Posts By Dave Bonta
Przesłanie Pana Cogito / Last Message from Mr Cogito by Zbigniew Herbert
A 2010 film by Canadian director Anna Woch using a poem and reading by the great Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert. The YouTube description notes that it was awarded “Best experimental video at the Black and White Audiovisual Festival in Porto. Also projected at the Miden Film Festival in Kalamata and Obraz + Idea Festival in Brodnica.” The soundtrack includes original music by the Wintership Quartet.
Also translated as “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito,” the poem was the first to feature Herbert’s character Mr. Cogito, who supplied the title for a 1974 volume of poetry and appeared in four successive volumes through 1998.
Initially Mr. Cogito was an Everyman, a universal element of humanity sharing his opinions on various aspects of life and existence. However, the more he says, the more disembodied he appears, and becomes transformed into an ethical symbol and a metaphor of the tough choices we have to make between good and evil.
The character’s name originates from Descartes’ famous phrase, “Cogito ergo sum.”
(Hat-tip: The Film & Video Poetry Society)
The Leash by Ada Limón
After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear,
the frantic automatic weapons unleashed,
the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands,
that brute sky opening in a slate metal maw
that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what’s
left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned
orange and acidic by a coal mine….
Ada Limón‘s searing poem was animated by Rachel Visser using “After Effects, paper, paint, sand, clay, yarn, other found objects” and the poet’s own recitation.
Visser has also animated a poem by Czesław Miłosz.
Dear Alison by Helen Mort
Chris Prescott of Dark Sky Media (“specialists in adventure film production”) directed this short, documentary-style poetry film featuring Helen Mort as poet and climber. The Vimeo description:
‘Dear Alison’ is a poem featured in the anthology No Map Could Show Them by critically acclaimed poet Helen Mort – a collection of poems centring on women making their mark and forging their own paths throughout history, both in the wilderness and in modern urban life. ‘Dear Alison’ is a personal tribute written by Helen to the late British mountaineer Alison Hargreaves – a mother, a wife and a talented climber who faced criticism due to her risk taking and her decision to continue climbing as a young mother, before her untimely death on K2 in 1995. The short film Dear Alison by Dark Sky Media and UKClimbing.com is a visual recreation of Helen’s words with imagery and sounds which evoke the poet’s emotional connection to Alison.
The film is currently featured on the front page of Liberated Words, where the accompanying, unsigned essay calls Dear Alison “a metanarrative on the process of writing: of the struggle of putting one word after another; of literally conceiving poetry, line by line.”
With the topic of non-metaphorical poetry films still echoing in our minds we also might consider this particular work as riven with metaphorical seams (rock metaphors to discuss metaphor notwithstanding). Throughout ‘Dear Alison’ close-up shots of Helen’s hand writing the poem punctuate the film and at the end she draws a firm but balanced line under the last word. We might think of this as jointly associative for both climber and poet: the metaphorical horizontal evocation of the joyous release from the vertical ropes and carabiners that stop a climber’s fall; or equally, the poet’s release from language, deliberately letting the line go; the summit having been reached. However, the analogy between mountaineering and writing ends there: the poet displays their roped words, carabinered like woven lace; the mountaineer hauls in their rope erasing all traces of the climb.
Poem on Prayer by Tolu Agbelusi
I see a lot of religious poetry videos on Vimeo and YouTube, and most of them, it has to be said, are pretty godawful. Not this one! Filmmaker Toby Lewis Thomas and poet Tolu Agbelusi really raise the bar for poetry films of Christian witness in this video uploaded a week ago by the London Diocese, who note:
On 3 June, we hosted a beacon event at St Paul’s Cathedral as part of the global wave of prayer “Thy Kingdom Come”. Tolu Agbelusi, a Nigerian British poet, playwright, facilitator and lawyer, wrote a poem on prayer commissioned specially for the event.
Tolu worships at St Luke’s Kentish Town and her father is Vicar at Christ Church, Crouch End.
The film was made in London by Toby Lewis-Thomas who is part of St John at Hackney church, with the support of Christian Vision.
The British election through poetry (and music) videos
From time to time, it’s worth looking at major contemporary events through the window of poetry videos, to get a sense of the extent to which videopoetry and poetry film are taking part in the general zeitgeist. The just-concluded general election in the UK is a case in point. Commentators from all sides of the political spectrum are saying that the unexpected, unprecedented surge in support for Labour and Jeremy Corbyn may mark the beginning of the end of print media’s traditionally out-sized influence on British politics: all the tabloids came out strongly against Labour, but the youth don’t read the tabloids, and it was their turn-out on election day which appears to have tipped the balance. Where do they get their news? From YouTube and social media, apparently. Pro-Labour and anti-Conservative memes were rife on Facebook, including this Theresa May mashup from the inimitable Cassetteboy:
One of the last Labour ads released before the election features Corbyn reciting Shelley’s memorable lines from “The Masque of Anarchy” (Stanza XXXVIII):
At The Guardian today, Manchester-based spoken word poet Tony Walsh, A.K.A. Longfella, “performs his poem Net Worked about the young people who voted in the 2017 General Election on Friday”:
If the embed doesn’t work, watch it on their website.
The Guardian also posted a poem by the poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, in response to Theresa May’s disastrous campaign, though sadly it’s only available as text. For those who don’t understand the reference in the last line, once again here’s a videopoetic YouTube remix to get you up to speed:
That video by “Musician, Electronic Music Producer & DJ from Liverpool” Keeley Ray has been viewed 37,739 times — respectable, but nothing like the nearly 3 million views logged by Captain SKA‘s general-election remix of their song “Liar Liar,” which was downloaded 40,000 times and made it to No. 4 in the UK charts in the weeks leading up to the election despite a complete embargo by radio stations. This may not be a poetry video per se, but it’s a good reminder of the power of sung, chanted and spoken words to goad people into action — especially when yoked to visual images:
Perhaps if the song had been allowed on mainstream UK radio, the political punditocracy might not have been caught so completely off-guard by the election results.
Encontrada by Erica Goss
A new videopoem from Erica Goss, who notes on Vimeo:
This is the second video from my poetry collection titled Night Court. I filmed the whole thing at Villa Montalvo, a center for the arts in Saratoga, California, in May 2017. I spent about two weeks, on and off, editing it. “Encontrada” means “found” in Spanish.
The music is by Podington Bear; everything else is Goss’s work. See also her video for the book’s title poem, “Night Court.”
Metamorphosis by Sophie Reyer
A videopoem by Marc Neys A.K.A. Swoon with poem, voiceover and sounds contributed by Sophie Reyer, piano music by Liu Winter and footage by Jan Eerala. The overall soundtrack composition is Marc’s, along with “mastering, add. camera, editing, grading & concept,” according to the Vimeo description.
This was not Swoon’s first collaboration with Sophie Reyer; he also worked with the Austrian writer and composer two years ago to make Abschied. Metamorphosis was among the 16 films selected for the 2nd Weimar Poetry Film Award.
The Microwave by Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez
A three-part videopoem from Chilean poet Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez and director Hanisha Harjani for the Visible Poetry Project. According to the page about Gutman-Gonzalez on the project website,
The poem chosen for the Visible Poetry Project, “The Microwave,” is in conversation with the hypnotic, digitalized world in Taiwanese artist Chen Wan-jen’s video “The Unconscious Voyage,” in which people move across a barren landscape in loops of repetitive movement. Boundaries, scope, elegy, and apocalypse, are some of the ideas animating this poem.
It seems only appropriate that a poem prompted by a video should be made into a video in turn. Here is The Unconscious Voyage (best expanded to full screen):
Ode to my Bitchface by Olivia Gatwood
If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of “resting bitch face” (apparently it’s mainly an American expression), the Wikipedia article will get you up to speed. Once you’ve read it, you’ll understand why this response by poet Olivia Gatwood and the dancer/choreographers Rebecca Björling and Rebecca Rosier of the We:R Performance Collective is so, so good. The video was shot and edited by Tim Davis. Björling and Rosier note on Vimeo that
Our latest work ‘Bitchface’ is a dance film we made in reaction to the amazing fierceness of Olivia Gatwood’s poem ‘Ode to my Bitchface’. Beautifully delivered by Olivia in a live performance, we felt like we had to dance the chills out of our bodies as soon as we saw her original video.
And here is the original video in question, posted to YouTube on April 2. It has already been viewed more than half a million times:
