~ November 2011 ~
Introducing VidPoFilm
I am announcing the birth of a new online journal: VidPoFilm.
VidPoFilm explores the poetics of video and film poetry and offers critiques of works in this genre.
I am both curating and editing the material at VidPoFilm. So far, I’m posting my Video and Film Poem Fridays articles.
VidPoFilm is open to submissions — only articles on other video and film poems, this is not a self-promotion site for me or any other video or film poets — but I won’t have a description of my requirements ready for another month or two. Articles can be pre- or co-published in your own blogs, this is preferable in fact. My only rule, so far, is one article per year per video or film poet. Brilliant work is being produced world-wide in this field and I do not foresee running out of material. I’ve put up a loose “About” page and welcome comments and questions, which will help me to articulate what the journal is and seeks.
Subscribe by RSS feed to the site. Blogger offers a state-of-the-art blog that enables you to watch the videos in your Readers. VidPoFilm is about disseminating video and film poems far and wide while offering a way to ‘read’ them. The stats on the videos and films discussed is more important than the stats on the journal site, so please watch the films — they are ‘top notch’! These flicks are the crème de la crème.
Walking in Plastic by Bandile Gumbi
Another unique video collaboration from South African artist, poet and filmmaker Kai Lossgott, who sets it up for us as follows:
Slums are rapidly becoming the defining landscape of the twenty-first century, both in the developed as well as the developing world. One out of every three city dwellers worldwide nearly a billion people lives in a slum. Performance artist Mduduzi Nyembe presents a memory of a wounded woman, a dream for an absent father, and a dance in a street market for survival. They are ritual stories of the heartache of the slums substance abuse, violence, gender inequalities, chronic unemployment, families incapacity to provide for and protect their children. Each of Nyembe’s characters, taken from his daily interactions in the township, is left, in the words of poet Bandile Gumbi, “a constant wanderer / always at the beginning of complete circles”, trapped in the existential cycle of poverty.
For more on Bandile Gumbi, see her page on the Creative Africa Network.
Peter Quince at the Clavier by Wallace Stevens
A new film by the indefatigable Swoon (which he blogged about here). The inspiration and reading came once again from Nic S.’s new site Pizzicati of Hosanna… which takes its title from a line in this very poem.
French Movie by David Lehman
A poem from Yeshiva Boys (Scribner, 2009), produced to honor the general editor of the Best American Poems series at Motionpoems‘ first screening of films produced for this year’s anthology:
Scott Wenner surprised audiences at the Motionpoems Festival in Fall 2011 by unveiling this motionpoem adaptation of David Lehman’s poem, “French Movie.” In it, the narrator is depicted as an old-school movie camera, and the inevitability of the poem is like a bullet.
(From the description at Vimeo.)
Treacle by Paul Farley
“Featured in the Museum of Liverpool. Shot by Steven Ferguson, directed and edited by Lucy Armitage,” according to the description on Vimeo. Paul Farley is a native of Liverpool, and is said to be “one of the most culturally wide-ranging of current British poets. Born in the mid-1960s, his imagination is equally likely to refer to film, television, pop music and modern art as to literature.” Armitage is a production coordinator at ITV.
Feature films announced for the NYC episode of the International Literary Film Festival
Day 1 of the International Literary Film Festival
On Monday Nov 14, 60 Writers / 60 Places will be screened on the first evening of the International Literary Film Festival, a festival I founded a few months ago. According to our festival’s website:
60 Writers / 60 Places, a film by Luca Dipierro and Michael Kimball, is about writers and their writing occupying untraditional spaces, everyday life, everywhere. It begins with the idea of the tableaux vivant, a living picture where the camera never moves, but the writers read a short excerpt of their work instead of silently holding their poses. There is Blake Butler reading in a subway, Deb Olin Unferth in a Laundromat, Jamie Gaughran-Perez in a beauty salon, Tita Chico in a dressing room, Gary Lutz at the botantical gardens, Will Eno in a park, Tao Lin next to a hot dog cart, and Rick Moody on a baseball field. The writer and the writing go on no matter what is going on around them.
Watch a trailer for 60 Writers / 60 Places on YouTube
Watch another trailer for 60 Writers / 60 Places on YouTube
Day 2 of the International Literary Film Festival
On Tuesday Nov 15, Doc will be screened on the festival’s second evening. According to our festival’s website:
Doc, a film by Immy Humes, presents a portrait of her father, the legendary forgotten novelist and counterculture icon Harold Louis “Doc” Humes. Doc’s friends and family—including Norman Mailer, George Plimpton, Timothy Leary, William Stryon, Peter Matthiessen, Paul Auster, and Jonas Mekas—weave together a story of politics, literature, protest and mental illness, shedding light on an original mind as well as the cultural history of postwar America.
Watch a trailer for “Doc” on YouTube
Watch another trailer for “Doc” on YouTube
Short Literary Films
Several short literary films will also be screened on the two evenings of the festival. The program for short lit films will be announced soon on www.LiteraryFilmFestival.com.
Videopoetry discussions elsewhere: text vs. voice, art or entertainment, and a new weekly column
Several interesting discussions of videopoetry theory and practice have popped up around the blogosphere over the past several weeks, initiated by videopoets whose names should be familiar to followers of Moving Poems.
1. Using text vs voice in videopoems
Nic S.’s thoughtful blog post responded to a point in Tom Konyves’ Videopoetry: A Manifesto about the use of visual text, and Tom stopped by to clarify what he meant in the comments. A fascinating conversation ensued.
2. Visible Verse Festival 2011 • Art or Entertainment; do I really have to choose?
Heather Haley, organizer of the Visible Verse festival in Vancouver (which I hope all Moving Poems followers from the Pacific northwest will be attending this weekend!), shares a bit of her thinking behind the festival in particular and the genre in general at her blog One Life.
Videopoetry or poetry video. Film or video? And then there is cinema to consider. I find semantics tedious. My reaction to the insistence there be a formal definition of the genre, is, why? Don’t we have enough divides? We live in the age of the mashup. Isn’t that merging? Fusion? Transformation? In any case, I have faith in the poet’s ability to render his or her poem. Via video or film, a poet will explore, push the boundaries of image, language and sound. Whether it’s illustrative or conceptual, I trust the poet to make choices, to create a work according to his individual style and sensibilities. Vision. While I can’t abide cliché or literal translations, surely there’s room for both narrative and non-narrative treatments. One man’s execution is another man’s experiment. One man’s amusement is another man’s pith.
3. “Friday Film and Video Poem” series at Rubies in Crystal
Aside from a scattering of brief, general essays and blog posts, plus occasional process notes from videopoets, there’s been an almost total lack of meaningful literary/film criticism of videopoetry and related genres focusing on individual films and artists. Brenda Clews has begun to fill this void with a weekly series at her blog.
- A Hundred and Forty Suns by Jonathan Blair
After the Kafkaesque beginning with insect-like noises that become a mechanical factory of looped wheels and cogs, the organic sound of drumming as the light increases is warm, comforting. And the light is shining, shining into the perception of the animated character who responds with joy, and into the screen where we as viewers feel that pleasure. Ultimately this film imparts joy, beauty, forgiveness, transcendence, the pulse of life renewed anew.
- ‘immersion /2’ by Sheila Packa and Kathy McTavish
Unlike traditional Bokeh, there is no foreground subject. Rather we are immersed in an ever-shifting slow-moving background. It is as if she composes abstract expressionist artwork before our eyes, painting with light and colour.
- ‘Ground’ by Ginnetta Correli
Ground is hauntingly beautiful, in a disturbing way. In the embracing mindfulness, a poetry of poison, death, loss, and beauty, all of which is natural, found in the natural world, amidst a surreality. We feel cross-currents, disambiguations, and yet the over-arching journey metaphor of Cook’s minimalist poetry, and the bond of love he speaks of, yes, living is like this. Simply a superb film.
- ‘SHED’ by Christina McPhee
I consider SHED a genre-crossing piece that brings together a poetry of drawing and video editing. It is a multiplicity, a place of vectors. The nodes and intensities are democratic, without hierarchy; they are nomads drawn into being by the brush of India and acrylic ink and red paint encrusted on the paper by the artist.
Love Poem by Richard Brautigan
A mash-up of Richard Brautigan‘s “Love Poem,” recited in different voices, with excerpts from Samuel Beckett’s novel Molloy presented as text in English and Korean translation. Titled Love Poem, this was shown at three festivals last year: the 10th Seoul International New Media Festival, the 7th Experimental Film and Video Festival in Seoul, and the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin.
Mirror by Sylvia Plath
A brilliant text animation of Plath’s 1961 poem with images from vintage print advertisements. It’s the work of the New Zealand-based designer Kylie May, née Kylie Hibbert — the name under which she made this film and another in 2005, part of a “postgraduate study exploring the visual language of poetry” she called the Belles Lettres project.
By transforming the written words of poetry into choreographed kinetic performance the project seeks to expand typographical conventions of traditional published poetry. The research project utilises the poetry of Emily Dickinson’s (1862) I died for beauty and Sylvia Plath’s (1961) Mirror, to explore the potential of paralinguistics and poetry as emotive narrative. These two poetic voices are fused by intimate revelations of anxiety, which have relevance in today’s society.
Both films were shortlisted for the 2006 Berlin ZEBRA Poetry Film Awards, Mirror attracting a finalist placing.
PLEASE NOTE: Music used under the AUT screenrights license. For academic research purposes only.
