Posts By Dave Bonta
Upcoming videopoetry and poetry film festivals
Book your tickets! The annual autumn parade of poetry film festivals is about to begin. Some calls are still open: for the Vienna, Ó Bhéal and CYCLOP festivals (see below), and for the as-yet-unscheduled 5th Sadho Poetry Film Fest (deadline: October 30) and International Film Poetry Festival in Athens (deadline: November 20). And don’t forget that submissions to Zata Banks’ PoetryFilm screenings series never close.
September 15-19, Vilnius, Lithuania
TARP Audiovisual Poetry Festival 10: INTER-states
This year‘s special touch – audiozine, which will see poets Dainius Gintalas, Laima Kreivytė, Marius Burokas, Benediktas Januševičius, Agnė Žagrakalytė and others being recorded reading poetry in their favourite settings.
The last day of the festival TARP 10 will be dedicated to TARP academy, together with video poetry researchers Sarah Lucas and Lucy English from Great Britain, andan open discussion with the festival guests. The closing of the festival will be crowned as usual by an open mic readings and the opening of the „INTER-states“ exhibition – because it is just the festival that will end, while poetic states will flutter in the air for long afterwards.
September 30, Minneapolis, MN, USA
Big Bridges Film Festival
Mark your calendar for September 30, 2015 when we will reveal the winners of the Big Bridges Film Contest! The event, hosted by MotionPoems and the Target Studio at the Weisman Art Museum, will include a special screening of selected films from the contest. All are welcome!
More details coming soon at www.BigBridgesWAM.com!
October 4-11, Cork, Ireland
Ó Bhéal @ IndieCork Film Festival
→ Submissions open until September 15
This is Ó Bhéal’s sixth year of screening poetry-films (or video-poems) and the third year featuring an International competition.
Up to thirty films will be shortlisted and screened during the festival, from 4th-11th October 2015.
October 10-11, Worcester, MA, USA
Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival
Rabbit Heart 2015 will once again be at the delightful Nick’s Bar in Worcester, MA! This year there will be two shows–
Showcase Matinee – Saturday, October 10th 12-3pm
Join us for lunch, and check out some of the fantastic material that we wish we had time to share at the awards ceremony (we got SO many good entries this year!) We will screen the best of the best that didn’t fall into prize categories, as well as curated showcases from renowned UK archivist Zata Banks of PoetryFilm. Watch this space for more information on the individual showcases.Awards Ceremony and Viewing Party – Sunday, October 11th 8pm (doors at 7:30)
The show you’ve been waiting all year for – the best of the best, the handing out of trophies, popcorn and fancy dresses, and your lovely emcees Tony Brown and Melissa Mitchell! Come meet your judges and cheer for your finalists – and see who takes home the sparkle-hearted bunny for Best Overall Production.
October 17, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Visible Verse 2015 Festival
Presented by The Cinematheque since 2000, Visible Verse is one of the longest-running video poetry festivals in the world. Video poetry is a hybrid creative form bringing together verse and moving images. Visible Verse selects its annual program from hundreds of submissions received from local, national, and international artists.
On the occasion of the 2015 festival, The Cinematheque says a fond farewell and expresses its great gratitude to Heather Haley, founder of Visible Verse and its curator and host from 2000 to 2014. We welcome Vancouver poet Ray Hsu into his new role as Visible Verse’s artistic director.
November 20 and 22, Kyiv, Ukraine
5th CYCLOP International Videopoetry Festival
→ Submissions open until September 30
The festival programme features video poetry-related lectures, workshops, round tables, discussions, presentations of international contests and festivals, as well as a demonstration of the best examples of Ukrainian and world videopoetry, a competitive program, an awards ceremony and other related projects.
December 5-6, Vienna, Austria
Poetry Filmfestival Vienna (AKA Art Visuals & Poetry Festival)
→ Submissions from German-speaking countries open until September 15
After an inspiring Poetry Film Festival in 2014 we are happy to go on in 2015. What´s new in 2015? We found a new festival location in middle of city center. Metro Kinokulturhaus. It’s one the most beautiful cinemas in Vienna and the result of a new cooperation with Filmarchiv Austria.
Map of the Underground by Ifor ap Glyn
A terrific animated film from 2005 directed by Hywel Griffith of Griffilms Animation Studio, featuring a poem by Ifor ap Glyn, two-time winner of the National Eisteddfod of Wales. Music and dub are by Meilyr Tomos.
Fifth Avenue by Hasan Mujtaba
Oh my beloved country
When I sing of your separation
I return to myself
But all I hear in return,
Is the language of guns…
A poetry film in the style I like to think of as illustrated spoken word—a style that works particularly well for poems that blend the personal and the political. Sofian Khan of Capital K Pictures directed. Here’s the Vimeo description:
An exiled Pakistani poet finds fresh inspiration in his new home, while reflecting on the tragedy of partition that has left a legacy of war and strife in his beloved land. Fragments of a globalized world seem to coalesce here on fifth avenue, strung together in the poet’s mind.
Directed by Sofian Khan / Cinenmatography – Bob Blankemeier / Original Score – Joshua Green / Sound + Mix – Evan Manners / Animation – Will Clark / Makeup – Jackie Push / Starring – Arik Hartman
The English translation is by Annie Ali Khan. I couldn’t find a website for Hasan Mujtaba, but he’s active on Twitter.
Inside and Out by Anna-May Laugher
A new film by Helen Dewbery using a text by the French-British poet Anna-May Laugher, with music by Kevin MacLeod. According to the credits, it was “created as part of a elephantsfootprint workshop led by Helen Dewbery and Chaucer Cameron with thanks to Hilda Sheehan for inviting us to be part of Poetry Swindon”. For more on Elephant’s Footprint, see their website and Vimeo page.
Snö / Snow by Marie Silkeberg
…a collection of snow figures to mourn the dead
the dead man of snow
the mourners of snow
the ground covered
while the refugee camps
are filled with freezing people
the tents bulge under the snow…
A new, multilingual videopoetry collaboration by Marie Silkeberg and Ghayath Almadhoun. Here are the credits from the YouTube description:
film by: Marie Silkeberg & Ghayath Almadhoun
poem: Snö by Marie Silkeberg, 2014
english translation: Frank Perry
arabic translation: Ghayath Almadhoun
camera: Marie Silkeberg & Ghayath Almadhoun & shared films from the internet
music: Hanna Hartman
The Spotted Leaves of Some Marsh Orchids by Steve Griffiths
If you haven’t been keeping up with the Late Love Poems film project (30 films featuring the poetry of Steve Griffiths in 30 weeks), you’re in for a particular treat this week, with the debut of Film 7. Griffiths comments:
This is an important poem for me, about an extraordinary moment of realisation when you fully see the individuality of the person you love. I read it at our wedding for that reason. What’s been done to it in this film is something else. It was the first poem I worked on really hard after unhappy trials in front of the camera, and I rediscovered levels, nuances, turns of rhythm and pace that I’d forgotten since I wrote it. Then there’s Eamon Bourke’s film work, and the first substantial, astonishingly sensitive, musical input from Ivan “Ogmios” Owen, of battlerap fame on YouTube, who I’ve known since he was two. The way it falls together feels special.
7 Painters: haiku by Gabriel Rosenstock
“7 Painters is a film composition I made for 7 ekphrastic haiku by Gabriel Rosenstock,” writes Marc Neys A.K.A. Swoon, noting that it’s his second collaboration with the poet after Farrera earlier this year. Click through for texts (including the original Irish), stills, audio, and additional process notes.
Making poetry films and videopoems with texts originally sparked by other works of art presents the filmmaker with a bit of a conundrum: whether to suggest or include those art works, and if so, how? Here, Swoon seems to be responding purely to the words. But this works, I think, because the link between text and footage remains oblique enough that we might be watching what the painter, too, saw before taking up the brush.
Suicide’s Note by Langston Hughes
Filmmaker E’lisha Holmes, A.K.A. E’lisha Jule, approached Langston Hughes’ three-line poem in the same way some poetry filmmakers like to approach haiku, with the text coming at the end as a culmination of, or a response to, the footage. Given the subject matter here, this approach allows an effective, oblique resolution of the film’s mounting tension.
I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast by Melissa Studdard
This may be my favorite Motionpoem to date. The title poem from Melissa Studdard‘s new collection is impressive in itself, but it would’ve been so easy for a filmmaker to ruin it by choosing conventionally “cosmic” imagery, or by illustrating some of the more quotidian images in the text. Instead, as director/producer Dan Sickles told Rosemary Davis in an interview,
My way into this poem was an experiential familiarity. It’s an articulation of a moment of utter presence, where a mundane activity provides a portal to divine contact. The poem is elemental, and speaks of nature, life, and death. I wanted to aid in an ethereal, celestial experience of Melissa’s words through film, to inspire a feeling rather than a literal interpretation.
What was the first image you thought of after reading this poem?
The first image I thought of after reading the poem was a shot of the entire planet floating in space. Ultimately, that inspiration boiled down to this idea that size, a juxtaposition of micro and macro shots, and fluidity/liquidity in camera movement were the basic ground rules for how we approached production. […]I was in Puerto Rico for the premiere of my last film, Mala Mala, which we shot on the island over the course of three years, and that’s when we shot this, the day after our premiere. I was after a particular tone expressed in the poem, which I felt could be best represented by the raw, dense, natural landscape in Aguas Buenas and surrounding towns outside of San Juan.
And his approach resonated with Studdard, as well:
I love it! In fact, it is specifically because they avoid the predominant metaphor and related images that they are able to so skillfully tease out subtext. I felt much more understood than I would have if they’d simply shown someone eating a pancake and drinking tea. By pairing the textual imagery with this new visual imagery, they further elicit the sense of creation, sustenance, and elemental divinity at the heart of “I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast.” Rather than timidly toeing the periphery of the poem, they brave the thick inner brushland and cut new paths back out. That is as it should be. They’re not here to merely represent my poem. They’re here to create a new work of art.
Learning about inch worms by Simply Sylvio
https://vine.co/v/eKqtW7Z6nEX
I figured it would only be a matter of time before someone created a viral videopoem on Vine. (This has also been uploaded to YouTube.) The author, Simply Sylvio, is “Vine’s first avant-garde gorilla,” according to Mashable.
Sylvio’s Vine feed is a treasure chest of drama, comedy, animation and abstract art, all in the form of six-second looping videos. He’s taken a cinematic approach on the platform, showcasing his travels and everyday routines for his 300,000 followers.
Sylvio doesn’t speak, but he once wrote to us: “Vine became the perfect way to capture all of the small, quiet moments on the road that would otherwise have been lost.”
Sylvio himself may not claim that this is a videopoem, but I think it fits the classic, Konyvesian definition to a T.
Presented as a multimedia object of a fixed duration, the principal function of a videopoem is to demonstrate the process of thought and the simultaneity of experience, expressed in words — visible and/or audible — whose meaning is blended with, but not illustrated by, the images and the soundtrack.
The playful manipulation of a Google search recalls the screenshot poetry of Google Poetics. The search acquires a certain pathos, the frantic flailing of the eponymous inchworm remaining open to interpretation no matter how often we re-watch it on Vine’s infinite loop. Given that inchworms are also commonly referred to as loopers, there may also be a certain self-reflexivity at work.
I do think it’s better with the sound off, though. That’s just cheesy.
A Kite is a Victim by Leonard Cohen
Elizabeth Lewis directed and animated this film based on a Leonard Cohen poem, using a reading by Paul Hecht. It’s actually an excerpt from a longer film produced by the National Film Board of Canada in 1977: Poets on Film No. 1, which “brings together animated interpretations of four poems by great Canadian wordsmiths” by four different animator-directors.
(Hat-tip: Anik Rosenblum at the Poetry in Animation Facebook group.)
You Will Drown For Poems by R.A. Villanueva
Based on a poem by U.S. poet R.A. Villanueva, this was commissioned by London’s 2015 Dance Film Festival UK—”a collaboration between the dancer/choreographer, Julie Ann Minaai, and Garrett and Garrett, a brother-sister team of filmmakers,” as Villanueva told me via email. Michael and Katie Garrett work for a variety of clients, but according to the Dance Film Festival UK website,
their real passion lies in filmmaking for the arts, particularly, poetry, dance and music. They have won several awards for their dance and poetry pieces as well as producing a documentary which won the Channel 4 short documentary award at the Kendal Mountain Film Festival. […]
The piece “You will drown for poems” is a continuation of their love of collaborative arts projects and mixes poetry with movement for the screen. The key theme in this piece is that of the migrant artist and it reflects upon the importance of one’s work as a link to home and sense of belonging.
I’ve seen a lot of innovative dance-centered poetry films over the years, but this is the first aquatic one that I can remember, and Julie Ann Minaai‘s choreography takes full advantage of the dream-like movement of fabric and diffuse lighting available underwater. The evocative music is credited to Cato Hoeben. As for the poem, it originally appeared in Lantern Review: A Journal of Asian American Poetry, and carries the dedication “for Dennis Kim, 1983-2005.”
