Posts By Dave Bonta

Dave Bonta is a poet, editor, and web publisher from the Appalachian mountains of central Pennsylvania.

Call for Entries: Juteback Poetry Film Festival 2017

On 21 January, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - calls for work, festivals and other screening events

Juteback Poetry Film Festival poster

The late, lamented Body Electric Poetry Film Festival is back with a new name! The Juteback Poetry Film Festival will take place on May 20th at the Lyric Cinema Cafe in Fort Collins, Colorado. Festival director R.W. Perkins will collaborate with Matt Mullins to program the festival. They note:

At the Juteback Poetry Film Festival we are looking for innovative and technically sound filmmaking, coupled with a strong grasp of poetics. It is our hope to showcase a wide range of talented film-poets from around the world to best represent the budding art form of videopoetry.

Submit online through the website. I’ll paste in the instructions:

THE JUTEBACK POETRY FILM FESTIVAL SUBMISSION GUIDE

  • All films must be submitted online. Please use the form below to complete your submission. To submit please load your film to Youtube, Vimeo or media sharing site of your choice, then provide the link in your submission. If you choose to use a privacy setting on either Youtube or Vimeo please be sure to provide us with a proper access code to view your film.
  •  All films must be completed before the deadline of April. 16th, 2017. As long as your film has been completed before the April 16th deadline please feel free to submit.
  •  All non-English films must have English sub-titles.
  •  All films selected for the festival grant Juteback Productions, LLC the rights to use all video images and press materials from the film for promotional purposes.
  •  Juteback Productions, LLC is permitted to retain copies of each film selected as part of our festival library and for media educational use.
  •  You may submit more than one film, please repeat process for each entry.
  • Films must be no more than 15 minutes in duration.

Submit here. And follow the festival on Facebook and Twitter.

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Archipelago by Conceição Lima

On 21 January, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 2 Comments - Performance Poetry, Videopoems
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Moving Poems’ first poet from São Tomé and Príncipe, Conceição Lima, is featured in this ultra-short but effective video by David Shook filmed in São Tomé earlier this month. The poem is from her second collection, A Dolorosa Raiz de Micondó, and if its brevity left you hungry for more, check out the four additional poems Shook translated for World Literature Today. There are also three of Lima’s poems in translation by Amanda Hopkinson at Words Without Borders.

“Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry” opens with four-minute filmpoem

On 20 January, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - festivals and other screening events


Watch it at The Wrap.

A powerful, prophetic poem by Wendell Berry opens the film Look & See (previously titled The Seer, but changed at Berry’s request) by Laura Dunn and Jef Sewell, which is playing at the Sundance Film Festival as part of The New Climate program. Here’s the description on the Sundance Institute website:

Director Laura Dunn returns to the Festival with this fitting follow-up to her acclaimed documentary, The Unforeseen (2007 Sundance Film Festival). Her latest film, Look and See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry, premiered at the SXSW Film Festival, where it received a Special Jury Award for visual design.

This gorgeously realized look at the decline of modern U.S. agrarian culture is highlighted through the writings and reflections of author Wendell Berry, who embedded himself in rural life upon returning home to Kentucky in 1965. Writing from a long wooden desk overlooking the landscape, Berry used that vantage point to eloquently praise the benefits of a life deeply connected to the land. Since then, society has shifted dramatically, with mass development of rural areas and corporate farming practices replacing the roles of small family farms.

In this visually stunning ode to a changing cultural landscape, rare photographs blend with farmers and family members expressing their own stories. Using original wood engravings to frame chapters, Look And See explores the graceful intersection between art, life, and the natural world.

The film is available for pre-order on Blu-ray and DVD.

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Now is the Time by Lucy English

On 20 January, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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From the filmmaking duo Katia Viscogliosi and Francis Magnenot, AKA Cinéma Fragile, a new addition to UK writer and poetry-film expert Lucy English‘s Book of Hours project. The voiceover (by Viscogliosi, I’m guessing) is very effective, but her accent may present occasional difficulties for some listeners, so they’ve helpfully supplied subtitles — click the CC icon.

Moments That Breathe by Meghan McDonald

On 19 January, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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An author-made video from 2015 by Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Meghan McDonald, who evidently stumbled upon the idea of videopoetry herself, judging by what she wrote on YouTube:

This little tidbit is an idea I’ve been crafting for a while. It is intended to literally bring an imagery aspect to poetry (like a music video, but with poetry). I also wanted to incorporate beautiful moments that take place every day that may be overlooked.

Last year she uploaded six more videos to her Poetry Videos playlist, in addition to going busking across the U.S. Definitely someone to keep an eye on.

Bayside Reporter by Ian Gibbins

On 18 January, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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Australian videopoet Ian Gibbins is a retired neuroscientist with three books of poetry under his belt and a penchant for experimental video and electronic music. His Vimeo description for Bayside Reporter reads:

Suspicions of criminal activity along the beachfront… Filmed between St Kilda and Port Melbourne, Victoria. Sounds were recorded beside the Yarra River, on trams between the City and Middle Park, and along the beachfront itself. A version of “Bayside Reporter” was published in Australian Poetry Members Anthology 3, Digital Edition, 2014. Here is the link.

No Black Scorpion Is Falling Upon This Table by Aaron Fagan

On 17 January, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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An author-made videopoem by Aaron Fagan from 2014. Fagan has been experimenting with video for a number of years now, initially in collaboration with visual artists Jeffrey Schell and K. Erik Ino. In more recent years he’s been mostly working on his own, and he described his philosophy about multimedia poetry in an interview with huck magazine (which also featured this poem and video):

Why did you decide to turn some of your poems into videos?
I wanted to use sound and image with the poems for texture and offer a different, hopefully more inviting, way to experience poetry. I’m not looking for any literal relationship, I just like how the language, the music, and the image correspond with each other like a dialogue.

The interesting thing about making the videos is that it was totally arbitrary. The length of the movies, the length of the poems, and the length of the songs drove it all. I had a few movies I made with my phone and a few I used my phone to film stuff I liked online off my laptop. So that became a collection of images I liked. Then I looked at a bunch of poems I recorded in a friend’s studio back in 2010. If a film and a poem were the same length I just dumped them together and found a piece of music in my music library that was the same length. They are all like these happy accidents to me. They seem harmonised.

หลงทางในประเทศของตัวเอง / Lost in Homeland by Rossanee Nurfarida

On 14 January, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 5 Comments - Videopoems
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Thai poet Rossanee Nurfarida recites her poem about the plight of Rohingya refugees in a video by German-American filmmaker Ryan Anderson for the OXLAEY multimedia project. Anderson’s English translation appears as text on screen.

Lost in Homeland was featured last week in Atticus Review‘s Mixed Media section, which is edited by videopoet Matt Mullins. Here’s how Anderson described the video there:

LOST IN HOMELAND is a video poem read by the author Ms. Rossanee Nurfarida while stranded on a boat perched at the top of a four-story, urban house. Ms. Nurfarida’s current collection of poetry, Far Away From Our Own Homes, is a Finalist for the 2016 South East Asian Writers Award. Lost in Homeland was written in 2015 during the Rohingya refugee crisis when thousands of stateless Rohingya from Myanmar set out on old fishing boats seeking a better future. The video’s visual references to Islam extend the poem’s metaphor, commenting on southern Thailand’s Muslim minority as a people stranded in the country of their birth.

Click through for more about the OXLAEY project and for bios of Nurfarida and Anderson. Additional credits are given in the YouTube description.

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Two Poems About X, 2009 and 2014 by Blair Braverman

On 13 January, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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An author-made videopoem by Wisconsin-based writer Blair Braverman that combines two poems in the soundtrack, read, one presumes, by the poet herself, for an interesting interplay of text and video imagery. It’s from the Summer/Fall 2016 issue of TriQuarterly, where the video editor Kristen Radtke says this about it:

Blair Braverman’s “Two Poems About X, 2009 and 2014” features dueling narratives, competing for our attention as they volley back and forth, left to right. The viewer must make a choice: focus on one and experience it fully, or alternate between the two and splice them together into a new, tailor-made narrative—a rare quality in a medium where the viewer is often a passive participant. Braverman’s video invites rewatching, and as one narrative becomes familiar, we’re more capable of digesting the other—most interestingly, opening up a space in which we can experience those narratives in conversation. Much of Braverman’s video is concerned with desire made complicated by gender and terrain, and near its end comes one of its most powerful and beautifully voiced lines: “Half my problems come from wishing that men who have been bad to me would be worse, and the men who have been good would confront them.”

I notice by the way that all videos at TriQuarterly now seem to be designated video essays, which is perhaps a good way to side-step the whole controversy about what to call poetry films; their cinepoetry category hasn’t had any new additions since the previous video editor’s departure. Regardless of what they call them, though, it’s great that such a prominent American literary magazine continues to place such value on literary short films. And I’m pleased to see that they now have a fully public page at Vimeo.

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This Has Begun by Soren James

On 12 January, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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“A short film about beginnings and the creative process” from UK-based artist Soren James. It was featured last month at Prick of the Spindle, a print literary journal with a film section on their website.

A Petty Morning Crime by Georgi Gospodinov

On 11 January, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation
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Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov‘s poem in an utterly brilliant animation by Asparuh Petrov and the Compote Collective. Here’s the description from Vimeo:

А murder in the second degree, that doesn’t cut down the guilt…

04:01′ / DCP / 2015 / directed by Asparuh Petrov
“A Petty Morning Crime” is based on the original poem by Georgi Gospodinov of the same title. The film is part of the visual poetry project “Mark & Verse” produced by Compote Collective.

It was selected for ZEBRA 2016 and featured as a film of the month at PoetryFilm Kanal. Here’s the conclusion of their essay (worth reading in its entirety), via Google Translate:

A Petty Morning Crime convinces on all levels: from the voice, the sound design, the integration of the writing into the picture and the manner in which the poem is adapted visually. The adaptation retains a certain piece of work without falling into the illustration trap. The abstract figures, the spatial elements and the strong noises and sounds divert the attention of the viewer from the direct correspondences of word and image, and open his eyes to the special cinematic pictorial language, as much as the text also the everyday and banal pages of life poetry.

Adondar a lingua / Kneading language by Celia Parra

On 7 January, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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A videopoem by Galician filmmaker-poet (and videopoetry blogger) Celia Parra. There’s also a version without English subtitles. The Vimeo description:

“Kneading language” speaks about love for language and the emotional roots that connect us to it. It explores the role of family in transmitting affection for our culture and traditions.
FESTIVALS
– Nominated to “Best Valentine” at Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival (USA) 2016
– Selected at Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival (USA) 2016
– Selected at Ó Bhéal Poetry-Film Competition (Ireland) 2016
AWARDS
2º Prize for videoart (ex aequo), Xuventude Crea 2016

According to the credits, Parra was responsible for poem, voiceover, camera-work and editing, while the soundtrack was composed and recorded by Alejandro Almau. I must say, as an amateur baker, I was fascinated by the footage, and have a sudden urge to make Galician empanadas. Northwest Spain is apparently where the empanada originated.