~ 2022 ~
To Touch & Taste a Comet by Caroline Reid
Caroline Reid‘s marvelous poetry and performance combines with film-making by Patrick Zoerner in this videopoem, To Touch & Taste a Comet. The poem can be read on the page at Cordite Poetry Review. It is the first in a collection of Caroline’s prose and poetry titled Siarad (a Welsh word meaning to talk, to speak). From a review of the book by Alison Clifton in Stylus Lit:
Reid’s poems and short stories are allegorical in their impact: seemingly mundane events are elevated to the symbolic and the sacred… While Reid’s striking similes and surprising metaphors are a true joy, her observations about the human condition are also brilliant – in turns poignant and pointed… To find novelty in the commonplace, seek the exceptional in the banal, and write thought-provoking observations without resorting to cliché – these are remarkable skills.
Last month we shared another of Caroline’s outstanding collaborative videopoems, murder girl gets wired.
The Clapping Tree by Matt Dennison
Australian filmmaker Jutta Pryor‘s atmospheric, pitch-perfect response to a text by American poet Matt Dennison, with whom she regularly collaborates. Actress Rebecca Page serves as a stand-in for the female narrator of the poem—presented as text-on-screen up until the final, spoken line. Click through to Vimeo for the full text. Here’s the description:
The Clapping Tree is a poetry film tribute to mark International Women’s Day, celebrating the strength, vulnerability and spirit of a woman surviving the rigors of life in a remote, male dominated, pioneering settlement. A film collaboration between poet Matt Dennison (Columbus, Mississippi, US), sound artist Mario Lino Stancati (Italy) and filmmaker Jutta Pryor (Melbourne, Australia). Filmed at the Tyrconnell Historic Goldmine in outback north Queensland, where several original buildings and machines remain testament to a goldrush that took place 120 years ago.
Dennison has also made films with Marc Neys (aka Swoon), Marie Craven, and Michael Dickes. We’ve shared a few of them here.
I’ve noticed that current academic discourse in the U.S. has cooled toward prosopopoeia, in reaction to all-too-common instances of poets from traditional oppressor groups presuming to speak in the voices of the oppressed without a whole lot of awareness or cultural sensitivity. But I think it’s an over-reaction to completely proscribe this kind of writing, because even when the imaginative effort falls short it’s still essential for everyone to try to put themselves in others’ shoes, or why live in a society at all? I don’t want to speak for Matt, whom I don’t know, but speaking for myself as a cis-het white male who has written a lot of poems in the voices of women over the years, and has also been known to write from the point-of-view of trees: the openness and vulnerability involved is perhaps an end in itself. To then entrust one’s words to others—women artists, in this case—represents a logical next step toward some kind of genuine synthesis of compassion and understanding. The potential rewards of such an imaginative project may be gauged by the high aesthetic and emotional quality of this film. If the ending doesn’t make you mutter “Holy shit!” I don’t know what to tell you.
Poetry Film Festival: in Weimar and online 20th – 31st May
Opening on 20th May is the International Poetry Film Festival of Thuringia held in Weimar, Germany.
The in-person event runs until 22nd May, while online lasts until the end of the month. Tickets available through Eventbrite https://www.eventbrite.de/e/international-poetry-film-festival-of-thuringia-tickets-333442003007
For full details of the programme please see their website: https://poetryfilmtage.de/
Requiem for a spoken word by Marc Zegans
In Requiem for a spoken word, a short poem by Marc Zegans comes into play with experimental computer animation by Jim Hall. Both artists approach their work with a jazzy, improvisational openness that makes for a quirky videopoem about a single word.
A number of Marc’s collaborations with different film-makers have been shared before here at Moving Poems, as well as an interview with him by Dave Bonta.
This video came to my attention while scrolling the list of finalists at the 2021 Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition in Ireland. It is also published on the website of +Institute for Experimental Arts in Athens, which runs the video poetry festival there each year.
Call for work: Maldito Festival de Videopoesía 2022
Held in Spain since 2017, the Maldito Video Poetry Festival is open for submissions for 2022. The festival takes place in the city of Albacete (screening date yet to be determined).
The festival is organized by non-profit Association Cultural Maldito; formed by a small team of professionals from the film industry, poetry and culture in general. They explain their festival and their name:
“MALDITO seeks to vindicate video poetry as an art that connects people, transmits feelings and stimulates different ways to see the world. It is also a tiny contribution of enormous people to empower visual art, stopping it from being marginal and damned*.
* The Spanish word for damned is MALDITO.”
Poetry films must be 5 minutes or less, and films in languages other than Spanish must have Spanish subtitles. The deadline for entry is 25 September 2022, full details on submission is available on their website: https://malditofestival.com/registration-video-poetry-contest-medium-full-length-film/
Calls for work: four possibilities for poetry film-makers
Four possibilities for entry … two dedicated festivals, a festival that includes poetry film within a category, and something that doesn’t mention poetry film at all (but could have potential).
In Ireland there is the Ó Bhéal 10th Winter Warmer poetry festival. The festival will happen 25th-27th November 2022 in Cork and will include the 2022 Poetry Film Competition.
Submissions are open from now until 31st August and are free, and open to all for films of up to 10 minutes. Full guidelines on entry are available on their website: https://www.obheal.ie/blog/competition-poetry-film/
Meanwhile Arts + Literature Laboratory are running their third Midwest Video Poetry Fest on 7-8th October 2022 in Wisconsin, USA, and submissions to this event are open until 1st July for films of up to 7 minutes. More about the event and previous festivals are on their website: https://artlitlab.org/programs/literary-arts/midwest-video-poetry-fest
Full details and entry are on FilmFreeway.
MicroMania FilmFest exists for films of up to 5 minutes. This festival is not specifically aimed at poetry film but the freestyle category description includes poetry film as one of the areas of interest and has options for films under 2 minutes and 2-5 minutes. I could also imagine some films from our genre fitting into the experimental category too. The event will be in person and online from 3–24 September 2022. See FilmFreeway for more details and entry
And finally a more left-field possibility: Sensoria 2022. This is a festival of film, music and digital happening in Sheffield, UK from 30 September to 8th October 2022. The organisers say:
“The festival team are on the hunt for exciting new work in the realms of music, film and digital.
We’d also love to hear from potential partners, co-promoters or anyone who wants to make a suggestion – do get in touch.”
If you explore the Sensoria website you will glean that the festival is heavily aimed towards music. But if your poetry film includes music in an exciting way, particularly if it has original music – then I think you may have what the organisers are looking for: “short films with innovative soundtracks or scores”. Read more about the event on their website: https://www.sensoria.org.uk/news/sensoria-2022-call-for-submissions/
I love to see poetry film crossing over into other worlds and while some opportunities may be long shots, the more that poetry filmmakers enter into wide-ranging events, the more we can hope to bring what we do to wider audiences. Selection for events can be less about the definition of a genre and more about the little thing that captures the imagination and excitement of the selector – and who knows which film might just do that …
Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll‘s famous nonsense poem Jabberwocky has been adapted to the screen many times. This version from 2020 by Dutch artist Sjaak Rood was produced for TED-Ed as part of a series of collaborations between educators and film animators. Music is by Mark Nieuwenhuis with narration by Jack Cutmore-Scott. It was a 2021 finalist in the Ó Bhéal Poetry Film Competition in Ireland.
Moving Poems has previously shared two other film versions of Jabberwocky as well as an adaptation of Carroll’s The Mad Gardener’s Song.
Keeping Up with the Huidobros by Lina Ramona Vitkauskas
I fear we have not been keeping up with the always-original videopoetry of Lina Ramona Vitkauskas. This one from last year has a pretty intriguing origin story:
It began with Chilean poet, Vincente Huidobro. The opening / preface of his poetic masterpiece, Altazor, launches into a metaphysical cascade of imagery. This was exciting to a young poet like me—at age 29 with some Spanish knowledge and seeking a manifesto to climb (the name “altazor” is a combination of the noun “altura” / “altitude” and the adjective “azorado” / “bewildered” or “taken aback”).
I’d been experimenting with layered or looking-glass ekphrasis (a term that I’ve coined for this process). As I create cinepoems, a visual language in of itself, I found this poem in particular to be different: it was fueled by a homophonic translation (three languages fused: English, Spanish, and the visual). From this, a separate Lithuanian poem sprung, inspired by the overlapped sounds of street noise, a looped harpsichord, and selected juxtapositions of the poet’s translated phrases and/or words. Now four languages.
Note: It was also a synchronous discovery to find that the first issue of Huidobro’s international art magazine, Creación, featured Lithuanian-born, Cubist sculptor, Jacques Lipchitz.
Click through for an English translation of the Lithuanian poem as well as the full text of the homophonic translation included as voiceover.
