~ March 2015 ~
Frangipani Grove by Cindy St. Onge
https://vimeo.com/123074886
Nic S. has remixed a video of a horse and rider by Gregory Latham with a Poetry Storehouse poem about what endures after the death of planets by Cindy St. Onge. Somehow it works—for me, at any rate. I’m not crazy about the music (which is by David Mackey) and I think I might’ve preferred St. Onge’s own reading at the Storehouse to Sebastian’s. But the juxtaposition of images is strong and surprising enough to make up for that.
Sueños Culinarios (Culinary Dreams) by Pedro Mercado
This is Sogni Culinari, a humorous, surreal poetry film by Venezuelan director Clarissa Duque and AWA Producciones, based on a poem by her friend Pedro Mercado. The actors are Nabilia Gąnem and Javier Figuera, and the recitation is by Luigi Sciamanna. The Italian translation is by Marco Baldo and the English by Lorenzo Duque. There’s also a version with subtitles in the original Spanish.
For the full credits, see Vimeo or the film’s own website. Sogni Culinari also has a Facebook page and a Twitter account (which is how I found out about it). It’s kind of cool to see a surrealistic short getting this much promotion and publicity. And why not? It’s very well done, and they clearly spared no effort in the production. Duque talked about it on the blog Directors Notes. I was especially interested to hear how her script expanded on the text with details from her own dreams:
The idea for Sogni Culinary began once I read a poem written by my friend Pedro Mercado. That poem is recited exactly as in the original by the character of the dreaming man as voice over throughout the film. The very first time I listened to the poem, I felt bombarded by different images and sensations. One of the first ones that came up in my mind was that feeling when a great love breaks your heart and leaves it behind like pieces of waste laying on the ground. Everybody has felt at least once in their life that terrible sensation of emptiness produced by an unrequited love.
Alongside that is my passion for the culinary arts. I learned when I was still a child how every single ingredient of a dish is like a magic recipe, itself capable of activating every human sense and evoking all kinds of sensations in the human body. My father, a great cook, always used his skill as a tool to get what he desired. He was able to close great deals after his partners, captivated by the sensitivity and power of his food, would accept any proposition my father made to them. Never the less, he also managed so many times to solve romantic problems with delicious banquets. I always thought that he was a kind of magician. With time, I understood that love and food, even though they can also be my weakest points, will always be the greatest passions in my life.
Since my childhood, my oneiric world has been very intense. I wake up from nightmares very often where I am a fish and I end up dying asphyxiated outside of the fishbowl. The people around me, trying to calm me down always tell me “It was just a dream”. Therefore, this time with my new short film I couldn’t miss the opportunity to transmit not only my two greatest passions in life (Love and Food) but also a part of my own oneiric world. I have to confess, filming the scene of the fish was very stressful, even more so because lately I’ve been working for animal rights.
The production of Sogni Culinary was just wonderful. It was January 2015 and we didn’t have any money but we were all looking forward to starting the new year working on a new project, but not those that you don’t like but take to pay the rent. We actually wanted to start working on a project that you get really passionate about and involved with. We wanted to make cinema, so I gathered a group of friends and proposed that we start working without a budget but all together for this culinary dream. Luckily, everything that was needed came along. Rental company Pata Negra let us use a Red One camera, an optic kit, a dolly and lights with all their accessories. As we say in Venezuela “Now we got all the toys”. The crew from Artecomestible made the food makeup which was very rigorous work with lots of attention to detail. The shooting was very pleasant, even though it lasted for a very long day from 6.00am in the morning till 2.00am of the following day. Actually, we’re a tight crew so, when we are at work filming on the plateau, we feel like a fish in the water (literally).
Filming real food can turn out to be a very difficult art. The hardest shot we did was with the meatball, trying to make it bleed in a Tarantinoesque style. The hose placed inside the meatball got blocked many times by the fork, then we had to shoot it several times until it finally worked and looked just as I had dreamed. We knew from the beginning that we could achieve all the special effects that we wanted in post-production. For example; the water falling down from the paintings hung on the walls. Glendis Lopez and I have worked together in art direction many times and now we know that we don’t want to lose the sense of reality and handcraft in our productions. We like to keep the old school style. Still, it was very complicated for her and Filou Frechou to build the scenography with the system of pipes behind the walls but as expected, it turned out to work perfectly and we only had to repeat the shots twice.
News roundup: Text(e) Image Beat exhibition, “Send and Receive” videos, Facebook video embedding and more
The videopoetry exhibition Text(e) Image Beat, curated by Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel H. Dugas, is now showing at the Galerie Sans Nom in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada. It runs through May 1.
With: Heid E. Erdrich + R. Vincent Moniz, Jr + Jonathan Thunder; Hannah Black; Matt Mullins; Martha Cooley; John D. Scott; Tom Konyves; Swoon (AKA Marc Neys) + Howie Good; Michel Félix Lemieux; Kevin Barrington + Bruce Ryder; Maryse Arseneault; Fernando Lazzari; Matthew Hayes + Sasha Patterson + Lee Rosevere.
[…]
The call for Text(e) / Image / Beat did not specify particular themes. Through the necessity of paring down the choices and assembling a flow of works that complemented and gave space to each other, we became aware of recurrent elements. In spite of the fact that the videos originate from many distinct locations, ideas of awaiting / finding miracles and mysteries of living, are frequent. Each work exhibits innovation and imagination, calling upon a wide range of skills to layer meaning. Slam poetry, rants, softly spoken words, hand written notes, and remixes are all used to articulate.
Click through to read the rest of the detailed and annotated curators’ commentary.
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I discovered this week that videos of presentations from the “Send and Receive – Poetry, Film and Technology in the 21st Century” conference at FACT in Liverpool have been posted to the web at artplayer.tv. The videos are embeddable, but with code that will probably not show up in feeds or email, so I will just link to the presentations here. Check out presentations by: Suzie Hanna; Zata Kitowski; Marco Bertamini; Deryn Rees-Jones; Jason Nelson; George Szirtes; Judith Palmer; and Roger McKinley (the host). They’re all worth your time, but I found Rees-Jones’ talk to be especially thought-provoking. (See also the earlier report at Moving Poems Magazine: “Conference on poetry, film and technology at FACT: three views.”)
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News emerged this week from Facebook’s annual developer conference, F8, that Facebook videos will soon be embeddable. Venturebeat reports.
A lot of poetry videos, especially of the more rough-and-ready sort (e.g. self-recorded recitations), are only uploaded to Facebook, so it will be helpful to have the freedom to share them on sites like this one. But Facebook launching a proper video hosting platform isn’t necessarily something I welcome, given the corporation’s poor track record with privacy and its ambition to swallow up the independent web, which Facebook succeeds in reproducing about as well as the Mall of America reproduces an agora.
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More details are emerging about Media Poetry Studio, the multimedia poetry summer camp for girls in Silicon Valley. The website now lists the time and location (July 20-31 at Edwin Markham House in San Jose’s History Park at Kelley Park, home of Poetry Center San Jose). And a March 27 article in the San Jose State University newspaper Spartan Daily interviews camp organizers Erica Goss and David Perez:
In terms of tuition, Goss said the program is “pretty reasonable,” costing $799 for two weeks.
The three poet laureates started planning the camp last spring.
“We had to secure funding, we had to write grants, we had to come up with curriculum—which we’re still working on—we had to find a place to do it and a fiscal sponsor since we’re not a nonprofit,” Goss said. “There’s lots of work and we’ll be doing it right up until the day it starts.”
Goss said they want to be able to give each student individualized attention so there is room for about 20 young women.
The Indiegogo campaign is now 62% funded, with $3,075 raised toward a $5,000 goal.
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And finally, speaking of Erica Goss, she has an essay in The Pedestal Magazine about her experience at the 7th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival last October.
Late Fragment by Raymond Carver
https://vimeo.com/116807686
This is Último Fragmento, Spanish director Eduardo Yagüe‘s film based on a brief poem by Raymond Carver. The actors are Pau Vegas and Faustino Fernández, and the music is by Swoon. It’s the final film in a series of eight that Yagüe calls La Luz Tenaz.
LA LUZ TENAZ es una serie de ocho vídeos en los que investigo con los lenguajes de la poesía, el cine, la actuación, la música, la fotografía… Mezclo los géneros, experimento, busco la manera de contar las historias que los poemas que uso como inspiración me sugieren, creando una obra nueva y personal.
[THE TENACIOUS LIGHT is a series of eight videos in which I investigate the language of poetry, film, acting, music, photography… I mix genres, experiment, look for ways to tell the stories that the poems I use as inspiration suggest to me, creating a new and personal work.]
The Art of Poetry Film with Cheryl Gross: “dollhouse”
dollhouse
Poem and film by Shabnam Piryaei
We witness the devastating aftermath of war. I think this subtitle in and of itself is a powerful opening statement for dollhouse and perhaps it should have stopped there.
In all fairness I find the video too long and the poem too short. Somehow it doesn’t match up. The visuals are also quite effective, but knowing a bit of technology, I think it could have been pieced together more effectively. It’s obvious that Piryaei was using green screen, which should have or could have been made to look seamless. The color saturation is high and should have been adjusted. I love the sea of dolls, but again if the poem had been longer, the piece would have had more of an impact. The whole piece should be cut in half. I think we get the point within the first 2 ½ minutes.
I found the cries for Momma a bit melodramatic and again I would have been happier with more words rather than sailing through a poorly shot video.
Death Meditation by A.M. Thompson
This is the second of two films by Marie Craven using Poetry Storehouse poems by A.M. Thompson. (I also liked the first, Unavoidable Alchemy, but felt that it ended too abruptly.) Here she has used footage by Mollie Mills, guitar music by Josh Woodward and a voiceover by Nic S. to create a surprisingly upbeat video remix. I’ll let viewers decide whether it succeeds, but I salute its boldness as an experiment in confounding expectations. (Read the text.)
Common Room by Talia Randall
This animation of a poem by UK artist and performance poet Talia Randall was one of the 29 competition films (selected from among 770 submissions) at the 7th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival last October. It’s also a staff pick at Vimeo, where it’s amassed more than 58 thousand plays. Here’s the description at Randall’s website:
The Common Room Animation Project is a collaboration between 13 animators, based on Talia Randall’s spoken-word poem Common Room. Each of the animators chose a segment of the poem that inspired them the most, and brought their own unique style, technique and interpretation to the poem.
The film has been shown at film festivals and events across the world including Argentina, Germany, Brazil, Russia, America and the UK.
The animators are (in order of appearance) Yael Ozsinay, Nir Philosof, Maayan Moreno Erlich, Shimi Asresay, Inabl Breda, Noa Evron, Inbal Ochyon, Yuzefovic Valery, Dekel Oved, Adva Rodan, Dan Berger, Sivan Kotek and Tal Rachmin.
(Click through to read the text.) Watching this again, I’m even more impressed than I was the first time I saw it, on the big screen in Berlin. It’s like a master class in poetry animation; very few of the quite distinct segments veer too close to literal illustration. Instead, they each expand upon the text in a different way, yet somehow we are not distracted from the poem’s argument and music. And it’s the sort of poem that really benefits from this kind of treatment, having a strong message and a fairly discursive style. Had it been denser and more allusive in the manner of much contemporary lyric poetry, I don’t think it would’ve so easily permitted the animators’ imaginations to run riot. In effect, they are supplying much of the allusive power here, in a sort of conversation among artists that makes the whole succeed as something greater than the sum of its parts: a true videopoem or filmpoem, in other words, and not merely a poetry film.
Facing the Wall by Laura M Kaminski
A Swoon film from five months ago that I somehow forgot to share until now. Laura M Kaminski‘s text (from The Poetry Storehouse) is meditative enough to make the slow revealing of lines work here. You’ll probably need to watch the video in HD in order to read them all, though. The poem appears in Kaminski’s 2014 collection last penny the sun (which I happen to own, and recommend highly).
Swoon (Marc Neys) shared some process notes on his blog, as he usually does. Here’s an excerpt:
This poem felt perfect for another film composition (rather than an audible videopoem), so I started with constructing a (longer) soundscape;
During my trip to Bristol I filmed some close ups and details of walls. Footage that fitted perfectly together with other recently filmed images. A search through IICADOM and Videoblocks completed the collection process.
After that came the fun part. Combining lines from the poem with the suitable footage, trying out different fonts and sizes for the text on screen, placement of words… It’s a puzzling way of editing.
I’m not only editing film anymore, I’m carefully trying to blend sound, image and text in one edit. It feels more like composing. It makes me rethink the way I worked (and still work) with audible videopoems.
Call for poems to be turned into films about “Big Bridges”
The Minneapolis-based poetry-film organization Motionpoems, in cooperation with the Weisman Art Museum of the University of Minnesota, is seeking submissions to a poetry-film installation called Big Bridges.
See your poem turned into a film! Calling all artists, designers, engineers, poets, and the entire community…Join us in a creative dialogue to establish the expectations, possibilities, and aspirations for the future of our Big Bridges over the Mississippi River. America’s bridges are failing. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, 25% of America’s bridges are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.
To inspire future engineers, Motionpoems and Target Studio at the Weisman Art Museum of the University of Minnesota invite poets to dream big about bridges. We want poems to inspire our nation’s designers, engineers, and architects to reimagine the future of America’s big bridges. You might send us a poem that imagines a physical bridge of the future or one that conceptualizes the idea of bridging in a big way or you might send us a poem that reinterprets bridge-crossing for a new age. Broad interpretations of the theme encouraged. Executive director of the Poetry Society of America and former New Yorker poetry editor Alice Quinn will judge this poetry contest.
Five winners will:
- receive $1,000
- see their poems turned into short films
- see those films at the Weisman Art Museum
- receive airfare/accommodations to attend the premiere in Minneapolis (date to be announced).
The deadline for submissions is April 30, and only poets resident in the U.S. may enter. Click through and scroll down past the images to read the terms of entry. There will be a second call for entries, this time to U.S. filmmakers, at a yet-to-be-determined date after the five poems have been chosen.
Cambridge University Press sponsors poetry film competition for UK school students
British students between the ages of 14 and 18 are encouraged to “bring a poem to life” by making a poetry film. The contest pitch is aimed at teachers:
Encourage your students to enter our multimedia poetry competition for their chance to win some fantastic prizes.
Engaging students with poetry is often a challenging and difficult area of teaching English. To help you encourage your students to develop an appreciation of poetry, we invite your students (recommended for KS4 and 5) to enter our ‘Bring a Poem to Life’ competition, a multimedia approach to exploring and enjoying poetry.
How to enter
To enter, students must submit a ‘poem film’ with an audio recording of one of the poems below and film their own video clip or clips which will fit the mood, tone and meaning of the poem for a chance of grabbing a great prize.
Submissions can be from an individual student or a group of students (maximum five students per group). Students or teachers can choose from one of four poems from the current AQA Poetry Anthology ‘Moon on the Tides’.
The poems the students can work with include “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “London” by William Blake, “The Farmer’s Bride” by Charlotte Mew, and “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning. Author Trevor Millum is the judge. The competition is open to all UK students, recommended for KS4 and KS5, and closes on 5th May 2015. Click through for complete rules and guidelines.
Typemotion exhibition opens in Taiwan
The Typemotion exhibition most recently in Liverpool, and before that in Karlsruhe and Vilnius, has now moved to Taiwan. TYPEMOTION: Type as Image in Motion opened today at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts and will run through 7 June. As before, the exhibition includes examples of concrete poetry and sound poetry as well as a generous selection of poetry clips. But it sounds as if this incarnation will have a distinctly Taiwanese cast:
The exhibition TYPEMOTION presents 159 outstanding examples of Schriftfilme//Typemotion Films from more than sixteen countries, including twelve works of art by Taiwanese artist, dating from 1897 to the present. The exhibition focuses on artistic films, videos, and new media art works, but also includes feature films, title sequences, commercials, music videos and works from the computer demo scene. It is the very first time to introduce a grand international exhibition which focuese on writing and dynamic images in Taiwan. To highlight the particularity and artistry of Chinese characters and the mature development of new media and filmic art in Taiwan, twelve Taiwanese works are brought into the curitorial context, juxtaposed to reflect the contrasts between Schriftfilme//Typemotion Films in oriental and occidental cultures. This also features the main characteristiscs of TYPEMOTION. Type as Image in Motion exhibition in Taiwan.
The exhibition TYPEMOTION presents over 150 outstanding examples of Schriftfilme//Typemotion Films from more than fifteen countries, dating from 1897 to the present. The exhibition focuses on artistic films, videos, and new media art works, but also includes feature films, title sequences, commercials, music videos and works from the computer demo scene.
We define Schriftfilme//Typemotion Films as analog or digital films or film sequences in which mainly animation, graphic design, or music open up possible uses of type far beyond conventional ways of communicating with type. Referring to those sites and situations where we encounter type in motion, the exhibition examines the multiple possibilities for the presentation, perception and ways of communicating with type.
