Latest video reviews
Unto Ourselves by Forrest Gander
“To see what’s there and not / already patterned by familiarity” begins this videopoem by Forrest Gander, using a text from his latest collection, Twice Alive: an Ecology of Intimacies. (The full title of the poem in the book is “Unto Ourselves III: To See What’s There”—p. 52.) The imagery of South Asian temple sculpture is used to great effect in this interrogation of familiarity/unfamiliarity, until “unconditional foreignness grows conditional, stops being foreign at all.”
Any non-titillating examination of the erotic is necessarily foreign to our sex-obsessed culture. And Gander goes further than that, choosing language from science rather than religion without disrespecting, much less heedlessly appropriating, a culture other than his own. Consider, for example, how a man with a wheelbarrow emerging from a dark passageway prepares us to see a giant boulder, a stone pestle grinding in a mortar, and the closing encounter with a lingam: the connections feel visceral rather than spiritual, to the point where stone and bodies become nearly interchangeable. This may be my favorite Forrest Gander videopoem to date.
We’d Love to be Masters of Our Time by Lina Ramona Vitkauskas
Dedicated to Wim Wenders, this square-format videopoem by Lina Ramona Vitkauskas with music and mixing by Ben Turner is an electronic ode to transience and mutability. As Vitkausas notes on her Vimeo page,
Words on paper or screen are arranged and captured for a moment. Poems exist, but the unique act of word arrangement for that moment in time is fleeting.
My poems are like photographs, capturing a string of images or moments so that they may exist in newly created forms for one moment.
Do visit her website as well. She’s launched a fascinating new generative poetry project called Hallucinations, and is looking for collaborators.
The Weekender by Joanna Fuhrman
A whimsical re-imagining of the New York City subway system by videopoet Joanna Fuhrman.
泡 Soaked In by 唐诗雨 Shiyu Tang
This animated poem by CalArts student filmmaker Shiyu Tang has done very well on the festival circuit for good reason: it doesn’t give away all its secrets on a first watch or even a third. Dedicated “To the sisters we never had a chance to meet,” it takes a deeply personal look at female infanticide and abortions in China, with a kind of Notes section at the end to help orient an international audience. My only criticism is that some of the subtitles didn’t linger on-screen long enough for me to read them all on the first viewing, but aside from that, it was a pitch-perfect film, I thought.
Shiyu Tang is clearly a poetry filmmaker to watch. In addition to her Vimeo page, she’s got a channel on YouTube, an active Instagram account, and a website where she describes herself as an “Independent animator, whose works are mostly based on social phenomena and female perspectives.”
Endlings by Angela France
UK poet Angela France reads her poem “Endlings” in a film directed by Helen Dewbery for Nine Arches Press. “Endlings” was nearly the title poem for France’s latest collection, Terminarchy (2021), as she noted in an interview:
I came across the word ‘endling’, which means the last of any species, a while ago. For a long time this collection was going to be titled ‘Endling’ but then a poet in the USA brought out a collection with that title and there is also a series of fantasy books and a computer game called endling. The other word for the last of a species is ‘terminarch’. I didn’t like terminarch as much at first, it had an ugly sound to my ear. Adding a ‘y’ softened the sound and suggested a different direction; we are used to talking about patriarchy, monarchy, oligarchy, perhaps we should think about whether we are heading for terminarchy.
I liked the sound of the word endling but also thought a lot about what it means to be the last. The strongest, most urgent drive in nature is to reproduce so an endling is driven into hopelessness. The endlings in the poem ignore their prey because of that ‘older, greater need’ and only find release, and peace, in death.
I suspect most of us could name at least a couple of extinct animals, such as the Tasmanian Tiger (the thylacine) but when I started researching the species lost in the last few years, I was astonished, and saddened, at the number of them. Some of the names were just wonderful, such as the ‘Gloomy tube-nosed bat’ and the ‘Darling Downs hopping mouse’. They didn’t find their way into this poem but they have remained in my memory, perhaps for another time. There is a very particular grief, for me, in discovering these things after they have left us.
The form of the poem is a loose terza rima, with slant rhyme. I like this form because of its subtle music and also because the interlocking rhyme scheme can have the effect of looking back while stepping forward. I usually prefer slant rhyme because I find full rhyme can fall very heavily on the end of the line unless it is used with great skill.
I feel I should explain something about Sparrow who appears at the end of this poem. William Sparrow was a historical character in my last book, The Hill. He was one of the ringleaders of the local riots over the closure of rights of way on the hill, in 1902. He was a road-sweeper and was literate, witty, and furious, writing daily letters to the newspapers. He has insisted on having a voice in this book but he is not now William Sparrow. He is not Sparrow the man, nor is he sparrow the bird, but something else entirely and he speaks up in a few poems through the book. I am not sure what he is except that he seems to take the role of an ecological conscience. Here, he weeps for all we have lost and are losing, the hopelessness of not having an ark.
In Conversation – Angela France
