Posts By Dave Bonta
Lit. Collage: A festival for poetry and collage in Weimar
A new press release from the folks behind the Weimar Poetry Film Festival notes that
With »Lit. Collage« we are setting a special emphasis this year. Paired with the Film Festival, the Collage and Poetry Festival is meant for anyone who enjoys experimenting with cutting and assembling techniques and sharing them with others. […]
This year 479 films from 51 different countries were submitted for the 9th Weimar Poetry Film Award. The award ceremony will take place on June 1st at the Lichthaus Kino in Weimar. Stay tuned for more information about our official selection!
April-May
Workshops and eventsWe invite you to participate in several workshops in April. The courses are led by the Weimar animation artist Franka Sachse, the Berlin Poetry Slam pioneer Bas Böttcher and the Weimar musician Kay Kalytta. Poems by the Belarusian poet Volha Hapeyeva, the Colombian author Ramona de Jesús and the Weimar writer Gisela Kraft (1936–2010) serve as inspiration and source material.
The results of the workshops will be presented on various occasions in May.
APRIL
SAVE THE DATES:13.04. & 14.04.
Stop motion workshop with Franka Sachse
ACC Galerie, Burgplatz 119.04.
Text collage workshop with Bas Böttcher
LiteraturEtage, Marktstr. 2-4 (OG)26.04 & 27.04.
Sound collage workshop with Kay Kalytta
Klangradar Weimar, Fuldaer Str. 185The entry fee is 30 euros per workshop (including festival pass for the Poetryfilmtage on 31st May/1st June).
Registration via mail: info@literarische-gesellschaft.de
For more information, click hereMAY/JUNE
SAVE THE DATES:02.05.
Exhibition opening „Drehmoment“ by Aline Helmcke
LiteraturEtage, Marktstr. 2-4 (OG)25.05.
Silent Party
ACC Galerie, Burgplatz 131.05.
Lit.Collage. Poetry, Performance, Film
Mon ami, Großer Saal, Goetheplatz 1101.06.
Poetryfilmtage / Award ceremony of the 9th Weimar Poetry Film Award
Lichthaus Kino, Am Kirschberg 4
Visit their website for detailed descriptions of the April workshops for Stop-Motion, Text-Collage, and Sound-Collage.
Where to watch poetry films in April
April is Poetry Month in the U.S. and Canada, so it’s no surprise that a couple of major poetry film festivals are held then. First up: Houston’s REELPoetry Festival.
Online April 1-5, 2024
In Person April 6-7, 2024
922 Holman St, Houston, TX 77002
REELpoetry/HoustonTX 2024 is an international poetry film Festival. This week long event showcases 100+ screenings under 6 minutes from 20 different countries. Connect with international curators and presenters in real time online, and in-person on the weekend; watch world premieres from Houston creatives; experience ASL poetry and performances; join use for two fabulous after parties.
Then toward the end of the month, it’s Seattle’s Cadence Video Poetry Festival.
Verse meets visuals in motion at Northwest Film Forum (NWFF) in April 2024. Cadence Video Poetry Festival, presented by Northwest Film Forum, programmed in collaboration with Seattle author Chelsea Werner-Jatzke and intermedia artist Rana San, is a series of screenings, workshops, and discussions on the genre of video poetry, taking place annually during National Poetry Month. This year’s festival takes place in-person April 19–21 and online April 19–28. Cadence approaches video poetry as a literary genre presented as visual media, cultivating new meaning from the combination of text and moving image.
In its seventh year, Cadence Video Poetry Festival remains the only festival dedicated to the form in the Pacific Northwest. The festival program includes four themed screenings with works selected from an open call for submissions, including video poetry by the 2024 screening team and jurors.
“This year, we did away with the submission categories the festival has had in place for the last six years. Moving away from submissions organized by how they were made (collaboration, video by poets, etc) places further emphasis on what is being made in the video poetry genre,” says co-director Chelsea Werner-Jatzke. “For the first time, a screening team of prior Cadence Artists-in-Residence helped program the festival, broadening the diversity of perspectives considering the video poetry that is screened as part of Cadence.”
“The 2024 festival includes video poems from 20 countries in 11 languages with a strong Pacific Northwest contingent, a quarter of the works representing artists based in Washington, British Columbia, and Montana,” notes co-director Rana San. “In conjunction with the online and onsite festival screenings and workshops, there will be gatherings for artists and audiences to connect in-person and virtually. We’re also collaborating with Frye Art Museum again to host a special satellite screening and artist discussion in May following the fest.”
Meanwhile, in Weimar, Germany, though details so far remain scant, one is advised on the Poetryfilmtage Instagram account to
SAVE THE DATES – Lit.Collage x Poetryfilmtage 2024
This year we are setting with „Lit.Collage“ a special accent. The collage and poetry festival is combined with our film festival and is meant for those who enjoy experimenting with editing techniques and sharing them with others.
…so as you can see: this year we have a lot more action going on and you can join our festival from the 13th of April till the 1st of June. Make sure you’ll save the dates! 🤩
More details on the individual events will follow soon.
It’s great that people anywhere in the world with a good internet connection can virtually attend these festivals, but I am just as excited by another new trend: more and more general poetry festivals are including film and video in various innovative ways. In Madison, Wisconsin, for example, the Hawthorn Public Library will be screening “some of our favorite video poems featured in the first four years of the Midwest Video Poetry Fest,” and in Newtown, Pennsylvania, poet Vasiliki Katsarou will be screening her feature film Fruitlands 1843. So be sure to support your local poetry scene!
Open call: Maldito Festival de Videopoesía 2024
Spain’s MALDITO FESTIVAL DE VIDEOPOESÍA has just announced open calls for its International Videopoetry Contest (short films) — guidelines here [PDF] — and its International Poetic Film Showcase (medium- to full-length films) — guidelines here. Maldito is
an international videopoetry contest that has been held in Albacete (Spain) since 2017.
MALDITO FESTIVAL launch this contest with the purpose to show two disciplines that, either individually or collectively, are much more isolated and forgotten as we would like. According to our experience, these disciplines are considered marginal and minor in the extent of the great European capitals, moreover, in the humble towns within regional borders where its dissemination is nonexistent.
MALDITO seeks to vindicate video poetry as an art that connects people, transmits feelings and stimulates different ways to see the world. It is also a tiny contribution of enormous people to empower visual art, stopping it from being marginal and damned*.
(* The Spanish word for damned is MALDITO).The festival is organized by non-profit Association Cultural Maldito; formed by a small team of professionals from the film industry, poetry and culture in general.
MALDITO Crew, as lovers of poetry, image and the expressive possibilities of its symbiosis, we pick up the baton and propose to continue the line of action, encouraging their approach to the public, either with the festival events or the educational activities that we carry out.
The festival will be in November 11-17. The deadline is July 10.
Tasting Notes by Matthew Stewart
This is one of the best, most satisfying films based on a poetry collection that I’ve seen. It was made in 2013 in support of a pamphlet (chapbook) of the same title from Happenstance Press. The poems are clearly differentiated, yet blend pretty seamlessly into a whole, with shots of the poet in a vineyard as part of the connective tissue. British poet Matthew Stewart collaborated with Spanish filmmaker José María Fernández de Vega of GLOW production company in Extramadura, where Stewart works in the wine trade. It’s hard to imagine a more poetic vocation! And since the speaker in each poem is a different variety of wine, and they’re all delivered in the poet’s own voice, it’s as if we’re hearing missing metamorphoses out of Ovid.
A while back I compiled my Top Ten Multi-Poem Films and Videopoems. This would certainly have occupied a prominent position in the list had it been available at the time. Conservative as the choice of images is, they rarely feel overly obvious. And Stewart’s voiceover is well done: readerly, but with excellent cadence and modulation. I’d have preferred somewhat less melodic music by way of contrast, but otherwise there were no false notes for me among these very tasty words and images.
Fuck / Our Future by Inua Ellams
A video made for some kind of climate series at The New York Times, locked behind the paywall, I think. My request for clarification on filmmaker(s) has gone unanswered, but it seems the result of a collaboration with the photographer named at the beginning, Josh Haner, a Pulitzer-winning feature photographer for the paper. Ellams himself also works in graphic art and design. I like how the poem’s searing language is mediated by the intimate space of an online reading, giving way to natural places and a more-than-figurative tree of life.
Earlier we shared a film by Jamie McDonald for the title poem from Ellam’s 2020 collection The Actual, among several other video interpretations of Ellams’ work. It’s fascinating to see giant legacy media organizations like the NYT and the Financial Times promote Ellams’ poetry, almost as cover for their ceaseless promotion of the planet-destroying financial and military/industrial machines.
The Lines by Andrew Motion
Suzie Hanna just uploaded to Vimeo this 2001 animation she co-directed with Hayley Winter. Live images and straight recordings interact with artifice at all levels, borrowing elements from glitch art and concrete text experiments. The former UK poet laureate Andrew Motion supplied the poem and reading, and Sebastian Castagna composed the soundtrack.
The Lines, a poetry animation, was selected for numerous festivals including Manchester Poetry Festival and Hamburg Animation Festival, it was part of a programme curated by the British Council ‘Shooting Rhymes and Cutting Verses’ which was shown all over the world to promote UK Culture. The Gene used it as visuals for a concert tour and it was shown in cinemas as part of the Sonimation project which was instigated by Suzie Hanna in collaboration with Sonic Arts Network and Digital Arts Network in 2001.
We’ve shared Hanna’s work often here. The bio on her website is worth quoting in full:
Suzie Hanna is Emerita Professor of Animation at Norwich University of the Arts. She was Chair of NAHEMI, the National Association for Higher Education in the Moving Image from 2016-2019, and remains an honorary member of the executive. She is an animator who collaborates with other academics and artists, and whose research interests include animation, poetry, puppetry and sound design. She has made numerous short films all of which have been selected for international festival screenings, TV broadcast or exhibited in curated shows. She contributes to journals, books and conferences, and has led several innovative projects including animated online international student collaborations and digital exhibitions of art and poetry on Europe’s largest public HiDef screen. She works as a production consultant and as an international academic examiner, was a member of the AHRC Peer Review College from 2009-2014, and is a longstanding member of ASIFA. She plays the violin and the musical saw.
All will be well by Jane Lovell
A new videopoem from UK poet Jane Lovell and artist Janet Lees, using some stunning underwater footage from Janet’s recent trip to the island of El Hierro in the Azores. Here’s how she captioned it on Instagram:
Feeling very muted going into this new year, hard to feel hopeful. I think this short videopoem holds a sense of solace. A deceptively simple poem by Jane Lovell, containing beautiful images and word-music, combined with footage I shot in the incomparable island of El Hierro recently, notably at Cala de Tacorón, a transformative place. I usually go for the lateral rather than the literal when putting film and poetry together, but somehow in this instance a straight translation between the elements felt right. This is part of an ongoing collaboration between the two JLs
Music is by The Duke of Norfolk.
Moment by Matt Dennison
A new film by Marc Neys, with music of his own composition, for the poem ‘Moment’ by Matt Dennison. Marc used the U.S. Army’s footage of an atomic bomb test, leaning into the distressed quality of the film stock digitized by the Prelinger Archive.
I See My World Shaking by Yuyutsu Sharma
This 2021 documentary poem by UK-based director Stephan Bookas uses a text from Nepalese-Indian poet Yuyutsu Sharma to portray the horror and aftermath of the 2015 earthquake with an intensity that would be hard to mimic in a standard narrative short.
Sharma is the first Nepalese poet we’ve featured on Wikipedia, and he has a fascinating background. Wikipedia notes that
In 2016 he published Quaking Cantos, a collection inspired by the 2015 Nepal earthquakes featuring Sharma’s poetry and photographs by Prasant Shrestha. In the Kathmandu Tribune, Arun Budhathoki wrote that it “immortalized the tragic event and captured the bitter memories of the Himalayan on a grand scale”. Andrea Dawn Bryant called it “stunningly heart-wrenching, albeit healing”.
a beach scene from ostend by Mola Clay
Mola Clay is the creative duo of film-maker and musician Yannick Mosimann, and vocalist and lyricist Selina Brenner, both in Switzerland. This recent video from them contains a deeply touching, poetic reverie, spoken by Brenner. Mosimann’s flickering images are ghostly, suggesting forgotten memories. The voice is calming in its subdued softness, in a soundtrack with silences, where intimacy is felt.
Mosimann’s brilliant earlier film Mrs. Bovary de Porrentruy was a couple of weeks ago awarded the international prize at Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Germany. His film-maker’s voice in both films is distinct and affecting.
From Selina Brenner’s bio…
Selinas work is transdisciplinary and interweaves art forms like music, dance, performance art and visual arts using the body, words/poetry, field recordings, song elements paired with extended vocal techniques and live electronics. Works are inspired by human behavior and perception, nighttime and feeling home, handled in a raw and expressive matter… Selina grew up in Maryland (USA) before moving to Switzerland when she was 12 years old. Selina has been living and working in Berne since 2016. (source)
