Posts By Dave Bonta
Ich lebe mein Leben im wachsenden Ringen / I live my life in widening circles by Rainer Maria Rilke
Rilke’s “primordial tower” (uralten Turm) is given literal shape in this otherwise wonderfully suggestive film of a video installation based on the famous poem from the Book of Hours. The film, directed by the artist Pat van Boeckel, takes a kind of call-and-response approach—which seems highly appropriate, given the subject matter—by having a voiceover of the poem at the very beginning (with the English translation by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows in subtitles), followed by the installation in a kind of reverse ekphrasis. According to the Vimeo description, the installation was “Made for art project Internationales Waldkunst in Darmstadt.” Max Richter composed the music.
Motionpoems’ Season 7 poetry films to premiere in October
https://vimeo.com/98679430
Autumn in the northern hemisphere usually brings the highest concentration of poetry film festivals and screening events worldwide, and this year, Motionpoems is set to join the fray, with the long-awaited world premiere of their Season 7 films to be held on October 27 in Minneapolis. (There’s also a Rooftop Sneak Preview scheduled for October 20.) Visit splashthat.com to reserve your tickets.
Motionpoems is the world’s only poetry film company. For our seventh season, we’ve partnered with Cave Canem to produce a series of films based on fantastic poems by Black poets. We’ll premiere them for the first time on October 27 at the Walker Art Center Cinema (1750 Hennepin Avenue), and we want to see you there. NOTE: There are TWO showings: One at 6pm and one at 8pm. Reserve your seats today for a $10 donation! They go fast!
This does mean that it will conflict directly with the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Münster (October 27-30), where I’m sure at least a few of Motionpoems’ films will be screened.
At Thirty by Paula Bohince
A poem by Paula Bohince adapted to film by Thibault Debaveye for Motionpoems, who refer to it on Facebook as
our first crowdsourced voiceover! Thanks to our voiceover artists John W. Goodman, Jeannie Elizabeth, Louis Murphy, Amy Miller, Jennifer Jabaily-Blackburn, Veronica Suarez, Carrie Simpson, Michelle Meyer, Juliet Patterson, Will Campbell, and Clare McWilliams.
Debaveye’s description on Vimeo:
Feeling empty. Null and void. Finding a new identity.
“At Thirty”, a visual poem about this feeling of being there but not being present.
Non-existent silhouette of ordinary people as they go about their lives in everyday chores.
See Motionpoems’ upload for the full credits, and visit their website to read the text of the poem and a brief interview with Bohince.
If I Could Tell You by W. H. Auden
https://vimeo.com/180747404
This is Holocene, a film by Berlin-based photographer and filmmaker Esteban Iljitsch that juxtaposes Auden’s poem (in Tom O’Bedlam’s almost too-perfect reading) with footage of Iceland for a powerful meditation on time and mutability. The Vimeo description:
It’s been two years now since we took off to Iceland with some cameras, a raincoat and a five-wheel-hooptie.
In the never ending summer days we lost sense of time and space, got dizzy walking around sulfur fields, had lobster soup next to black beaches and accidentally rejuvenated our feet in a hot spring.
There must have been reasons for all this – if we could tell you, we would let you know.Concept: ESTEBANxILJITSCH
Director/DP/Edit: Esteban
Actor: Manuel Iljitsch
Factotum: Hannes Kleager
Colorist: Nicke Jacobsson
Sounddesigner: Moritz Staub
Voiceover: Tom O’Bedlam
Poem: „If I Could Tell You“ by W.H. AudenThanks to the great people involved who made this possible and Anna for pushing me to finish it!!!!
River Étude by Sandra Louise Dyas
What mysteries lie hidden in a single name? As if in answer to the OTTERAS videopoem Navn Nome Name and its celebration of a telephone book’s worth of names, Iowa-based artist Sandra Louise Dyas set out to pay closer attention to one great river of a word, as the Vimeo description explains:
River Étude is an experimental video poem inspired by the Mississippi River and John Cage. When I was very little, I learned how [to] spell Mississippi and Dubuque by singing the letters. Life offers you nothing to hang onto. To survive you must learn how to let go and swim. Become the water. Stop resisting.
Afternoon by Max Ritvo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv_oKqPwidA
American poet Max Ritvo‘s death of cancer at 25 was widely mourned on social media last week. As the New York Times noted, much of his work was devoted to chronicling his struggle with Ewing’s sarcoma, which he contracted at 16. The above video is one of a pair of animations by Nate Milton produced to accompany an NPR podcast, as the YouTube description explains:
Ritvo visited the Only Human podcast for the second time during what he called his “farewell tour”. His debut collection, “Four Reincarnations” will be published later this year. Listen to the episode here: http://www.wnyc.org/story/max-ritvo/
See also the other animation, “Poem to My Litter.”
Kumukanda by Kayo Chingonyi and Sean Graham
Coming-of-age rituals are at the center of this powerful, uniquely collaborative poetry dance film from director Fiona Melville and producer/creative director Nathalie Teitler for the Dancing Words project, featuring poet/dancer Kayo Chingonyi, poet/dancer/choreographer Sean Graham, and a composition by Gemma Weekes (who is also an accomplished British writer).
According to the Wikipedia page on the Lovale/Luvale people of Zambia and Angola,
In Zambia the Luvale people hold the ‘Makishi festival’ to mark the end of the ‘kumukanda’ (or ‘initiation’). Every 5 years or so, boys from the same age group (young teenagers) are taken into the bush for 1–2 months where they undergo several rites of passage into manhood. These involve learning certain survival skills, learning about women and how to be a good husband, learning about fatherhood, and also they are circumcised. The Luvale consider uncircumcised men to be dirty or unhygienic. It is said that in some very rural areas where the kumukanda is maintained in its strictest traditional sense that if a woman is to pass by the boy’s ‘bushcamp’ whilst they are undergoing kumukanda then she must be punished, even killed. To celebrate the boys’ completion of the kumukanda the Makishi festival welcomes them back to the village as men.
Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll
This “experimental visual poetry” directed by Katie Williamson stars Walter McCord in an imaginative riff on Lewis Carroll’s great nonsense poem. The soundtrack includes, if I’m not mistaken, a track by the Master Musicians of Jajouka.
Quattro Ottobre (October Fourth) by Francesca Gironi
A unique piece even by the highly eclectic standards of the poetry-dance film genre. For one thing, the dancer/choreographer, Francesca Gironi, also wrote the text. For another, video artist Jack Daverio‘s imagery complements and expands the text in such a way that this could easily be characterized as a videopoem senso strictu. It’s described on Vimeo as an “Ironic dialogue between poetry and video art. Self escape becomes hyper presence.” The music is by Luca Losacco.
Quattro Ottobre was a finalist at the Doctorclip poetry film festival as well as in the Carbon Culture Review Poetry Film Competition 2016, judged by Zata Banks, who describes it as “A strong example of a dance-led poetry film incorporating sound design, visual layering and a voiceover poem about the self.” (Click through for biographies for Gironi, Daverio and Losacco.)
navn nome name by OTTARAS
Sound poetry and concrete poetry elude most efforts at translation — except for translation into videopoetry, as in this new release from OTTARAS (Ottar Ormstad and Taras Mashtalir) and Alexander Vojjov. I’m sure knowing Norwegian would add layers of meaning but even without that, I found the visualization of names as planetary objects or one-celled organisms intriguing and delightful. Here’s the Vimeo description:
NAVN NOME NAME (2016) is based on Ottar Ormstad’s “telefonkatalogdiktet” (‘the phonebook poem’). It is his third book of concrete poetry, published in Norway by Samlaget (2006). For this language research project, Ormstad read (!) the phonebook of Oslo 2004 and selected names on a poetic basis. In the book, the names are presented visually as concrete poetry. Most of the names are strongly connected to Norwegian and describe phenomena in nature.
NAVN NOME NAME is the second work of a collection of video poems created by the Norwegian-Russian duo OTTARAS (Ottar Ormstad and Taras Mashtalir) in collaboration with Russian video artist Alexander Vojjov. In the video, Ormstad reads names selected by the Russian-American composer Mashtalir. Through this work, Norwegian language turns into international sound poetry. Ormstad’s collection of family names present in Oslo’s phonebook at the time of reading are exposed and read by the author while performing to Mashtalir’s pulsating music. Is everyone connected to each other in the sphere that is shaping before the viewer’s eyes? How do names and language relate to the atmospheric scapes Vojjov creates of numbers, geometric forms and abstract shapes?
NAVN NOME NAME exists in different versions made for screening and live performance. Raising awareness of electronic poetry and sonic ecology, attracting new audience to a potent yet to come genre is the inspiration for this collaboration.
The video is produced in HD 16:9 in color, stereo.
Duration: 06:05 mins
Animation: Alexander Vojjov
Music: Taras Mashtalir
Concrete poetry, voice & production: Ottar Ormstad
© Ottar Ormstad 2016
