. Carpenter.
During the conference itself, I then discovered the VR experience The Abandoned Library by Dreaming Methods. The VR creates a compelling world with lapping seashore, dripping rain, and blowing dust, in which to experience what could easily be described as a moving poem. There is spoken poetry in the audio, and poetry written in the landscape you see in front of you, and archive film clips, but everything contributed together to a very poetic experience. It was more than the sum of its parts in the best tradition of poetry film.
The keynote speaker Adrian Hon was great, and I particularly appreciated his call for creatives to be involved with technology at all stages of development and production of a project – this, I feel, is can be true for poetry filmmaking collaborations.
Panel 5 featured poetry film in Narratives of Climate Crisis – voicing loss, resistance and hope through the poetry film. The audience heard from Sarah Tremlett and Csilla Toldy, though sadly Janet Lees was unable to attend.
A further poetry film cameo was in Panel 12: Remixing the archive – creative digital reimaging, reworking and reuse. I shared the new project that I’m working on with writer Toby Martinez de las Rivas and sound artist Neda Milenova Mirova that uses, and is inspired by, a photographic archive at the Museum of English Rural Life.
Thank you to all the MIX team that put the event together. I look forward to another one.
The exhibition in London is open until 15 October 2023.
Unremembered by Marjorie Buettner
Selected for the 2023 Haiku North America Haibun Film Festival. Browse the other selections.
From Dutch director Pat van Boeckel, who honed his craft in the documentary film genre before branching out into video art. His documentaries have been broadcast on Dutch public television and showcased at festivals, covering diverse topics such as indigenous peoples and ecology, with a philosophical undercurrent. His video installations delve into the complex relationship between humanity and the natural environment, exploring contemporary life through the lens of lost values and other forgotten elements of modernization. His works are notable for their simplicity, which stands in contrast to the fast-paced and ever-changing visual culture of today. His focus on the experience of time and place is central to both his documentary and video art works.
Judges’ statement: “Some really imaginative imagery and ideas. We particularly loved the layered reflections and shadows when the finger is drawing a flower on the window, and the ‘kiss’ of the rose leaf was totally captivating. We also loved the hand within a hand within a hand of the shadows and hand holding the cast of a hand. These images had a haiku-like quality all their own.”
Marjorie Buettner is a Pushcart nominated, award winning haiku, tanka and haibun poet who has published widely throughout the U.S. and U.K. and has previously been an editor for the online journal Contemporary Haibun Online. She has taught haiku and tanka at the Loft in Minneapolis and has presented various poetry workshops throughout Minnesota. Her collection of haibun, Some Measure of Existence (published by Red Dragonfly Press, 2014), won first place in the 2015 Mildred Kanterman Merit Book Awards; it was also nominated for the Minnesota Book Awards. She has a collection of haiku and tanka published by Red Dragonfly Press: Seeing It Now, 2008. She writes book reviews for various haiku and tanka journals.
HNA Haibun Festival 2023: a brief report
I was delighted to be able to present nine unique poetry films in Cincinnati last Thursday for Haiku North America 2023. HNA had sponsored a haibun contest last fall to pick model texts for filmmakers to work with, as they note:
All submissions were evaluated anonymously by our haibun judges, Jim Kacian and Jannifer Hambrick, then sent to Moving Poems. Not all haibun selected by the haibun judges were made into films.
Close to 100 people attended a panel on new directions in haibun, moderated by Jim Kacian, with my talk on haibun and videopoetry bringing up the rear, which allowed me to prepare the audience for what they were about to see. The other panelists were Lew Watts, Rich Youmans, and Jennifer Hambrick. The new book Haibun: A Writer’s Guide, by Watts, Youmans, and Roberta Beary, was hot off the presses, so there was considerable interest in the overall topic. Jim had convinced us to each close our talk with a haiku, as if it had been a haibun, because why not? So as abstruse as we got, we still had to bring things back to earth at the end, which felt right. This was not a typical academic conference!
I’ll paste in the text of my talk below, though as I said on Thursday, I am not a brilliant scholar, and in fact often find it painful to get out of “poetry brain” long enough think in a straight line. Anyway, I was grateful that most of the audience stuck around for the festival, oo‘d and ah‘d at all the right places, and seemed genuinely inspired and/or energized by the screening, judging by the many kind comments I got afterwards. I showed the five adaptations of Joseph Aversano’s haibun “The Gone Missing” first, then the other four. Audience discussion afterwards focused on a couple of questions: Why did that one haibun appeal to so many filmmakers? (Watch them for yourself and decide.) And: How can we encourage more of this? Which for many poets, of course, means: How do I find a filmmaker to work with? I suggested that haiku people might want to set up something similar to the sadly defunct Poetry Storehouse, aggregating texts whose authors have licensed them for remix under the Creative Commons at a site that can then be shared with filmmakers. If anyone does anything like this, or has other ideas, be sure to let us know.
I’ve now posted all nine films to Moving Poems: watch them here. I don’t know whether we’ll do this again, but we’re certainly hoping it prompts more filmmakers to consider working with haibun—and maybe spawns a few new videopoets, too. Here’s my argument for why that might make sense:
Haibun and Videopoetry: some considerations
presentation for the Haibun Innovations panel at HNA 2023
Videopoetry (AKA cinepoetry or filmpoetry) is a hybrid of film and poetry that can work especially well with haibun. Like haibun, it hijacks a narrative medium for lyrical ends in a creative subversion of a typical audience’s expectations.
To understand how videopoetry works, a haiku poet need look no further than haiga, because in both cases, the relationship between text and imagery is tricky to get right, and the best videopoems, like the best haiga, avoid mere illustration in favor of more subtle and suggestive interplay. The hope is that the right juxtaposition of images and ideas will produce a kind of gestalt.
Videopoetry pioneer Tom Konyves has stated that the best texts to use in a videopoem should have a quality of incompleteness—something also associated with Japanese-derived poetry forms, where indirection and ambiguity are often prized. Otherwise, a film adaptation can feel superfluous and unnecessary: the poem was already complete without it. You need a text that doesn’t spell everything out.
This happy coincidence between traditional Japanese and avant-garde aesthetics makes haibun videopoetry a fruitful area for poet-filmmakers to explore, especially given the democratizing of access to video-making tools in the digital era. Learning to make videopoems can be very challenging, but no more so than learning how to make an effective haiku. As shareable online content, haibun videos have the potential to enlarge the audience for modern haiku.
Whether or not that actually happens, learning how to shoot and edit videopoems, or collaborating closely with a filmmaker, does offer the possibility of a change in how we compose and think about haibun.
Film is so closely identified with storytelling in most viewers’ minds, that it becomes a challenge to prepare audiences for more avant-garde uses of the genre. I used the term “hijack” above, and I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. Pushing people out of their comfort zones, especially by removing that anticipation of what might be coming next in a narrative, can be a real challenge for directors of poetry films. But since many haibun begin with narrative prose, film adaptation can follow a pattern intimately familiar to most older audiences from watching commercial television, whether they’re conscious of it or not: a narrative segment followed by a lyrical non sequitur. (And in fact, many directors of poetry films these days are moonlighting from their real gigs with the advertising industry.)
Film, like music, like the spoken word, is a temporal art: it unfolds over time rather than in three-dimensional space. But making a film is like making virtually anything, in that hours of effort are required to make something that goes past really very quickly by comparison. Haiku poets must be acutely conscious of this disparity. Make a haiku into a film and you can suggest something of the mental process or circumstances that led up to a given ah-ha moment, while also showcasing the asymmetry so central to Japanese aesthetics. Make a haibun into a film, and the bun portions serve something of the same function. A haibun film, then, might glibly be described as art imitating life imitating art. Less glibly, it offers a way to represent fleeting moments of insight within a temporal flow, with the tantalizing possibility of communicating something of the flow state itself.
lakeshine on my shirt
i gain an audience
of mallards
The Gone Missing by Joseph Aversano (Janet Lees)
Selected for the 2023 Haiku North America Haibun Film Festival. Browse the other selections.
Janet Lees is a lens-based artist and poet. Her films have been selected for many festivals and screenings, including the Aesthetica Art Prize, the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival, and Festival Fotogenia. In 2021 she won the Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film competition. Her art photography has been exhibited around the world and her poetry is widely published and anthologised. She has had two books published: House of Water, a collection of her poems and art photographs, and A bag of sky, the winning collection in the Frosted Fire Firsts prize hosted by the UK’s Cheltenham Poetry Festival.
Director’s statement: I use the camera as a storytelling machine rather than a documenting device. I think film, photography and poetry are among the most important means of creative expression in the Anthropocene. Joseph Aversano’s intriguing haibun ‘The Gone Missing’ seems to me to encapsulate so much of the nature of humanness and life in these times; a sense of living on a knife edge of destructive compulsions. As a photographer and filmmaker I am drawn to damaged, dangerous places, so this piece absolutely struck a chord.
Judges’ statement: We loved the framing, the camera angle, the flickering filtered sunlight and the soundtrack, and admired the build-up to the closing shot, which somehow fully expresses Aversano’s enigmatic haiku.
Joseph Salvatore Aversano is a native New Yorker currently living on the Central Anatolian steppe with his wife Asu. His poems have been published in numerous journals and some have been awarded or anthologized. He is the founding curator of Half Day Moon Press and editor of Half Day Moon Journal. We chose five different films that used his haibun, “The Gone Missing,” intrigued that so many filmmakers chose to work with it, and eager to show the variety of approaches that poetry filmmakers can take.
Interview with Edalia Day: poet, performer, filmmaker and much more
Edalia Day is the creator of a beautiful animated poetry film Duvet Days, made in collaboration with Kat Lyons, which some may be familiar with because it was selected for Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin.
Duvet Days from Kat Lyons on Vimeo.
And great fun is the presentation of The World’s First Animated Poetry Slam, a 25 minute animated project created during pandemic lockdown when in-person poetry slams had to be abandoned.
But most exciting and innovative are the shows Edalia Day creates with projection mapping. I first encountered Edalia describing her work in the context of an online talk about interactive projection mapping. I was hoping for inspiration for the possibilities of the technology, but totally unprepared to be quite so blown away by the multi-disciplinary nature of a body of work which moves so comfortably between spoken word, poetry, drawn animation, stop-motion animation, physical theatre, music, comedy, and probably a few more aspects that I haven’t yet named or put my finger on.
Not new as a process in the context of massive budget theatre and music venues, but Edalia’s projection mapping work is made in the spirit of much poetry film – small scale, small budget and created with great skill and passion, and as such, hugely pushing the boundaries of what can achieved at this scale.
I am delighted to say that Edalia agreed to answer some questions for me …
Jane: With so many skills and talents to draw on – from acting to mime to animation – do you consciously decide which to use when in a show or a piece of work, or do you just go with the flow?
Edalia: When it’s my own work I start with the aim of telling the story first and foremost and it could use none of my skills for all I know. I only use what’s necessary at first, but then I have all of these different skills to play with and inevitably I end up having a lot of fun playing with all sorts of them and finish with an eclectic mix.
Jane: When did you discover projection mapping?
Edalia: I’ve worked as an actor for 15 years and had worked with projection several times before deciding to use it myself. Though all of those times it had been in various ways disastrous so I pledged to myself that I’d never use projection in my own work. The first time was in 2008, playing the lead in a rock musical version of Hamlet that toured Italy. I had to hold a skull that was projected onto some gauze in front of me and in every venue the projection was in a slightly different position and i had no way of knowing if my hand was in the right place or not.
When I started making my own videogame inspired version of Hamlet though in 2016 I thought “if ever there’s a show in which I ought to try using projections it would be this.” I’ve animated for a hobby my whole life and if I hadn’t gone into acting would have done that, and when I got into projection, it opened all sorts of creative doors to me, and has ended up being a lot of fun.
Jane: Did you immediately see its potential for a hybrid medium that combined your visual creativity with your physical performances?
Edalia: It quickly became clear it could do that for me, yes. I did a 15 minute version of the show at the Cockpit in London which was very physical, and people said they thought projections would work well in it. I then did a rough 50 minute long version at Red Rose Chain’s theatre in Ipswich using simple pixel art animations such as me riding a kart in Mariokart and jumping from position to position in a character selection screen, and it became really fun finding creative ways to interact with the projections and move with them.
Jane: Super Hamlet 64 is a live theatre show but also exists as a poetry pamphlet with videos linked by QR codes. The show is broken down into films for each poem, song or scene, while the pamphlet is made in the style of a 90s video game instruction manual. I personally love Super Hamlet 64 because I love work that plays around with material taking it from one context or media and putting it into another and mimicking other forms. You have done that by putting Shakespeare into videogames into comedy and poetry, and into a poetry book. How does your work evolve into the different modes for you? Did you plan from the outset to have both the show and the pamphlet?
Edalia: No. To start with, it was just the show. It was the second show I’d made myself and I hadn’t really been satisfied with the first show, so to start with I just wanted to have fun making a good show. Also I’d never published anything before and didn’t know how to approach that. Once I’d done one tour of the show though, and could see it was working well, I came up with the idea for the videogame manual style pamphlet and it became a real delight to work on too.
Jane: What would you do with your incredible talents and creativity if budget were no object?
Edalia: At the moment I’m making a series of YouTube animated sketch comedy pieces about trans “issues”. Each takes about 6 months+ and is about a couple of minutes long. With enough budget I’d love to hire a team of animators to bring it to life in style. I’ve set up a Patreon www.patreon.com/edaliaday to help me some day reach that goal. It would be great to hire people to do all of the producing and fund raising and technical implementation of ideas too so that I could just focus on writing, performing and video design for my shows.
Jane: Do you hunt for new technology or software to play around with and see what you could do with it, or do you find it as solutions to creative problems?
Edalia: I mostly look for software to solve creative problems. Sometimes I get invited to work with theatre companies trying out tech and it can be fun, but the possibilities with such tech are huge and often they’re more interested in just playing with tech rather than actually using it to create something, and I often find that actually the most clever looking things can be done in very simple ways.
Jane: Who or what are key influences on your work?
Edalia: I love physical theatre companies like Complicite and Kneehigh, as well as those that use a lot of clowns like the travelling troupe Footsbarn. I trained at Lecoq in Paris and love theatre that’s full of vibrant physicality. In terms of projection I haven’t seen anyone doing the kinds of things I like to do with projection, but I’m always inspired each time I see what other people are doing with it, even if they’re not like my own style.
Jane: Tell us about what you are excited to be working on now or next?
Edalia: Like I said I’m making these animated comedy trans pieces. I finished my first one a month ago, about a couple trying to get cancelled so they can sell more books, and now I’m making a much more ambitious one about a transphobe who tries to misgender a group of friends but accidentally gets their genders right with hilarious consequences. I’m also making a young adult novel about a trans girl surviving the apocalypse, written in the style of a teenage diary, full of doodles and poetry, and 1623 have commissioned me to make a trans version of Shakespeare’s Pericles. For that one I’ve been having a lot of fun placing cameras on the ceiling filming myself on the floor and projecting that along with various animations. That’s a fun project to explore.
Biography:
Edalia Day is a transgender spoken word artist, animator and theatre maker based in Norwich. Trained at Lecoq and Alra, her spoken word is full of energy and theatrical flair and her theatre combines comedy, live music and interactive projection mapping. She trained in classical acting at the Academy of Live and Recorded Arts in London and in mime and physical theatre at the Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris.
After 10 years as an actor, she started writing and producing her own work in 2014 with In The Surface Of A Bubble, about a world of dreams, then Super Hamlet 64, a one person show about videogames and Shakespeare, and Too Pretty To Punch, about celebrating trans and non binary people.
Since lockdown started she trained as an animator and motion designer with School Of Motion and has produced several successful projects combining Animation and Poetry, working with the Young Vic, HOME, Harrogate Theatre, Theatre Royal Norwich and Lost in Translation Circus. Projects in development include: an animated online comedy series about trans people and Spectacular Spacebots: a play and a series of picture books for under 10s exploring neurodivergence, masculinity, and emotional well being.
blue jay by Anthony Matos
A poem accompanied by a visual story, blue jay is written and directed by Anthony Matos in Maine, USA. He describes the film as “a story about three strangers trying to overcome different forms of grief and loneliness.”
From his bio at FilmFreeway:
My love for film grew from my love of poetry and the Walt Whitman and Mary Oliver collections I read in high school. I lived through these poets and craved to be able to appreciate life and the moment around me as they did.
Poetry films are most often very short and small-scale in production. By contrast, Blue Jay is over 12 minutes and involved a substantial cast and crew. In these ways it more closely resembles a well-produced narrative short.
The combination of poem and story is an interesting approach, and I find this touching film well worth the time in watching.
so the war would know i’m here by Yahya Ashour
A powerful evocation of life under aerial bombardment. Palestinian poet Yahya Ashour recites his work in English—two poems translated with the director, Andrew Burgess, who provided some background in an email:
This film visualizes two of Yahya Ashour’s poems about growing up during wars in Gaza. The setting, visual motifs, and sound design work embody the physical experience of danger — hiding, being next, recollecting damage — and create an immersive experience. This film was produced through the University of Iowa International Writing Program by NonProphet Media. [link added]
Top Ten: Poetry, Dance and Song
Dancing, music and singing have been key aspects of my life over the decades since my childhood, and I am naturally drawn to them as ways of exploring and expressing poetry in film.
This collection of ten is made up of pieces that move me in different ways. The order I have given them is not a ranking, but simply designed to be seen and heard in a flow from start to end.
*
ODE TO MY BITCHFACE
Film-maker: Tim Davis
Writer & Voice: Olivia Gatwood
Choreography & Performance: Rebecca Björling & Rebecca Rosier
USA/Sweden
A marvelous response in dance to a powerful poem, Ode To My Bitchface was written by Olivia Gatwood in the US, who also voices the piece. The rhythm of the film, directed by Tim Davis, follows closely the choreography and dancing by Swedish artists Rebecca Björling and Rebecca Rosier. The dance is timed to the rhythms of phrases in the poem, and the movements literally matched to the meanings of the words. The fast-paced precision is exhilarating. The absence of music highlights instead the strength of the words, voice and bodies in motion. The poem can be read on the page here.
*
DEAF BROWN GURL (LA MORENA SORDA)
Film-maker, Writer & Performer: Sabina England
Voice & Sound Design: Micropixie
Music: Om/Off (Paco Seren and Pablo Alvarez)
India/UK/USA
Sabina England makes beautiful expressive dance from American Sign Language in this film about identity. In her own words…
It’s based on a poem of the same name that I wrote, which I performed in San Francisco, Washington DC and at Pride Fest. It’s about exploring my identity as a deaf brown girl growing up feeling isolated, lonely and different, and learning to accept who I was and coming to love myself.
I shot beautiful scenes of various places all over Bihar, including the ancient Buddhist site at Mahabodi Temple in Bodh Gaya, Bihar. I also went to a deaf girls school in Patna and I was so proud and impressed with these little girls because they could write in Hindi, English, and they were also fluent in Indian Sign Language! (source)
*
MORE THAN ONE
Film-maker & Writer: Amang
Composer & Singer: Lo Sirong
Taiwan
A musical videopoem from Taiwan, More Than One features the exquisite voice of Lo Sirong singing a poem by the writer known as Amang, who is also the film-maker. The image streams in Amang’s videos are distinctly poetic in themselves, with a quality of mystery going far beyond literal illustration of the words. The wonderful music and voice of Lo Sirong features in some videos by other film-makers here. More videos from Amang are here.
*
BETWEEN BEFORE AND AFTER /WAR/
Film-makers: Marichka Lukianchuk & Elena Baronnikova
Writer: Marichka Lukianchuk
Dancer: Angelina Andriushina
Music: DakhaBrakha
Ukraine
This profoundly moving video from Marichka Lukianchuk and Elena Baronnikova features a brief dance sequence as part of an ensemble of poetic image and sound. The subject is the experience of living in Ukraine at this time of war. I find unimaginable serenity and bravery in this film. The simple beauty of the dance performed by Angelina Andriushina is an important part of the vulnerability and hope expressed. The music that further graces the piece is by DakhaBrakha. Marichka Lukianchuk writes eloquently and at more length about the film here.
*
SHADOWS
Film-maker: Tal Rosner
Writer: Langston Hughes
Composer: Lior Rosner
Singer: Janai Brugger
Dancers: Cameron McMillan & Fiona Merz
USA
The poem Shadows by Langston Hughes (1901-1967) is expressed in this film in exquisite music by Lior Rosner, so beautifully sung by Janai Brugger. Visually it begins as an abstract animation that graphically responds to the music, later morphing into fragmented moments of dance performed by Cameron McMillan and Fiona Merz. The film-maker bringing all elements together is Tal Rosner. The poem can be read on the page at poets.org. More information and stills can be found at Tal Rosner’s website.
*
HALLOWEEN
Film-maker: Marc Neys
Writer & Voice: Hugo Claus
Choreography & Performance: Nadia Vadori-Gauthier
Belgium/France
Central to this haunting film by influential Belgian artist Marc Neys, is an extraordinary dance piece created and performed by Nadia Vadori-Gauthier, artistic director of the French dance company Le Prix de l’essence. The piece for this film is from her amazing project titled One minute of dance a day. For this she has posted inventive short dance videos every single day since 2015. Marc Neys has been a prolific maker of distinctive videopoetry for over a decade. His slow motion treatment of the dance, and his selection of moments from it are mesmerising. The dark ambient music is also his creation. The poem is read in Dutch by its well-known Flemish author, Hugo Claus (1929-2008), in a recording from the German Lyrikline website, where it can be read in a number of different translations.
*
T.I.A. (THIS IS AFRICA)
Film-makers: Matthieu Maunier-Rossi & Ronan Cheneau
Writer: Ronan Cheneau
Choreographer & Performer: Aïpeur Foundou
France/Congo
Congolese dancer Aïpeur Foundou is a graceful and compelling presence in this film, a collaboration between director Matthieu Maunier-Rossi and poet Ronan Cheneau, both in France. The poem is a reverie about the freedom that can be found within, in simple experiences and places, when it cannot be found in the wider world. The film-maker writes about the process of making the piece here.
*
ROLLING FRAMES
Film-maker: Katie Garrett
Writer: Ella Jane Chappell
Voices: Katie Garrett & Nicholas Herrmann
Choreography: Anna-Lise Marie Hearn
Performers: Laura Boulter, KJ Clarke-Davis, Lydia Costello, Jennifer Jones, Nathalia Lillehagen & Ella Mackinder
UK/Norway
Film-maker Katie Garrett and writer Ella Jane Chappell, both in the UK, teamed up with Norwegian choreographer Anna-Lise Marie Hearn to create this affecting dance film that won the Southbank Poetry Film Festival in 2014. From the film’s notes at Vimeo:
At the heart of Rolling Frames are a series of shifting voices and characters that inhabit three very different relationships. These relationships are linked by the role that dependency plays in each. To some extent, every relationship involves a yielding of independence. The poem dissects this manner of yielding: the manifestation of greed in desire, the vulnerability in love, the loneliness in lust. The physicality and inner rhythms of the words are translated once over by the expressive movements of dance, and once again through the gaze of the camera’s eyes.
*
BECAUSE GODDESS IS NEVER ENOUGH
Film-maker: Jane Glennie
Writer: Rosie Garland
Voice: Rosie Garland & Alison Glennie
Dancer: Natasha Jervis
UK
This film about a dancer draws inspiration from the life of Austrian-born Tilly Losch (1903-1975), also a choreographer, actor and painter. It is a collaboration between film-maker Jane Glennie and writer/performer Rosie Garland, both award-winning artists in the UK. The subject is the representation of women artists in history, especially the ways their stories have been footnoted in relation to famous men. Jane Glennie animates thousands of her photographs in a rapid stream, meticulously layered with contrasting rhythms that underscore voice and text. Rosie Garland’s expressive narration of her own poem is highly effective, alternating with that of Alison Glennie, equally as affecting in the sections that evoke Losch speaking for herself. Jane Glennie writes about the process of making the film here.
*
HUMAN CONDITION
Film-maker: Mark Wilkinson
Writer and Performer: Rich Ferguson
Singer: Stella Ademiluyi
USA
Compared to most poetry videos, Human Condition is an action-packed blockbuster. It was written and performed by Rich Ferguson, the beat poet laureate of California 2020-2022. For this satirical, sometimes scathing, yet ultimately uplifting musical, he teamed up with director Mark Wilkinson and an ensemble of performers and musicians, including singer Stella Ademiluyi and James Morrison from the cast of Twin Peaks. The text of the poem is posted at YouTube in the video notes.
The Cosmic Sea of Video Poetry: A Top Ten List
The world of video poetry is a cosmic sea where seeds of poems grow in a vast fluid of cinematic possibilities. You can meet enthusiastic amateur art projects where an amazing poem is the real protagonist. You can experience works by professional directors or amazing narrators, an attractive deep voice to guide you into the mind of a world known poet or to see for first time images blossom from an unknown poem. You can be touched and even cry watching heroes of a poem come alive on the screen or be overwhelmed with awe watching a dance performance or animation inspired by poetry. The creative collaborations among directors, poets and musicians around the world establish a new art genre, video poetry, as a new way to experience poetry today.
I don’t know from where to start. From the beginning or from the end. From the past or from the present. I will choose to take a trip from future to past. I will base my top ten list in the outstanding and awarded films that captured our souls in the ten last years of the International Video Poetry Festival and I will end up with some glamsy memories from the international digital platform http://filmpoetry.org – both projects organized and curated by the Institute for Experimental Arts.
Let’s start!
THEY PROMISED US A FUTURE (Mexico)
Director & Poet: Laura R. Tolentino
An amazing experimental film poem. Laura R. Tolentino created a very strong performance video poem that brings together technology, psychedelic intimate visions and ceremonial community futuristic lifestyles. The video offers strong comments about the social and environmental issues of our era with unique, extraordinary way. Premiered and awarded at the 10th International Video Poetry Festival in Athens.
HEBEERIN (Russia)
Director & Poet: Inga Shepeleva
Hebeerin or The Bear Festival is an art project inspired by the world of spirits from the mythology of the Yakut people. It is a fragile celebration on the remains of a slain animal. An extraordinary atmosphere worships the forces of nature. Watching the film poem we understand that we are small, we are all children inside the palm of the universe.
Inga Shepeleva was born and raised in an academic town near Yakutsk, the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in a family of scientists who have dedicated their lives to studying permafrost. In 2017, she produced her first cycle of videos based on her poetry work called Hebeerin, dedicated to Yakut mythology. The video art cycle received awards and nominations at Russian and European video poetry and experimental film festivals, such as the video poetry festival Fifth Leg (Saint-Petersburg), The International Video Poetry Festival (Athens) and International Experimental Film Festival Zebra (Berlin).
CHAMADA GERAL (Portugal)
Director: Manuel Vilarinho
Poet: Mário-Henrique Leiria (1923–1980)
Mário-Henrique Leiria was a Portuguese surrealist poet. Born in Lisbon, he studied at the Escola de Belas Artes. He and his fellow surrealists were involved in an absurdist plot to overthrow the dictatorship of Antonio Salazar. The performance in this video poem is very strong. It fits perfectly with the thematic of the poem.
THE LIFE WE LIVE IS NOT LIFE ITSELF (Australia / Greece)
Director: Ian Gibbins
Poetry: Tasos Sagris
Music: Whodoes
A production of the Institute for Experimental Arts, this video is a collaboration of the Greek spoken word / multi media duet Tasos Sagris & Whodoes with the Australian experimental director Ian Gibbins. Tasos Sagris’s poem, with its haunting soundtrack by Whodoes, offers us an extended exploration of lives lived in parallel worlds, at cross-purposes, in and out of love, around the world. The video, awarded and presented in more than 45 festivals around the world, invite us to observe deep inside us for a real reason to live today. But what is the reality? What is mere illusion? Can there be more to life than simply living?
WHITMAN ILLUSTRATED: Song of Myself (USA)
Director: Allen Crawford
Poetry: Walt Witman
Illustrator Allen Crawford has turned Whitman’s poem Song of Myself into a sprawling, 256-page work of art. The densely-handwritten text and illustrations intermingle in a way that’s both surprising and wholly in tune with the spirit of the poem—exuberant, rough, and wild. “Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself” is a sensational reading experience, an artifact in its own right, and a masterful tribute to the Good Gray Poet.
IF I GO OUT WALKING WITH MY DEAD FRIENDS (Germany / Greece)
Directors: Aleksandra Corovic and Alkistis Kafetzi
Poet: Ritta Boumi-Pappa
The poem If I go out walking with my dead friends belongs to the book A Thousand Murdered Girls which was published in 1964 by the communist poet Ritta Boumi-Pappa . The book consists of 65 poems, each named after a woman who was sentenced to death for participating in the Greek Resistance against the Nazis. The film, produced by the Institute for Experimental Arts, is a humble memorial for the female heroines mentioned in Papa’s verses but also for today’s freedom fighters. It rings the bell in the consciences of people, pointing out the risk of suppression of freedom within a decaying social system. The past and the present are connected through a visualized dramaturgy of associative patterns. The human body becomes a canvas on which mankind paints its struggles and battles. Its reality is caught in confrontation between projected values and societal demands. How do society’s proceedings reflect on the individual experience?
iRONY (Australia)
Director: Radheya Jegatheva
An Oscar qualified and AACTA nominated filmmaker based in Perth, Australia and born in Johor, Malaysia to parents of South Korean, Japanese, Indian and Malaysian ancestry, the poet and filmmaker Radheya Jegatheva inspects a wide range of elements through a critical lens and bring awareness to terrible issues such as cyberbullying and teen suicide. The animated video poem causes discussion or at least contemplation about these issues in a creative way, and make people reconsider the overconsumption of social media or the ways in which it can be harmful.
MULTISPECIES OFFLINE (UK)
Director: mmmmmfilms
mmmmmfilms is a collaboration between Adrian Fisher, Luna Montenegro and Gines Olivares. Since 2003 they have been making art films that show in festivals, biennials and galleries in Europe and Latin America. The Multispecies Offline is an intelligent video poetry that combines performance and spoken word and cinematic video poetry. Exploring different modalities of social media, theatre, film noir, photography and overlay ‘multispecies offline’ is a film that considers our relations with the human and the non-human.
THE HUMAN CHILD (Ukraine)
Director: Lika Nadir
Our life balances between internal freedom and belonging to others. The inner measure of truth never lies, like the human body. Try to live your life so as to penetrate through it the truth for those who will come to this world after you. Lika Nadir was born in the Crimea. At the age of 14, she began writing: short scripts and stories. An art historian by training. In 2019 she got accepted to the Moscow School of New Cinema (workshop of Dmitry Mamulia). In her works Lika raises social themes, and also seeks the aesthetics of naturalness and realistic existence of actors. Notable works: video for La Priest, collaboration with L’Officiel Russia.
I DON’T OWN ANXIETY (Australia)
Filmmaker: Marie Craven
Poetry: Kelli Russell Agodon
A film poem that is outstanding in content and form, in lyrics and photography, in atmosphere and meaning. The poem is strong and the voice over grabs your attention from the first moment.
