~ Videopoems ~

Videopoetry, filmpoetry, cinepoetry, poetry-film… the label doesn’t matter. What matters is that text and images enter into dialogue, creating a new, poetic whole.

Mirror by Sylvia Plath

On 2 November, 2011 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation
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A brilliant text animation of Plath’s 1961 poem with images from vintage print advertisements. It’s the work of the New Zealand-based designer Kylie May, née Kylie Hibbert — the name under which she made this film and another in 2005, part of a “postgraduate study exploring the visual language of poetry” she called the Belles Lettres project.

By transforming the written words of poetry into choreographed kinetic performance the project seeks to expand typographical conventions of traditional published poetry. The research project utilises the poetry of Emily Dickinson’s (1862) I died for beauty and Sylvia Plath’s (1961) Mirror, to explore the potential of paralinguistics and poetry as emotive narrative. These two poetic voices are fused by intimate revelations of anxiety, which have relevance in today’s society.

Both films were shortlisted for the 2006 Berlin ZEBRA Poetry Film Awards, Mirror attracting a finalist placing.

PLEASE NOTE: Music used under the AUT screenrights license. For academic research purposes only.

enough by Kai Lossgott and Mbali Vilakazi

On 1 November, 2011 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems, Dance, Performance Poetry
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A marvellous video collaboration produced for a 2009 poetry festival in Cape Town called Badilsha Poetry Exchange, sponsored by Africa Centre, whose description of the film at YouTube is worth quoting in full:

Sometimes you’ve had enough. And sometimes you have enough. A fusion of sound and light, video poet Kai Lossgott’s and performance poet Mbali Vilakazi’s authentic and intimate multimedia poetry performance enough takes you into the dream cycles of obsessive behaviour and uncomfortable truths in the search for wholeness. It is about the breakdown of society, and people at breaking point.

In a lyrical conversation of experimental music and cinema, the poets draw their self-portraits only to erase them, through testimonies that become ciphers in the round-trip between abundance and gratitude, lack and self-pity. Through spoken word, dance, and gesture, they journey with the audience through breathing rhythms of take and give, where insecurity comes up for air and we open like blossoms.

For more about the poets, see their websites: Mbali Vilakazi and Kai Lossgott.

I Will Make an Exquisite Corpse by Matt Mullins

On 28 October, 2011 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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A terrific new video from Matt Mullins. I’ll just quote his emailed description of how this came about:

This evolved from a video loop that is one facet of a piece of electronic/interactive literature currently under development (also titled “I Will Make an Exquisite Corpse”). This piece of e-lit will be the third installment in a triptych of pieces I’m creating for lit-digital.com. (The first two are already up there.) The poem and this particular video both play off the concept of the surrealist exquisite corpse [see the Wikipedia article —ed.]. As such, I’m working with the notion of three sections/elements that flow together while remaining singular/disconnected. The poem strives to do this on the page with three sections that stand alone while also flowing together to create a larger whole. Those who want to see the poem in its original form can find it here: http://killauthor.com/issueeight/matt-mullins-2/

The poem and video mean that title line in two ways (i.e., the speaker of the poem is about to create, before your eyes, the surrealist idea of an exquisite corpse; and, the speaker, treading the self-destructive path of the poem, is telling the reader “I know where I’m headed and I’m gonna look damn good dead”).

The motionpoem seeks to do the same through repetition/evolution of its primary elements and its three image specific sections. It’s all footage I shot myself, with the exception of two stills I found online (the anatomy mannequin and the doll’s leg). I did my visual and audio edits/effects/etc in iMovie and Garage Band.

Riqueza (Riches) by Gabriela Mistral

On 27 October, 2011 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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After all my web hosting woes of late, I think it’s safe to say that this site, at least, is back on an even keel. To celebrate, I made a video for one of my favorite poems, and Nic S. was gracious enough to upload a reading I could use to Pizzicati of Hosanna. I found the music on SoundCloud: “The Foggy Dew” on tin whistle by Chris Kent. I blogged a bit more about this at Via Negativa just now.

What I Have Learned So Far by Mary Oliver

On 26 October, 2011 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Performance Poetry, Videopoems
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http://vimeo.com/31104514

O.K., this is something different for Moving Poems — a videopoem made to embody the mission of a university. Marquette University is a Jesuit school whose motto is “Be the Difference.” (Gotta love Jesuits!) The filmmaker is James P. O’Malley of Carnaval Pictures. Here’s what he says in the description at Vimeo:

Using Mary Oliver’s inspirational poem as a script, I created this Poem-Videoclip for the inauguration ceremony of Marquette University’s new president.

I shot all the images solo with my Canon 5D Mark2, using Nikkor and Canon lenses and available light. The sync sound day included John Egan, of Egan Audio Services, and Patrick O’Malley as assistant. Patrick composed, recorded and mastered the piano solo, and John Egan created the sound design and audio master.

The readers are Marquette University students, and all on-camera performers are “non-pro” or “real-people”.

I edited and mastered on FCP, except for the simple graphic call to action I exported from After Effects.

The result is lightly branded enough, I think, to engage Oliver fans unconnected with Marquette. I know I enjoyed it.

Fábula de la Sirena y los Borrachos (Fable of the Siren and the Drunks) by Pablo Neruda

On 21 October, 2011 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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Moving Poems’ latest production takes advantage of a new free-audio site that other filmmakers might be interested in, too: pizzicati of hosanna: dead poets’ poems read by Nic S. in English & other languages. The footage is from Blackwater Falls State Park, West Virginia. I blogged all about it at Via Negativa.

No. XLII by e. e. cummings

On 19 October, 2011 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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http://vimeo.com/29969928

Another text-only videopoem, but today with a soundtrack. I’m not crazy about the font-choice — for some reason, I have trouble seeing a Cummings poem in anything but a typewriter font — but otherwise this strikes me as a highly successful re-imagining of the text.

Nic S. blogged about “using text vs voice in videopoems” the other day, and it’s sparked an interesting discussion in the comments, with videopoetry pioneer Tom Konyves weighing in.

Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock by Wallace Stevens

On 18 October, 2011 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation
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http://vimeo.com/26089551

A visually arresting, silent watercolor animation by Lilli Carré. The poem has its own Wikipedia page. (Hat-tip: Hannah Stephenson)

In Praise of My Brother, the Painter by Michelle Bitting

On 17 October, 2011 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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Another film directed by Michelle Bitting for one of her own poems, with editing by Phil Abrams. Great use of found material, I thought, suggesting quite a bit more than the text itself says about the narrator’s brother.

Prison Hounds by Cynthia Cox

On 14 October, 2011 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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A new video for an old poem by Cynthia Cox, using found footage from the Prelinger Archives. Cynthia writes,

The footage is from an excruciatingly bad ‘scary’ film I found in the Prelinger Archives written by John Parker called “Daughter of Horror.” The howling hounds I downloaded from iTunes and ran through the iPhone VoiceChanger app, because on its own the howling sounded too low and kinda dopey. Honestly, there is a prison right behind my neighborhood, and when they run the dogs there’s a much higher, keening sort of sound that I couldn’t get VoiceChanger to duplicate, so I went with an effect called “Haunting.” Then I recorded my voice with VoiceChanger as well, using an echo effect mostly to try and disguise the pops I made on “prison” and “quiet” (didn’t really work, but I timed everything else about the reading out so well I chose not to re-record. I’m far from a perfectionist.)

Everything Simple Becomes Complex by Howie Good

On 13 October, 2011 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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http://vimeo.com/29124206

Another Swoon film for a poem by Howie Good — his seventh to date. The description at Vimeo characterizes this as “an edited, layered compilation of ‘simple’ camera-errors, to fit the jagged music and the title of the poem itself.”

Schubertiana by Tomas Tranströmer

On 12 October, 2011 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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This is A Galaxy Over There — a lavishly produced film by British director Martin Earle, illustrating excerpts from Tranströmer’s poem “Schubertiana,” as translated by Jöns Mellgren and narrated by Graham Sharpe in a kind of bedtime-stories voice. Though much of it is rather too literal for my taste, it’s hard to find fault with such beautiful filmmaking. The flying household objects in the first part seem in keeping with the spirit of Tranströmer’s “miracle speech,” and I love the scene where the landscape turns into a bed quilt. It’s also hard to see how they could’ve used anything other than a Schubert string quartet for the soundtrack!