~ ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival ~
“Poetry & Film” feature at Lyrikline blog
Lyrikline.org, an international audiopoetry site, is celebrating World Poetry Day with a feature on Poetry & Film at their blog. Since their parent organization, Literaturwerkstatt Berlin, also sponsors the ZEBRA poetry film festival, they were in a good position to solicit statements from a number of practitioners of the art. Begin with their own statement:
Diverse as the entries might be, there’s one thing that all the good ones have in common: they succeed if one can experience in some way a clever and maybe even poetic relationship and correspondence between the words and images. When poetic principles and features, such as rhythm, tempo, meter, imagery, denseness, and tone unfold, poetry and film together can reach another level and merge into something unique.
Then read the statments by Paul Bogaert, Avi Dabach, Tom Konyves, J.P. Sipilä, and Uljana Wolf.
I particularly liked the statement by Wolf, a German poet and past member of the ZEBRA film jury, for its concision and gnomic quality:
Like a translation, and like poetry itself, or perhaps like prose poetry, or the prose poem—already we see the problem here—a poetry film exists in a between-space, a Zwischenraum. It can not be named. It can only be invented with each attempt; its inability to occupy a name or a space or a genre is what generates these attempts to create something that is true to its name. It will fail every time.
But I think the most interesting thing about the feature is the extent to which these diverse filmmakers agree about what makes a good videopoem or filmpoem. There’s far less disagreement among them than one might have supposed.
[meine heimat] by Ulrike Almut Sandig
The 2012 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival has introduced a new contest, inviting filmmakers to
make a film of the poem [meine heimat] by Ulrike Almut Sandig. The directors of the three best films will be invited to come to Berlin to meet the poet and have the opportunity of presenting their films and talking about them.
This is Swoon‘s entry. Ulrike Almut Sandig’s webpage is here, and there’s a bio in English at the online journal No Man’s Land.
Submissions are open for the 6th ZEBRA film festival
Poetry-filmmakers have until May 2 to submit works to be screened at the world’s premiere poetry film festival, held biannually in Berlin. The guidelines and entry forms are now online in English and German.
The ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival is calling for entries for the 6th competition to find the best poetry films! Entries should be short films based on poems. Prizes in the competition will be awarded to a total value of €10,000. From all films submitted, a Programme Commission will nominate the films for the competition and select the programme contributions. The winners will be selected by an international jury.
The prizes that will be awarded are:
– ZEBRA Prize for the Best Poetry Film, donated by the Literaturwerkstatt Berlin
– Goethe Film Prize, donated by the Goethe Institute
– Ritter Sport Film Prize, donated by Alfred Ritter GmbH & Co KG
– Audience Prize awarded by the radioeins juryThis year, for the first time, the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival will also be making awards for poetry films in the categories »Best First Film«, »Best Film for Tolerance« and »Best Poem Performance on Film«.
The festival is also for the first time inviting everyone to make a film based on the poem [meine heimat] ([my home]) by Ulrike Almut Sandig. The directors of the three best film versions will be invited to Berlin to meet the poet and have the opportunity to present and discuss their films. You can find the poem with audio and translations here.
ZEBRINO – the prize for the best film for children and young people: Children and young people award their own prize. The young viewers will be deciding on the winner of the ZEBRINO, the best poetry film for eight-to-twelve-year-olds.
Closing date for entries for all competitions is 2 May 2012.
All films that are submitted will automatically be entered for all selection procedures!
The 6th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival will be held from 18 to 21 October 2012 in the Babylon Cinema in Berlin.
tour de trance by Monika Rinck
Argentinian-born artist and composer Mario Verandi directed and wrote the music for this “audiovisual composition,” as he calls it, which appears to have benefitted from a very active collaboration with the poet: that’s Monika Rinck’s face in the film and her voice reciting the German text. I was also interested by the fully bilingual nature of the compostion, the German in the soundtrack alternating with English in a different voice (that of Douglas Hendenson). The film premiered at the 2008 ZEBRA International Poetry Film Festival in Berlin.
For more on poet, essayist and actress Monika Rinck, including English translations of some of her poems, see her page at Poetry International Web.
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.
Die unsichtbare Hand (The Invisible Hand) by Daniel Falb
http://www.vimeo.com/23368191
The last of the three collaborations between German poets and Israeli filmmakers sponsored by the 5th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival. Christian Hawkey is credited as translator for the English subtitles. I was struck by how the inclusion of a song at the end, during the credits, helps unlock the meaning of the videopoem.
For more poems from Daniel Falb in English, as well as a bio, see Poetry International Web.
Teich (Pond) by Monika Rinck
Another of the three collaborations between German poets and Israeli filmmakers sponsored by the 5th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival. The text seems like an especially good one for a poetry film, since it imagines multiple interpretations or applications for a central image, accentuating the synergy of the text-film combination.
For more English translations of Monika Rinck’s work, see her section on the Poetry International Web site, as well as the volume 16 Poems translated by Alistair Noon.
Christmas in Huntsville, Texas by Jan Wagner
http://www.vimeo.com/23368453
The world’s premiere poetry film festival, ZEBRA, in Berlin, has now begun sponsoring the production of new videopoems as well, as the video description on Vimeo makes clear:
The result of the Film-Workshop held during the 5th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival. Three pairs of artists comprising Israeli filmmakers Emanuella Amichai, Avi Dabach and Joshua Simon and German poets Daniel Falb, Monika Rinck and Jan Wagner were working together to produce scripts and create poetry films in six days.
The poet here, Jan Wagner, is also a “translator of poetry from the English (including Charles Simic, James Tate, Simon Armitage, Jo Shapcott, Louis MacNeice, Kevin Young),” according to this online CV.
