Search Results for: What is LIfe
Qué se ama cuando se ama (What do we love when we love) by Gonzalo Rojas
http://vimeo.com/1871573
“A tribute to the poet and to love,” says Cristián Tàpies, the maker of this widely screened photomotion film. English subtitles are the work of Pedro Donoso. Gonzalo Rojas was a major Chilean poet who lived much of his life in exile, and died this past April.
In Extremis by Marly Youmans
Marly Youmans reads another poem from The Throne of Psyche, out earlier this year from Mercer University Press. Film and music once again are by Paul Digby. In her description at YouTube, Marly writes:
This poem is about a visionary experience that flooded in during a harrowing passage in my life. The timing was a bit difficult; I had given birth to a third child and then immediately moved to South Carolina. Not long after we arrived, our eldest, a little boy of 8, was struck with meningitis. The short blank verse poem begins at a point where he had been immobile for a week: still and unresponsive, and was about to be moved from St. Francis Children’s Hospital to a larger hospital with an Infectious Diseases specialist.
Free stock footage on Vimeo
Thanks once again to Nic S. for one of the latest additions to our growing list of resources for videopoem makers: a Vimeo group dedicated to sharing free HD stock footage. It’s the work of Phil Fried from Austria, and imposes only the condition that users not sell or redistribute the clips elsewhere. There are currently 149 videos in the group. It’s particularly good for nature imagery: flowers, sunsets, the beach, and animals.
Another user on Vimeo (found via the links in the aforementioned group) goes by the handle Free Stock Footage, and has so far uploaded 85 videos “free to use in non-commercial projects” (though donations are appreciated). The videographer appears to be a resident of Alberta, Canada, and includes some great sky, water and landscape footage, a few wildlife videos, and some random CGI stuff.
“Bound is a Boatless Woman”: tribute to Látra-Björg
Neither a filmpoem nor a bio pic in the conventional sense, this six-minute film by Lisa Castagner, an artist from Northern Ireland, invokes the life and spirit of a fierce, 18th-century Icelandic poet I’d not previously heard about. Google Translate isn’t much help in deciphering the Icelandic Wikipedia page, except to impart the information that her given name was Björg Einarsdóttir, and “Látra-Björg” means something like “Trees, Boulders.” Fortunately, Castager’s description at Vimeo is a bit more helpful:
The title originates from a Viking proverb ‘Bundinn er bátlaus maðu’, meaning ‘Bound is a boatless man’. Likewise, a woman without a boat is a prisoner.
Látra-Björg was an 18th Century outcast fisherwoman who wrote poems believed to cast spells on those who crossed her. Fisherwomen were required to wear their skirts regardless of practicality, so they often defied the law and removed them at sea. Látra-Björg lived and died a beggar in an isolated northern fjord of Iceland during the ‘Mist Famine’ which forced many to emigrate to Canada.
I made the piece as an imaginative interpretation of Látra-Björg’s poetry and story while I stayed in that part of Iceland; her most well-known poem is ‘Fagurt er i Fjörðum’ (‘Tis fair in the fjords), a verse describing the beauty of the fjords when the weather is fair, until the extreme hardships of the winter, ‘when man and beast must die’.
Physicist (Физик) by Sergei Timofeyev
Diana Palijchuk and Artur Punte added English subtitles to this Russian-language videopoem from Latvia, part of the Orbita 4 collection, which won the Latvian Poetry Prize in 2005, according to the website for the Orbit multimedia poetry collective and the invaluable services of Google Translate, which rendered this bio for the poet, Sergei Timofeyev:
Born in Riga in 1970.
Poet, author of five books of poetry (three of them were published in Riga and two in Moscow and St. Petersburg). He participated in many poetry festivals – in the UK, Holland, Sweden, Ukraine, Germany, Slovenia, Georgia, etc. Translated into the languages of those countries. In 1999 he became one of the organizers of a multimedia poetry project “Orbit”.
One of the first post-Soviet area began to develop the genre of poetry video (the first work – “Orchestra Rehearsal” was filmed and assembled together with director Victor Vilks in 1995). Other poetry video (in the poem “Light”) was involved in the finale of the festival poetic video “Zebra” in Berlin in 2001.
In 2003 he joined the short list of Russia’s Andrei Bely Prize. Along with the rest of the project “Orbit” was in 2005, the Latvian Poetry Prize for audio-video collection “Orbit 4.”
Continuing the theme of multi-media experiments with poetry, in 2007, has pioneered the development of the computer game “I am – Text”, and in 2008 and 2009, together with Arthur Punte realized poetic installation “Room-time” and “Energy Independence Poetry” at the Annual Forum of Contemporary Culture “Balta Nakts”.
Wrote some lyrics for songs by the band “OgneOpasnoOrkestr“, Brainstorm and Intars Busulis. His poems were published in a number of Latvian, Russian and international anthologies: “Dzejas Diena”, “Freed Ulysses,” “Nine measurements”, “This Same Sky (80 poets from 30 countries)”, “A Fine Line: New Poetry from Eastern & Central Europe”, “La Nuova Poesia Russia”, “Hotel Parnasus”, “Ord och spår (Words and Steps)”, etc. A short prose published in German in the book “Sprache Im Tehnischen Zeitalter”.
The most complete collection of texts written before 2005, is available here.
Sergey also oversees the poetic program “North-South” during the annual Days of Latvian poetry.
Thanks to Artur Punte for emailing and alerting me to what sounds like a thriving videopoetry and multimedia community in Latvia. This September they will hold their fourth Word in Motion event in Riga. Here’s some more background on the group, from a document Artur attached to his email:
Orbit (rus. Orbita) is a creative collective of Russian poets and artists whose works are dedicated to dialogue between various creative genres (music, video, etc.) and cultures. The collective came into being in Riga, the Latvian capital, in 1999. Since that time Orbit has published a number of eponymously titled almanacs in which literary works appear side by side with works of visual art (photography, graphic work, painting). Additionally, Orbit has organized three “Word in Motion” festivals of poetic video and multi-media art in Latvia (in 2001, 2003 and 2007); issued three audio compact discs and a collection of poetic video clips on VHS (2001) and DVD (2005); created several multi-media poetry installations for public exhibition; produced a number of bilingual (Russian-Latvian poetic publications; issued an anthology of contemporary Russian poetry in Latvia—at one and the same time a unique study of this phenomenon; and published a number of other works.
Orbit actively participates in Latvian and international cultural life. Members of the group have been published in many European countries and are frequently invited to European literary and artistic festivals—including, for instance: the International Moscow Poetry Biennial, the Berlin Poetry Festival, the Gothenburg Book Fair, the ARS Festival in Bratislava, the White Nights in Madrid, TARP in Vilnius, the Book World Festival in Prague, and many others. In Latvia Orbit’s achievements have been recognized with the Annual Literary Prize of the Union of Latvian Writers in 2005, the Annual Prize for the best photography album in 2006 and for the best photography exhibit in 2007, as well as a number of prizes for book design and various other literary and artistic awards. Since its founding Orbit appears in literary and multimedia performances in conjunction with invited musicians and video-artists.
The site www.orbita.lv (in Russian) provides an introduction to the works of the group.
On Edward Hopper’s Automat by H.K. Hummel
A poem from H.K. Hummel’s online chapbook Handmade Boats, read by Nic S., gets the Swoon Bildos treatment (with additional camera work by David Michaud and Jason Kempnich).
Making a film for a poem about a painting represents a unique challenge for videopoets, I think. How to reference the mood or spirit of the original visual inspiration without resorting to out-right (and probably hopeless) imitation? In his Dutch-language blog, Swoon described his approach as follows (according to Google Translate):
Departed from night lights gliding images of cars and urban night life as background, I tried to tell the story of what (who) you do not see in the picture.
Is she really alone? Who sees it? She knows that people look at her?
What can happen after all the poem. After the painting.
Viva Zombatista by Simen Hagerup
Norwegian writer Simen Hagerup‘s poem is brought to life by Kristian Pedersen of Gasspedal Animert. (You might have to expand it to full-screen to read the English subtitles.)
the wanderer’s blessing by Nic S.
This new Moving Poems production features a poem and reading by Nic S. from her collection Forever Will End on Thursday. She blogged her reaction to the video here. “The wanderer’s blessing” originally appeared in the online journal Escape Into Life.
For more about Nic, including links to a number of her poems online, see the bio page at her blog.
Making of Poetic Encounters
http://www.vimeo.com/23365539
This brief documentary on the making of the three poetry films to emerge from the 2010 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival workshop (see the previous three posts here to watch videos of the films) is a must-watch for anyone interested in ekphrastic collaboration. I was particularly impressed by poet Monika Rinck’s remarks on the life of a poem beyond the page, and her interest in avoiding the sort of filmmaker who might over-interpret a poem:
I like poems and I think also movies about poems to guard a certain openness. I don’t want to have the pictures in the poem locked, as if it couldn’t be otherwise, as if the pictures of the movie override everything which was open before.
I also liked her collaborator Avi Dabach’s admission that he is better able to connect with poems that he doesn’t fully understand, implying that the making of a poetry film is a kind of close reading or exercise in hermaneutics.
