~ April 2016 ~
Call for Contributions to Poetryfilm Magazine on Sound and Voice-over in Poetry Film
Poetryfilm Magazine, the multilingual, digital and print publication from Poetryfilmkanal, has just issued a call for essay contributions to its next issue, which has the theme “Ton und Voice-over im Poetryfilm” (Sound and Voice-over in Poetry film). I’ll reproduce the English-language version below. There’s also a version in German.
Dear reader,
a film poem might be seen as a visual illustration of a metaphoric text. Beyond that, the sound is a fundamentally important element. Music, voice and sound design have to be considered as essential aspects that add to the whole of the audiovisual experience of a poetry film.
Particularly the recitation is of central importance. No matter if visuals and sound were adapted to the poet’s recital of his text or if the visual part was created prior to the voice-over, the poetry film genre has always been an important experimentation field. More than in dialogue-based fiction films, single words play a key role.
The voice itself is not a neutral media. It intensifies and interprets the poem. Maybe it comments, parodies or even attacks it instead of bringing it into its service. Moreover, it has to adapt or to be adapted to the complex rhythm of the moving imagery, the edit, the foley, the sound and the music. This can happen in various ways. When the relation between the visual and the sound level is redundant, it might be perceived as a disturbance. Complementing one another, the two might create a third level which can add an additional meaning, an audiovisual surplus (Michel Chion) to the text.
Sounds, tones and noises have an impact on the emotional value of a film and guide our visual perception. What we see depends on what we hear. Even what we don’t hear can gain a presence through the sound. As poetry films live from their mood and their atmosphere, they rely fundamentally on the sound design’s qualities.
In her contribution to the first Poetryfilm Magazine’s edition Stefanie Orphal states that the fascination of the poetry film genre can be pointed out particularly well through the consideration of the sound. This is why a charismatic voice and an experienced sound designer should be engaged in the production process wherever possible.
When the music dominates and the beat remains a minor element, the poetry film draws near the genre of the music video. Music videos and video installations can be seen as poetry films, whereas songs and tunes can be interpreted as poetry. Various transitions and crossover forms can be found in this field regarding the visual language, the way of singing or reciting as well as in the complexity of the texts.
Call for Essays
We are looking for submissions for our Poetryfilm Magazine’s second edition, which will focus on aspects of sound and voice-over in poetry film. We are interested to initiate an interdisciplinary exchange of views on and experiences about recitation, music, noise, sound and artistic sound design in poetry film. Essays can be based on a historical research, a film analysis or a theoretical reflection – important to us is the practical approach, through which the filmmakers as well as the audience can gain a better understanding of the genre.
The contributions in the magazine’s first edition »Fascination Poetryfilm?« were held short on purpose, as we wanted to give as many authors as possible a chance to raise their voice. From now on, we are planning to publish longer texts of up to 10.000 signs (without footnotes wherever possible). We are hoping for submissions which lead us to open discussions and unexpected perspectives onto the topic. The second edition of the magazine will be published in time for this year’s ZEBRA-Festival, which for the first time will take place in Münster.
Aline Helmcke, Guido Naschert
For those who may not have read it yet, the inaugural issue of the magazine is available as a PDF.
Intertwined by Eleni Cay
https://youtu.be/42gKkAtVwHQ
Both poem and concept are credited to the Slovakian poet Eleni Cay; animation and score are the work of beyon wren moor of the ecofeminist film and theater production company LoveHoldLetGo (which has apparently let go of its former domain, loveholdletgo.com). The YouTube description also notes that “Intertwined was shortlisted for the Elbow Room Prize 2015 and for the Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition 2015.”
Who Keeps Observance in the Fever Room by Jane Draycott
This is part of a series called Beginning to See the Light by Corinne Silva. The text is by Jane Draycott, “a UK-based poet with a particular interest in sound art and collaborative work.” As the Poetry Society (U.K.) webpage explains,
The Poetry Society and Jaybird Live Literature commissioned six poets to create new pieces to celebrate National Poetry Day 2015, the theme of which was ‘light’. The poems followed the path of light over one October day. Artist and filmmaker Corinne Silva then made filmpoems of six of the poems, which you can watch on Vimeo or YouTube.
I see these as more in the video art tradition than previous poetry films sponsored by the Society; some of the imagery reoccurs from film to film, and watching them in order does give an interesting impression of the passing of time. But the juxtaposition of footage and text most often feels arbitrary, so for me they don’t really work as videopoems or filmpoems. Still, kudos for the Poetry Society for continuing to push the envelope and sponsor interesting multimedia poetry projects.
Time’s Up by Holly Corfield Carr
https://vimeo.com/104014704
Bristol-based writer and artist Holly Corfield Carr made this brief but effective videopoem in 2014 as a promo for a live event called MINE, which she describes on Vimeo as
A poetic excavation of second-best diamonds
MINE journeys into the extraordinary underworld of an 18th-century grotto, a cave blistered with crystals and coral collected from slavers’ ports, to tell a story of dolour and dolerite amongst the city’s dealt dirt.
An audience of six descend with writer Holly Corfield Carr to play cards, trade voices and dig up a murder mystery, a disastrous meeting, a comedy, a spiralling inferno.
MINE was part of a 9-day arts festival held in September, 2014 for the Bristol Biennial. As for the videopoem, Carr writes:
To transfer some time back to you, I’ve piled it all up into a rushed sort of stalagmite. There’s about two million years here. So we’re even.
Peyton Place: A Haiku Soap Opera by David Trinidad
Writer and filmmaker John Bresland, the former video editor for TriQuarterly, made this videopoem for David Trinidad’s haiku collection using clips from the soap opera that prompted the haiku. It appeared in the November 2015 issue of Blackbird, accompanied by a commentary by Gregory Donovan which is essential reading if, like me, you’re too young to remember Peyton Place, “the very first American prime-time soap opera.” It was, he says, “one of the first televised programs in the U.S. to deal frankly with sexual themes, which revealed the hypocrisy and masked immorality beneath the misleadingly peaceful façade of small-town American life.”
In David Trinidad’s Peyton Place: A Haiku Soap Opera (Turtle Point Press, 2013) he has whipped up a haiku concoction to respond, with an energy both antic and erotic, to each of the over 500 episodes of the complete run of the television program. Reading this series of poems, carefully constructed within the confines of a taut form yet unleashing a sardonic and often laugh-generating appreciation of the oddities of a now-dated television drama, one is struck by an experience on the page that brings the television series back into the mind’s eye with a pointed mix of humor, pathos, and social critique.
Meanwhile, the imaginative adaptation by John Bresland, collected, edited and enhanced into an equally layered, genre-challenging video essay, employs actual clips from the television program with the texts of Trinidad’s poems superimposed and narrated. Bresland builds upon Trinidad’s frank exploration of the many dimensions of “the male gaze” and further examines the looking generated not only by the camera’s eye, but also by our own changed vision of a set of cultural moments and icons that time and history have inescapably altered. Bresland’s video piece provides its own unique experience that arises from the atmosphere generated by Trinidad’s book while also plunging us into an even more pointed sense of the absurdities and strange possibilities of realization available in the now transformed and reconstituted images of what was once, and is now again, Peyton Place.
Shop by Lucy English
The latest addition to UK poet (and Liberated Words festival co-creator) Lucy English’s Book of Hours project comes from the U.S. artist (and Moving Poems Magazine columnist) Cheryl Gross. Her usual “Dr. Seuss on crack” approach to animation makes a great fit for the poem’s wry take on motherhood, I thought.
Incidentally, I believe that the call for filmmakers to contribute to the project is still open, if anyone’s interested.
The Washington Post sponsors ten poetry animations for National Poetry Month
Wednesday’s Washington Post online published ten brief but innovative animations of portions of poems by contemporary U.S. poets. The feature, authored by Phoebe Connelly, Suzette Moyer, Julio Negron, Amy King, Emily Chow, and Ron Charles, has a headline complete with line breaks:
To celebrate
the 20th anniversary of
National Poetry Month
We asked
10 poets for
poems.
10 designers
put them
in motion.
Sadly, there’s no accompanying text to give readers any indication that poetry animation might be a thing that other people have done before — a missed opportunity to, for example, link to Motionpoems, who have been matching up prominent U.S. poets with top animators and directors for years. (Though to be fair, Motionpoems too has sometimes acted as if it’s the only organization doing this.) In another indication of the newspaper’s scarcity mentality, they made the unfortunate choice to host the videos themselves, streaming them from the Amazon cloud, which translates to poor performance at my slow DSL speed, and probably for plenty of others in flyover country as well. And anyone who isn’t a paid subscriber may be blocked if they’ve already used up their monthly quota of articles. Fortunately, the Post has also uploaded the videos to AOL.On and Dailymotion, and a couple of the animators have posted their work to Vimeo, so let me share those versions as a public service, in the order in which they appear in the article. (The one thing that’s missing here is the text of the poems, which is useful to see how the excerpts used in the animations relate to the larger works. For that, you’ll still need to visit the Post‘s website.)
Kevin Young + Art&Graft: ‘Commencement’
Edward Hirsch + Ellen Porteus: ‘Cotton Candy’
Mary Karr + Charlie Brand: ‘Face Down’
Dunya Mikhail + Hannah Jacobs: ‘A Second Life’
Nick Flynn + James Price: ‘Harbor’
John Yau + Bran Dougherty-Johnson: ‘Portrait’
Patricia Lockwood + Paul Cooper: ‘The Hornet Mascot Falls in Love’
Michael Robbins + Rafael Verona: ‘Not Fade Away’
Tracy K. Smith + Muti: ‘Visitation’
Can’t be embedded — Watch on AOL.
Victoria Chang + Phil Borst: ‘The Boss Calls Us at Home’
Can’t be embedded — Watch on AOL.
The Hero is Light by Matt Mullins
Usually, the American poet and electronic literature expert Matt Mullins makes his own poetry films, but for this one he teamed up with Spanish director Eduardo Yagüe, providing only the poem, voice and music. The poem is dedicated to the Soviet artist Eva Levina Rozengolts (1898-1975), a drawing of whose appears in the credits. According to the Museum of Russian Art website,
Eva Levina-Rozengolts was one of the few Soviet artists who managed to creatively transform and express the trauma of Stalinist repression in a striking visual language.
Trained in the celebrated VkHuTeMas, the hotbed of early Soviet avant-garde, Eva Rozengolts worked as a textile designer and later a copyist at the Soviet Artists’ Union production studios. She was arrested in 1949 and sentenced to ten years of exile in the depth of Siberia where she lived in a settlement on the Yenisei river, in the Krasnoyarsk region. She was assigned to work as a woodcutter, wall painter, and later medical assistant. After returning from exile, she regained her creativity, undeterred by age and failing health. In fact, it was after her return from Siberia, that her talent came into its own. Unknown to the broad public, her work stirred the attention of the new generation of unofficial artists that emerged after Stalin’s death. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Eva Levina-Rozengolts became recognized as one of the outstanding figures of the ‘lost’ artistic generation of the Stalin era.
Yagüe shot the film in Stockholm with actress Carolina Rosa.
Light by Ed Madden
This short video by Allen Wheeler in support of Ed Madden’s poetry collection Ark has two things I love: time-lapse photography and a single, continuous shot from one position. The flooded field in the shot is presumably even more full of light than the field referenced in the text, but given the nature of photography, it’s hard to see how anything less would have worked. The piano music by Kai Engel was found on the Free Music Archive, according to the credits.
John Scott: Ten Favorite Cinépoems
I’m a filmmaker not a poet. So for me the word “poetry” means something different I think than how poets might see it. For me the poetry part of cinépoetry is not the written part, it’s a kind of magic that can suddenly bring alive an enchanting correspondence between words, sounds and images. Given this definition, here are my current favorites put into categories.
Category 1: The Interior Dilemma Comes to Light
Once
Written and directed by Lyn Elliot, 2000
Lyn Elliot must surely be America’s most underappreciated filmmaker. Her work is so smart, so simple and often times uproariously funny. What more do you want? Ok, how about short and to the point too. I love this film. I wish I was this smart.
On Loop
Directed by Christine Hooper, 2013
Poem by Christine Hooper and Victoria Manifold
I went to the Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin in October of 2014 and I saw many great cinépoems. This was my favorite one there. I still don’t fully understand how she did it, but I think she perfectly captures that moment where we are trying to sleep but our mind seems instead to dissect us into multiple fighting personalities who churn things over endlessly.
Having Intended to Merely Pick on an Oil Company, the Poem Goes Awry
Directed by Joanna Kohler, 2010
Poem by Bob Hicok
Are all the best cinépoems directed by women? Sheesh, third in a row. I think what I really love best about this one is how it finds a way to create an enchanting dialogue between the interior voice of the poem and a kind of external visual journey of the ruminating man. Also, projecting on chest hair is a genius visual idea. I wish I’d thought of that.
Category 2: Opening up New Worlds
Closed Wounds
Directed by Lanka Haouche Perren, 2014
Poem by Michael Harding
I saw this at the Zebra Poetry Film Festival in 2014. It’s haunting. A brilliant and troubling juxtaposition of images and sounds with words. Some might call the film exploitative, but all I saw was its humanity. Also, I never would have thought of putting this poem with these images. It’s a surprising confluence of words and images that would at first seem entirely inappropriate, but here, somehow, this piece elevates both the words and the visuals to levels I’m not sure they achieve on their own.
When Walt Whitman was a Little Girl
Directed by Jim Haverkamp, 2012
Poem by M.C. Biegner
I think this film takes us down a rabbit hole into an Alice in Wonderland style visual universe that’s enchanting in way that’s both completely its own thing, but also perfectly suited to the tone of the words. I also like that I don’t think it tries to be impressive – like so many calling card short films. It just makes the original work sing again with spirit and soul, transposed into a new key.
Never Too Late
Director uncredited, 2013
Poem by Michael London
I love the poem and how it sounds when read. I think the words work cleverly to open up the difficulties, paradoxes and the potential for change in what I take to be life in inner city Chicago. Also, for me at least, it feels like I am invited to feel the breathing spirit of a personal, family space and understand its value to the poet, and to all of us. I know the piece has affected me when all the natural sound drops out at at the end and I can still feel and hear it in the poem and what it describes.
Heliotropes
Directed by Michael Langan, 2010
Poem by Brian Christian
I think the sequence from :52 to 1:09 in this film are my favorite 17 seconds in cinépoetry. It’s perfect. I’m sure there is some kind of eternal punishment for being perfect, even if it’s just for 17 seconds — maybe door to door electioneering for Donald Trump(?)
Cars Will Make You Free
Written and directed by Lyn Elliot, 1997
I don’t guffaw, or make giant snorting sounds while watching this piece (like I do while watching certain scenes from Trailer Park Boys) but I do laugh throughout it, and you can’t really wipe the stupid grin from my face. It’s simple, fun and smart.
Massacre at Murambi
Written and directed by Sam Kauffmann, 2007
I think this is a cinépoem masquerading as a documentary. One could could characterize the words here as simply poetic, rather than a poem onto itself. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. I guess I don’t care either way. But for the purists, I urge you to hang with it until its conclusion before you cinch any final judgment here. While at first the words may seem like a conventional documentary voice-over, the poetry is revealed soon enough, and the whole movie turns on a few well chosen words and their devastating reveal.
Category 3: Masterwork
La jetée
Written and directed by Chris Marker, 1962
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLfXCkFQtXw
Well, who am I to add anything more to the volumes written about this movie. It’s an acknowledged masterwork that deserves your undistracted attention for its duration. Actually, imagine you didn’t have a phone or a computer or any devices and you were in a dark cinema in Paris in 1962. It’s still great though even if you do glance at your devices once or twice. I don’t believe it has been surpassed really — an astounding blend of visuals, sounds and words. It’s a one of a kind work that, if not a cinépoem must be instead a grandfather to the genre.
