Posts By Dave Bonta
Some small room for surprise by Jen Karetnick
https://vimeo.com/100030112
Nic S.’s latest video remix incorporating a text from the Poetry Storehouse uses a soundtrack by Elan Hickler. The poet, Jen Karetnick, blogs at A Body at Rest. See her full collection of poems at the Storehouse for a bio.
Naar Wat We Waren / For What We Were by Eric Joris
This film was selected as the winner of the Open Competition at the 2014 Filmpoem Festival in Antwerp (part of the Felix International Poetry Festival). The description accompanying Filmpoem’s upload to Vimeo:
Naar Wat We Waren, a film by Lies Van Der Auwera of the poem by Eric Joris is just terrific. We chose this as the Filmpoem Prize for reasons which will be clear as soon as you watch it – a real melding together of sound word and image. There are many beautiful poetry-films, lush and sumptuous. This is not one. This is real, alive and honest. Congratulations to all involved!
The film was produced collaboratively by the Poetry Prophets: Eric Joris (poem and voice), Kristof Van Rossem (music) and Lies Van der Auwera (camera and editing). There’s also a version without subtitles. It’s part of a collection of videopoems that emerged from a workshop led by Marc Neys (Swoon) at a creative writing program in Antwerp.
This is exciting to me because it shows that videopoetry workshops can be an integral part of writing programs, and that they can produce highly effective, publishable results. (Here’s the English translation of the writing program page from Google.) American MFA program directors, take note!
All American by David Hernandez
If the films released so far on their website are any indication, Motionpoems‘ 2014 season is their most stylistically diverse collection of poetry films to date. This film, released just before Independence Day in the U.S., builds on the poem’s challenge to any easy assumptions about American identity. (It’s also slightly NSFW, with glimpses of female nudity.) Here’s the description from the website:
Filmed near Lake Geneva Switzerland (and at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern), British filmmaker Richard Johnson and dancer Jasmine Morand present this francoperspective on California poet David Hernandez’s all-inclusive poem, “All American.”
Click through and scroll down for the text.
For more on Richard Johnson, see his pages on Cinely and IMDb. For more on the poet, visit DavidHernandez.com.
Swoon’s View on poetry filmmaker Eduardo Yagüe
Spanish filmmaker Eduardo Yagüe’s “intuitive and deliquescent works” are the focus of Marc Neys’ column this month at Awkword Papercut. I’ve been intrigued by Yagüe’s recent poetry films, so was glad to learn a bit more about him:
Eduardo Yagüe studied Dramatic Arts and Spanish Language and Literature. In Madrid he worked as an actor in theater and film. Parallel, and as a hobby, he’s has been writing poetry and stories since he was fifteen. All these things show when you look at his films. Eduardo understands the language of the camera, the subtleties of timing and the potential of human expression.
Marc goes on to present and analyze two films, Insomnio and Amor. Check it out.
The Poetry Storehouse featured in Connotation Press
As regular visitors to Moving Poems know, the Poetry Storehouse is an increasingly important, curated online meeting-place for poets and poetry-film makers. This month in her Third Form column at Connotation Press, videopoetry critic Erica Goss takes a look at five pairs of videopoems that each use and respond to the same text from the Storehouse.
Video artist Elisa Kreisinger warns about the “death of the YouTube mashup”
Anyone who cares about video remix culture — which should include every regular visitor to this site — may want to re-think their use of YouTube in the wake of its decision to formalize its relationship with big media companies. The threat to indie artists whose companies fail to reach an agreement with YouTube has been widely publicized. But an article in The Daily Dot suggests that an entire creative subculture based around YouTube may be in danger as well. If a big media company objects to a mashup, Brooklyn-based video artist Elisa Kreisinger discovered that YouTube now seems quite willing to completely ignore the Fair Use provision of U.S. copyright law and similar, international legal allowances for parody and remixing.
It took 24 hours to create my mashup, but 10 months to get to the bottom of why it was blocked. And even after I discovered why it was blocked, I still could not get it back up. If large content companies have the power to usurp the rule of law for their own purposes and make anything disappear, why bother making mashups?
YouTube was the birthplace of the mashup. And because it is the largest video site on the Internet, it’s important that cultural critiques like remixes and mashups be here for public consumption. But now mine, and so any others that drew from Universal’s library, remain disabled.
YouTube describes itself as “a forum for people to connect, inform, and inspire others across the globe.” But a forum that gives big members extra powers to silence everyone else will never be as vibrant as it should be. To be the forum it aspires to be—that it should be—YouTube needs to stop cutting special deals with big rightsholders like Universal Music Group and start encouraging creativity again. That’s true even if creativity makes Universal Music Group uncomfortable. If YouTube doesn’t get rid of special deals, they threaten to kill the very originality that made the site great in the first place.
Read the full article at The Daily Dot. And remember: videos posted at Vimeo or Dailymotion, for example, can go viral just as easily. Technologically speaking, there’s nothing special about YouTube, and I don’t think it needs to be nearly as dominant as it has become. There are other video-hosting sites that are much more committed to freedom of expression.
Interview with poet-filmmaker Sara Anika Mithra at Voice Alpha
Voice Alpha, a blog focused on reading poetry aloud for an audience, has an interview with American poet Sara Anika Mithra about her use of audio- and videopoetry. I was especially struck by her description of how doing audio recordings helps her work through early drafts of poems, but she made some interesting points about video remix as well:
On Vimeo, with my found footage poem-videos, I’m engaging a distinct medium — video — that acts like a carrier oil for perfume. Poetry can be too rarefied to carry scent alone. Unlike recording my performances, the process for editing video out of archival footage is _not_ closely related to writing. Finding home movies from the 50s and splicing them into a three minute video is a subtractive process, like sculpture — paring away excess scraps of image to create a tone more than a narrative. It’s a decadent and aesthetic practice that gives each poem a visual soundtrack. I love editing video — it eats away hours of time and allows pleasure, plus gives me the chance to collaborate with musicians on the score. These massive projects take months, so I need to commit to a poem that bears scrutiny without boring me.
Filmpoem at Southbank Centre in July — full schedule of events
Those who weren’t able to make it to Antwerp for the Felix Poetry Festival a couple of weeks ago will have another chance to see this year’s, traveling version of the Filmpoem Festival at London’s Southbank Centre in mid-July. Let me just paste in the description from the Filmpoem website:
Filmpoem will be partnering up with Southbank Centre to bring our own unique blend of artists films, workshops and events to the Poetry International, held from Thursday 17 July 2014 – Monday 21 July 2014. Poetry International is part of Southbank Centre’s Festival of Love – the festival features an exciting programme of free events, differently- themed weekends, performances, poetry, talks and pop-ups. Poetry International is a bold and inspiring festival of poetry, film and spoken word as part of our summer Festival of Love. For, after all, ‘at the touch of love everyone becomes a poet’ (Plato).
– Filmpoem will showcase on rotation on the screens throughout the Foyer for the entire festival! Friday 18 – Monday 21 July/ 10am to 11pm/ Presented on screen in the Foyers at Royal Festival Hall. This is a FREE event.
– Filmpoem will be judging and presenting the prizes for the SHOT THROUGH THE HEART Poetry Film Competition on Friday 18 July 2014 at 6.45pm.
– Alastair Cook will be delving a Filmpoem children’s workshop with poet Carolyn Jess-Cooke and composer Luca Nasciuti – the resulting film will be screened at 4.30pm on Saturday 19th July. This is a FREE event.
– Poetry Society director Judith Palmer and Filmpoem director Alastair Cook will present a screening of new films commissioned by Filmpoem and Felix Poetry Society in association with the Poetry Society, including the National Poetry Competition commissions and commissions from David Harsent, Michael Symmons Roberts, Helen Mort and John Glenday/ Saturday 19 Jul 2014 6.30pm. This is a FREE event.
Phew! See y’all there.
Since I’m in the U.K. this summer, I’ll be able to attend some of this myself, including the Saturday evening program, and I hope to get a chance to meet some Moving Poems readers and contributors. Come over and say hi if you see me. I’ll be the guy with the beard and the ball cap scribbling things into a pocket notebook (because, you know, I’m still too technophobic to own a mobile device).
Hij morrelt aan je ziel / He fumbles at your Soul by Emily Dickinson
https://vimeo.com/93230216
This is Dickinson’s poem F477 (1862)/J315, translated into Dutch by J. Eijkelboom and into film by Marc Neys, A.K.A. Swoon, who says he began with an old reading he had made of the poem, building an experimental soundtrack around it.
The track was (except for the electronic ‘drumthumbs’ in the back) completely constructed out of (altered) sounds I made with my mouth. A fun experiment. For some reason the track worked quite well with that old recording. Maybe there was a short video in it too?
Keeping a similar kind of restriction as I did with the sounds, I wanted only one short piece of footage in the video; leaves.
The whole thing was created in one afternoon (and it probably shows), but I had fun doing so. Keeping it simple and fresh.
A fun inbetweenie stuffed between longer videos and ongoing projects.
Ocean by David Harsent
David Harsent reads his poem over a score composed by Luca Nasciuti in this film by Alastair Cook; James William Norton contributed cinematography. According to the description on Vimeo, “Filmpoem Festival 2014 commissioned British poets David Harsent, Helen Mort, John Glenday and Michael Symmons Roberts to produce new work on the theme of migration,” and then commissioned films incorporating the poems. I hope to share the others here in the weeks ahead.
