Posts By Dave Bonta
Firearms by Nikkita Oliver
Another powerful blend of videopoetry and performance poetry video, today from poet Nikkita Oliver and filmmaker Bryan Tucker. Here’s the Vimeo description:
If the gun that was used to murder Trayvon Martin could talk, what would it say?
Firearms was written by Nikkita Oliver – a Seattle-based creative, teaching artist, and anti-racist organizer. Nikkita is an attorney and holds a Masters of Education from the University of Washington.
Written & Performed By: Nikkita Oliver
Directed, Filmed & Edited By: Bryan Tucker
Produced By: Bryan Tucker & Nikkita Oliver
Audio Recording: Tomi Adewale
Protest Photos by Naomi Ishisaka {naomiishisaka.com}
Special Thanks: Washington Hall, Robin Rojas, Brian Lee, Aselefech & Zariya, Niki Amarantides
Music: “The Way Home” by Tony Anderson (licensed via The Music Bed)
H/t: “New Video Poem by Nikkita Oliver Imagines Trayvon Martin Shooting from Gun’s Perspective”
Countdown by Prufrock Shadowrunner
You would think a politically minded poetic countdown from 100 might get a little draggy after a while. But you would be wrong. This collaboration between Prufrock Shadowrunner (poem, performance) and Rob Viscardis (video, music) blows me away. It was an official selection for the Reframe International Film Festival 2016 and the 2016 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival International Competition.
Nicknames by William Richardson
This is a great example of how a good soundtrack (here, the work of Luca Nasciuti, with voiceover by Alastair Cook) can really make a poetry film work. It’s from a new-to-me-project:
The fitba, the teams, the love for the game. Nicknames was written by William Richardson, read by Alastair Cook and filmed by Jane Groves. Nicknames was made as part of Luminate Festival’s Well Versed project. Workshops with Craigshill Good Neighbour Network were led by poet Rachel McCrum and filmmaker Alastair Cook. Nicknames was edited by Alastair Cook.
Scotland’s creative ageing festival, is held from 1st to 31st October across Scotland each year. The festival brings together older people and those from across the generations to celebrate our creativity as we age, share stories of ageing and explore what growing older means to all of us. Each year, there are activities all over Scotland – from art workshops and dance classes to music performances and authors’ events – and you will find Luminate in theatres, galleries, community halls, care homes and lunch clubs, as well as events online that take us to audiences everywhere.
The Well Versed screening was held last Saturday, apparently. The videos are now all online in the video gallery of the Luminate website.
The Applicant by Sylvia Plath (3)
A unique twist on the performance poetry video genre from my new favorite channel on Vimeo, Tootight Lautrec’s This Be the Verse.
Tootight Lautrec, the Drag Laureate of the sub-sub-sub basement at PS 75 The Emily Dickinson School, brings you poetry–often as a drag queen lip-sync from archival recordings of poets–This Be The Verse: Poetry for Adults.
This wouldn’t work if Lautrec weren’t very, very good at lip-syncing. In all the years I’ve been combing YouTube and Vimeo for poetry videos, I can’t remember anyone taking this approach before, let alone pulling it off with such panache.
This is the third video for “The Applicant” that I’ve shared here over the years. See also Josep Porcar’s video remix and Maggie Bailey’s interpretative dance.
You Are 6 Years Old and She is Teaching You How to Ride a Bicycle by Stephanie Dogfoot
https://vimeo.com/134787597
Stephanie Dogfoot is a performance poet with numerous slam championships in Singapore and the UK under her belt, but here filmmaker Sarah Howell of the Dream Bravely production company has made the unusual (for performance poetry) decision to focus not on the poet but on the poem, with salutary results. This is also a great example of how to use video to drive home the political message of a poem. It was made in collaboration with the Haque Centre of Acting & Creativity for “the August [2015] installment of their storytelling night Metaphors Be With You: Childhood Stories,” according to a blog post by Dogfoot. Michael Lim was the cinematographer, with music by Celer and Konrad Feucht.
This is one of the films in the Zebrino Competition at the upcoming ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival next week, and I need to give a tip of the hat to the ZEBRA Poetry Film Club channel on Vimeo, which has been adding films at a great rate in the build-up to the festival. I’ll be sourcing films from that channel for weeks to come, but if you can’t wait, go there now and gorge.
On Your ‘A 1940 Memory’ by Daljit Nagra
This is Across Fields, a film by Tim Davies incorporating British poet Daljit Nagra‘s tribute to the great World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon, who fought in the Battle of the Somme, paired with “Site-responsive video recorded in and around the Bois de Mametz in the Somme Valley,” as the credits inform us. The poem and film were commissioned by a poetry project called Fierce Light:
Perhaps no art form captured the complexity and terror of the First World War more acutely than poetry. Drawing on their experiences, poets used their art to reflect on the war’s impact: from the horrors of the battlefield to the ways in which the conflict rendered a familiar world unrecognisable to those left living in it.
Fierce Light brought together leading poets from countries that participated in the First World War, including Yrsa Daley-Ward, Jackie Kay, Bill Manhire, Paul Muldoon and Daljit Nagra, to create new works that endeavour to understand the incomprehensible; exploring contemporary events while also contemplating the First World War. These works were presented alongside a series of specially commissioned short films, each made in response to the new poems and themes raised within them. […]
Launching with an exhibition and a special live event, Fierce Light featured the poets during the City of Literature programme at Norfolk & Norwich Festival, before the poems and films were presented on radio, at other literary festivals and online.
I have stolen everything by Abeer Hoque
This is one of three short films by the New York-based filmmaker Josh Steinbauer based on poems by Nigerian-born Bangladeshi American writer and photographer Abeer Hoque, all from her book of linked stories, The Lovers and the Leavers (HarperCollins India, 2015). The third partner in this collaboration was the band Dragon Turtle Music, which supplied the soundtrack for each of these deceptively simple videopoems. Watch all three at Scroll.in (but be careful: it’s one of those annoying sites that sends you off into a new article if you scroll down too far).
The Damascene Collar of the Dove by Mahmoud Darwish
This is In Damascus (في دمشق), a stunningly beautiful film by the Syrian filmmaker and motion graphic designer Waref Abu Quba. Here’s the description from Vimeo:
Winner | Outstanding Cinematography in the Autumn Shorts Film Festival, Somerset, Kentucky USA 2015.
Official Selection:
• ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival Münster|Berlin – 2016
• Arab Film Festival, San Francisco, CA – 2016
• 9th Annual Houston Palestine Film Festival – 2015
• Autumn Shorts Film Festival, Somerset, Kentucky USA – 2015Watch In Damascus VFX Breakdown and read the description for technical Information about the film on this link.
This film is about Damascus, an 11,000 years old city, the most ancient & precious of cities, set to the poetry of the world famous Palestinian poet / author Mahmoud Darwish.
More than three years have passed since the idea inception up to this moment. This project was my companion during my staying abroad, it was like a friend and an enemy at the same time, sometimes I spend hours working on it, and sometimes I leave it for months.
Now after two months of heavy work, I’ve finished it, and I would like to present it to you … I hope you like it.
Be sure to watch it on the largest screen you have.
“Dictionary Illustrations” by Marie Craven wins 4th Ó Bhéal Poetry-Film Competition
The 2016 Ó Bhéal judges, poet Kathy D’Arcy and filmmaker Rossa Mullin, have chosen a winner: Dictionary Illustrations, by one of my favorite poetry filmmakers, the multi-talented Australian artist and musician Marie Craven. Actually, I’m doubly biased here, because it’s an adaptation of a poem by Sarah J. Sloat, an American poet and journalist living in Germany whose work I love (though sadly she has yet to put out a full-length collection). I’ve featured the video on the main site in the past, but it’s definitely worth another viewing:
This news comes via Twitter and a post on the Ó Bhéal Facebook page, which quotes the judges’ decision:
Dictionary Illustrations was a perfect film poem because, remembering it, we can’t distinguish which parts were the words, which the images, which the sounds: each element harmonised perfectly with the others to create one discrete artwork. This effect is so rare, and so rewarding.
Other recent posts on their Facebook page include photos of the festival, which was apparently well attended. Descriptions of all the films in the competition appear on their website.
Craven had two other films on the shortlist, Joining the Lotus Eaters and One Dream Opening Into Many, so I suppose that gave her pretty good odds, but she was also up against some very tough competition, including a few films I would’ve been nearly as pleased to see win, so huge congratulations to Marie and to Sarah — and to the judges for a tough job well done.
Subterranean Homesick Blues by Bob Dylan
This clip from D. A. Pennebaker‘s 1967 documentary Don’t Look Back remains an innovative, proto music video. Poetry-film expert Alice Lyons included it in her list of “Ten Films to Look at When You Want to Think About Poetry and Film.”
Hoover by Trevor Meaney
This is the first of a four-part series of film poems called The Meaning of Lemon, based on the poetry of UK performance poet Trevor Meaney and directed by Bryan Dickinson of the Lancaster Film Makers’ Co-op. Each of the films in the series uses a similar device: a nonplussed or phlegmatic person listening to a unexpected poem delivered through improbable means. In “Hoover,” actor Philip Cowles’ eyebrow action really makes the film for me.
