~ December 2014 ~
For the love of poetry film, support the Internet Archive!
Ceramic Archivists by sculptor Nuala Creed at the Internet Archive building (photo: Jason Scott)
‘Tis the season for end-of-year charity drives, and I’m sure almost everyone reading this has already done their share of donating to worthy causes. But if you love poetry film, please try to find it in your hearts and wallets to donate to the one and only Internet Archive, home of the invaluable Prelinger Archives and many other collections of free-to-use film materials. By now, I’d say many hundreds of videopoems and poetry films have been made with footage from the Internet Archive; I’ve probably featured at least a hundred here at Moving Poems. In fact, without the easy availability of public-domain films at the Internet Archive, I’m not sure we be in the midst of a videopoetry renaissance right now. And for people just getting into digital video remixing, it’s always the best place to start looking for evocative material.
Which is not to downplay the sheer educational and entertainment value of the massive website’s many offerings, from independent radio shows to vlogs, digitized books and other texts, live music, and the NASA Images Archive. And let’s not forget the Wayback Machine, which, with more than 150 billion web captures, truly is an archive of the internet.
As an idealistic nonprofit, the Internet Archive’s mission to preserve and share knowledge should arouse little of the unease that Google’s similar (and vastly better funded) efforts tend to provoke. Its servers house more than 10 petabytes of data, it employs 200 people, and its annual budget tops $10 million, with a significant portion coming from donations by users. It has hosted the Prelinger Archives since 1999 — the first expansion of its collections beyond the core web archive.
So my advice is to give till it hurts. (Or, if you’re a masochist, give till it feels great!) The payment options include Amazon, Paypal and Bitcoin. Visit any page at the Internet Archive to make a donation. Let me just paste in the current text of their appeal:
Dear Internet Archivists, We are a non-profit with a huge mission: to give everyone free access to all knowledge—the books, web pages, audio, tv and software of our shared human culture. Forever. Together we are building the digital library of the future. A place we can go to learn and explore. The key is to keep improving—and to keep it free. That’s where you can help us. The Internet Archive is a non-profit library. We don’t run ads, but we still need to pay for servers, staff and bandwidth. Right now, a Philadelphia supporter will match your donations for 72 hours—dollar for dollar—so your impact will be doubled. Help us meet this challenge! If you find the Archive useful, we hope you’ll give what you can now. Thank you.
For background, see the relevant Wikipedia article. Among other nuggets of information, I was especially charmed to learn that the Internet Archive also archives itself, in an artistic way (whence the above photo):
The Great Room of the Internet Archive features a collection of over 200 ceramic figures by Nuala Creed representing employees of the Internet Archive. This collection, commissioned by Brewster Kahle and sculpted by Nuala Creed, is ongoing.
C. K. Williams bio pic “The Color of Time” panned by Vogue
A film critic at Vogue, Nathan Heller, didn’t think much of the latest feature-length poetry film starring James Franco. It sounds as if it suffers from some of the same defects that mar poetry shorts made by conventionally minded directors. One of the poems interpreted in the film is “My Mother’s Lips“:
The subject of the poem—the transmission of language—is nowhere evident, and neither is the poem’s supple specificity. Whichever of the film’s many writers and directors was responsible for “My Mother’s Lips” gives us, instead, lots of banalities: a mother and child in a field, a mother and child in a wartime kitchen, a mother and child in what appears to be a bathhouse. […] The Color of Time is less a transmutation of Williams’s poems than the illustration of a vague and naïve idea about what Poetry means—dreamy, moody people murmuring tender lines out of their hearts as treacly music plays. The effect is of a Vermeer reproduced with crayon: It’s all there (kind of), and yet everything that makes Williams’s work surprising and distinctive has been blurred, effaced, and smeared over in Goldenrod.
Heller ends on a prescriptive note for poetry film in general:
Many people say that poetry today gets too little attention. They are right. And yet the way to honor poetry seems not to dumb it down or dress it up. The strength of the art is its powerful exactitude of language and perception. The finest tribute to work like Williams’s—sadly, one the makers of The Color of Time missed—is just to let the poem be itself.
I enjoyed Howl, but I’m not sure I’ll go to this one. Its rating so far on Rotten Tomatoes, with 16 reviews, is an abysmal 6 percent. On the other hand, a Hollywood movie based on the works of a poet as austere as C. K. Williams is a pretty unique cultural occurrence. It might be worth getting a bunch of poetry friends together to see it in the theater, especially if everyone stops at a bar first. Hilarity would likely ensue.
At any rate, here’s the trailer:
(Hat-tip: Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel on Facebook.)
Why can’t I buffer an entire video on YouTube any more? (Yet another reason why videopoets should use Vimeo)
YouTube’s message to users with slow internet connections
Among those people fortunate enough to have a connection to the internet, many — like me — who live in the U.S. or other disadvantaged countries are forced to make do with DSL or 3G connections of 1M/sec or slower. What happens when, against the expectations of ISPs and certain large video hosting platforms, we choose to watch a video in higher resolution? If it’s hosted by Vimeo, no problem: select the HD option if provided (and if not, the resolution is still probably pretty high, depending on what the video owner uploaded), click play and then pause, and wait. Most poetry videos are less than five minutes long, so it’s not going to take forever, and in any case, if you’re accustomed to this speed, you know the drill: find something else to work on. Multi-tasking, for better or worse, is how most of us operate now anyway.
But sometime in 2013, YouTube stopped letting me do that. I’d select 360p (because anything less is unwatchable), and it would sometimes resume, sometimes not, but the buffering wouldn’t continue for more than another 30 seconds or so before stopping, no matter how long I waited. To add insult to injury, a little banner often appears below the video: “Experiencing interruptions? Find out why.” I’d click the link, and it would take me to a page telling me this was my ISP’s fault. Which was entirely unhelpful, because like most Americans, I don’t have any alternatives to the semi-monopolistic provider I already use, and they’re not about to invest in faster internet service until the government forces them to.
My preference, at least as far as videopoetry goes, would be to just stick with Vimeo, but unfortunately, many videopoets still only upload to YouTube. Today, I finally decided to do a little research and find out why YouTube sucks so hard these days.
It turns out that they’ve implemented a kind of daddy-knows-best strategy to video streaming, implementing a technique known as DASH, which stands for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP. It sounds really good on paper.
Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH), also known as MPEG-DASH, is an adaptive bitrate streaming technique that enables high quality streaming of media content over the Internet delivered from conventional HTTP web servers. Similar to Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) solution, MPEG-DASH works by breaking the content into a sequence of small HTTP-based file segments, each segment containing a short interval of playback time of a content that is potentially many hours in duration, such as a movie or the live broadcast of a sports event. The content is made available at a variety of different bit rates, i.e., alternative segments encoded at different bit rates covering aligned short intervals of play back time are made available. As the content is played back by an MPEG-DASH client, the client automatically selects from the alternatives the next segment to download and play back based on current network conditions. The client selects the segment with the highest bit rate possible that can be downloaded in time for play back without causing stalls or rebuffering events in the playback. Thus, an MPEG-DASH client can seamlessly adapt to changing network conditions, and provide high quality play back without stalls or rebuffering events.
MPEG-DASH is the first adaptive bit-rate HTTP-based streaming solution that is an international standard. MPEG-DASH should not be confused with a protocol — the protocol that MPEG-DASH uses is HTTP, hence the “H” in the name.
MPEG-DASH uses the previously existing HTTP web server infrastructure that is used for delivery of essentially all World Wide Web content. It allows devices such as Internet connected televisions, TV set-top boxes, desktop computers, smartphones, tablets, etc. to consume multimedia content (video, TV, radio…) delivered via the Internet, coping with variable Internet receiving conditions, thanks to its adaptive streaming technology. Standardizing an adaptive streaming solution is meant to provide confidence to the market that the solution can be adopted for universal deployment, compared to similar but more proprietary solutions such as Smooth Streaming by Microsoft, or HDS by Adobe.
What worries me about this, and the reason I’ve quoted the entire introduction to the Wikipedia article, is that it sounds like something Vimeo might eventually adopt, too. Maybe they will implement it better, though, and still provide an alternative for those who want it.
There is apparently a work-around for DASH on YouTube that might work for some — a browser add-on for Firefox, Opera, and (with some installation difficulty) Chrome — but I wasn’t able to get it working with my own Firefox installation, possibly due to a conflict with some other add-on. If you’d like to give it a try, see the instructions in PC World, “Force YouTube to buffer your entire video.”
As for that annoying “Experiencing interruptions?” banner at the bottom of YouTube videos, tech writer Christina Warren at Mashable puts it into context. Apparently, the lack of tech-savvy among many YouTube visitors may be partly to blame.
When quality fails, users are quick to blame the content source — especially if other websites seem to work just fine.
If a user experiences downtime and buffering from a service or site too many times, he or she will be less likely to use it. Content services want to be shielded from some of that blame, and pass it off to what they see as the ultimate gatekeeper: the ISP.
The real question is: Does this naming and shaming really have any impact? It would be one thing if users could pick and choose their ISP, but most of us have one choice and one choice only (the same is true for cable TV).
Indeed. The one thing Warren doesn’t point out, however, is that the message is a bit disingenuous. Yes, my service is slow, but I’m experiencing interruptions because you lot decided you knew what was best for me and stopped letting me choose to buffer an entire video.
There is one easy, low-cost way YouTube could fix things, though. Instead of an unhelpful page about ISPs, the “Experiencing interruptions?” link could go directly to Vimeo.
First installment of The Nantucket Poetry Project debuts at The New Yorker
A poetry film made earlier this year by media and video production company TNP Labs has just been posted to the web by The New Yorker, which hosts its own video (including six previous examples of “poetry and such“). The poem, Robert Pinsky’s “Shirt,” was first published by The New Yorker in 1989.
Twenty-five years later, “Shirt” has been brought to the medium of film, as the first installment of The Nantucket Poetry Project, an initiative by the Harvard professor Elisa New and the Nantucket Project to disseminate poetry through video and other multimedia platforms. In this visualization of the poem, several people read the text—including Kate Burton, Nas, and Pinsky himself—while the camera captures the details of stitching and fabric, spinning and sewing, and nods to the poem’s account of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in Manhattan. New said, “ ‘Shirt’ is neither short nor simple, but I knew it had the power to reach anyone who heard it, to live in every voice that lends itself to the text.”
The link goes to a blog post from last June announcing the collaboration. What makes this especially noteworthy, aside from the involvement of elite institutions such as Harvard and The New Yorker, is the promise of more to come.
Our vision is simple. We believe that great poetry is meant to be read aloud, and whenever we gather together to do this, our culture is enriched. We also believe that poetry lends itself to multiple interpretations and can find exciting expressions through various forms of media – from music to dance to video art. And so we are assembling a group of world-class artists, thinkers and performers whose interpretations will bring to life the many diverse textures in “Shirt,” in the form of a short film.
So six months later, we can see the results. The poem was already available on YouTube in a reading by the poet at the 2014 Dodge Poetry Festival, but the audio there is a little, uh, dodgy, so this film is already a big improvement in that regard. Also, the production quality overall is excellent, as one would expect — TNP Labs have had “more than 50 Emmy Award nominations (and 16 wins),” they tell us. I liked the use of different readers and the blend of reading footage with other imagery. I’m guessing that the filmmakers were not well versed in the poetry-film/videopoetry tradition and were feeling their way — which is not always a bad thing, because completely original approaches are what keep the genre fresh. Here, we see a bit of that freshness with the innovative use of multiple readers. But otherwise the film struggles to escape the gravitational pull of narrative filmmaking, though I did like the use of mannequins as ironic stand-ins for faceless workers.
I’m indebted to Ruben Quesada for bringing this to my attention. At my request, he shared his own impressions via IM:
I found the inclusion of readers from different cultural backgrounds exciting, at first, but it didn’t go beyond simply having them read to the camera, and the literal images were too on-the-nose. I expect video poems to offer a figurative interpretation of a written poem instead of a literal, linear narrative translation. The use of a Latina woman made me a little uncomfortable and not in a good way—the way an image challenges us to learn something new about others or about ourselves. Perhaps it was my own personal experience of growing up in Los Angeles and being aware of the many women of color, mothers of many of my peers, who would ride the bus into Beverly Hills to work as housekeepers or nannies at the start of the week and not return again until the week was over. This woman of color in the video who appears to work in a dry cleaning business echoed this memory—it reinforced the idea of a woman of color as a domestic worker. An image seen many times and caricatured more recently as Seth McFarlane’s animated character Consuela in Family Guy.
In any case, it was a pleasant surprise to come across the video and I’m very glad to see The New Yorker making space for video poems.
It will be interesting to see how many more poetry films The Nantucket Poetry Project produces; this can’t have been cheap to make. I hope it gets plenty of exposure at film festivals and on TV. The poem is compelling and certainly deserves a large audience. Also, big ups to The New Yorker for making their videos fully shareable and embeddable. I hope they continue to publish poetry films, whether through a partnership with The Nantucket Poetry Project and/or through an open call for submissions. (Needless to say, we’d be sure to publicize the latter.)
Now if someone would just make a feature-length film with Chris Llewellyn’s harrowing collection of persona poems about the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, Fragments from the Fire…
Tiny Openings Everywhere by Kallie Falandays
The poet and reader here, Kallie Falandays, runs Tell Tell Poetry, a site dedicated to “making poetry fun again,” and true to form, this is a fun piece — and a bit of a departure for Swoon (Marc Neys), both in the high-energy style of the reading and the way it’s incorporated into the film. As he says in a recent blog post,
I found the poem at The Poetry Storehouse, but it was Kallie Falandays’ jagged reading that made me pick this up.
I first created a soundtrack where her reading could be the spiky centerpiece. [Listen on SoundCloud.]
The visuals for this one came fairly easy. A string of footage (found and filmed) was edited close to the rhythm and pace of the soundscape. I wanted everyday objects (almost still life) juxtaposed with images of the everyday rat race. For some reason that works well and results in an overall strange atmosphere.
I was prompted to post a second Swoon videopoem this week by the realization that I have missed quite a few good ones this year. I think that’s excusable, though, given that he’s released 70 poetry films in 2014 (so far), collaborating with poets both famous and obscure from all over the world. Considering how many of his films have appeared in festivals and exhibitions, not to mention on this and other websites, it’s fair to say that Neys is doing more to bring poetry to the screen than any filmmaker alive — all on a shoestring budget.
My Handwriting by Dan O’Brien
https://vimeo.com/112336376
This is the most recent of three short videopoems by Ruben Quesada based on texts from Dan O’Brien‘s new poetry collection Scarsdale. (The other two are “Greenwich / Isle of Dogs” and “Breaking the Ice.”) Scarsdale was published last month in London by CB Editions, but an American edition is due out next year from Measure Press, according to the description on Vimeo.
It’s great to see a poet and editor of Quesada’s stature getting into videopoetry. He’s been at it for at least six months, judging from his output on Vimeo, and as this video demonstrates, he already has a pretty deft touch.
The Art of Poetry Film with Cheryl Gross: “We Are The Parents of L.A. (for Harvey Kubernik)”
https://vimeo.com/113601304
Watch at Nowness.com.
I first visited L.A. in 1986 with the intent of moving there. I stayed in Laurel Canyon and enjoyed the gigantic billboards on Sunset and what the city had to offer. When I finally did move in 1987 it was a different story. I lived in Silver Lake. At that time it was one of those forgotten neighborhoods teeming with bodegas, Mexicans and of course artists. Silver Lake sits between two, then-seedy neighborhoods, Hollywood and Echo Park. At the time, gentrification was slow going east towards Downtown and you took your life in your hands walking or riding through. This was my L.A. back in the 80s and I loved every aspect of it. A façade of glitz against the graffiti sun baked streets where people struggled to stay one step ahead of the landlord and/or worked as waiters, anticipating the next audition and perhaps their chance at stardom.
We Are The Parents Of L.A. (for Harvey Kubernik) captures my existence in the city of angels. Film trio T. Gerike, R. Koval, S. Raphael (also known as Facts), did an awesome job creating the film. The cinematography is beautifully framed and captures every aspect of the city, from the Pacific Ocean, to the oil fields and flavorless shopping malls. The people on the street selling Mylar balloons and clothing add to the tone of the entire piece, revealing the reality of how most people live and not what you see on T.V. The poem grew out of a spoken word piece by Henry Rollins (one of my favorite commentators on pop and counter culture). See “Thank You America: Punk prayers old and new fuel a Thanksgiving message” at NOWNESS.
Proof: a poetic glimpse into the archives of Bloodaxe Books
A poetry film/documentary hybrid. The filmmaker, Kate Sweeney, describes it in the Vimeo description as
A poetic glimpse into the archives of the North East [UK] poetry publisher Bloodaxe Books, the contents of which were recently purchased by Newcastle University.
The film was made by artist Kate Sweeney in collaboration with poets Tara Bergin and Anna Woodford in spring 2013
Anna Woodford and Tara Bergin both held residencies at the archive. Bergin talks about her fondness for archives in a video introduction to the film. The same site (CAMPUS social network) gives a fuller explanation of how Proof came to be:
In 2013, Newcastle University acquired the archive of Bloodaxe Books, one of the most important
contemporary poetry publishers in the world. Two poets and recent PhD graduates, Anna Woodford and Tara Bergin, were asked to take a look into the as yet un-catalogued boxes to gain an initial sense of the archive’s scope and potential. To document their findings, they teamed up with artist Kate Sweeney to make a short ‘poem-film.’ They called it ‘Proof’.“It was very strange and very interesting,” Bergin says.
The film includes guest appearances by Bloodaxe authors Gillian Allnutt, Simon Armitage, John Hegley and Anne Stevenson.
Cold Moon by Erica Goss
We buy longing, our faces
aggressive and breakableon the cusp of winter.
The perfect poetry film for the holiday season. This is the final part of the 12 Moons series, the year-long videopoetry collaboration between Marc Neys A.K.A. Swoon (concept, camera and direction), Erica Goss (poetry), Kathy McTavish (music), and Nic S. (voice), presented by Atticus Review. Marc wrote:
As with the other 11, Kathy provided me with a great soundtrack. Moody and floating on ‘loneliness’. Perfect for Nic’s reading and the poem itself.
Reading and hearing the poem gave me the idea of using images of people shopping for the holidays. I filmed these for another project (Day is done), but this was a perfect match.It’s like Erica said after viewing the video: “In “Cold Moon,” the young woman’s expression captures the essence of the poem: that holiday shopping is a poor excuse for spirituality, and that faith is still an unexplained phenomenon.”
So this was the last of the series. All of these were made over more than a year ago, but I still have great memories working on these. My gratitude also goes out to Atticus Review and Moving Poems for giving those videos an extra home.
Showing these 12 at Zebra Festival in Berlin this year was a highlight, but collaborating with those three was the best reward.
Nic S.: Ten Fabulous Videopoems
It turns out
Martha McCollough, 2012
Several things about Martha McCollough’s work delight me. Her voice and reading style for one. Voice, where it is used, is almost overridingly important for me, and if vocals are off, the whole film is off. Martha’s voice and reading style carry her work superbly. I also love her double- or triple- (or more) narration style, where you frequently have the voice carrying one narrative thread, the kinetic text carrying another, and the visuals a third. You feel that text is an actual character in her films. I also enjoy how she plays around with vocals, using repetition, chorus, and other vocal effects. She has a great sense of humor! Check out Mr Lucky’s Jackpot for a more straightforward combination of her different techniques.
The Polish Language
Alice Lyons and Orla Mc Hardy, 2009
At eight minutes, this is far longer than my usual optimum video poem length (ideally, less than two minutes, three approaches a stretch…), but is so finely and imaginatively made that one instantly forgives. Again, kinetic text as character and dynamic role-player/narrator, but presented here in a truly fantastic variety of form. Background vocals only (as a separate non-English narration track — nothing obviously duplicating the text) and a wonderful mix of individual/chorus vocals, intermittent sound effect, intermittent tuneful piano, and (most of all) intermittent silence. So beautiful and moving.
Rain
Maria Elena Doyle, 2011
All my favorite elements here: kinetic text that plays as a dynamic character in the overall audio-visual story, marvelous visuals that combine regular video footage with animation, and nice vocals towards the end. Based on the poem “Rain” by Maori poet Hone Tuwhare. Poem text here.
https://vimeo.com/25072181
Sonnet 44
Thomas Freundlich, Lumikinos Production & Art Slow, 2012
This short dance film is based on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 44. It’s an imaginative remix of a classic, and one that assumes audience familiarity with the original text. So rather than presenting the text in the usual linear, pedestrian format, the film-maker incorporates it in a dynamic, fragmentary fashion, so that it participates by inference, almost, and again, as a live character in the piece.
A Word Made Flesh
Eliza Fitzhugh, 2010
As Dave Bonta said at Moving Poems, this is “a fascinating linguistic deconstruction of the poet’s lines … The multiple accents should remind us that now more than ever, with the advent of the web, Dickinson’s poetry belongs to the world.” Poem text here. No particular visuals or film-making talent to admire in this one, but what pleases me is the word play, in every sense of the phrase, where both text and vocal versions of the word are presented and re-presented in shifting and re-shifting form. A sort of philological Greek chorus, moving the overall narrative forward with clever diversions and rest stops.
Tongue of the Hidden
David Alexander Anderson, 2007
Mysterious and beautiful, love poems of Hafez read in the original Persian, with illustration and animation based in Persian calligraphy. This is over five minutes in length, and as far as I can tell contains two poems, one that starts about 40 seconds in and a second that starts around the three-minute mark. I’m including the Persian version below. If you prefer to hear the same narrator read the poems in English, go here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUhaF1JI5r8
Instructions to Hearing Persons Desiring a Deaf Man
Raymond Luczak, 2014
I find this video extraordinarily moving. Again, no film-making virtuosity to admire, just a very talented and convincing poem performance by Raymond Luczak. I frequently rant on about reading poetry aloud for an audience at Voice Alpha, and for me, what is transformative about that act — what makes a poem and your relationship to it qualitatively different — is the act of putting the poem into your body, the physicalization of the poem in preparation for presenting it to an audience. This video gets at the same idea from a different perspective altogether — just beautiful to watch. And if you have a minute, take a look at this video from Sarah Rushford. The subjects close their eyes and recite lines from memory, to intriguing and convincing effect. Once more, I see the transformative effect of putting a poem into the body.
The Woods
Kristian Pedersen, 2012
Over at Voice Alpha I am building a collection of readers I call ‘musical readers.’ People who, while they read poetry aloud for an audience, appear to hear an internal music which both guides and manifests itself in their reading. Cin Salach and Carl Sandburg are my favorite examples of this phenomenon. It manifests itself charmingly here in the voice of the Norwegian poet, Aina Villanger, who does the reading for this delightful videopoem. I love the spare imaginative use of simple abstract shapes and a minimal color palette to play out the action in the poem, marching perfectly along with the reading.
Karl
Scott Wenner (animation) and Motionpoems, 2011
I am not usually intrigued by or particularly drawn to Motionpoems‘ poetry films, as they generally tend, in my view, to be fairly literal visual interpretations of the text poem they engage. I also find their vocal tracks are often not quite ‘there.’ Not this one though — it’s pretty much perfect in every way. A dissonance that somehow really works between the text narrative by Dag Straumsåg and the visual narrative. That moth, that spider. The drum, the piano, the synthesizer. And that wonderful voice with its fabulous reading. Each element spare and solitary, but somehow they are all necessarily attached to each other. (Maybe the one thing I would have changed had I been in charge would have been to not snap the spider web at the very end…)
Montserrat
Fernando Lazzari, 2013
Kinetic text once more (this time in celebration of an actual specific typeface). I really like the reliance on text alone as the narrator and the fact that the film-maker does not feel the need to run duplicative vocal narration alongside the text presentation, as too often happens in kinetic text productions. Wonderful graphics. Very clever idea to present a city as the ‘stage’ for this segment of a Jorge Luis Borges poem, upon and across which the text ‘actor’ performs its dynamic role.
See five more poetry videos that didn’t quite make this list at Nic’s blog, Very Like a Whale. —Ed.
