Ungleiche Brüder / Unequal Brothers by Gerhard Rühm
This short piece by Austrian filmmaker Hubert Sielecki for a poem by Gerhard Rühm was cited by videopoetry pioneer and theorist Tom Konyves as an example of a good sound text videopoem, in a new, lengthy comment at the Moving Poems forum. (This was in response to a Russian translator of his “Brief summary of videopoetry” requesting examples of each of the five types he identifies in the piece.)
History of a future by Renee Reynolds
This was the grand prize winner of the 2012 Shanghai Tunnels Project International Video Festival. According to the festival page on the Unshod Quills website,
Renee Reynolds is a freelance writer from Chicago living and working in Shanghai since 2007. Olivier Wyart is a freelance designer from Paris living and working in Shanghai since 2009. The poem was compiled over the course of five years in China by an American expatriate scribbling in the subways of Shanghai. The video ventures to visually straddle the mishmash of East, West, history and future colliding in the text.
Landays: Pashtun women’s poetry from Afghanistan
Produced by the Poetry Foundation to accompany the June issue of Poetry magazine, which was entirely devoted to the two-line Afghani poems known as landays. Seamus Murphy‘s film includes lots of stunning shots, and displays familiarity with the filmpoem genre in its imaginative conjunctions of text and image. Murphy has been taking still photographs in Afghanistan since 1994, and some of them accompany his fellow journalist Eliza Griswold‘s essay on, and compilation of, landays for the magazine. One thing the film contributes to the issue is the sound of the Pashto originals, which aren’t otherwise included in the online feature.
A story from PBS NewsHour provides additional background about the project:
A Westray Prayer by John Glenday
A Westray Prayer by C.J. Hurst
http://vimeo.com/69640126
Filmpoem 32/A Westray Prayer by Alastair Cook
A Westray Prayer by Marc Neys (aka Swoon)
(See Marc’s blog for some process notes.)
One of the highlights of the Filmpoem Festival earlier this month in Dunbar, Scotland, was a screening of five films by five different filmmakers for this same poem, all of them employing the same reading by the author, which they were not allowed to cut up. This meant that each of the filmmakers had to decide how to fill the silence before and after the short text. John Glenday himself attended the screening, reading and introducing his poem, which, he pointed out, is partly about silence. “When we’re silent, we’re letting the world in,” he said, adding: “Silence gets all the best phrases.”
The other two filmmakers who contributed work for the screening, Ian Henderson and James Norton, don’t appear to have uploaded their films to the web, though Norton has shared his audio track at SoundCloud:
https://soundcloud.com/james-w-norton/a-westray-prayer
Ozymandius by Percy Bysshe Shelley (Breaking Bad trailer)
If this video has not been made available in your country, try one of the unofficial YouTube uploads: here or here.
American cable TV channel AMC has created what I think must be the first videopoem ever made as a trailer for a television show, the award-winning crime drama Breaking Bad. In another first, the video garnered a feature in the NY Daily News:
Did “Breaking Bad” just drop a literary spoiler about its upcoming season?
On Tuesday, AMC released a chilling new teaser for the long-anticipated final episodes of the series. The clip shows no characters, no plot and no obvious hints. In fact, the video is only scenery shots of the New Mexico desert, interspersed with a few glimpses of White’s home and abandoned meth-cooking trailer and one peek at what looks like White’s hat, lost in the sand.
The real hint is the soundtrack: Bryan Cranston, who plays meth kingpin [Walter] White, reading aloud Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sonnet “Ozymandias” over a steady, heartbeat-like thump.
“Ozymandias,” supposedly inspired by the Egyptian statue of Ramesses II, is a particularly appropriate choice for the series. The central theme of the poem is the inevitable decline of empires.
“Nothing beside remains,” Shelley wrote. “Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare/ the lone and level sands stretch far away.”
“Breaking Bad” has always had a bit of a literary bent. Last season, White’s brother-in-law had an important revelation while perusing Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.” Will all that White created crumble into decay? Viewers will have to wait until Aug. 11, when the series returns, to find out.
This is, in my view, a highly credible videopoem on its own, and I’m pleased to see that the two official versions on YouTube (one with AMC branding and one without) have so far garnered just shy of 700,000 views. No filmmaker is credited, but I’m assuming that the show’s creator Vince Gilligan had a great deal to do with it, so I’ll put him down as filmmaker until better information comes along.
The 2nd annual International Film Poetry Festival will take place in Athens in November 2013
The +Institute [for Experimental Arts] and Void Network organize the International Film Poetry Festival that will take place in Athens in November 2013.
The yearly International Film Poetry Festival will be held for a second time in Greece. Approximately 1000 people attended the festival in 2012.
There will be two different zones of the festival. The first zone will include video poetry shows by artists from all over the world (America, Asia, Europe, Africa). The second zone will include cross-platform collaborations of sound producers and music groups with poets and visual artists in live improvisations.
It is very important to notice that this festival is a part of the counter-culture activities of Void Network and +the Institute [for Experimental Arts] and will be non-sponsored, free entrance, non-commercial and non-profit event. The festival will cover the costs (2000 posters, 15.000 flyers, high quality technical equipment, etc.) from the incomes of the bar of the festival.
All the participating artists and the organizing groups will participate voluntary to the festival.
We would like to inform you that The International Film Poetry Festival is under negotiations for the production of the festival and the presentation of the same video poetry programme in other countries, among them in India, in Switzerland, in Brasil and in U.S.A. After the end of the negotiations, the participators will be informed for several other international presentations.
Void Network started organizing multi-media poetry nights in 1990. Void Network and +the Institute [for Experimental Arts] believe that multi media Poetry Nights and Video Poetry shows can vibrate the heart of Metropolis, bring new audiences in contact with contemporary poetry and open new creative dimensions for this ancient art. To achieve this, we respect the aspirations and the objectives of the artists, create high quality self organized exhibition areas and show rooms, we work with professional technicians and we offer to the artists and the people meeting points that can stand antagonistically to the mainstream culture.
See photos of the International Film Poetry Festival 2012.
You can look here for some photos of previous poetry nights organized by Void Network and +the Institute [for Experimental Arts]:
voidnetwork.blogspot.gr/2007/12/void-history-words-environment.html
voidnetwork.blogspot.gr/2011/06/insurrectionary-poetry-poetry-night-in.html
voidnetwork.blogspot.gr/2007/12/words-environments-multi-media-poetry.html
For more photos from Void Network art, events and actions: flickr.com/photos/voidnetwork
We look forward to your participation. For more info in Greek and English language, and an APPLICATION FORM, visit: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8wa5RElmHB8Z0VZblE0NXlMSTQ/edit?usp=sharing
La Casina Rossa / The Red House by Michaël Vandebril
A film by Dutch photographer and filmmaker Judith Dekker with words by Belgian poet Michaël Vandebril. The English translation for this version of the film is by Will Stone; there’s also a version without any text in the soundtrack at all, which Vandebril uses for live performances. The poem appears in his book Het Vertrek van Maeterlinck.
This was Dekker’s very first filmpoem, and it won the 2013 Filmpoem Festival Prize in Dunbar, Scotland.
Casina Rossa is the name of the house in Rome where John Keats died.
The Pioneer Wife Speaks in Tongues by Donna Vorreyer
Swoon‘s latest film features Donna Vorreyer reading a poem from her new collection The Imagined Life of the Pioneer Wife. The footage is from a public-domain documentary. As Swoon says in a blog post:
Sometimes I collect images, keep them with me until the right poem comes along.
The same with certain tracks I create.
‘And So They Live’ (John Ferno, Julian Roffman, 1940) is a piece of archive showing poorly educated “mountain peoples” living in poverty and stricken with disease, it’s a public-domain documentary about life in the Appalachian mountains with some great looking shots but a typical and very patronizing narration.
I used some parts before more than a year ago in ‘Odds and Ends’. The images stayed on my ‘shelf’ since then…In came Donna Vorreyer. We worked together before and I think she’s a very fine poet.
Donna has got a new collection out: ‘The Imagined Life of the Pioneer Wife’ (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2013)
Almost every poem in that collection could have been used for this videopoem. Not because they’re all the same. Because they’re all so good![…]
There was one sequence in the film I really loved. Can’t explain why, but the feet in the snow worked on a whole other level. When I placed that sequence on the basis, the rest came naturally.
