~ 2015 ~
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.
Reading Arabic by Amy Miller
A Moving Poems production. I uploaded this to Vimeo five months ago but never got around to sharing it here, side-tracked by my trip to Berlin for the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival a week later. And then when two of Amy Miller’s poems got made into such superlative films by Lori Ersolmaz (“Backward Like a Ghost“) and Eduardo Yagüe (“I Was Grass“), I sort of forgot about my own, more primitive effort. But I was reminded of it again by the rising tide of anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia around the world. This videopoem with its hopefully not too obvious calligraphic touches was meant as a gesture of deep respect to the aural and visual qualities of a great literary civilization.
The text is from the Poetry Storehouse and was first published in Faultline. I used some Creative Commons-licensed footage from Equiloud (Uwe Schweer-Lambers), rearranged and turned black-and-white—the colors of ink and paper. I thought Miller’s understated reading from the MP3 file at the Storehouse could carry the video without any additional sounds, especially since the poem’s all about reading. Like the insects in Equiloud’s macro shots, literate human beings are thoroughly absorbed and enmeshed in the warp of text. (In Latin, text means “woven.”)
The writer, editor and videopoet Dustin Luke Nelson also tried his hand at a remix of Miller’s text. He took a very different approach:
It’s fascinating how much variation there can be in how we see or hear a given text.
My Mother Speaks to me of Suicide by Dave Lordan
Pádraig Burke of the production company Runaway Penguin directed and edited this filmpoem-performance video hybrid. Though some of the shots struck me as a bit too literal, they were balanced by other, more oblique images, and Dave Lordan‘s intense delivery was a good fit for the dire subject-matter of the poem. “My Mother Speaks to me of Suicide” appears in his collection The Lost Tribe of the Wicklow Mountains (Salmon Press, 2014).
Incidentally, Runaway Penguin takes its name from one of my favorite Werner Herzog scenes… which also relates, in a strange way, to the subject of Lordan’s poem.
The Society for the Prevention of Something by Dale Wisely
Dale Wisely has acknowledged the Belgian filmmaker Marc Neys A.K.A. Swoon as one of the major influences on his recent foray into videopoetry. Here Swoon returns the favor with a video remix of one of Wisely’s poems from The Poetry Storehouse. He shared some process notes on his blog.
I found this poem perfect for a ‘filmcomposition with txt on screen’ type of video.
First I made a re-edit of a track I made earlier to give me a nice timeframe and a ‘mood’ to work with.
For some reason I wanted animals (crawling, floating, …) in this video. Browsing different footage providers gave a good collection of jellyfish, crows, a worm, insects,…I combined these with shots of nature, agriculture, hunting (all very moody) and tried out what lines from the poem worked best with what image. I still think it’s a fun way of ‘composing’ a videopoem.
Poetics Lesson at the Baruch Houses by Rich Villar
Another great spoken-word video from Advocate of Wordz, this time featuring writer, editor, activist, and educator Rich Villar, who wrote about it in a January blog post:
Appropriately, my first project for 2015 returns to a subject I first wrote about in 2004. Beyond the legacy of the Nuyorican writers, I can’t fully explain the pull of the place. But when I’m there, when I’m roaming the Lower East Side, there is poetry.
And there are poets from there. Some heralded, others not so much, but I’m honored to speak this poem into existence, to them and for them. And I’m even more honored that Advocate of Wordz chose to record me reciting it at various places on the Lower East Side, including those iconic Baruch Houses at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge.
More soon, gente. For now, enjoy the poem.
The Art of Poetry Film with Cheryl Gross: Leonard Cohen’s “Democracy”
Democracy
Poem and performance by Leonard Cohen
Directed by Mark Pellington
See also the music video.
I have only known Leonard Cohen as a singer/songwriter. To my surprise I came across his video poem titled Democracy.
Cohen is an outstanding poet and I have been a devoted fan since my adolescence. However I have never seen or heard him just read his poetry, not without musical accompaniment, which was and remains the perfect blend by which Leonard Cohen presents himself. Neither genre supersedes the other. He is indeed an icon and has influenced an entire generation.
Visually, with the exception of the backdrop (flag changing into a bar code at the end), Democracy reminds me of a static poetry reading. Not much movement going on. Perhaps all we need is to watch Cohen stand there, and be the spoken-word artist. He does it very well. There is something to be said for letting purity be the platform and downplaying the drama. The camera plays a significant role in this by switching to close-ups of Cohen, zooming in and out, silhouetting, and coming back in while respecting the graphic element of the piece. This works well, and as we know, his words carry the weight. His voice is juxtaposed, rough but smooth, and he reads with feeling. The bar code provides the perfect ending to this political statement. The background music in my opinion is as important as the visual, which makes them combined vehicles that work well together. I only wish I knew what he is fondling.
This video poem was part of a series called The United States of Poetry, produced by Bob Holman, Josh Blum and directed by Mark Pellington for PBS. Sixty poets were featured, among them, Allen Ginsberg, Lou Reed, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Ruth Forman.
An interesting bit of information that I learned is that former president Jimmy Carter became the first U.S president to write a book of poetry: Always a Reckoning and Other Poems, published by Crown in 1995 and illustrated by Sarah Elizabeth Chuldenko. (Crown also published Jimmy Stewart and his Poems, which I happen to have illustrated.)
Bob Holman’s website will give you more of an idea of the series.
Call for submissions: Usurp Zone5 Film Festival
London’s Usurp Art Gallery is planning a film festival this summer, and the call for entries explicitly mentions poetry films as one of the things they’re interested in. I also like the emphasis on films or videos made with little or no money:
Free submission!
Submission deadline: 20 April 2015
Festival dates: 17 July – 2 August 2015Usurp Zone5 – an eclectic festival curated by the Usurp Art Gallery that will showcase inventive work by low-budget / no budget film and video makers in a gallery setting.
Think – abstract, absurd, activist, animated, asemic, clandestine, collage, conceptual, cut-ups, environment, experimental, glitsch, graffiti, graphic, identity, kinetic, outsider, paracinematic, performance, plunderphonic, poetry, radio, rebellious, scores, sci-art, scratch, silent, sonic, subterranean, subversive, surreal, synesthetic, typographic, video art…This is a UK and International call out so show us what you have!
Usurp Art Gallery develops opportunities for creative and critical voices from the margins – open to experimental ideas in all media. The Usurp Zone5 Film Festival will also launch our Usurp Film Club.
Visit the festival website for submission forms and more.
Upcoming PoetryFilm screenings in Scotland and Greece
In last week’s round-up of poetry film and videopoetry screenings planned for this spring, I lamented that there didn’t seem to be anything on the calendar for April yet. Fortunately that’s no longer the case. Zata Kitowski has announced two screenings on tap for next month, and each sounds very interesting: Transmutations: PoetryFilm / Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival, 16-19 April 2015; and PoetryFilm in Athens, 24-26 April 2015. The former will feature
a diverse selection of film artworks, chosen for their alignment with poetry, with poetic structures, with poetic experiences, and with the visual, verbal and aural languages of poetry in various forms. The 45 minute screening will be followed by a 15 minute Q&A with some of the filmmakers, including Richard Bailey (USA) and Sean Martin (UK).
The Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival will take place 16-19 April 2015 in Hawick, Scotland, UK.
Click through to the PoetryFilm post for a very complete description of the program.
As for the Athens screening,
PoetryFilm will be contributing a special programme of poetry films focusing on the body and gender/identity to the sound acts event in Athens in April 2015.
Visit the sound acts website for more about this unique-sounding festival.
Poetryfilmkanal website launches, issues call for essays to publish in magazine
After a slight delay from their projected February launch, the German website Poetryfilmkanal debuted this week, and I was happy to be able to add such a promising new site to the Moving Poems links page. Most of the content so far is in German, but it still has some useful features for Anglophone (and other) readers—especially the Calendar of world-wide poetry film events and the bibliography (Lektüretipps).
As the latter page suggests, this is a scholarly site. Here’s a machine translation from Google of the background page (Die Idee), edited for clarity:
Poetryfilmkanal—Poetry Film Channel—is an e-platform designed to carry ideas and information about the genre of poetry film. It was founded as a joint project between the Multimedia Narration degree program at the Bauhaus University Weimar and the Thüringen Society of Literature, incorporated [e. V.] by Aline Helmcke and Guido Naschert.
Examples of the cinematic adaptation of poetry, or poetic-associative design of short films related to poetry, can be found since the beginning of film history. With the advent of new media design options, a global poetry film movement has emerged in the last two decades. A growing number of festivals and contests, seminars, blogs and scientific publications have made for a confusing field. In addition, the standards by which poetry films are judged (and supported financially) are still very diffuse. The genre is often referred to, but without being explained – and misunderstood accordingly.
Poetryfilmkanal will supply information about this wild field, invite dialogue and contribute to the formation of concepts. With an international calendar of screenings and festivals (Calendar) and regular information on contests (Deadlines), ways to produce and view poetry films will become more transparent. Short articles showcase particularly valuable short films on a monthly basis (Film of the Month). Poetryfilmkanal also imparts basic knowledge of the history of poetry films (Timeline), shares references (Reading Guide) and tries to find a network of relevant web content (Links).
The core of the site is the Magazine that tracks the blog about three quarters of a year on a specific theme, before all the posts appear in an ePaper edition—just the Poetry Film Magazine archived. The editorial provides an introduction to the topic. Essayistic and literary texts in German and English will monitor the genre or introduce artists and authors. In addition, the blog will contain “excavations”: historical poetry films, interviews, festival reports and meetings. And an English translation of German contributions will be provided in the future.
This all sounds very ambitious. Two films have already been included in the Film of the Month feature, and the inaugural editorial, “Faszination Poetryfilm?” has been made available in English translation. I urge anyone with an interest in the genre to go read the whole thing; I’ll just quote the final two paragraphs:
We decided to open the blog’s discussion on a very general level in order to prepare the ground for more specific investigations in future editions. What makes an engaging poetry film? By which characteristics a poetry film is able to develop a certain fascination? Is there any general answer or do we have to look more precisely into the categories of live action and animation film? Are there certain sorts of poems which are particularly suitable for a translation into the audio-visual media? In which way do sound and voice-over determine the outcome? How come so many poetry films appear to only scratch the surface and fail to take us deeper into the meaning of the poem?
The discussion will consist of short blogs in an open form, about 3000-4000 signs in length. We will invite practitioners in the field to contribute their texts but encourage and welcome anyone interested to submit their own statement or opinion. By the end of this year, we aim at publishing the first edition of the Poetry Film Magazine from the texts and statements received.
We are looking forward to an engaging and lively discussion!
All the Best,
Aline Helmcke, Guido Naschert
