This recent film by Janet Lees, who needs no introduction here, took top honors at this year’s Filmetry festival, part of the ten-day Capital City Film Festival (CCFF) in Lansing, Michigan. Its propulsive energy and light-hearted approach, while a bit of a departure from some of the slower, more meditative work that Lees is best known for, demonstrates a mastery of textured layering, and overall makes a great fit with the poem by Amy Gerstler — one of a selection of texts provided by the organizers:
This year’s theme was POETICS OF CINEMA. Pre-selected poems all engaged the concept of cinema in some way, and filmmakers were encouraged to create new work from them. The only rule is that filmmakers must include the text of the poem in full.
CCFF website
As for the poet,
Amy Gerstler is a writer of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, art criticism, journalism and other stuff. She has published thirteen books of poems, a children’s book and several collaborative artists books with visual artists. Index of Women, her most recent book of poems, was published by Penguin Random House in 2021.
author website
Be sure to browse the archive at Filmetry, which has been updated to include all of this year’s films—a great resource.
This year in person 31 May/1 June, with the online playlists available until 15 June 2024, the festival in Weimar always has a thoughtful and thorough programme of poetry film. It is all very well documented on their website and in a downloadable pdf programme: https://poetryfilmtage.de/
In this year’s prize award the organisers say they received “479 films from 51 different countries … the program commission nominated 12 films for the competition”. But do take a look at what else is on the programme beyond the competition selection.
This winner of the 2017 Maldito Festival de Videopoesía, by Spanish artist, filmmaker and videopoet Hernán Talavera, deploys an unspecified quantity of short, anonymous folk poems to great effect.
Dainas are small lyric poems coming from the oral tradition that constitute one of the most important and ancient treasures of Latvia. In 2001, dainas were declared Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO. “Balta puķe” (“The white flower”) is a dialogue between some of these dainas and images recorded in Latvia in the winter of 2015. This dialogue revolves around the concept of “memento mori” -remember that you have to die- that reminds us the inexorability of Death.
webpage (click through for the list of screenings)
Latvian language along with Lithuanian, are considered the most archaic Indo-European languages of those which are spoken today.
Talavera is one of the filmmakers included in Versogramas, a 2017 documentary about videopoetry, in which he said that places are the main characters in his videopoems; he sees them as “little universes.” “Solitude and emptiness are not negative concepts” for him, but provide relief from the suffering caused by our endless quest for stimulation. He added that he frequently removes sound or color from his videos in a “compromise with austerity,” pointing out that “when you close your eyes you may begin to hear better.” One can certainly see this in Balta puķe.
There’s also a version with Spanish subtitles: La flor blanca.
London-based videopoet Mikey Delgado just surfaced after a three-year hiatus with this remix of war footage with a recitation from Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2, all of it uncredited in the best samizdat style, and it’s perfectly, horribly on-point. I’ve lost my mirth, too…
I have of late, but
wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all
custom of exercises, and, indeed, it goes so heavily
with my disposition that this goodly frame, the
Earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most
excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging
firmament, this majestical roof, fretted
with golden fire—why, it appeareth nothing to me
but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.What a piece of work is a man, how noble in
reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving
how express and admirable; in action how like
an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the
beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and
yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man
delights not me, no, nor women neither, though by
your smiling you seem to say so.
A brilliant musical adaptation and video remix of A.S. Kline’s English translation of Mallarmé’s poem by D. Estrada, AKA Vox Poesis (YouTube, Instagram, Bandcamp). The sped-up images of water have a propulsive force to match the music and intoned text, for an effect that’s at once meditative and unsettling—as the poet probably would’ve wanted.
A 2020 upload from Blank Verse Films, one of the channels added to our freshly updated links page. Director Mike Gioia told me in an email that he ‘borrowed the concept of the Stage Manager from Thornton Wilder’s play “Our Town” and applied it to the poetry. I made the poet a physical character in the scene but one who is distinctly apart from it.’ It works brilliantly, in part because the guy playing the poet, Brendan Constantine, is a very good performance poet in his own right.
The YouTube description notes that ‘The music is “Tango Cool” by Ted Gioia, copyright Time Records.’ Here’s what it has about the poet:
Tom Disch (1958-2008) was a gifted, witty, and biting writer. Disch wrote poetry under the name Tom Disch and wrote science-fiction and fantasy under the name Thomas Disch, including the children-adventure series The Brave Little Toaster, which was later adapted into a Disney movie. Disch’s dark yet hilarious take on the world is beautifully condensed in this poem “The Self as Product”, which was originally published in his 1991 collection Dark Verses & Light.
You can find out more about Tom Disch on his wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_M._Disch
You can read more of Tom Disch’s poetry here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/tom-disch
British author and performance poet Salena Godden reads “Cathedrals” from her just-published collection With Love, Grief and Fury in a video from the production company STORYA. This is not a book trailer, however, but something new to me: a museum exhibition trailer in the form of a videopoem!
The exhibition is William Blake’s Universe at the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge, UK., and the museum also worked with STORYA and Godden on a more conventional video trailer: a reading of Blake’s most famous poem, “The Tyger” which I’ll append below. But they had the sense to include Salena’s own, personal reactions to Blake and the exhibition at the end of that trailer, and then—or perhaps from the inception—they had the brilliant idea to ask her to read a poem of her own, placing her in conversation with the poet whose multimedia works are the focus of the exhibition.
STORYA is Lucy Andia and Frederick Shelbourne, both profiled on their About page. They say they specialize in videos about artists and exhibitions, and in fact their filming of “The Tyger” is one of the two highlighted projects on their website:
To coincide with the Fitzwilliam Museum’s exhibition, William Blake’s Universe, we were commissioned to create a film. The brief? Capture the exhibition’s striking design and draw inspiration from Blake’s powerful poetry.
Salena Godden, a poet deeply inspired by Blake’s rebellious spirit and unwavering dedication to creativity, was the perfect choice for a reading. Her selection: the iconic poem, The Tyger. Through creative brainstorming sessions, our team identified fire as the poem’s central element to visualise.
Flickering lights and shadows of tigers and foliage were used to create an immersive atmosphere surrounding Salena’s reading. This museum film, a testament to the power of collaboration, is the result of many creative minds coming together.
Godden has a whole blog post about the shoot, full of photos—check it out. As she notes, “Radical British poet, painter and visionary William Blake believed in the power of art and words to bring us together.”
The Lyra Festival is Bristol’s (UK) poetry festival, and 2024 is the festival’s sixth edition. The theme for this year was Poetic Futures, with a focus on technology and the future and also imaginative new worlds.
I was invited to view Cancer Alley, a poetry film created by UK poet, Lucy English, with US filmmakers Pamela Falkenberg and Jack Cochran, with digital media effects company Holotronica.
The film itself is a powerful insight into the lack of responsibility that multinational companies take (or governments enforce) for the impact of their activities on the environment. It highlights the industrial area of ‘Cancer Alley’ in Louisiana and the devastating problem of pollution created by the factories at the heart of the global petrochemical industry. It is impossible not to be deeply disturbed by the situation humanity finds itself in, and reflect on past situations that we still haven’t learnt from. A short poetry film is vastly apart from an Oscar-nominated blockbuster on so many counts (not least budget of course), but I think it is a compliment to the quality of this film that I brought to mind Erin Brockovich and felt depressed that 24 years on from the film, and 50+ years on from the Hinkley ground water contamination incident that it features, that here is another horrible situation that is, inevitably, just one of so many more around the world. I hope that the film is a tiny stepping stone to widening knowledge of Cancer Alley.
The film was presented as a continuous loop at the Watershed arts centre in Bristol. It was situated in its own darkened space, just off the main bar, and was free to enter and exit at will. The audience steps in and faces the double screen presentation, where they can watch standing or sitting.
This was a great venue because it was open all day for curious people to drop in and take a look. For me, I think the chance encounter is hugely valuable for drawing in audiences from a wider base than would choose to specifically attend a film screening of any kind of poetry or art film. The film was prominently featured in the brochure for the festival too, which I think is very encouraging for poetry film. It can be all too easy for organisers to put events that run for a duration at the back of a brochure (where they are easily overlooked), after the ‘headliner’ daily events. I hope this encouraged festival visitors to plan to drop in to the Watershed before, or after, their ticketed events, and people hanging out at the bar for a coffee or some lunch to take a look too.
The film was advertised as a poetry film hologram exhibition. I have to say, this was the most disappointing thing about the presentation. With hologram in the description, I was expecting a 3-d element to the film and felt I was mis-sold on that. I’d been hoping for something more like the ‘Apparition’ I’d seen of a Dominique Gonzales-Foerster piece in her retrospective exhibition a few years ago that was in Dusseldorf and Paris, but in the poetry film genre. I’ve since checked to see if I had misunderstood the nature of holograms, but a generally defining feature of them is the creation of a 3-dimensional effect. Cancer Alley is presented with a layered element. The film is split between footage that appears on a back wall, and images and text that is on a foreground transparent gauze screen. Together these are beautifully done. I particularly liked the integration of the type on screen, and the images of smoke and yellow rain. However, for me, these are flat layers rather than 3-dimensions, albeit with a depth to them.
Holotronica, the company that English, Falkenberg and Cochran worked with on this, does create 3-dimensional presentations, and in fact claims itself as ‘world-leaders in hologram effects’, with many amazing shows and events, including Beyoncé, on their website. They have specialist products for projection – including the specialist gauze screen. Unfortunately, though the quality of the image on the foreground gauze was just beautiful, it was extremely hard to appreciate when the projection on the back wall was on a screen that did not fill the ‘window’ in the gauze. The surroundings of the back screen are all too visible because they were not blacked out. I had to work hard to suspend disbelief that I wasn’t looking through the gauze layer into a classroom with a whiteboard (effectively I was), and that a teacher wasn’t going to appear soon to set geography homework on the effects of pollution.
But there were also serendipitous pluses at work too. There were points at which the projection spilled onto the ceiling and the adjacent metal pipework and surrounded the viewer, and those moments felt stunningly immersive. They brought me into a comparison with feelings I had inside the Sarah Sze and Artangel project ‘Waiting Room’ last summer in Peckham Rye, London.
I was fortunately able to chat to all three of the creators, Lucy, Pam, and Jack, after I watched the film. They see the result at the Watershed as their pilot project, something that they would like to build upon, leading to something better and more ambitious in the future. For this event specifically, they are fully aware of the limitations of the technical presentation of the film at the Watershed. Budget is always an issue because the technical equipment is very expensive, and it does create limitations and compromises. They would have liked to have been able to black out the area behind the gauze. Some artists are of the mindset that they would not show their work in less-than-ideal conditions. But I am very much with Pam on her views that doing something and showing work on a shoestring is better than doing nothing – it can only mean learning from the process and helping to demonstrate what is possible and what might be achieved in future. They would love to be able to bring this work to other venues, and I hope it helps them, and others, to bring poetry film installation ideas to fruition in the future.
It is sad that creatives are so often put in the difficult position of doing something with nothing or very little, and/or funding it themselves. The technology is paid for, the technical staff are paid for and little is left for either the details of fulfilling the true creative potential of the work that has been created, or paying the artists fairly. (I recommend anyone interested in this to check out the campaign of UK-based artist Lindsay Seers – Frank Fair Artists Pay)
It is also interesting to reflect on the differences between this and the VR experience Abandoned Library that I saw at the MIX 2023 conference at the British Library. The VR meant that the creatives were in full control of the ‘environment’ in which the viewer was placed. There were similarities in the environmental theme, and the use of smoke, mist and rain to create mood and feeling for the piece. However, VR is still so restrictive and uncomfortable to experience. I’m not sure I would readily swap the ease of stepping into a room and comfortably sitting down, for something I’ve got to wait my turn for or book a slot, then sitting awkwardly in a swivel seat while someone (at far too close quarters) adjusts the headset while I feel like I am about to have a minor medical procedure. I would rather be in a room with Cancer Alley.
Like Pam Falkenberg, I am always going to be a fan of doing something on whatever basis you can manage regardless. Poetry film is a powerful genre, but making events and opportunities where it can step up a level to become impactful through immersion is, for me, something to keep pushing for. Cancer Alley is to be celebrated as another stepping stone forward in presenting poetry film in more immersive and creative ways.
…though not as much as I might’ve hoped yet. My web-design skills are rudimentary, so please be patient, but recovery continues from a malicious hack and my disastrous, panicked response to it ten days ago. I took advantage of the crisis to do something I’d been intending to do for some time now: merge the news-and-views section, formerly known somewhat confusingly as Moving Poems Magazine, with the video library into one WordPress installation under a single banner. This should mean fewer problems with the email newsletter, since we no longer have to rely on a third-party feed blender (though we may still have to relocate to Substack at some point).
I think I’ve re-created all the posts I inadvertently destroyed, though I’m afraid a few pages may be unrecoverable.
If anyone is mad enough to want to join us as an author, get in touch. I have increasingly limited time to review videos for the site.