~ November 2016 ~
The Art of Poetry Film with Cheryl Gross: “It turns out”
It turns out
poem and film by Martha McCollough
2012
Martha McCollough is one of my absolute favorite artists. It turns out is another one of her pieces that is over the top.
She combines one voiceover that uses echo with another that is just plain-spoken. And she gives us two formats in one, the written work and spoken word. It’s as if they are two separate poems. Could it be one is imagined and the other based in reality? What is the message? We ask for help, but does it exist?
There’s a nice collage effect, interlacing texture with line animation and design. I love the voiceover. Images of a floor plan are juxtaposed with talk about no help from a help desk. I often feel that way. Are we to assume that we must venture on alone? Could she be talking about immigration? Electing Trump? Trying to escape from the horrors of war and reality? We are left to fend for ourselves, applying her words however we can to assist us on our journey. Have technology and the media impaired our senses and way of being? Or am I reading too deeply into what has been in front of us all along?
We see imagery of people running, wolves running towards them — a metaphor. There are so many questions to be asked in such uncertain times.
So how does one go about critiquing a work that is perfect in its imperfection? It turns out does seem somehow very fitting for the post-election funk we are feeling. Can we call it prophetic? Is this what people have been trying to say all along? It makes me wonder what is real and what has been manipulated to appear so.
The Orbita Poetry and Multi-Media Group to Tour in the United States
I just received the following press release, which I’m happy to pass on. The Orbita anthology Hit Parade is one of the best poetry anthologies I’ve read in years, and I’m a big fan of the group’s videopoetry, which they’ve been making since the era of videotape. Watch five examples of their work on Moving Poems. —Dave
The Orbita collective from Riga, Latvia will appear with poetry readings in four cities on the East Coast of the USA.
The tour will take place from November 14-19 in connection with the release in the United States of the anthology of translations of poetry by members of Orbita, Hit Parade. This bilingual edition, including poems in Russian and translations into English, was published at the end of 2015. Kevin M. F. Platt, professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania, served as editor of the volume and also among the translators. The book appeared in the New York publishing house Ugly Duckling Presse.
In the USA the Orbita Group will present a compact version of its poetic performance the FM Slow Show, with which it has appeared in a number of European countries. In this version of the show, poems with sound accompaniment will issue not from an array of radio receivers, but instead from portable loudspeakers like those used by tour guides and live street advertisers. In addition to Kevin M. F. Platt, the poets will be joined in their readings by various other members of the translating team behind Hit Parade, that included Polina Barskova, Charles Bernstein, Julia Bloch, Michael Wachtel, Maya Vinokour, Sarah Dowling, Eugene Ostashevsky, Bob Perelman, Karina Sotnik, Sasha Spektor, Anton Tenser, Natalia Fedorova, Daniil Cherkassky, and Matvei Yankelevich.
In the words of Sergej Timofejev, member of Orbita: “The full complement of Orbita has never before traveled such a great distance together—across the ocean. We are bringing along our texts and also our performance experience, accumulated over fifteen years of activity. We are also taking a bit of clothing and several bottles of Riga Balsam with Black Currant. All of this will doubtless come in handy, and we are also counting on the support of those who will attend our performances, and also of those who will keep their fingers crossed for us at home in Latvia.”
The tour was supported by the Latvian State Cultural Capital Fund, Amherst College, New York University and the University of Pennsylvania.
Schedule of planned appearances of Orbita on tour in the USA:
- Amherst (Massachusetts): The Russian Cultural Center at Amherst College, November 14
- New York: The Jordan Center of New York University, November 15
- Philadelphia: The Penn Book Center Bookstore, November 17
- Washington, D.C.: The Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies Convention, Washington Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, November 18
Orbita is a collective of poets, photographers, musicians, and media-artists that has played an active role in Latvian cultural life since 1999. Orbita presents poetic performances, creates installations, and publishes multilingual editions of literature and photography. The group not only disseminates the Russian poetry of Latvia, but also translates contemporary Latvian poetry, convening an intensive collaboration between Russian- and Latvian-speaking poets and artists. The group has appeared in many European countries, including Lithuania, Estonia, Germany, Ukraine, Finland, Russia, Croatia, Serbia, Slovakia. and others.
The group has been recognized not only by the public, but also by poetry experts. It has been nominated for and won prizes in a range of Latvian and international competitions: the Prize of the Year for literature from the Latvian Union of Writers, the Zelta ābele award and also the award of the Latvian Club of Art-Directors for book design, as well as the Purvitis Prize for visial art, the Sergei Kurechin Prize, etc.
The main participants in Orbita include: Artur Punte, Vladimir Svetlov, Serej Timofejev, and Semyon Khanin.
Off the Trail: poetry by Michael McClure and Gary Snyder
This film, a selection from the longer experimental documentary Headlands Lookout by Jacob Cartwright and Nick Jordan, was awarded the prize for Best Poetry Film at this year’s ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival “For a pre-apocalyptic journey [with] a perfect guide in a stitched uniform into a world that’s going to unravel itself.” Here’s how Jordan describes it on his website:
Walk the path, sit the rains, grind the ink, wet the brush, unroll the broad white space….Lead out and tip the moist, black line.
Gary Snyder’s invocation to the muse of a Chinese scroll painter sets the tone in a short film adapted from Cartwright and Jordan’s longer work, Headlands Lookout.
Filmed in former US military barracks, and in the long-abandoned homes and circular library of Gary Snyder and Zen philosopher Alan Watts, Off the Trail follows a central protagonist, a soldier from another era, as he performs a series of actions and rituals. The uniformed figure paints Chinese nature symbols, chants, meditates and wanders dreamlike through a rolling Californian landscape of fog-shrouded hills, coastal defences and dense woodland valleys. Scenes are accompanied by haiku and poetry readings from Michael McClure and Gary Snyder, and the disembodied voice of Alan Watts, ruminating upon the passage of time and our perception of the ‘wild’.
As someone who studied Japanese and Chinese literature at university, there were parts of this that made me wince — the inept brush calligraphy, for example, and occasionally simplistic or misleading characterizations of Daoist and Buddhist thought — but I do recognize the historical importance of mid-20th-century writers such as Watts and Snyder in bringing East Asian thinking to a Western audience, however colored by Orientalism their versions of it may have been. And there’s no denying the beautiful cinematography and intriguing almost-narrative here, not to mention the innate fascination of the ruins where it was shot.
На заре – наимедленнейшая кровь / At dawn – quiet blood by Marina Tsvetaeva
A poem by the great Marina Tsvetaeva in a film directed by Natalia Alfutova. Be sure to click the CC icon for the English translation by Tony Brinkey. Anastasia Somova (Anastasia Somique) and Artem Tkachenko are the actors, Valeria Ordinartseva co-wrote the script with Alfutova, and Mikael Hamzyan was the cameraman.
The President’s Address by Ivan Stanev
Ivan Stanev‘s Totleben TV project presents “news from yesterday,” but this is avant-garde remix videopoetry at its most relevant. The latest episode features fragments of footage of Mussolini, and it seemed appropriate for this day after the US election, for some reason.
Here’s the complete description of this video from the website:
Livestream from Todessa
Camera: Tman
Cast: Totleb & Co.
Editor: Todito
Soundmix: Todonsky Junior
Directed by: T.L.©Ivan Stanev. All Rights Reserved
Acknowledgements
archive.org; freesound.org; Benito Mussolini
There’s an equally facetious About page. According to a Google translation of a German-language biography, Ivan Stanev was
Born in 1959 in Varna (Bulgaria). Author. Director. Stanev grew up bilingual, attending a German boarding school. He has been writing poetry, prose, plays and aesthetic treatises since his childhood, which could never be published in Bulgaria. From 1978 to 1980 he was in military service, then studied directing at the Academy of Drama, Directing and Theater Science in Sofia, at the same time studying philosophy.
Bun Stop by Paul Summers
https://vimeo.com/189766748
This oddly compelling film from photographer Dan Douglas, poet Paul Summers, and composer Roma Yagnik “sets out to discover beauty in even the darkest parts of Newcastle upon Tyne,” according the Vimeo description. So many online poetry videos deploy slowly moving still images — the “Ken Burns effect” — but this does the exact opposite, using a stationary camera to frame beautifully composed shots through which people, cars, and pigeons move, an approach which seems to mirror the score’s minimalism and Summers’ poetic strategy: an understated yet expressive recitation of a praise-poem full of interesting juxtapositions and word music.
Douglas posted the video to his website, where it has attracted some revealing comments from Newcastle residents and natives. He notes that
we hope [Bun Stop] is the first of a few short poetry films about the North East. We want to work with other local composers and actors, the overall project will be called Confluence.
Zebra Poetry Film Festival Münster 2016: a view from the jury
The international ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival has a new home in Münster. In 2016, for the very first time, the Filmwerkstatt Münster, in cooperation with Literaturwerkstatt Berlin/Haus für Poesie, hosted the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival Münster|Berlin. The festival was located at Schloßtheater, a beautiful 1950s Art Deco cinema in Münster.
The focus of this year’s ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival Münster|Berlin was the Netherlands and Flanders (Belgium). Since I’m Flemish, maybe that was one of the reasons they asked me to be on the jury.
I did not get a chance to see other than the selected films this year, nor to visit any of the extras that ZEBRA’s program had to offer. Maybe that’s a shame, but maybe it also made me a more focused visitor than I was at my previous visits to Zebra.
Jury Duty
Eighty films. That’s how many we had to see in two days. Eighty films from which to pick four winners. Hmm… That’s a lot.
The other members of the jury were filmmaker and festival organizer Juliane Fuchs and poet Sabine Scho — two women with a clear view and a strong interest in videopoetry/poetry films. They were also a delight to work with.
A few things I’d like to say about our goals as jury: We congratulate all the filmmakers, artists and poets who were chosen by the selection committee. We saw some fantastic films and wonderful creations this year, and were proud to play a part in the international competitions. We as ‘the jury’ wanted to make a statement. We believe that more films should have been awarded a prize. Not because it was too difficult to pick just four winners, no — that was fairly easy. We believe that more artists deserve a prize, and would prefer the budget for prizes to be split up to go to more ‘winners.’
So as ‘the jury,’ we were happy that we managed to pick six winners (instead of just four) and give three special mentions this year. On top of that, we also presented a list of films that deserved to be noted as well — films we could not award with a prize, but were too good not to mention:
Kaspar Hauser Song (Director: Susanne Wiegner, Poem: Georg Trakl)
Tzayri Lee Tzeeyur | Paint Me A Painting (Director: Jasmine Kainy, Poem: Hedva Harechavi)
Viento | Wind (Director & Poem: David Argüelles)
The Headless Nun (Director: Nuno de Sá Pessoa Costa Sequeira, Poem: Kris Skovmand)
Long Rong Song (Director: Alexander Vojjov, Poem: Ottar Ormstad)
The Poster Reads: ACTIVE SHOOTER EVENT (Director: Cheryl Gross, Poem: Nicelle Davis)
I Could Eat A Horse (Director & Poem: Jake Hovell)
What about the law (Director: Charles Badenhurst, Poem: Adam Small)
Refugee Blues (Director: Stephan Bookas, Poem: W.H. Auden)
If it were up to me, I would have invited (and paid) all 80 filmmakers/poets and only given prizes as an honor instead. Because the quality of those 80 chosen poetry films was so high.
The jury also felt that the selection committee left a lot of more experimental films out that we would have appreciated seeing. That is, of course, their right. It’s all about taste, after all. This year’s selection, like selections of previous years, was stuffed with many films from art schools and production companies. And that’s OK — these films have a great (technical) quality.
But the jury missed the not-so-perfect films. We missed the loner with the camera and the crazy idea. We often missed a strong poetic involvement. Brilliant technique, fantastic visuals, strong sounds and music, moving performances and lovely creatures do not always make up for the lack of a poetic experience. We really think we should encourage everyone who wants to make a poetry film (and to submit it to ZEBRA) to do so. No matter whether she or he only has a cellular with a camera and an idea, just go for it. Art should not be about equipment and/or budgets.
If you see hundreds of really well-made films — films that they could broadcast on TV any night of the week — then we jury members were looking for the one film that no one will show on TV. We tried to look beyond the well-made surfaces. If, as an artist, you feel a pressure to say something, then: say it with pressure, and not only with the perfect surface a consumer-orientated society supplies you with.
Many of the films we saw, said: here we are, ready to be melted, we already fit in your slots. Maybe young filmmakers and artists shouldn’t cooperate so eagerly right from the start.
But that’s something else altogether. We were there to pick winners. And yes, there were films that blew me and the other jury members away. Films that raised questions but left out the answers (Off the Trail; Director: Jacob Cartwright & Nick Jordan – Poem: “Endless streams and mountains” by Gary Snyder). Films that had the perfect surface and a wonderful technique, but also connected with the poem and left plenty of room for the viewer (Steel and Air; Director: Chris & Nick Libbey – Poem: “Steel and Air“ by John Ashbery). And films that stopped being ‘perfect combinations of different artforms’ and simply were stunning because they ‘simply were,’ in their own right, a work of art, pure and elegant (Goldfish; Director: Rain Kencana – Poem: “Goldfish“, by Shuntaro Tanikawa).
Some of the films showcased a strong sense of humor combined with a political impulse (Calling All; by Manuel Vilarinho – poem: “Chamada Geral” by Mário Henrique Leiria). Others just made you smile all the way through (Hail the Bodhisattva of Collected Junk; Director: Ye Mimi – Poem: “Hail the Bodhisattva of Collected Junk”) or cry (Process:Breath; Director: Line Klungseth Johansen – Poem: “Process:Breath“ by Line Klungseth Johansen).
I’m not going to describe all of the films we picked. (See the complete list on the ZEBRA website.) I hope that they will be all online in due time (and on Moving Poems from that day on).
But for now: Google them. Search them. Take your time looking for those that already are online. Listen and watch. See them again and again. And dive into the marvel that they are.
Upcoming poetry-film and videopoetry screenings
Autumn is usually a busy time for poetry-film events around the world, and I never quite manage to announce all of them, but it’s interesting to note their number and diversity even if this comes too late for some. In that category goes this past Friday’s screening of videopoetry in Mallorca, Sinestesia, with twelve films from Spain and abroad. It’s not too late, though, for anyone in Argentina this week to make plans to attend one of VideoBardo’s 20th anniversary festival screenings from the 8th to the 12th. And even those of us who can’t make it should extend our congratulations to the festival’s organizers for an extraordinarily long and successful run.
Coming up a week from Wednesday, on November 16, the winning films from this year’s ZEBRA festival will be screened in Berlin at the Zebra Poetry Gala.
The ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival Münster/Berlin celebrates its prizewinning films. Shortly after the 8th edition of the festival has been brought to a close in Münster, the winners of four competitions come to Berlin. “Kino-King” Knut Elstermann from radioeins presents the winning films and filmmakers, along with musical guests.
And finally, I’ve gotten word of one more screening of Justin Stephenson’s poetry film The Complete Works, for a total of two remaining in 2016: the first at the Niagara Artists Centre in Saint Catharines, Ontario on November 23 at 8:00 p.m., and the second in Winnipeg at the Cinemateque on December 15 at 7:00 p.m.
I should also note that although no date has been set yet for International Film Poetry Festival in Athens (sometime in December, I guess), submissions remain open through November 20.
Chamada Geral / Calling All by Mário-Henrique Leiria
“Calling all! A man walks free,” reads the description at ZEBRA, where this film by Manuel Vilarinho of a poem by Mário-Henrique Leiria was awarded Special Mention in the Prize for the Best Film for Tolerance. The ZEBRA website also has a short bio for Manuel Vilarinho:
Born in Portugal, 1974. Graduated in Tecnologia da Comunicação Audiovisual by IPP, Instituto Politécnico do Porto in 2004. He won several awards at video film festivals and currently works on TVI, Independent Television in Portugal.
The English Wikipedia entry for the poet is similarly brief:
Mário-Henrique Leiria (1923–1980) was a Portuguese surrealist poet. Born in Lisbon, he studied at the Escola de Belas Artes. He and his fellow surrealists were involved in an absurdist plot to overthrow the dictatorship of Antonio Salazar. He is best known for his books Contos do Gin-Tonic (Gin and Tonic Tales, 1973) and Novos Contos do Gin (More Gin Tales, 1974). He died in 1980.
Music is Made Out of Smoke by Tanya Shirley
Iranian-British filmmaker Roxana Vilk with a poem by Jamaican poet Tanya Shirley. It’s described on the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival website as a “tribute to Jamaican reggae artist Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and an elegy to the sultry fields of the American South.” The Vimeo description notes that it was “Commissioned for Commonwealth Games 2014 by Scottish Poetry Library, British Council and Creative Scotland and executive produced by Scottish Poetry Library & United Creations Collective.” According to Vilk’s website, it was one of eight short films she directed and produced for her Composing the Commonwealth series in 2014 featuring four different poets, the camera work of Ian Dodds, sound and music by Peter Vilk, and editing by Ling Lee and Maryam Ghorbankarimi. Go watch.
