Posts By Dave Bonta
The Opposites Game by Brendan Constantine
This film of Brendan Constantine‘s brilliant anti-gun poem (click through for the text) kicked off a promising new YouTube channel called Blank Verse Films, the work of L.A.-based filmmaker Mike Gioia. He described his modus operandi in an email: “I travel around filming poets, and then edit the recitations into little films.” He added,
Making the videos is much more challenging and exciting than I originally anticipated. I’m trying lots of different approaches but still don’t feel like I’ve “cracked the code” of how to film poetry. Later this month I’m going to try some experiments with dramatic reenactments of poems that will use actors who speak the lines of poetry.
Do consider subscribing to his channel and (of course) watching the other films. There’s also a Facebook page.
Dear Robot 2018 by Cecelia Chapman and Jeff Crouch
A new videopoem from Cecelia Chapman and Jeff Crouch. Chapman wrote in an email,
Dear Robot 2018 is a mail collaboration with Jeff Crouch and Diana Magallon music. A personal housebot goes rogue on an emergency disaster relief mission. Jeff and I have spent YEARS emailing each other links and articles about AI and robots and speculation about behavior.
In Between Words by Lilian Mehrel
This is the first in a projected series of City Odes directed, shot and edited by Sheldon Chau, in collaboration with poet Lilian Mehrel (herself also an award-winning filmmaker), actor Achiaa Prempeh, who helped inspire the text, and composer John Corlis. Here’s the description:
A woman looks for her place in New York City as she contemplates the meaning of the word, “home.”
The City Odes Project is a passion project in which my composer and I will collaborate with a poet and an actor to create a humanist, emotional, and visual story amidst the backdrop of a particularly city. “In Between Words” is the first of many to come, and kicks off this series in the city I currently reside in – New York City. The narrative was birthed out of an eagerness to collaborate with Achiaa, my actress, who now lives in New York and is originally from Ghana. In speaking with her, I decided to pursue a story about someone searching for home; a woman who is figuring out if NYC is the place for her, who is coming to terms that she is 5,000 miles away from her original home in West Africa, and thus easing out tensions with her mother, who of course wants her to return. The final result here features the work of Lilian Mehrel – a fellow filmmaker and classmate of mine back at NYU Grad Film school – who captures these feelings through her words, and my frequent collaborator John Corlis – an LA-based musician and composer – who complements the poetry with his mixture of piano and strings.
Please, enjoy this short poetry video and my ode to New York City.
Go to Vimeo for the complete credits and text.
The large moth that flew in by Claudia Serea
Australian filmmaker Jutta Pryor (film and sound production) collaborated with Romanian American poet Claudia Serea (text and voice). There’s also a version without the titling, but I think this one’s better for savoring the poem’s unusual vocabulary: the etymology of “moth,” plus some of the more bizarre names of actual moth species.
To me, though, the most impressive thing about this filmpoem is its successful use of pretty literal imagery—footage of a moth—without in any way seeming to reduce or pin down the text. If anything, I think it leaves it more open. Why this succeeds, when so many similar efforts by lesser filmmakers fail, I’m not entirely sure. I love how the camera seems to adopt a moth’s erratic flight toward the end.
Constroi uma casinha / Build Me a Cottage by Fernando Pessoa
“Video poem made in a abandoned wool factory in Portugal for the museum of Guarda by Pat van Boeckel and Peter van der Pol”, says the Vimeo description. The Guarda City Museum (Museu da Guarda) is in central Portugal.
The English in the subtitles has a few problems, but the film, centered on an art installation, is so imaginative, it more than makes up for it. In fact it’s the Portuguese that’s a translation; Pessoa, who was raised in Durban, South Africa, wrote the poem in English under the heteronym Alexander Search, and the film uses a much later Portuguese translation by Luísa Freire. Pat van Boeckel notes that it’s not a well-known poem even in Portugal.
This is the third videopoem by van Boeckel that I’ve shared (here are the others). Visit his website and Vimeo page for more of his work.
Updated with more accurate information about the poem’s provenance.
Aurora’s Aura by Edwin Torres
A film directed by Nicholas Motyka for the Visible Poetry Project, using a text by Edwin Torres. Azume Oe and Stacy Smith play the puppet and puppeteer, respectively, and Rae Nelson is the narrator.
River Hymns: poetry by Tyree Daye
Snippets of interview are interspersed with poems in this wonderful portrait by Morgan Potts of the poet and educator Tyree Daye, who appears equally at home in the classroom and the North Carolina landscape. The poems are from his collection River Hymns, winner of the 2017 APR/Honickman First Book Prize. Though this may resemble a book trailer, it’s actually a public television spot, aired on PBS station UNCTV back in February.
The Entropy of Forgiveness by Angelica Poversky
Merissa Victor directed this videopoem about self-acceptance, with Vancouver-based spoken-word poet Angelica Poversky contributing the original concept and lyrics. I’m blown away by Poversky’s voiceover here—refreshingly free of affectation, it’s the perfect compromise between a natural speaking voice and rhythmic musicality, to my ear. Unsurprisingly, a note in the YouTube description says it’s “Coming soon to Spotify as part of a debut album by Angelica Poversky.” The vocal accompaniment and musical direction are by rhé (Rhea Casido); moses c.c. is the producer.
Thanks to Moving Poems reader Emily Sergey for the tip.
Flicker film, and a review of the world’s first documentary on videopoetry
Two new English-language articles have recently been published in the online version of Poetryfilm Magazine, the bilingual journal embedded in the Weimar-based Poetryfilmkanal website and released annually in a print and PDF version. UK artist and typographer Jane Glennie, a couple of whose videos I’ve shared at Moving Poems, has an essay titled Flicker film and the videopoem:
A ›flicker film‹, as I have made them and understand them thus far, consists not of moving image footage but of a series of still images presented at around 24 or 25 per second. It could be described as an extremely rapid slideshow. Cinema film is also, of course, still images projected at 24 frames per second, but with the intention of transforming frames into seamless movement, whereas a flicker film disrupts the seamless with disparate frames.
Glennie gives a brief history of the technique, which dates back to 1966, then talks about its relevance today, and to her own practice:
Flicker film can also be perceived as reflective upon the broader culture of the online environment where so much time is now spent. Indeed, Parker’s film was derived from her Instagram feed. Image usage, sophistication and relevance continues to grow rapidly. In 2014, two thousand million photos were shared per day across five key social media platforms, rising to over three thousand million in 2015. Upcoming generations are expected to communicate with images even more than at present (happily videopoetry is part of this ever growing online scene). Flicker film can have instant visual impact in a short length and can capture attention in the brief, ephemeral encounters of social media. For instance, my film Being and being empty (2018) was selected for the world’s first Instagram Poetry exhibition at the National Poetry Library in London. But flicker film also offers challenges to the viewer: what can be perceived each time it is viewed? What images or messages might have entered the subconscious? If I continue to view the film – can I perceive more through practice or ›training myself‹ or do I enter a visual fatigue and ›see‹ less and less? A flicker film can be seen as a test of endurance and the brain’s ability to digest images at speed and through the subconscious. If we are to continue to consume images at ever greater volumes and pace, the flicker film begs the question – what are the limits that human cognition can take? Is there a point at which the message and/or the poetic is lost in the frenzy? I am interested in how the fleeting can be imprinted in the mind and create an overall impression through repetition, the subliminal message, and/or the blurring of the distinctions between discrete elements.
Fascinating stuff. Do go read the whole thing.
The other article was my own, published just yesterday: ›Versogramas‹ and the Possibilities for Videopoetry.
Versogramas, the 2017 film directed by Belén Montero, is apparently the world’s first documentary about videopoetry, and as such, it’s likely that viewers may come to it with heightened expectations which will not be fulfilled. Taken on its own terms, however, I found it a delightful romp with a few glaring defects. It has great potential as a teaching aid in the poetry or film classroom—especially if, as I hope, its official web release is accompanied by links to all the videos and videopoets in the film. It’s also available as part of a bookDVD from Editorial Galaxia (which I have not seen).
Quoting oneself is always a bit awkward, but let me skip over the snarky bit and give one more excerpt:
It’s impressive that the producers can focus on just one part of the world—Spain, especially the Galician region—add a handful of filmmakers and videopoets from outside that region, and still end up with a highly varied, complete-feeling snapshot of the state of videopoetry in the 21st century. […] I liked the rootedness of this approach, and I enjoyed getting a sense of how Spanish and Galician poets and artists have been working with videopoesía in recent years.
And for all its playing around with definitions, Versogramas does not end up providing some kind of unified field theory of videopoetry, thank God. (Though it does give Konyves the last word, as is fitting.) What it does, and does very well, is present us with a series of possibilities: this is what videopoetry might be (the narrative sections); this is what a bunch of actual practitioners have found it to be (the interviews).
I had, of course, much more to say than that. I’m grateful for the opportunity to have seen the documentary, and if and when it becomes generally available online, I’ll be sure to share the link here.
