~ Video Library ~

A Scientist’s Advice on Healing by Christy Ducker

On 25 October, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation
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The winner for Best Animation at Rabbit Heart Poetry Festival 2017, where it was also a finalist for Best Overall Production. Filmmaker Kate Sweeney notes in her c.v. that the 2016 film is a “2.05 min hand-drawn animation. In collaboration with poet Christy Ducker and Centre for Chronic Diseases, York. Funded by Wellcome Trust.” It’s one of at least two films that came from that collaboration, as well as a pamphlet of photography and poetry called Messenger.

Drawing on the science of immunology, Messenger explores how we wound and how we heal. Whether the focus is a tiny molecule or a global problem, Christy Ducker’s succinct poems offer ‘hope and a warning’. Illustrated throughout by Kate Sweeney’s striking photographs, Messenger shuttles between science and art to suggest alternative ways of looking at recovery.

For more on Ducker, see her website.

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Dancing Lesson by Rachel Kann

On 24 October, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Dance, Videopoems
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I’ve been championing the dance category of videopoetry for years, so I was pleased to see this worthy representative of it take the top honors at last weekend’s Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival. Written and performed by “modern-day mystic” Rachel Kann, with choreography by her and Jhon Gonzalez, and directed by Brad (Bradford L.) Cooper, it won Best Overall Production and Best Sound/Music (the work of Cooper and Atom Smith). See YouTube for the complete credits and Hevria for the text.

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Out of Reach (Rain Night) by Jorge Díaz Martínez

On 21 October, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, Videopoems
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A 2014 film by Pablo Diartinez and Erik Parys that’s been out of reach to web viewers until now, making the indie film festival rounds and racking up a bunch of awards — and rightfully so. It’s a beautiful film. Here’s the summary from IMDb:

‘Out of reach (rain night)’ is the first installment in ‘From the pages of Album’, a series of short films adapting the poetry of Jorge Diaz Martinez to the screen in a collage of animated graphics, texts and live action. ‘Out of reach (rain night)’ finds the series’ protagonist, a nameless poet in Brussels, seeking shelter and a place to sleep in a tram stop, while memories of lost friendship and love invade his clouded mind and the screen. The poem for this episode, a ‘found object’, paints a state of incommunicado and evasion.

Music and sound are by T.S.E.G. (Thomas Giry). For more on the poet, see his blog; the Pages of Album has its own website and Facebook page. I’ll be following the progress of this “fusion cinema poetry book” with great interest.

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Blue by Erica Goss

On 20 October, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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The latest author-made film from Erica Goss, who included these process notes in the description:

During the summer of 2017, my brother visited me from New York City. He wanted to get a tattoo, so we found High Priestess in Eugene, where I had just moved. I asked my brother and the tattoo artist if I could film the procedure, and they agreed. I had a poem, titled “Blue,” that I wrote in 2014 after listening to the Joni Mitchell song of the same name. The poem mentions tattoos, so I thought it would be a good fit with the subject of the video. A technical note: I did no color correction on the video except for the last scene, where I increased the light and contrast slightly. The room was fairly dark, so the spotlights show up as a bit blown out. I like the effect and didn’t want to change it.

The music is by Kevin MacLeod.

Tryouts by Gary Jackson

On 19 October, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Animation
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Animation by Victor Newman of a poem from Gary Jackson‘s book Missing You, Metropolis, which “imagines the comic-book worlds of Superman, Batman, and the X-Men alongside the veritable worlds of Kansas, racial isolation, and the gravesides of a sister and a friend,” according to the publisher’s description. Newman was assisted by animators Jonathan Djob Nkonbo and Jeff Chong, JD McMillin did the sound design, and the voiceover is by Chuck Johnson.

Tryouts was produced by Motionpoems as part of their Season 7, in partnership with Cave Canem. For the text of the poem, see the Motionpoems website.

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The Desktop Metaphor by Caleb Parkin

On 18 October, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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The Desktop Metaphor is a film by Helmie Stil of Caleb Parkin’s second placed poem in the National Poetry Competition 2016, commissioned by Alastair Cook of Filmpoem in partnership with the Poetry Society.

Dutch filmmaker Helmie Stil is also the organizer of Filmpoem Festival 2017 at the Depot in Lewes on October 28, which will include a screening of all ten of the films made for the 2016 winners of the UK Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition.

Caleb Parkin is a “poet, performer, artist, facilitator and educator, based in Bristol.” His poem on the page takes an interesting diptych-like form as the words echo back and forth from one line to the next.

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Descrambled Eggs by Steve Currie

On 13 October, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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Canadian poet Steve Currie stars in this video, directed by Kayla Jeanson with illustrations by Sergio Garzon and music by Kevin McLeod. “Created for F-wordz – Winnipeg Film Group 2015,” it was re-released last June by Button Poetry.

Although Currie doesn’t appear to have a website, a quick search reveals that he was the 2012 slam champion of Winnipeg, currently teaches high school in British Columbia, and is not landed gentry. Assuming that’s all the same guy.

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Repeated by Dani Salvadori

On 12 October, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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I’m not sure why all the disparate elements of this haiku videopoem should hold together so well, but they do. Text, video and sound design are all the work of Dani Salvadori, who notes on Vimeo that the “Footage [was] shot during 2016 and combined to commemorate too many business trips.” The music is by Troy Holder.

I like Salvadori’s about page:

Video poetry, for the smallest screen. Made by mobile for mobile viewing.

Check out her other videos.

Thank You, Tree by Fatou M’Baye

On 11 October, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Performance Poetry, Videopoems
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Nathan Tranbarger filmed and edited this video for the Wick Poetry Center’s Traveling Stanzas project, which has been going on now as long as Moving Poems. I’m happy to see that they’re not only still around; they’ve expanded into a proper online magazine as well as maintaining the public poetry poster side of the project. Kent State Magazine also has a short piece about this video:

[Fatou] M’Baye wrote the poem “Thank You, Tree” last fall as a fifth-grader attending the Holden Elementary School Writer’s Club, an after-school program. David Hassler, director of the Wick Poetry Center, held a workshop at the club as part of the center’s outreach efforts to the community. “In the first session, we started with the idea of being grateful for something in our lives,” says Hassler. “Fatou chose this tree.”

“I wanted to thank her for helping me and my friends,” says M’Baye. “I wanted to thank all the trees. Without them we wouldn’t have healthy, happy lives.” […]

Since 2009 illustrated poems have made their way across Northeast Ohio, displayed on buses and transit systems and printed on posters and postcards as a project of the College of Arts and Sciences’ Wick Poetry Center. Now these poetry illustrations are journeying around the world as part of an interactive website and traveling exhibit that launched this fall, with support from the Ohio Arts Council.

Traveling Stanzas—an award-winning collaboration between the Wick Poetry Center and the School of Visual Communication Design—aims to facilitate a global conversation through the intimate and inclusive voice of poetry. Featured poems are curated from global submissions and illustrated by Kent State students and alumni.

Click through to see the poster made for M’Baye’s poem.

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12 Sights of the Sea by Ian Gibbins

On 10 October, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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A new version of a videopoem by Ian Gibbins, transferring the majority of the text, which had been entirely on-screen on an earlier version, into a voice-over. I find this approach much more effective, though the earlier version is undoubtedly more accessible to the deaf (and possibly also to the dyslexic). Here’s the Vimeo description:

… the rippling enfoldment, across the ebb, failure below deck, only By-the-Wind-Sailors … text originally published in Cordite 45: Silence (2014)… images and sounds recorded from the seas and islands around the Fleurieu Peninsula, South Australia.

Be sure to follow Ian’s blog to keep up with all his video- and music-making. He claims to be retired, but the evidence strongly suggests otherwise.

13 Ways of Looking at a Haiku + anagram mix by Jim Kacian

On 6 October, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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Jim Kacian riffs on the famous Wallace Stevens poem, but in visual terms, featuring variants on an original theme. Filmed on Moosehead Lake, Maine, in 2016 and presented here during HaikuLife 2017, part of International Haiku Poetry Day, an initiative of The Haiku Foundation, held 17 April 2017.

That’s from the Haiku Foundation’s HaikuLife 2017 page, which also presents a companion video:

While creating 13 Ways of Looking at a Haiku for HaikuLife 2017, Jim Kacian became addicted to the anagrammatic possibilities of his “seed poem”. Here are 13 of what he feels are the best variations (he warns that many others are possible).

Jim Kacian is one of the most prominent practitioners and publishers in the modern (gendai) English-language haiku scene. It’s great to see him taking such an innovative approach to haiku videopoetry here. Most haiku videos on YouTube and Vimeo are intensely conservative and boring, in my opinion, featuring little of the creative disjunction for which modern haiku is known.

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Life, Life by Arseny Tarkovsky

On 5 October, 2017 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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It’s always fascinating to see how different poetry-film makers will deploy the same text. In his film, Cameron Michael juxtaposes the dreamy text and soundtrack with time-lapse shots of New York City, while in Exiles, Bangladeshi director Amirul Rajiv uses black-and-white footage of a vast Rohingya refugee camp. Which is a better fit? How does our understanding of the poem change from one film to the other?

Poetry-film fans should recognize the name Arseny Tarkovsky: his son, the great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, included his father’s poems in some of his most memorable scenes. Here, the title poem from Virginia Rounding’s recent volume of English translations comes to us via an album by the film composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, which he offered up for an international short film competition earlier this year. Here’s how the website No Film School described it:

The composer behind ‘The Revenant’ has teamed up with Apichatpong Weerasethakul to give out awards totaling $5,000 cash.

This past spring, Ryuichi Sakamoto released his album async, which he described as a “soundtrack for an imaginary Andrei Tarkovsky film.” Today, he announced the async Short Film Competition, in which he asks filmmakers to create a movie around his music.

The short films will be judged by Sakamoto and acclaimed filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives). In addition, one filmmaker will be given an “Audience Award” based on the following method: One point for every time the submitted film is played on Vimeo; 10 points for every “like” on Vimeo; and 10 points for every “like” on Facebook by September 30th, 2017.

Sakamoto will decide on a winner based on the following criteria:

  • Originality
  • Creativity
  • Unique expression of the relationship between the music and the images
  • The general appeal of the film

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Apichatpong will decide on a winner based on the following criteria:

  • Originality
  • Creativity
  • The general appeal of the film

Links to all the films entered in the competition are currently on the front page of Sakamoto’s website. You can see more film interpretations of this poem by doing a Google video search for Arseny Tarkovsky “Life, Life”.

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