~ Video Library ~
Nic S.: Ten Fabulous Videopoems
It turns out
Martha McCollough, 2012
Several things about Martha McCollough’s work delight me. Her voice and reading style for one. Voice, where it is used, is almost overridingly important for me, and if vocals are off, the whole film is off. Martha’s voice and reading style carry her work superbly. I also love her double- or triple- (or more) narration style, where you frequently have the voice carrying one narrative thread, the kinetic text carrying another, and the visuals a third. You feel that text is an actual character in her films. I also enjoy how she plays around with vocals, using repetition, chorus, and other vocal effects. She has a great sense of humor! Check out Mr Lucky’s Jackpot for a more straightforward combination of her different techniques.
The Polish Language
Alice Lyons and Orla Mc Hardy, 2009
At eight minutes, this is far longer than my usual optimum video poem length (ideally, less than two minutes, three approaches a stretch…), but is so finely and imaginatively made that one instantly forgives. Again, kinetic text as character and dynamic role-player/narrator, but presented here in a truly fantastic variety of form. Background vocals only (as a separate non-English narration track — nothing obviously duplicating the text) and a wonderful mix of individual/chorus vocals, intermittent sound effect, intermittent tuneful piano, and (most of all) intermittent silence. So beautiful and moving.
Rain
Maria Elena Doyle, 2011
All my favorite elements here: kinetic text that plays as a dynamic character in the overall audio-visual story, marvelous visuals that combine regular video footage with animation, and nice vocals towards the end. Based on the poem “Rain” by Maori poet Hone Tuwhare. Poem text here.
https://vimeo.com/25072181
Sonnet 44
Thomas Freundlich, Lumikinos Production & Art Slow, 2012
This short dance film is based on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 44. It’s an imaginative remix of a classic, and one that assumes audience familiarity with the original text. So rather than presenting the text in the usual linear, pedestrian format, the film-maker incorporates it in a dynamic, fragmentary fashion, so that it participates by inference, almost, and again, as a live character in the piece.
A Word Made Flesh
Eliza Fitzhugh, 2010
As Dave Bonta said at Moving Poems, this is “a fascinating linguistic deconstruction of the poet’s lines … The multiple accents should remind us that now more than ever, with the advent of the web, Dickinson’s poetry belongs to the world.” Poem text here. No particular visuals or film-making talent to admire in this one, but what pleases me is the word play, in every sense of the phrase, where both text and vocal versions of the word are presented and re-presented in shifting and re-shifting form. A sort of philological Greek chorus, moving the overall narrative forward with clever diversions and rest stops.
Tongue of the Hidden
David Alexander Anderson, 2007
Mysterious and beautiful, love poems of Hafez read in the original Persian, with illustration and animation based in Persian calligraphy. This is over five minutes in length, and as far as I can tell contains two poems, one that starts about 40 seconds in and a second that starts around the three-minute mark. I’m including the Persian version below. If you prefer to hear the same narrator read the poems in English, go here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUhaF1JI5r8
Instructions to Hearing Persons Desiring a Deaf Man
Raymond Luczak, 2014
I find this video extraordinarily moving. Again, no film-making virtuosity to admire, just a very talented and convincing poem performance by Raymond Luczak. I frequently rant on about reading poetry aloud for an audience at Voice Alpha, and for me, what is transformative about that act — what makes a poem and your relationship to it qualitatively different — is the act of putting the poem into your body, the physicalization of the poem in preparation for presenting it to an audience. This video gets at the same idea from a different perspective altogether — just beautiful to watch. And if you have a minute, take a look at this video from Sarah Rushford. The subjects close their eyes and recite lines from memory, to intriguing and convincing effect. Once more, I see the transformative effect of putting a poem into the body.
The Woods
Kristian Pedersen, 2012
Over at Voice Alpha I am building a collection of readers I call ‘musical readers.’ People who, while they read poetry aloud for an audience, appear to hear an internal music which both guides and manifests itself in their reading. Cin Salach and Carl Sandburg are my favorite examples of this phenomenon. It manifests itself charmingly here in the voice of the Norwegian poet, Aina Villanger, who does the reading for this delightful videopoem. I love the spare imaginative use of simple abstract shapes and a minimal color palette to play out the action in the poem, marching perfectly along with the reading.
Karl
Scott Wenner (animation) and Motionpoems, 2011
I am not usually intrigued by or particularly drawn to Motionpoems‘ poetry films, as they generally tend, in my view, to be fairly literal visual interpretations of the text poem they engage. I also find their vocal tracks are often not quite ‘there.’ Not this one though — it’s pretty much perfect in every way. A dissonance that somehow really works between the text narrative by Dag Straumsåg and the visual narrative. That moth, that spider. The drum, the piano, the synthesizer. And that wonderful voice with its fabulous reading. Each element spare and solitary, but somehow they are all necessarily attached to each other. (Maybe the one thing I would have changed had I been in charge would have been to not snap the spider web at the very end…)
Montserrat
Fernando Lazzari, 2013
Kinetic text once more (this time in celebration of an actual specific typeface). I really like the reliance on text alone as the narrator and the fact that the film-maker does not feel the need to run duplicative vocal narration alongside the text presentation, as too often happens in kinetic text productions. Wonderful graphics. Very clever idea to present a city as the ‘stage’ for this segment of a Jorge Luis Borges poem, upon and across which the text ‘actor’ performs its dynamic role.
See five more poetry videos that didn’t quite make this list at Nic’s blog, Very Like a Whale. —Ed.
Як вишні / As cherries by Olena Huseynova
Dariia Kuzmych directed, animated and edited this videopoem with poetry by Olena Huseynova and music by Heinali. It won first prize in the main competition at CYCLOP 2014.
See the CYCLOP-2014 playlist on YouTube, currently at 30 videos, for more Ukrainian poetry films, many of them with English subtitles. With the Western news media always focusing on conflict in Ukraine, it’s easy to lose sight of the country’s rich and complex culture. Watching these bilingual videopoems offers a glimpse into the way Ukrainian people think, what they value and what they dream about. Plus, they’re just very good films.
Кафка / Kafka by Kyrylo Polischuk
Kyrylo Polischuk (Pol Ischuk) composed the music and text, and Viktoria Netrebenko is credited with the idea and editing of this Ukrainian videopoem. It took 2nd place in the main competition at CYCLOP 2014.
Взрослеют / Growing Up by Ksana Kovalenko
A quirky, disturbing stop-motion animation by Eugene Tsymbalyuk with text and narration by Ukrainian poet Ksana Kovalenko. Denis Chernysh was the director of photography, and the actors are Victoria Klyosova and Roman Nemtsov. This was the third-place winner in the general competition at CYCLOP 2014.
Tsymbalyuk offers this synopsis in the description at Vimeo:
“Growing up” is an associative video, made under the impression of the short poem. It’s a story about growing up by pain. It’s about the ability to except the inevitable and to gain experience, when the treacherous knife in your spine turns out to be a key able to open new doors for you.
News roundup: Read Our Lips Filmpoem Competition, Rabbit Heart DVD, animated poetry film screening in Leipzig
Spoken-word poets from the north of England are invited to submit films to the Read Our Lips Filmpoem Competition 2015.
Read Our Lips is a unique digital project that aims to give poets and spoken word artists the skills to make their own filmpoems, from storyboarding through to editing.
We believe that a filmpoem is not a recording of a performance to camera, but is instead a layering of visual elements on to a spoken poem in such a way as to create a new, coherent work of art. We are looking for films that do more than simply illustrate the featured poem in a literal way, but which seek to surprise, enhance or subvert by their choice of additional imagery.
Click through to the Facebook event listing for the competition terms and conditions. The deadline is February 23, 2015. Prizes total £225. (I especially liked this bit: “All poems will be screened online during March 2015 for entry into the viewer’s choice prize category.”)
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Here’s a cool thing: just in time for the holidays, a Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival 2014 DVD from Doublebunny Press.
All the best video from the 2014 Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival collected in one place, including category reels, and the Best of What Not to Submit Monday.
Films by:
Yves Bommenel, Greg Brisendine, John Mortara, Sarah Guimond, Aisha Naseem & Chris Markman, Josh Lefkowitz and Chris Follmer, David Richardson, Timothy David Orme, Meriel Lland, Megan Falley and Rachel Rae Gausp, Malt Schlitzman, Cheryl Maddalena, Sou MacMillan, Jenith Charpentier, Laura EJ Moran, Scott Woods, Michael Medeiros, Cassidy Parker Knight & Jeff Knight, and Allan & the Nieces
To sample some of the films included on the DVD, see their YouTube page.
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Here’s an upcoming screening that sounds kind of intriguing: Leipzig-Präsentation von LAB/P – poetry in motion.
Wir präsentieren 9 Animationsfilme, die in der interdisziplinären Zusammenarbeit von AutorInnen und FilmemacherInnen aus der Region entstanden sind. Die Werke ermöglichen einen spannenden Einblick in zeitgenössische Lyrik und Animationsästhetik und geben Gelegenheit, neue künstlerische Positionen zu entdecken.
Which Google Translate renders as:
We present 9 animated films that have arisen in the interdisciplinary collaboration between authors and filmmakers from the region. The works provide a fascinating insight into contemporary poetry and animation aesthetics and given the opportunity to discover new artistic positions.
Here are the details:
Donnerstag, 11. Dezember 2014
Kleiner Empfang ab 19:30 Uhr, Vorführungsbeginn 20:00 Uhr
UT Connewitz, Wolfgang-Heinze-Straße 12, 04277 Leipzig, www.utconnewitz.deProgramm:
KANTEN DEINER AUGEN (Melissa Harms & Yevgeniy Breyger)
ROSTOCK, GRAND CAFÉ (Susann Arnold & Moritz Gause)
DAS BILD IN DEM BILD IN DEM BILD IN DEM BILD (Catalina G. Veléz & Marlen Pelny)
ECHO (Damaris Zielke & Peter Thiers)
AUSGEBRANNTES HAUS (Eva-Maria Arndt & Antje Kersten)
OHNE TITEL (Meng Chang & Daniel Schmidt)
VIVA VIOLENCE (Johanna Maxl & Katharina Merten)
DIE ANGST DES WOLFS VOR DEM WOLF (Juliane Jaschnow & Stefan Petermann)
KASPAR HAUSERIN (Nelly Chernetskaya & Katia S. Ditzler)
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Thanks for all three of these news items to the fabulous Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel, who seems to know about everything related to poetry film going on anywhere on the world, and posts it all to the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival group page on Facebook.
Алый апрель (Scarlet April) by Dmitry Vodennikov
Ukrainian filmmaker Anzhela (Angie) Bogachenko directed and edited this surrealist videopoem with a text by the contemporary Russian poet Dmitry Vodennikov (who is no stranger to video). That’s Vodennikov’s reading in the soundtrack, which was put together by Victor 78 — the long-haired male lead. The English translation in the subtitles is credited to Anna Shwets. (I like the way even the post-it notes are translated. And I love the post-it notes in general.) The cast includes Zoryana Tarasyuta along with Bogachenko and Victor 78. Vladimir Gusev was the cameraman. Asya was the cat.
Bogachenko also made that delightful film with the dancing cosmonauts that I posted back in October, “А у вас дім далеко від нас?” (Do you have a home away from us?).
Poet Benedict Newbery on collaborating with animator Sandra Salter
A fascinating interview with UK poet Benedict Newbery has just been posted in the Berlin-based arts magazine Chased. I was especially interested to learn how closely he works with his collaborator Sandra Salter in the making of their widely screened poetry films — it’s far from the passive role that many poets take in these kinds of partnerships. Bettina Henningsen is the interviewer.
Chased: You produced some wonderful and very successful poetry animations together with Sandra Salter – “Cul de Sac” and “The Royal Oak”, which were part of the film programme at the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin. Is making poetry films something you always wanted to do?
B. N.: I fell into poetry film quite by happy accident and had never thought of making one until I was contacted by Sandra in early 2008. We’d met very briefly a couple of years before through a mutual friend. She saw a call for submissions for the 2008 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin, remembered she’d met someone who’d just started writing poetry (me)and emailed me. Did I want to make a film of one of my poems? Of course! I replied.
I enjoy film and am interested in how film works. I did a short introductory course on animation a few years ago and would like to make some films on my own. But working full time and writing when I can doesn’t leave an awful lot of room for developing that side of things. I’m happy to let Sandra take care of that side of things for now!Chased: How did the co-operation of the two of you work exactly?
B. N.: Our first film Cul de sac was a pretty rushed job and we were both improvising quite a bit. Sandra works with watercolours and sent me a few images to start with. So I got a feel for the sort of thing she was looking to develop. After a couple of meetings it was obvious we were running out of time so we agreed that I’d storyboard the film — something I’d never done before but which I really enjoyed. From the storyboards, Sandra painted sequences of animation, each one very small — 5 x 4cm. She then scanned the images, reassembled them, placed them in sequences and then added my voice recording and Paul Murphy’s music. The animation process was done very quickly — there was no registration of images etc. But it worked! And we were shortlisted for the ZEBRA competition that year.
The Royal Oak was a bit more stop-start over a few years. We had met a few times to discuss storyboards and the general direction of the film but with no funding it was proving difficult with jobs and family commitments. Then Channel 4 got in touch with Sandra and asked her to make a pitch for its Random Acts series. The pitch was successful and suddenly we had the funding we needed. By this time we lived quite a distance from each other so we weren’t able to meet up so easily. But we’d email and chat on the phone. And in the end Sandra produced a fantastic film!
Chased: Is the film version of a poem an extension of the poem to you, or an addition?
B. N.: When I drew storyboards for both poems, I was illustrating the narrative flow as I’d realised it in the writing of the poems. I think left to my own devices in the first couple of films, less-interesting films would have emerged. Perhaps just a visual addition.
This was the key with collaborating with someone like Sandra. She’s a very talented film maker. And she also gets what it is that I’m talking about in the poetry. Through her animations she extends the poem into something new, substantive, with its own interpretation of the narrative. She has the skill and ability to take it somewhere else, and surprise me with her take on what is important — or how a particular aspect of the work needs to be given salience. Even though she followed the storyboards for Cul de sac she still brought in her own ideas that lifted the words elsewhere. And in animating The Royal Oak, she worked away from the original storyboards — to brilliant effect.
I think perhaps an OK or average film of a poem adds to the poem, if it’s lucky. A good film will extend it.
Chased: What is your next project?
B. N.: Sandra and I are looking to make our third film together — hopefully in 2015. We already know which poem we’re going to use — exploring the darker, seedier side of the English seaside town. It will see a continuation of Sandra’s style of watercolour transitions.
Do read the rest.
Hunter’s Moon and Trapper’s Moon by Erica Goss
I’ve gotten a couple of months behind on the 12 Moons videopoetry collaboration between Erica Goss (words), Marc Neys/Swoon (concept and directing), Kathy McTavish (music) and Nic S. (voice), so here are parts X, “Hunter’s Moon” (above) and XI, “Trapper’s Moon” (below). About the former, Marc writes:
The wind in this poem led me to a film I used earlier; ‘Terror in the midnight sun’ (Virgil W. Vogel)
I created a ‘windy’ scape using blocks of sound Kathy provided me with, added Nic’s reading and started playing around with the footage. (Different grading, colours,…)
In the end I only used one sequence. Played with repetition… I added a light layer of flickering windows to emphasize the wind even more.
For “Trapper’s Moon,” Marc notes that
Kathy provided me with a beautiful soundtrack, full of nostalgia and melancholy. A perfect fit for Nic’s intense reading.
I wanted very simple and pure images to go with this music. Preferably nature. A forest. Solitude.
Ephemeral Rift filmed one of his winter walks, I edited out a few bits and played around with colouring and timing in a split screen.
As with the others in this year-long series, both films were featured in Atticus Review.
Ironically, one of the reasons I got behind on sharing them was because I took almost two weeks off to go to the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in October… where one of the big draws was seeing all twelve films in order on the big screen, with both Marc and Erica in attendance to introduce them and answer questions afterwards. It was an utterly captivating experience; the films flowed really well one into another, which might not be obvious if you watch them individually on the web. I hope that won’t be the last time that the whole project gets shown in a theater.
(From an Awakened Sleep) by Charlotte Hamrick
https://vimeo.com/111364503
This is not the first time that Nic S.—known for her great reading voice—has made a videopoem with text-on-screen rather than voiceover, but it may be her most satisfying example of that sort of videopoem to date. The text, by New Orleans-based poet Charlotte Hamrick, comes from The Poetry Storehouse, and the music is by Rob Bethel, Todd Brunel and Matt Samolis, with Todd Brunel on clarinet.
