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The Art of Poetry Film with Cheryl Gross: “Despot’s Progress”

On 14 January, 2015 by Cheryl Gross with 1 Comments - Animation, The Art of Poetry Film with Cheryl Gross

I’m still looking for collaborations to write about, so poetry filmmakers and videopoets: please send me links to your work! Today’s collaboration involved two different filmmakers’ responses to the same poem. First, propaganda cartoons (thank you Walt Disney) compiled by Othniel Smith make a stirring backdrop for Robert Peake‘s poem “Despot’s Progress.”

I would like to begin with a bit of history. Walt Disney was pro-American and produced a number of propaganda animations depicting Hitler and the Nazi party as buffoons. Unfortunately his patriotism irrationally carried over into the 1960s. This resulted in not allowing people to enter Disneyland if their hair was too long. (This was sparked by protests against the Vietnam War that I believe he felt were anti-American.) If memory serves me correctly, Disney enforced a rule limiting the length a man’s hair could to be in order to enter the theme park. Call it discrimination, but it’s an interesting example of what the times were like, and I believe makes the interplay of audio and visuals here even more poignant. Since Disney was calling the shots, does that mean he was right in inflicting this regulation on his clientele? If he had prejudice against hippies with long hair, I wonder who else he didn’t like?

I happen to love cartoons, especially old Disney and Warner Brothers. This blended with Peake’s poetry makes a brilliantly chilling observation of injustice and intolerance. The poem speaks sarcastically of totalitarianism as something we must adhere to. Images of Donald Duck saluting and trying to conform “comically” support this theory, but as you can see it is not funny. The cartoons just make it palatable and easy to swallow. This piece points us in the direction of taking an otherwise unrealistic depiction (the actual animation) to reveal the nightmare that eventually came to fruition. I think the question that should be asked is, when it comes to being prejudiced, what is the real difference between Disney and Hitler? I suppose we can say it was six million Jews, but what about the haircut? The atrocities committed by Hitler were undeniably more severe than Disney’s point of view and perhaps I should not compare the two, but let’s not dismiss the last section of the cartoon, when the baby duck bursts out of the egg saluting “Sieg Heil!” To me that’s where it actually begins.

No matter what kind of discipline you practice, art is a very powerful medium. This couldn’t be more relevant to what happened at Charlie Hebdo last week. Je Suis Charlie!

Music/concept/editing by Swoon; footage: coxyde 1951 AB (IICADOM 903 at the Internet Archive).

Then we have Mark Neys A.K.A. Swoon‘s interpretation, which is equally chilling. The use of vintage footage puts me on the edge of my seat. The music gets under my skin and I can’t help but feel this is the second before a disaster is about to occur. I find in Swoon’s piece the end is very different. There is no baby Hitler being born, just anticipation. What is next? And is there a next? Perhaps a bomb will drop or a tsunami will wash away the mother and child, leaving us with basically the same outcome. The world has changed and continues to change.

See also Robert Peake’s blog post, “Two Views of ‘Despot’s Progress’ (Film-Poems).”

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Mule & Pear: two videopoems by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

On 14 January, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems, Book trailers
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Rachel Eliza Griffiths has made poetry book trailer-style videopoems for a couple of other poets, but this one from 2011 was for her own collection, and Roxane Gay, writing at HTML Giant, was impressed:

Mule & Pear is a new book of poetry by Rachel Eliza Griffiths and has a book trailer I really love which is saying something because I do not care for book trailers.

This Dust Road: Self Portrait is an excerpt from the final poem in Mule & Pear. According to the publisher’s description,

These poems speak to us with voices borrowed from the pages of novels of Alice Walker, Jean Toomer, and Toni Morrison—voices that still have more to say, things to discuss. Each struggles beneath a yoke of dreaming, loving, and suffering. These characters converse not just with the reader but also with each other, talking amongst themselves, offering up their secrets and hard-won words of wisdom, an everlasting conversation through which these poems voice a shared human experience.

Three haiku by Angie Werren

On 13 January, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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These are three, seven and twelve from Angie Werren‘s “twenty seconds of haiku” series, a deliberately low-tech approach to videohaiku that’s brilliant when it works. One big advantage Werren has over most other filmmakers, amateur or professional, who attempt videohaiku: she understands what English-language haiku — and micropoetry in general — is all about. Spend some time at her blog Feathers and you’ll see what I mean.

Watch all 13 videos in the “twenty seconds” series on Vimeo. Six also appeared in the new online literary journal Gnarled Oak (which is very videopoetry-friendly, by the way).

Zman / Time by Mei-Tal Nadler

On 12 January, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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A new poetry film by Avi Dabach with text by Mei-Tal Nadler and music by Harold Robin. Einat Weizman read the poem and Adriana X. Jacobs provided the English translation used in the subtitles.

Nadler won the 2014 Teva Prize for Poetry, whence this bio:

May-Tal Nadler is a poet and doctoral student of literature and Israeli culture at Tel Aviv University. Her first book of poetry, Experiments in Electricity, was published this year.
Nadler has previously won the Ministry of Culture’s award for poets for 2008 and was among the prize winners of the 2008 Poetry Along the Way competition, sponsored by the city of Tel Aviv. Her manuscript won the Leib Goldberg award for literary work.

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Liberté by Maciej Piatek

On 9 January, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, Author-made videopoems, Concrete and visual poetry
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A concrete videopoem by the UK-based Polish video artist Maciej Piatek that alludes to a text by Paul Eluard and an historic, public use of that text, as the write-up on Vimeo explains:

The film was screened at Liberté during the ArtsBridge Festival 2014. Liberté was a multi-discipline performance featuring collaborations in poetry, music, film, dance, prose, performance and visual arts, that used Paul Éluard’s “Liberté” poem as a starting point. The poem was famously dropped from aeroplanes during WWII by the British Air force over occupied France.

2014 was a year of the centenary of the start of WWI and the 75th Anniversary of the start of WWII, and in an age where we see almost perpetual war, we are told that it is all necessary “for our freedom”. The performance attempted to analyse what liberty/freedom meant to each contributor.

Featured work by Lianne Brown, Gillie Carpenter, Isolde Davey, Holly Hero, Gaia Holmes, Tallulah Holmes, Cliff James, Alice Mill, Paul Mill, Steve Nash, Maciej Piatek, Winston Plowes

ArtsBridge Festival 2014 at Christchurch, Sowerby Bridge, UK

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Simple Brushstrokes on a Naked Canvas by Howie Good

On 7 January, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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This is Five Miles (Simple Brushstrokes on a Naked Canvas) by Swoon (Marc Neys), made with the text of a poem from Fugitive Pieces, Howie Good’s new collection of poems. Here’s what Marc blogged about it:

So. A New year. New sounds. New videos. A big new project (more on that one later)
A solo exhibition  (more on that one later) and
New collaborations.

My first video of the year is Five Miles (Simple Brushstrokes on a Naked Canvas)
I first got the idea for this when reading ‘Fugitive Pieces’ by Howie Good.
It’s a great book of found poems published by Right Hand Pointing Press.
All proceeds from the book go to the Food Bank of the Hudson Valley.

People who follow my work, know I’m a big Howie fan. His writing moves me and (very often) is a perfect fit for my videos and sounds.

In Fugitive Pieces Howie Good used the techniques of the collagist.
The poems are collages sourced from various texts as well as his own imagination.
From the author’s note:

This meant creation through destruction, lifting things from one context and dropping them into another, establishing unfamiliar relationships among familiar objects.

That sounds a bit like creating videopoetry. I often find myself using that same approach (especially when working with found footage or archive material)

I first created a track around samples I took from a documentary ‘Target for today’.

[Soundcloud link]

Only after creating that track I chose a poem from ‘Fugitive Pieces’: Simple Brushstrokes on a Naked Canvas
The poem was the perfect match for my soundscape and would work well as ‘text on screen’ in a film composition.

[…]

I collected footage (from Videoblocks) to combine with certain lines from the poem. Played around with timing, font and placement of the text and started puzzling it all together. I believe it works well.

Click through for the text of the poem (or, you know, just watch the film).

Jung/Malena/Darwin by Albert Goldbarth

On 6 January, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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The deeply clever and always entertaining American poet Albert Goldbarth meets his match in director Chris Jopp. This is one of Motionpoems’ latest releases (click through for the text of the poem), and it was “made possible through a partnership with Graywolf Press.” Supplemental materials on the Motionpoems website include interviews with Goldbarth and Jopp by Rosemary Davis. I particularly liked this last bit of the latter:

MOPO: Have you done any collaborations like this before? What was it like to work with Albert?

JOPP: I have not collaborated with poets before. After hearing Albert did not own a computer, I thought about calling him. I then heard, that he was a fan of letters so I decided to write him a letter through the mail. I always feel like I can communicate better through text anyhow and this was a way to more thoughtfully pick his brain without the nerve-racking reality of this award winning poet breathing on the opposite end of the telephone. In fact, I think our “analog” correspondence influenced the way I made the film. I wanted it to feel genuine and authentic, and something about sending and receiving actual inked letters through the mail made me stick to that idea.

Albert was very receptive through the whole conceptual process and then sort of handed me the reigns and was like, “Alright, you have my thoughts and concerns, and think I trust you, so GO FOR IT!” So now I’m just following my own intuition! He said, at the screening he’d either shake my hand or punch me in the nose. Hopefully, the first.

MOPO: What has this project done for you? Learn anything?

JOPP: It has changed the way I think about poetry.

Read the rest.

Paisley Quilt by Becky Cherriman

On 5 January, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 2 Comments - Videopoems
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This poem deals with sexual violence and may be triggering to some people.

How do you make a film of a poem about rape? Poet Becky Cherriman and director Pru Fowler take a minimalist approach, with an unflinching close-up on the author’s face and her impeccable, understated delivery. The result is way more than just another talking-head-style spoken-word poetry video. As Cherriman said in an email, “I realise it is not as visually diverse as some of the films you feature but that was deliberate because of the stark nature of the poem.” Her performance of the poem took 2nd prize in the 2011 Ilkley Literature Festival Open Mic competition.

Woman Without Umbrella: poetry by Victoria Redel

On 2 January, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Book trailers, Videopoems
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This is a fascinating experiment: a poetry book trailer of sorts that’s also a collage videopoem by another poet, Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Here’s the description from Vimeo:

A visual poem based upon the poetry collection of the same title, “Woman Without Umbrella”, by Victoria Redel. Published by Four Way Books, 2012. The visual poem incorporates various spoken lines gathered from the poet’s collection and employs associative thematic imagery inspired by Redel’s work.

Directed/Edited by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Associate Producer: Joseph A.W. Quintela
Make-Up Artist: Cassi Renee
Narrator: Gabriel Don

Visit
rachelelizagriffiths.com
victoriaredel.com
fourwaybooks.com

Kudos to Redel and Four Way Books for giving permission for such an innovative remix.

drift by Martha McCollough

On 1 January, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 2 Comments - Animation, Author-made videopoems
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Let’s start the New Year with a brand-new piece by one of our best and most unique videopoets, Martha McCollough. (That link went to her page at TriQuarterly. Her website seems a little out-of-date.) Only those who create films entirely by themselves have the luxury of leaving out all credits as McCollough does. The free-and-easy motion of the fish through the word-water seems all the freer as a result.

Broken Figure / Figura Rota by Kathleen Kirk

On 30 December, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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Spanish director Eduardo Yagüe used a still image of Camille Claudel (“Camille Claudel à 20 ans” by César D.R.) as well as his own footage and music by Four Hands Project in this film of a poem by Kathleen Kirk from the Poetry Storehouse. The poem also appears in Kirk’s chapbook, Interior Sculpture: poems in the voice of Camille Claudel (Dancing Girl Press, 2014).

Yagüe has made not one, but two films based on this poem. They couldn’t be more different. Here’s the other one:

The translation is Yagüe’s own. The music this time is by archiv ev noise. Broken Figure was filmed in October 2014 in Stockholm, while Figura Rota was filmed the following month in Madrid. I wonder to what extent the different locations and languages may have helped produce such divergent results. But perhaps the real marvel is how the two films nevertheless exist in dialogue with each other in something approaching an apotheosis of translation.

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Only the Lonely by Neil Flatman

On 29 December, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Videopoems
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The latest collaboration from Marie Craven (video) and Dementio13 (music) uses a text and reading by the Dubai-based UK poet Neil Flatman, sourced from the Poetry Storehouse. (Here’s the text.)

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