Common Presence by René Char

In this film by Maxime Coton, Char’s text in English translation is presented on the screen in dialogue with the translator, Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody, who responds in the soundtrack — a novel approach to videopoetry that I haven’t seen before.

Lost at first in the crowd, a voice from the past emerges, in silence. A poem of René Char, poet and member of the resistance. Then another, younger, voice responds, filled with doubt and hope. By the glimmer of ephemeral points of light a conversation develops between these two voices, between master and disciple. Together, they evoke the necessity of creating, of rebellion, of transmission.

direction, editing, mixing : Maxime Coton
cinematography, color grading : Miléna Trivier
translation and english voice : Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody
music : Nico Muhly
credits : Stéphan Samyn

a BRUITS asbl production in coproduction with CPC asbl (Anouchka Dewarichet, Annick Ghijzelings)

Journey up the amazon by Martha McCollough

Martha McCollough says of her latest videopoem: “It’s about shopping. And death.”

This Is Just To Say by William Carlos Williams

http://vimeo.com/62503304

Nic S. blogged some process notes about the making of this video:

The reading had been up at Pizzicati of Hosanna for a while and is only 20 seconds long, so I knew I was looking for something very short in terms of video. There are still some wonderful Equiloud clips I haven’t used yet and it took me just a second of flipping through those to know that his gorgeous 28-second door-opening loop was exactly the kind of image/metaphor I was looking for, once I slowed the clip speed down by about half.

A Drinking Song by William Butler Yeats

Another of Othniel Smith’s videopoems made with free classic film footage from the Prelinger archives and free audio from Librivox. What makes this one work for me, oddly enough, is the lack of music juxtaposed with the dancing scene.

Animatopoeia by Khara Cloutier

Graphic artist Khara Cloutier calls this “a tongue-in-cheek look at semiotics, animal behavior and mimicry. Starring Atticus as ‘The Bird’.” I call it a videopoem.

On the Eve of Death (De cara a la muerte) by Ángel Guinda

Sándor M. Salas with the Seville-based Anandor Producciones made this videopoem using found footage, some footage of the poet, Ángel Guinda, in an acting role, and music by Anacinta Alonso. Subhro Bandopadhyay provided the translation for the English subtitles.

At Freeman’s Farm by Marilyn McCabe

An author-made videopoem by Marilyn McCabe which incorporates voices of war veterans and videography by Peter Verardi. There’s a long and fascinating essay on McCabe’s website about the making of this videopoem, her first. Here’s a more succinct description from an email she sent me:

I gave my poem to some local vets then interviewed them about whether it made them think of anything particular in their experience, and asked particularly about the landscapes of the wars they’d experienced. I then wove some of their words into the stanzas of my poem, and set them to images from the Saratoga National Battlefield park, and the French art song, which is about men who are leaving for the far horizon feeling held back by the souls in the cradles they leave behind.

And here’s a brief excerpt from her essay:

I think the most important thing I learned as an artist from this project is to let go and just wait and see, to try things out without fear. So I tried things and took one step at a time and things began to come together.

I began to learn that images too have rhythm, have silence; that speech – with its rhythms and stutters – is rich and complicated and that voices are a kind of text; landscape is a kind of text and has movement and emotion. That I could create a kind of lineation and space by manipulating the movement of sound and picture. In the end, the whole thing felt more like a creating dance than anything else.

One of the ways I dealt with time was in the movement from image to image. I felt a kind of rise in energy in the third stanza where they’re talking about ordnance and the mechanisms of war, so I used faster flashes, and used the rise of the music here.

Read the rest.

The Rose Thief (excerpt) by Michael Bagwell

A very professional, author-made poetry book trailer in the form of a videopoem. Bagwell is a graphic designer as well as a poet, and it shows. Here’s the description at Vimeo:

Constellations is an excerpt from the poem The Rose Thief, which is a part of the collaborative book Or Else They Are Trees with poetry by Michael Bagwell and artwork by Rebecca Miller. The book is new from El Aleph Press and is available for purchase at elalephpress.com.

Occasional China by Gaia Holmes

Jessica Symons writes:

This a film of a poem, Occasional China first published in ‘Lifting the piano with one hand’ by Gaia Holmes (Comma Press, 2013)

I am a member of Bokeh Yeah, a filmmakers club in Manchester. We got together with Comma Press, publishers of poetry, and chose Gaia’s poem about a recent bereavement.

One autumn day we gathered in a local cemetery to film Pete Ramsay walking among the graves trying to come to terms with the death of his mother. It is a poignant poem which reminds us of the fragility of life, as well as the fear of the loss that death brings.

114 & Lenox, 4AM by Molly Murphy

A Vimeo find. I don’t know anything more than this:

Director of Photography Jordan Chlapecka
Performed & Read by Molly Murphy

Shadows by Langston Hughes

I suppose this is technically a music video rather than a videopoem, but it strikes me as much closer to the latter genre to the former — save for the fact that the poem takes the form of a very beautiful art song.

Composed by Lior Rosner
Soprano: Janai Brugger
Directed and After Effects by Tal Rosner
DoP: Adam Woodhall
Dancers: Cameron McMillan, Fiona Merz

About the project:
One of America’s greatest poets, Langston Hughes was a social activist and early innovator of jazz poetry. Hughes distilled the experience of his generation of African Americans into poems that sang in his clear and unapologetic voice. In “In Time of Silver Rain: Seven Poems by Langston Hughes,” composer Lior Rosner uses his music to liberate Hughes’ words from the boundaries of historical context. Rosner’s modern settings challenge us to consider the contemporary relevance of Hughes’ frank and often searing meditations on the universal themes of oppression, loss, frustration and love. While the emotions captured in these songs are indeed timeless, beneath the undeniable modernity of Rosner’s music, there are subtle harmonic nods to the jazz that provided the sonic backdrop for the Harlem Renaissance.

Born to Die by Zaher Mousa

One poem, one cameraman, two films! Reel Festivals commissioned both Alastair Cook and Swoon (Marc Neys) to make films for a piece by the Iraqi poet Zaher Mousa, using footage shot in Iraq by American poet Ryan Van Winkle. Here’s how Alastair introduced his film (the first one above) on Vimeo:

Born to Die is a poem by Iraqi poet Zaher Mousa and is in his native Arabic. There are no subtitles, as I want you to hear to the emotion in this great poet’s voice. The English text of the poem is available on the Vimeo site if you click through. Born to Die was a commission from Reel Festivals and was shot in Iraq for Filmpoem by Ryan van Winkle. It is a pair with Swoon, with him making the English language counterpart translated by Lauren Pyott and read by Jen Hadfield; this is the second film we have paired, the first being Aan Het Water.

These films are part of a larger collaboration between Reel Festivals and Zaher Mousa. Check out Mousa’s essay, “Reel Festivals – Dialogue through Poetry.”