~ January 2015 ~

The Art of Poetry Film with Cheryl Gross: “Despot’s Progress”

I’m still looking for collaborations to write about, so poetry filmmakers and videopoets: please send me links to your work! Today’s collaboration involved two different filmmakers’ responses to the same poem. First, propaganda cartoons (thank you Walt Disney) compiled by Othniel Smith make a stirring backdrop for Robert Peake‘s poem “Despot’s Progress.”

I would like to begin with a bit of history. Walt Disney was pro-American and produced a number of propaganda animations depicting Hitler and the Nazi party as buffoons. Unfortunately his patriotism irrationally carried over into the 1960s. This resulted in not allowing people to enter Disneyland if their hair was too long. (This was sparked by protests against the Vietnam War that I believe he felt were anti-American.) If memory serves me correctly, Disney enforced a rule limiting the length a man’s hair could to be in order to enter the theme park. Call it discrimination, but it’s an interesting example of what the times were like, and I believe makes the interplay of audio and visuals here even more poignant. Since Disney was calling the shots, does that mean he was right in inflicting this regulation on his clientele? If he had prejudice against hippies with long hair, I wonder who else he didn’t like?

I happen to love cartoons, especially old Disney and Warner Brothers. This blended with Peake’s poetry makes a brilliantly chilling observation of injustice and intolerance. The poem speaks sarcastically of totalitarianism as something we must adhere to. Images of Donald Duck saluting and trying to conform “comically” support this theory, but as you can see it is not funny. The cartoons just make it palatable and easy to swallow. This piece points us in the direction of taking an otherwise unrealistic depiction (the actual animation) to reveal the nightmare that eventually came to fruition. I think the question that should be asked is, when it comes to being prejudiced, what is the real difference between Disney and Hitler? I suppose we can say it was six million Jews, but what about the haircut? The atrocities committed by Hitler were undeniably more severe than Disney’s point of view and perhaps I should not compare the two, but let’s not dismiss the last section of the cartoon, when the baby duck bursts out of the egg saluting “Sieg Heil!” To me that’s where it actually begins.

No matter what kind of discipline you practice, art is a very powerful medium. This couldn’t be more relevant to what happened at Charlie Hebdo last week. Je Suis Charlie!

Music/concept/editing by Swoon; footage: coxyde 1951 AB (IICADOM 903 at the Internet Archive).

Then we have Mark Neys A.K.A. Swoon‘s interpretation, which is equally chilling. The use of vintage footage puts me on the edge of my seat. The music gets under my skin and I can’t help but feel this is the second before a disaster is about to occur. I find in Swoon’s piece the end is very different. There is no baby Hitler being born, just anticipation. What is next? And is there a next? Perhaps a bomb will drop or a tsunami will wash away the mother and child, leaving us with basically the same outcome. The world has changed and continues to change.

See also Robert Peake’s blog post, “Two Views of ‘Despot’s Progress’ (Film-Poems).”

Mule & Pear: two videopoems by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Rachel Eliza Griffiths has made poetry book trailer-style videopoems for a couple of other poets, but this one from 2011 was for her own collection, and Roxane Gay, writing at HTML Giant, was impressed:

Mule & Pear is a new book of poetry by Rachel Eliza Griffiths and has a book trailer I really love which is saying something because I do not care for book trailers.

This Dust Road: Self Portrait is an excerpt from the final poem in Mule & Pear. According to the publisher’s description,

These poems speak to us with voices borrowed from the pages of novels of Alice Walker, Jean Toomer, and Toni Morrison—voices that still have more to say, things to discuss. Each struggles beneath a yoke of dreaming, loving, and suffering. These characters converse not just with the reader but also with each other, talking amongst themselves, offering up their secrets and hard-won words of wisdom, an everlasting conversation through which these poems voice a shared human experience.

Three haiku by Angie Werren

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These are three, seven and twelve from Angie Werren‘s “twenty seconds of haiku” series, a deliberately low-tech approach to videohaiku that’s brilliant when it works. One big advantage Werren has over most other filmmakers, amateur or professional, who attempt videohaiku: she understands what English-language haiku — and micropoetry in general — is all about. Spend some time at her blog Feathers and you’ll see what I mean.

Watch all 13 videos in the “twenty seconds” series on Vimeo. Six also appeared in the new online literary journal Gnarled Oak (which is very videopoetry-friendly, by the way).

Zman / Time by Mei-Tal Nadler

A new poetry film by Avi Dabach with text by Mei-Tal Nadler and music by Harold Robin. Einat Weizman read the poem and Adriana X. Jacobs provided the English translation used in the subtitles.

Nadler won the 2014 Teva Prize for Poetry, whence this bio:

May-Tal Nadler is a poet and doctoral student of literature and Israeli culture at Tel Aviv University. Her first book of poetry, Experiments in Electricity, was published this year.
Nadler has previously won the Ministry of Culture’s award for poets for 2008 and was among the prize winners of the 2008 Poetry Along the Way competition, sponsored by the city of Tel Aviv. Her manuscript won the Leib Goldberg award for literary work.

News round-up: FACT symposium, Tang Dynasty poetry films and more

FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), which describes itself as “the UK’s leading media arts centre, based in Liverpool,” will be hosting a day-long symposium on February 5: Send and Receive – Poetry, Film and Technology in the 21st Century. I’m not sure why it’s scheduled for a weekday rather than the weekend, but it certainly sounds interesting. The topic is somewhat reminiscent of the colloquium discussion at the most recent ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin. Hopefully they will avoid some of the pitfalls we ran into there by defining their terms (such as “platform”) a bit more clearly.

FACT, in association with the University of Liverpool, PoetryFilm and The Poetry Society, is pleased to invite you to imagine the future of poetry at our symposium Send & Receive: Poetry, Film & Technology in the 21st Century. With presentations from artists, scientists and thought leaders, the day examines innovative platforms involved in contemporary poetic practices.

How has the digital age changed the way in which poetry is written, performed, communicated and received? Further exploring themes demonstrated in Torque Symposium: An act of Reading, the day will focus on the prevalent difficulties, dialogues and collaborative possibilities that new technological avenues have revealed in the world of poetry.

The symposium will include three distinct discussion areas, with audiences invited to join facilitated discussions after each segment. Confirmed speakers include George Szirtes (poet and translator), Deryn Rees Jones (poet and director of Centre for New and International Writing), Zata Kitowski (Director PoetryFilm), Marco Bertamini and Georg Meyer (Visual Perception Labs UoL), Suzie Hanna (animator) and Jason Nelson (hypermedia poet and artist, Australia).

More information TBA soon.

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A news story from October, recently posted to the ZEBRA Facebook group by Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel, also caught my attention this week, about a very ambitious plan by CCTV and the China Central Newreels Corporation to make 108 short films based on Tang Dynasty poems. I can’t embed the English-language newscast video here; click through for that, because it includes brief scenes from a couple of the films. Here’s a bit of the transcript:

“I think film communicates Chinese traditional culture in a very powerful and vivid way. I think it will really help young people appreciate the beauty of Chinese poetry,” said President of Beijing Film Academy Zhang Huijun.

The production team carefully selected 108 poems to be adapted into short films. It explores the works through story-telling and recreating the life of the time. Each film is about 15 minutes long and involves top Chinese actors and directors.

“We selected the best poems. We also selected them based on whether it is easy to make them into a story. That is vital for the short film,” said deputy director of China Central Television Gao Feng.

The initiative aims to promote China’s rich heritage in literature, especially among the younger generation. 70 of the total 108 short films have already been completed, with the rest scheduled to be finished before the end of this year.

The organizers have also invited 108 young singers to perform the theme songs for the films. They are also planning to produce picture-story books based on the poems. The goal is to eventually promote the entire collection of poems from the Tang dynasty.

By “the entire collection,” I suppose they are are referring to the famous and ubiquitous anthology of 300 Tang poems, though that would of course involve also making films out of short lyrical poems lacking in strong narrative elements.

I must say the emphasis on story-telling, popular appeal, and “recreating the life of the time” worries me. I don’t want to pass judgement before seeing any of the films, but experience with big-budget poetry films made elsewhere makes me fear that these films will add little or nothing to the poems and risk achieving the opposite of the project’s stated goal: rather than making poetry more appealing, they will communicate the message that it needs to be sexed up and turned into glossy period drama in order to hold anyone’s attention.

I hope I’m wrong, and that these films do challenge audiences and help translate ancient poems into a new idiom. Because Classical Chinese texts do in fact need to be translated in some way in order to be comprehensible to a speaker of a modern Chinese language such as Mandarin. It’s easy to see how film could assist in that regard, because the Chinese characters are a strong bridge to the ancient language. Calligraphy or type animations similar to what Nissmah Roshdy did with classical Arabic in The Dice Player could help bring the texts across without resorting to actual translation into Mandarin, Cantonese, etc. Alternatively or in addition, subtitling into modern languages could be used with the original language in the voiceover. Traditional poetry recitation, a stylized and beautiful art, could be incorporated into the soundtracks.

As for the imagery, I do think it’s a mistake to leave out all contemporary references, which might well serve as further bridges, adding depth and nuance. One element of Classical Chinese poetry that’s in danger of being lost even to modern Chinese intellectuals is their wealth of allusions to older poems and other texts — the vast libraries that were committed to memory under the Confucian educational system. I wonder if it might not be possible to somehow work a few of those allusions in through film collage techniques? At the very least, filmmakers could strive for a roughly equivalent level of allusive depth by incorporating references to well-known movies, pop songs and the like. I’m simply worried that too conservative an approach risks dishonoring the spirit of the texts. It would be as if Tang Dynasty poets composed only gushi and never experimented with the then-daring jintishi. If they’d been that allergic to innovation, we wouldn’t still be reading their poems today.

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The January issue of Poetry brings news of a poetry film still in production, an English-language documentary tentatively titled Las Chavas focusing on girls on a Honduran orphanage who are learning to write poetry in English and Spanish, with the aid of an American Episcopal priest and the poet Richard Blanco. A brief essay is followed by a selection of the girls’ poems. Check it out. Honduras has always punched well above its weight where poetry is concerned, so I’ll be looking forward to the film.

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The Athens-based collective + the Institute [for Experimental Arts], sponsors of the annual International Film Poetry Festival, have launched a new website to replace their old Blogspot site. It’s certainly easier to navigate, not to mention better looking. The Festivals link in the header takes one to a gallery-style archive of posts about the poetry film festival.

Videopoetry challenge: help me shape a new(ish) style of videohaiku

This collaboratively produced videopoem with text by James Brush represents a new approach to videohaiku for me: one in which the first part of the haiku is represented by film footage, which freezes and transitions to text roughly where a mid-poem kireji or cutting word would occur in a Japanese haiku.

[A mid-verse] kireji performs the paradoxical function of both cutting and joining; it not only cuts the ku into two parts, but also establishes a correspondence between the two images it separates, implying that the latter represents the poetic essence (本意 hon’i) of the former, creating two centres and often generating an implicit comparison, equation, or contrast between the two separate elements.

It’s an approach for which I am partly indebted to Tom Konyves, who in his Videopoetry: A Manifesto cites Eric Cassar’s minimalist videohaiku as normative for the genre—”The videohaiku (approx. 30 seconds) uses a few words of text attached to the shortest duration of images”—and who responded to some recent thoughts of mine about different approaches to videohaiku (and there are many!) with a comment that took me a little while to digest. I had mentioned one approach in which a long shot (or series of related shots) is followed by the haiku as text-on-screen, so that the shot(s) function more or less like the painting in a traditional haiga as well as suggesting something about the poet’s observational process leading up to the composition of the haiku. This is a method both James and I have experimented with in the past. Quoting a description of the two-part structure of a typical haiku, Tom wrote:

The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that this “method” addresses a question about videopoetry’s strategies re: word-image relationships in the fact that the observation of the first segment – the division into two semantic elements of unequal length, usually corresponding to two different images or ideas, which for maximum effect should have some relationship but not too immediately obvious a one – is best achieved by the image, while the non-sequitur of the second segment is best expressed in words (the text in a videopoem).

It was with this on my mind last Monday that, rather on the spur of the moment, I challenged Facebook friends and members of the POOL group there to write something to go with a section of a randomly chosen old home movie from the Prelinger Archives. I gave them six hours, later extended to eight, and linked to my post from the Moving Poems Twitter account as well:

Ekphrastic haiku challenge: I need a haiku to feature in a haiga-style short film using footage from this old home movie—the section from 3:50 to 4:50 where the baby is brandishing a flower. Haiku should contain no more than 17 syllables but may contain fewer; kigo unnecessary; number of lines unimportant. It should work as a poem and should probably refer obliquely to the film imagery at best. You’ll be fully credited as author, and the resulting video may appear on Moving Poems if I’m satisfied with it. Email haiku (as many attempts as you like) to me: bontasaurus@yahoo.com by 10:00 PM tonight (Monday), New York time (3:00 AM GMT).

In short order I received 27 submissions from 13 people, most of them published poets along with a couple of inspired amateurs. I soon realized that my instructions had been inadequate if not down-right misleading. I shouldn’t have specified that a submission should work as a poem, because the lines that seemed to work best with the footage felt incomplete until I imagined them following the footage. James had started with a rather high-concept idea and pared it down in the course of three drafts. I suggested two further edits. What finally emerged was this:


how your hands burn
for the sun

with the ellipsis standing in for the footage of the baby in a meadow waving a daisy around. (One could even make it fit into a line: babe with a flower, say, or toddler in the yard.)

I’m excited by the result, and I’d like to propose a new challenge to help us further explore the possibilities of videohaiku. This time I’ll make the deadline midnight on Monday, New York time — i.e., 5:00 AM January 13 GMT. (That’s for people who get the weekly email digest and read it at work on Monday.) I tend to resist the idea that haiku need to be about nature all the time, so found a home movie, evidently from the 1930s, that features two men, naked but for jock straps, playing American handball in an indoor court. There are many minutes of that footage both at the beginning and end of the movie, but as before, I’ll select less than a minute of it, so feel free to suggest specific sections to use with your submission of haiku — or should I say, half-haiku. Because the idea this time is not to submit something that would necessarily stand on its own as a printed poem, but something that can be wedded with the footage as its other half, “generating an implicit comparison, equation, or contrast between the two separate elements” as the Wikipedia entry on kireji puts it.

Again, please use email (bontasaurus @yahoo.com) to submit, and send along as many suggestions as you like. Also, feel free to consider the possibility that the footage might fall in the second part of the verse, with one or two lines of text at the beginning. Would that even work as a poetry film? Could the flinging of a handball operate even as an end-of-verse kireji?

If you’re unfamiliar with haiku, or wonder why a lot of us who write it in English no longer believe in “5-7-5,” I recommend the Wikipedia entry on haiku, Imaoka Keiko’s essay “Forms in English Haiku,” and an excellent brief for writing haiku based on art or literature, rather than exclusively on direct experience: “Beyond the Haiku Moment: Basho, Buson and Modern Haiku myths” by Haruo Shirane. And for a good overview of 20th-century and contemporary haiku, I strongly recommend the Spring 2009 issue of Cordite, “Haikunaut.” The issue index at that link isn’t actually complete, because the essays are as illuminating as the poetry, so start with David Lanoue’s introduction and use the “next post” links to page through. By the end of it, you should have a pretty comprehensive picture of the variety of modern traditional and experimental haiku… except for videohaiku, which they don’t mention. I guess it’s up to us to write that chapter.

Liberté by Maciej Piatek

A concrete videopoem by the UK-based Polish video artist Maciej Piatek that alludes to a text by Paul Eluard and an historic, public use of that text, as the write-up on Vimeo explains:

The film was screened at Liberté during the ArtsBridge Festival 2014. Liberté was a multi-discipline performance featuring collaborations in poetry, music, film, dance, prose, performance and visual arts, that used Paul Éluard’s “Liberté” poem as a starting point. The poem was famously dropped from aeroplanes during WWII by the British Air force over occupied France.

2014 was a year of the centenary of the start of WWI and the 75th Anniversary of the start of WWII, and in an age where we see almost perpetual war, we are told that it is all necessary “for our freedom”. The performance attempted to analyse what liberty/freedom meant to each contributor.

Featured work by Lianne Brown, Gillie Carpenter, Isolde Davey, Holly Hero, Gaia Holmes, Tallulah Holmes, Cliff James, Alice Mill, Paul Mill, Steve Nash, Maciej Piatek, Winston Plowes

ArtsBridge Festival 2014 at Christchurch, Sowerby Bridge, UK

Simple Brushstrokes on a Naked Canvas by Howie Good

This is Five Miles (Simple Brushstrokes on a Naked Canvas) by Swoon (Marc Neys), made with the text of a poem from Fugitive Pieces, Howie Good’s new collection of poems. Here’s what Marc blogged about it:

So. A New year. New sounds. New videos. A big new project (more on that one later)
A solo exhibition  (more on that one later) and
New collaborations.

My first video of the year is Five Miles (Simple Brushstrokes on a Naked Canvas)
I first got the idea for this when reading ‘Fugitive Pieces’ by Howie Good.
It’s a great book of found poems published by Right Hand Pointing Press.
All proceeds from the book go to the Food Bank of the Hudson Valley.

People who follow my work, know I’m a big Howie fan. His writing moves me and (very often) is a perfect fit for my videos and sounds.

In Fugitive Pieces Howie Good used the techniques of the collagist.
The poems are collages sourced from various texts as well as his own imagination.
From the author’s note:

This meant creation through destruction, lifting things from one context and dropping them into another, establishing unfamiliar relationships among familiar objects.

That sounds a bit like creating videopoetry. I often find myself using that same approach (especially when working with found footage or archive material)

I first created a track around samples I took from a documentary ‘Target for today’.

[Soundcloud link]

Only after creating that track I chose a poem from ‘Fugitive Pieces’: Simple Brushstrokes on a Naked Canvas
The poem was the perfect match for my soundscape and would work well as ‘text on screen’ in a film composition.

[…]

I collected footage (from Videoblocks) to combine with certain lines from the poem. Played around with timing, font and placement of the text and started puzzling it all together. I believe it works well.

Click through for the text of the poem (or, you know, just watch the film).

The Art of Poetry Film with Cheryl Gross: “Ballad of The Skeletons”

This historic collaboration between Allen Ginsberg (1926-2007), Philip Glass and Paul McCartney was a low budget venture. Gus Van Sant who had ties to the Beat Generation directed it. I happen to love Van Sant’s work, which includes Drugstore Cowboy, Good Will Hunting and Milk. It aired on MTV making Ginsberg one of the oldest artists on the network at the time. This in and of itself is an accomplishment since MTV is primarily youth-oriented. It’s also a good way to acquaint an audience not necessarily familiar with a very important part of our culture.

Glass and McCartney carry the music and Ginsberg the poetry. The recording was produced by Lenny Kaye (Patti Smith group) along with an array of musicians.

The poem was first published in 1995, two years before Ginsberg’s death. The footage of Ginsberg reminds me of the time I saw him at the old Chelsea Hotel picking up his mail. We nodded to each other. I could see he was in pretty bad shape. To approach him would have been an intrusion. As far as I was concerned the acknowledgement was as good as an autograph. This was a special moment for me, and probably an everyday occurrence for him. Such is the price one has to pay for being a celebrity. I’ve also had the pleasure to see him read. Needless to say I’m a big fan.

I love and admire all three artists, but their collaboration created a bomb. To begin with, I adore the use of old footage but the interlooping of Ginsberg’s image in my opinion doesn’t work. I know it’s Ginsberg’s poem, I know, I know. So use Ginsberg as a weave. His image feels too disconnected. It’s as if Van Sant threw him in from time to time just to remind us this is Allen Ginsberg and how important he is. Even if it was low-budget, I think he could have done a better job. The vintage material Van Sant used is pretty powerful on its own. I would have liked to see it used as a backdrop with just Ginsberg’s voice. Another thing I would like to point out is the fact that in the so-called Vietnam Era we had the first war that was televised on a daily basis, thereby desensitizing us as a generation along with generations to come. Perhaps seeing this on a larger screen would have more of an effect, but for the small screen it’s almost dismissible.

The point of the poem as I understand it references the Mexican Day Of The Dead and refers to our figureheads and society as no more than skeletons that are posed, thus leading us to think they are doing something that will improve our lives. I would have liked to see more skeleton and Dead references used. It comes in only at the beginning and if you haven’t noticed by now, I’m a stickler for continuity. This is a very significant piece. If it were revisited today, perhaps it would have more of an impact on me personally. It hits me intellectually but not emotionally. Again, I love Ginsberg with his fuck-you attitude. Although dated I would have liked to be punched in the gut, where it really hurts, making me puke, rather than leaving me feeling detached.

There are two versions. The second is Ginsberg reading and McCartney playing guitar, filmed by one of McCartney’s daughters (which one I don’t know). This poetry video is a performance. I think I like it better than Van Sant’s attempt, which seems to have everything thrown in including the kitchen sink. This to their credit is pure and unpretentious.

Special thanks to Open Culture.

The Continental Review relaunches and The Volta’s Medium returns from hiatus

The Continental Review

A post at Queen Mob’s Teahouse tipped me off to the relaunch of The Continental Review, one of the oldest online videopoetry magazines, founded by Nicholas Manning in 2007 and still co-edited by Manning and Jordan Stempleman. It’s now hosted on Squarespace with a minimalist, responsive design that serves the content well. The archive is organized alphabetically by author’s last name and is very browseable indeed. And they have two new videos up for Winter 2015.

The Continental Review is included in the short list of recommended sites on the front page of Moving Poems. Another journal in that list, The Volta‘s video section Medium, had been on hiatus since April 2014, but as of January 1 they too have a new issue out, #85: a 20-minute videopoem by Brandi Katherine Herrera and Andrew Glei called Verso. It’s great to see Medium back, and I hope they’ll resume regular posting.

Both journals welcome unsolicited submissions, by the way — both through more or less the same process of uploading pieces to Vimeo and emailing their editors with the links.

Jung/Malena/Darwin by Albert Goldbarth

The deeply clever and always entertaining American poet Albert Goldbarth meets his match in director Chris Jopp. This is one of Motionpoems’ latest releases (click through for the text of the poem), and it was “made possible through a partnership with Graywolf Press.” Supplemental materials on the Motionpoems website include interviews with Goldbarth and Jopp by Rosemary Davis. I particularly liked this last bit of the latter:

MOPO: Have you done any collaborations like this before? What was it like to work with Albert?

JOPP: I have not collaborated with poets before. After hearing Albert did not own a computer, I thought about calling him. I then heard, that he was a fan of letters so I decided to write him a letter through the mail. I always feel like I can communicate better through text anyhow and this was a way to more thoughtfully pick his brain without the nerve-racking reality of this award winning poet breathing on the opposite end of the telephone. In fact, I think our “analog” correspondence influenced the way I made the film. I wanted it to feel genuine and authentic, and something about sending and receiving actual inked letters through the mail made me stick to that idea.

Albert was very receptive through the whole conceptual process and then sort of handed me the reigns and was like, “Alright, you have my thoughts and concerns, and think I trust you, so GO FOR IT!” So now I’m just following my own intuition! He said, at the screening he’d either shake my hand or punch me in the nose. Hopefully, the first.

MOPO: What has this project done for you? Learn anything?

JOPP: It has changed the way I think about poetry.

Read the rest.

Paisley Quilt by Becky Cherriman

This poem deals with sexual violence and may be triggering to some people.

How do you make a film of a poem about rape? Poet Becky Cherriman and director Pru Fowler take a minimalist approach, with an unflinching close-up on the author’s face and her impeccable, understated delivery. The result is way more than just another talking-head-style spoken-word poetry video. As Cherriman said in an email, “I realise it is not as visually diverse as some of the films you feature but that was deliberate because of the stark nature of the poem.” Her performance of the poem took 2nd prize in the 2011 Ilkley Literature Festival Open Mic competition.