~ 2015 ~
A Man’s a Man for a’ That by Robert Burns
https://vimeo.com/116846135
A new poetry film by Alastair Cook and Luca Nasciuti is always worth celebrating. This is one of three:
Filmpoem director Alastair Cook invited Makar Liz Lochhead, the National Poet of Scotland, to read three of Robert Burns’s poems and together with Italian composer Luca Nasciuti they have created three beautiful interpretations of some of Burns’s most loved works: I Murder Hate, Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation and A Man’s a Man for a’ That.
Watch all three films on the Filmpoem website. For more on Liz Lochhead, see her page at the Scottish Poetry Library.
The Art of Poetry Film with Cheryl Gross: “Östersjöar” (“Baltic Seas”)
http://vimeo.com/ondemand/ostersjoar
Watch the full-length film at Vimeo On Demand (enter the code “movingpoems” for a free, 2-day rental through Jan. 31).
Poem by Tomas Tranströmer
Filmed by Eva Jonasson and James Michael Wine
Original score by Charlie Wine
Longwalks Productions website
This is probably the longest yet most beautiful video poem I have reviewed so far. Since I am primarily a visual person, the video/graphic aspects usually spark my interest first. That’s not to say that the poem is not equally as important, but sometimes when the two are placed together one overrides the other.
This is not the case in Baltic Seas. It is lengthy and slow, which allows the viewer to take in every aspect of what it has to offer. It tells a story in six parts. Although many images are repeated, each section has its own canvas. We are on a life-long voyage. The first part is about the ship. The poet conveys it as an organism with power and purpose, taking its passengers in the hopes that they will obtain the knowledge this particular journey has to offer.
Section Two opens with images of a graveyard and speaks of an island with trees. Its focus is an old woman’s melancholy, remembering her past. We are led into a combination of life and death, “we walk together.” Then there is talk of war. The visuals are of the Nazi invasion, described as “a gust of wind.” “Terror confined to the moment” — in other words, this too shall pass. We see a memorial stuck into the sand. It’s a mine reminding us of a time when darkness had fallen. This should not be forgotten. Unlike most memorials it is quiet and gentle, thus allowing the theme to continue to unfold in a graceful manner.
In Section Three we are again reminded of the passage of life, through images of a baptismal font. The story carved is biblical, but the poet then speaks of numbers. The filmmakers use the Hex Color/binary code to illustrate this. It’s set into the sky, thereby continuing the passage of life, bringing us from antiquity to the post-modern world. Even the sea and its island cannot escape time.
Baltic Seas is a constant reminder that we continue to come full-circle. The environment changes and yet remains the same. It clarifies the lives that were lived and the ones that were lost, as remembered by the old woman. She, the old woman, through loss of family and her own death has somehow risen above it.
This is one video poem not to rush through — and not to be missed. You need to spend time and enjoy every aspect. It is to be digested rather than guzzled, like a fine wine. My only concern is that we live in a world where most people have the attention span of a gnat. My question is, in our overly caffeinated society, who has the thirty minutes?
Invest the time; you won’t be sorry. It’s a work of art you will remember for a very long time. If you are someone who is involved in making video poetry, it is something to aspire to.
Imprinted by Neil Flatman
I’ll admit it: I’m a sucker for single-shot videopoems. The text (by Neil Flatman, from The Poetry Storehouse) could so easily have elicited something melodramatic. The above remix is by Charles Musser, with music by Youngest Daughter. Nic S. also did a remix of the poem:
https://vimeo.com/101175533
Still fairly low-key. I like the use of text-on-screen. The soundtrack is more subdued, with a jazz piano ballad by Fabric.
Not Talking by Chris Woods
Concept, camera, direction and editing are all credited to Christopher Hughes (Shining Tor Productions), though I can’t help thinking the content of the film might have been influenced by the title of the book in which the poem originally appeared: Dangerous Driving by Chris Woods (Comma Press, 2007). Regardless, it’s a good example of how a narrative approach to filmmaking can work with a lyric poem.
Not Talking was “Made in partnership with Bokeh Yeah and Comma Press”; Bokeh Yeah is kind of the successor to the earlier Comma Film project, as I understand it. One way or another, at least four films have now been made based on poems from Dangerous Driving, each by a different director. Manchester would seem to have a very active poetry-film community indeed.
Christopher Hughes blogged a bit about how he came to make this film:
It seems like an age since Adele Myers approached me to come along to her group, Bokeh Yeah, and join in their poetry film challenge. Even though I agreed, I was initially quite dismissive of poetry films as they didn’t appear to worry about the things I worried about with narrative short films. Things like continuity, dialogue, plot, character, etc. They could shoot any abstract images they wanted and juxtapose them in any way that took their fancy under the general heading of ‘artistic interpretation’. It all seemed a bit too easy to me – or at least, that’s what I thought.
Anyway, I’d said I’d do it so I chose a poem that I liked and came up with a concept that gave me a chance to reference my beloved spaghetti westerns and away we went. I won’t go into more detail about the film, just watch it for yourselves, except to say, that I’m quite happy with it.
Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel: Ten Favorite Funny Poetry Films
“Always look on the bright side of life” (Eric Idle). So here are ten funny poetry films which have participated in past editions of the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival, a project of the Literaturwerkstatt Berlin in cooperation with interfilm Berlin. Enjoy!
Oedipus (poem by Nathan Filer)
Rong, 2005
The Art of Drowning (poem by Billy Collins)
Diego Maclean, 2009
Missed Aches (poem by Taylor Mali)
Joanna Priestley, 2009
https://vimeo.com/13830005
Der Conny ihr Pony (poem by Gabriel Vetter)
Robert Pohle and Martin Hentze, 2008
Financially strapped (poem by Katrin Bowen)
Katrin Bowen, 2008
Höpöhöpö Böks (poem by Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl)
Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, 2008
Dialog über Österreich (poem by Gerhard Rühm)
Hubert Sielecki, 2012
Giraffe (poem by Annelyse Gelman)
by Annelyse Gelman and Auden Lincoln-Vogel, 2013
On Loop (poem by Christine Hooper and Victoria Manifold)
Christine Hooper, 2013
Carnivore Reflux (poem by Eddie White)
Eddie White, 2006
Further experiments with videohaiku
The footage I linked to for a videohaiku challenge last week elicited very few responses, though each of them was very interesting. Perhaps composing a credible haiku is challenging enough without the additional burden of such WTF imagery to work with. However, in a classic example of beginner’s mind out-pacing the professionals, my friend Rachel Rawlins, who doesn’t consider herself a poet at all, suggested some lines which I thought worked very well. After some rather intense back-and-forth via email and Skype, here’s what we came up with:
To recap, the challenge was to treat the footage as if it were one part of a typically two-part haiku, either preceding or following the cut-point (usually represented in English by an em dash or colon). I find that composing this kind of videohaiku is much easier if you mentally substitute words for footage. So for this one, one could start with something like “[nudist handball—]”, e.g.
[nudist handball—]
not even netting
comes between us
which was an earlier joint effort of mine and Rachel’s.
Haiku are untitled, but Tom Konyves argued in an email that a videohaiku should have a title nonetheless. This was in the context of a critique of my first effort in this vein. I talked about it with James Brush, the author of the text, and he agreed. So we decided to call that piece flower (videohaiku) — though we didn’t remake the video itself, just changed the title on Vimeo, which was perhaps a bit of a cop-out. But for the second one with Rachel, you’ll notice we did put the title right on the video, using a freeze-frame as background.
There’s a long tradition of occasionally using bizarre imagery in written haiku and senryu. I found some truly WTF footage in the IICADOM collection (the Belgian equivalent of the Prelinger Archives), in an undated home movie identified simply as “Rural Life.” My mental substitution for the footage was “Hitler in the garden.” (This was in part a response to Othniel Smith’s video in this week’s Cheryl Gross column.) Anyway, here’s what I came up with:
I decided both videos worked fine as silent films, but I don’t think that’s necessarily part of the videohaiku prescription. I thought the ambient insect noise in flower was a good addition, and could work just as well with visitor here.
I’m now beginning to consider the best way to string videohaiku into videorenga. In classic Japanese linked verse (renga or renku), each stanza apart from the opening and closing verses is part of two different two-stanza poems in succession, which creates a dilemma for filmmakers: repeat each verse or not? And how to represent the shorter stanzas (two lines in English-language renga; 14 “syllables” in Japanese)?
I’m not going to issue another formal videopoetry challenge for now, but I am interested in continuing to work with other writers, and possibly other video remixers as well, so if you’d like to be part of that, let me know (bontasaurus@yahoo.com). Renga is a quintessentially collaborative approach to composition, and it seems to me it might be a natural fit for the remix/mashup culture of the web. But first we need to generate a prototype, I think.
Free Östersjöar (“Baltic Sea”) rentals for Moving Poems readers
You may remember my post from late December about the 31-minute poetry film based on a long poem by the great Tomas Tranströmer that’s now available through Vimeo On Demand. Director James Wine emailed with this offer:
Thanks so much for spreading the word through Moving Poems. We are nudging the audience closer to the first 1000 mark, with viewers in 20 countries on 4 continents — so far! Here in Sweden we are working on a celebration around Tomas’ birthday in April with screenings across the country.
We know the price bites many, but the cost breakdown after the 25% Swedish VAT, the platform charges and plain old taxes, it’s just about 30% left! (At least there is healthcare and free university for all!) No grants or outside funding contributed to the production.
But as thanks to you, we have put a promotion together for your followers, if you like: free rentals starting today through the end of the month. Just hit Rent and enter the code.
The Rental Promotion Code is: movingpoems
Also have put up on Vimeo Part 1 for embedding freely.
https://vimeo.com/116962956
(Be sure to click the “CC” icon to get the English subtitling.)
Here’s the link to the full-length film.
Frankly, I’m poor as the proverbial church mouse, but USD $5.00 doesn’t strike me as too much for a 48-hour rental of a high-quality, feature-length film. That said, I’m always happy to save some beer money. Thanks to Mr. Wine for his generosity.
To / For by Luisa A. Igloria
A text-on-screen-style videopoem by Swoon (Marc Neys) with a text from Night Willow, a 2014 collection of prose poems by Luisa A. Igloria. Back in September, Marc blogged some process notes about the video, calling it “The latest experiment in my series of videos where I re-think the relationship of image, sound, and text”.
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 cut. It feels more like composing. It makes me rethink the way I worked (and still work) with audible videopoems.These ‘film Compositions’ are meant to be played full screen and loud!
Marc talked about this style of editing in a brief interview I filmed for Moving Poems, Swoon on finding a new angle in videopoetry composition.
And God… by Eric Blanchard
Australian filmmaker Marie Craven demonstrates one way to get away with out-right illustration in a videopoem. Had she used footage of pinball games in a poem that references pinball, it would’ve seemed merely redundant, I think. But instead she hit upon the idea of using colorful still images (by Donald Bell) alternating with dark, silent-film-like title cards bearing the lines of the poem. Cut these images in time with up-tempo, pinball-esque music by CIRC, and rather than simply depicting a game of pinball, the video actually enacts or reproduces the effect of a highly kinetic ball careening around in an inert cabinet. “The whole thing / goes tilt.” And the poem is raised to a new level, I think.
The text by Eric Blanchard, first published in Pudding Magazine, was sourced from The Poetry Storehouse.
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).”
