~ Visible Verse ~
2013 Visible Verse Festival programme announced
The 2013 VISIBLE VERSE FESTIVAL programme has been announced at the Cinematheque’s website:
Visible Verse, The Cinematheque’s annual festival of video poetry, is back! Vancouver poet, author, musician, and media artist Heather Haley curates and hosts our celebration of this hybrid creative form, which integrates verse with media-art visuals produced by a camera or a computer. The 2013 festival will be selected from more than 150 entries received from artists around the world. As well, we are happy to host Colorado poet and filmmaker R.W. Perkins, who will give an artist’s talk on video poetry and filmmaking.
Video poetry and poetry film festivals and sites continue to pop up all over the world; The Cinematheque’s Visible Verse Festival is proud to maintain its position as North America’s sustaining venue for artistically significant video poetry. As founder of both the original Vancouver Videopoem Festival and Visible Verse, Heather Haley has provided a platform for the genre since 1999, and has also vigorously contributed to the theoretical knowledge of the form. Ms. Haley was honoured for her work with a 2012 Pandora’s Literary Award.
Click through for the full listing of film notes and showtimes. In a post at her blog One Life, Haley goes into a bit more detail about the selection process and the special artist’s talk:
As with last year, we received a record number of entries, over 200. … We received stellar works from South Africa, Thailand, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, Canada, the U.S, Ireland and the UK. With only one night of screenings, I am unable to include a lot of video poems I like.
Fortunately the program does include Literary Movement, a discussion with R.W. Perkins on the process of creating videopoems and the integration of modern filmmaking techniques, Q&A to follow. We will be screening his videopems Morning Sex & Blueberry Pancakes and Small Talk & Little Else. R.W. Perkins is a poet and filmmaker from Fort Collins, Colorado. His work has been published in the Atticus Review, Moving Poems, The Denver Egotist, The Connotation Press, and The Huffington Post Denver. Perkins’s work has been featured at film festivals all over the world, including an 18-state U.S. tour with the New Belgium Brewery’s Clips of Faith Beer & Film Tour in 2012 and at the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin, Germany. Perkins is also the creator and director of The Body Electric Poetry Film Festival, Colorado’s first poetry film festival, which held its inaugural event in May of this year. For more information on Perkins and his work, visit www.rw-perkins.com. We’re thrilled to have him!
The festival is Sat, Oct. 12 at the Cinematheque in Vancouver. My son has promised to edit a trailer for me, I’ll post it asap. *See* you there!
VISIBLE VERSE FESTIVAL 2013 Call for Entries and Official Guidelines
- VVF seeks videopoems with a 12 minutes maximum duration.
- Works will be judged by their innovation, cohesion and literary merit. The ideal videopoem is a wedding of word and image, the voice seen as well as heard.
- Please do not send documentaries as they are outside the featured genre.
- Either official language of Canada is acceptable, though if the video is in French, an English-dubbed or-subtitled version is required. Videopoems may originate in any part of the world.
- Please submit by sending the URL for your videopoem along with a brief bio, full name, and contact information to Artistic Director Heather Haley at hshaley@emspace.com. There is no official application form nor entry fee.
VISIBLE VERSE FESTIVAL Oct. 2013 DEADLINE: Aug. 1, 2013
Upcoming poetry film festival deadlines
2013 may be an off-year for ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival, but that doesn’t stop them from promoting other people’s festivals on their Facebook page. A recent posting listed all the upcoming deadlines for submission — something we should do here more often, as well:
- FilmPoem Festival in Dunbar, Scotland
DEADLINE: July 1, 2013 - DOCtorCLIP Roma Poetry Film Festival
DEADLINE: July 30, 2013 - Liberated Words Poetry Film Festival in Bristol, UK
DEADLINE: July 30, 2013 - Visible Verse Festival in Vancouver, BC
DEADLINE: August 1, 2013 - Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition 2013 in Cork, Ireland
DEADLINE: September 15, 2013
The first of these, you may recall, I have some connection to as one of the directors, and I will be attending the festival in August. More about that at a later date. For now, I just want to stress that filmmakers should read the guidelines carefully. Unlike many other festivals, we only consider submissions sent via post: on a DVD, CD or memory stick, and only in .mov or .m4v form. Alastair Cook says: “We’re receiving some great poetry-film from all corners of the world. And we are so pleased to be able to screen it! Now organising the events and workshops for the festival, so pleased to have such an amazing historic venue in such a beautiful town.”
For a more comprehensive list of regular and recent poetry film festivals, see the Moving Poems Links page.
Poetry film festivals: upcoming deadlines and more
First, a reminder that at least FIVE festivals devoted to poetry films are currently open for submission: Trevigliopoesia Festival (deadline: March 1), The Body Electric Poetry Film Festival (deadline: March 21), Filmpoem Festival (deadline: May 1), DOCtorCLIP Roma Poetry Film Festival (deadline: May 15) and Visible Verse Festival (deadline: August 1).
In addition, for those who missed the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin last fall, there will be a reprise showing of some of the best films at the Kosmopolis International Literature Fest, March 14-16 in Barcelona. The blog post announcing this includes a good thumbnail history of ZEBRA and of poetry-film generally. Here’s a snippet:
In the early 20th century poets were as much inspired by the cinema as filmmakers by poetry. The first film adaptation of the poem ‘Twas the Night before Christmas’ (1822) by Clement Clark Moore was made in 1905 in the studios of Thomas Alva Edison. Another very early testimony to the influence of poetry on the great directors is the film The Unchanging Sea (1910) by D. W. Griffith after the poem of the same title by Charles Kingsley. Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, with their futuristic adaptation of Walt Whitman’s city melancholia in their film Manhatta (1921), set standards which still apply today. L’invitation au voyage (F 1927) by Germaine Dulac is a timeless interpretation of Charles Baudelaire’s ‘Les Fleurs du Mal’ or Combat de Boxe (B 1927) by Charles Dekeukeleire after a poem by Paul Werrie. In L’Etoile de Mer (F 1928) by Man Ray lines from Robert Desnos’ 1928 poem »La place de l’etoile« are faded in on boards. And of course Un chien andalou (1929) by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí with its poetic system. These are only some examples of the early poetry adaptations.
The constantly rising number of entries demonstrates the growing worldwide popularity of the genre and the necessity of this festival. Of all the programmes organised by the Literaturwerkstatt Berlin, the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival is the most-booked, receiving invitations from throughout the world. It is regularly invited to take part in festivals from Buenos Aires to Taipei. In 2010–2012 alone it has been a guest in many countries including Algeria, Dubai, Morocco, Portugal, Spain, Lithuania, Malta, India, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Colombia, Ireland, Norway and Ukraine.
It’s definitely an exciting time for directors and fans of videopoetry/filmpoetry. Needless to say, there are a myriad other film festivals held annually around the world, and many if not most may be open to submissions of at least some types of poetry films.
VISIBLE VERSE FESTIVAL 2013 Call for Entries and Official Guidelines
- VVF seeks videopoems with a 12 minutes maximum duration.
- Works will be judged by their innovation, cohesion and literary merit. The ideal videopoem is a wedding of word and image, the voice seen as well as heard.
- Please do not send documentaries as they are outside the featured genre.
- Either official language of Canada is acceptable, though if the video is in French, an English-dubbed or-subtitled version is required. Videopoems may originate in any part of the world.
- Please submit by sending the URL for your videopoem along with a brief bio, full name, and contact information to Artistic Director Heather Haley at hshaley@emspace.com. There is no official application form nor entry fee.
VISIBLE VERSE FESTIVAL Oct. 2013, Vancouver, BC
DEADLINE: Aug. 1, 2013
See the website for more, including a postmortem on Visible Verse 2012. To view more videopoems by various artists, visit Visible Verse on Facebook.
Visible Verse Festival organizer posts detailed “post-mortem”
Heather Haley, indefatigable organizer of Vancouver’s Visible Verse Festival, has just blogged a detailed account of this year’s festival, complete with descriptions of, and links to, each poetry film in the lineup.
“The best year yet!” is what I was told repeatedly. Good turnout, a bit of press coverage, and wonderful new staff to work with, the festival is definitely entering a new phase. Changing the date from November to October, immediately following the Vancouver International Film Festival helped raise our profile, and get more bums in the seats.
New reviews of recent poetry film festivals
Shannon Raye at reviewVancouver shared some impressions of the Visible Verse Festival of Video Poetry, which was held on October 13 in Vancouver, British Columbia.
I have attended the last five years of the video poem festival, and this was my favorite year because of the diversity and quality of the work presented. Curator Heather Haley did a remarkable job bringing a full roster of culturally and artistically diverse video poems to the festival, which made for a fun and eclectic evening. Videos ranged from quirky anime and sci-fi fantasy to beautifully filmed short films with a narrative structure. I enjoyed the way the 38 video poems were presented, with funnier work following sentimental pieces, and experimental images following work that had more of a short-film feel.
One of the highlights for me was the number of international video poems. This year had a very global feel, with many European countries represented. In addition, there was a sizable selection of video poems exchanged from Argentina’s Video Bardo Festival.
Erica Goss travelled to Berlin for the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival held October 18-21, and this month in her Third Form column at Connotation Press offers the first of a two-part review of the event.
Watching poetry films as part of an audience is a new experience for me. Before the festival, I had only watched them at home on my computer, and usually alone. Sitting with other people in a dark theater while a series of intense, image-rich films rolled by on the big screen allowed me to examine them critically; for every film, I asked myself these questions: was it interesting? Did it create an alternative world? Was there a social, cultural, emotional, or intellectual message? Did the video enhance or detract from the poem? Was I startled, amazed, frightened or bored?
Vancouver’s Visible Verse Festival goes global!
Reposted from the Visible Verse Facebook page
We have lots of exciting changes in store for this year’s Visible Verse Festival! The date has been moved from November to Saturday, October 13, directly following the Vancouver International Film Festival and the program, still in the works, will include entries from 56 international artists and 100 videopoems from Australia, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Norway, Portugal, Poland, Russia, the U.S. and Canada. And for the first time, we are exchanging videopoems with Argentina’s VideoBardo Festival and featuring a selection from their 2012 program. As well, we are happy to host Alberta artist Phillip Jagger who will perform his poetry and present “Reigning In Chaos: Words Into Video”, a hands-on workshop demonstrating the use of handcrafted video, a Kaos pad, iPod and video jamming software.
With videopoetry and poetry film festivals and sites popping up all over the world, Vancouver and Pacific Cinematheque’s Visible Verse Festival maintains its position as North America’s sustaining venue for artistically significant videopoetry. As founder of the Vancouver Videopoem Festival and Visible Verse, curator and host Heather Haley has provided a venue for the genre since 1999 and vigorously contributed to the theoretical knowledge of the form. Haley is to be honored for her work with a Pandora Literary Award and has been invited to present a keynote address at the 4th VideoBardo Festival/Conference in Buenos Aires in November on the theme of “Videopoetry; New Perspectives on an Interdisciplinary Practice.”
New deadline for 2012 Visible Verse Festival: August 1
The deadline for Visible Verse Festival 2012 has been changed to Aug. 1. The festival will take place Saturday, Oct. 13 at Pacific Cinémathèque in Vancouver.
Please help spread the (visible) word!
VISIBLE VERSE FESTIVAL @ Pacific Cinémathèque in Vancouver, Canada
Call for Entries:
- VVF seeks videopoems with a 12 minutes maximum duration.
- Works will be judged by their innovation, cohesion and literary merit.
- The ideal videopoem is a wedding of word and image, the voice seen as well as heard.
- Please do not send documentaries as they are outside the featured genre.
- Either official language of Canada is acceptable, though if the video is in French, an English-dubbed or-subtitled version is required. Videopoems may originate in any part of the world.
- Please submit by sending the URL for your videopoem along with a brief bio, full name, and contact information to hshaley@emspace.com. There is no official application form nor entry fee.
DEADLINE: Aug. 1, 2012
For more information contact Artistic Director Heather Haley at: hshaley@emspace.com
Call for submissions: 2012 Visible Verse Festival
FYI, notice no more DVDs necessary for previews.
VISIBLE VERSE FESTIVAL @ Pacific Cinémathèque in Vancouver, Canada
Call for Entries and Official Guidelines
- VVF seeks videopoems with a 12 minutes maximum duration.
- Works will be judged by their innovation, cohesion and literary merit. The ideal videopoem is a wedding of word and image, the voice seen as well as heard.
- Please do not send documentaries as they are outside the featured genre.
- Either official language of Canada is acceptable, though if the video is in French, an English-dubbed or-subtitled version is required. Videopoems may originate in any part of the world.
- Please submit by sending the URL for your videopoem along with a brief bio, full name, and contact information to hshaley@emspace.com. There is no official application form nor entry fee.
DEADLINE: Sept. 1, 2012
For more information contact Artistic Director Heather Haley at: hshaley@emspace.com
Reposted from the Visible Verse group page on Facebook.
Program announced for Visible Verse videopoetry festival
Heather Haley has posted the program for the Visible Verse videopoetry festival, which will be in Vancouver, BC on Friday, Nov. 4 and Saturday, Nov. 5 at the Pacific Cinematheque. A few of the filmmakers’ names were familiar to me from curating Moving Poems (Swoon Bildos, Alastair Cook, Kathy McTavish), but the majority were not, which is exciting: it suggests that my online anthology, extensive as it is becoming, is really only the tip of the iceberg. Not only do I miss a lot of good stuff, but many people never upload their films to a video-sharing site, especially those who are more focused on getting into festivals.
This year’s festival will also include an artist talk/Q&A with Tom Konyves, focusing on his recent Videopoetry: A Manifesto, and a live reading by a vsisiting videopoet, Rich Ferguson.
Incidentally, the Facebook group page for the Visible Verse Festival, source of this information, is a good place to find links to new work, since anyone can join and post to it.
