~ reviews ~
Sound decisions: from minimalist to maximalist in poetry film soundscapes
I’ve always been fascinated by sound. When I was at art college a very long time ago I was electrified by the way directors like David Lynch combined sound effects, music and voice to fantastic atmospheric and emotional effect.
So when I was invited to curate a series of films for this year’s REELpoetry festival in Houston, I knew straightaway that even though sound wasn’t the most original of themes, I wanted it to be my focus.
I chose eleven films by ten filmmakers, a tip-of-the-iceberg look at how different poetry filmmakers build soundscapes that play a leading role in creating the emotionally immersive world of the poetry film.
There were hundreds of films I could have chosen, but my way of whittling down the selection was choosing the films that have the most emotional punch for me personally. So, these are also some of my favourite poetry films.
Fran Sanders, Festival Director of REELpoetry, says, “Janet Lees’s beautifully curated selection of poetry films highlights the dynamic power and subtle influences of soundscapes, providing wide ranging examples of how they animate our emotional responses and impact our visual involvement.”
To get under the skin of how they manage this feat of animating our emotional responses, I asked the filmmakers for insight into their decisions regarding sound. Here are those insights, along with the films, in the order they were screened at the festival.
Lament
This animated film by Afroditi Bitzouni is inspired by the poem of the same name by Miltos Sachtouris, with music and sound design by Kyriakos Charalampides and Giuliano Anzani.
I love the way the sound works with the visual here, right down to how the poet’s voice is integrated. There’s a constant sense of threat and precariousness, but at the same time a dynamic feeling of hope – the irrepressible energy of life.
Afroditi says, “I wanted audiences to engage with the poem on multiple sensory levels. The sound is composed of narration, flute recordings, foley, and analog synthesizers, which were later digitally processed. The music aims to complement and emphasize the poet’s raw diction and articulation, while simultaneously aligning with the fast-paced rhythm of the animation.
“A series of musical phrases creates a sense of continuity leading toward a resolution that never arrives. Instead, the sound generates a constant climax that persists until the poem’s end, when everything dissolves into the void.”
Beyond Words
Directed by Helene Moltke-Leth, this deceptively simple film is based on a poem by Else Beyer Knuth-Winterfeldt.
Helene says, “Sound has always been a key focus in my work. At the first art school I attended at 19, I created a sound piece that was showcased in a sound cinema designed for the event. Later, I became one of the first female electronic DJs in Copenhagen, which led to a four-year role at Denmark’s national radio. My documentary filmmaking education at the National Film School of Denmark also emphasised sound design. All of these experiences have shaped my deep love for sound in my creative process.”
This film opens with sounds of mass communication and city life, a masterful combination of sound effects and music that propels you into the film. And then, sudden silence, accompanied by a black screen. Out of this, like dawn rising, emerges a natural landscape, combined with slower, gentler music and natural sounds.
“My idea was to juxtapose busy, everyday life with the calming stillness of nature, reflecting the spirit of the poem,” said Helene. “This contrast came together beautifully in the editing process, particularly with the jarring sound of the truck that transitions the audience into the calmness of nature.”
Throughout the film, one recurring note sounds. For me, this anchors everything and adds a layer of meaning. It feels like the tolling of a bell, a lament for everything we’ve lost and stand to lose, if we do not heed the call to respect and reconnect with nature.
Body Electric
There is stupendous subversion at play in this largely purloined piece by the inimitable Mike Hoolboom. Bookended by other footage, the body of the film is a stolen ad – an iPhone commercial in which an electric socket laments in song how much it’s missing being connected to the phone (because the phone’s charge lasts so long).
The film opens with a forest fire, before switching to the iPhone footage, accompanied by partially repeated broken phrases and electronic sound. The roar and crackle of flames, followed by unpredictable synthetic noise and the hypnotic anaphora – delivered in a robotic voice that somehow holds both bafflement and yearning – are fantastically effective in creating a world of deep unease and existential sorrow you can’t look away from.
Mike says, “The soundtrack is mostly stolen. I cut it to fit the iPhone commercial (more or less) then only added layers of electric bulbs, buzzes, line hums, etc.”
Our Bodies
Another brilliant example of subversion, this time by Matt Mullins, which I find completely mesmerising. I love how it’s a fully found poetic experience – visually, textually and sonically: a recycling of a broadcast by the Christian televangelist Oral Roberts. Its soundscape is incredibly effective – whenever I think about the film, I can recall the sound with great clarity.
Matt says, “The soundtrack is directly tied to the source material and the creative process for that particular piece. The uncarved block of marble I started with was the original footage/soundtrack of that Oral Robert’s televangelist broadcast. When it came to me to make a visual/sonic cut up/erasure out of that source material/sermon, it seemed natural to do a cut up/loop of the music that accompanied the broadcast as the soundtrack/score.
“So what you’re hearing is a loop and distortion of the original organ music soundtrack that was played live at the beginning and the end of his sermon. I took that audio, looped it, added some dirt and other effects and let it gel with the visuals. It all happened rather organically and was part of that piece’s fever-dream process, which was basically two twelve-hour days back to back that resulted in the finished videopoem.”
What the Thunder Said
Pamela Falkenberg and Jack Cochran are a mighty double-act on the poetry film scene. Their immersive soundscapes are momentous and at the same time curiously intimate. I would recognise a Jack-and-Pam soundtrack anywhere, and it always feels as though it’s playing inside my head.
This film is a masterclass in propulsive sound, which dovetails with the unfolding found poem (based on ‘The Wasteland’ by TS Eliot), and Pam and Jack’s drive-by footage, to create a kind of poetry road movie.
Pam says, “The footage was filmed after Jack wrote the cento poem, and we went out on location to find evocative footage that matched the tenor of the lines of the cento. We had some specific locations we wanted to use, including White Sands National Park in southern New Mexico, and Gary, Indiana, once an important part of the US steel industry, but now largely moribund. And we also shot whatever we saw in transit that seemed relevant to the poem.
“Most of the film was shot using our iPhones, because the stabilization is remarkable. We wanted a soundscape score that would function as diegetic sound. Some of that sound was stuff that we’ve recorded and saved as a library, but a lot of it is sound that other filmmakers and sound guys share on the internet, and some of it comes from Final Cut Pro and other editing software resources. Compared to what it was like to create analog sound mixes using 16mm film flatbed editing equipment, which was state of the art when we were young, digital video and audio comes close to nirvana.”
Here we have whistling winds, howling winds, and what Pam evocatively calls “empty and fearful winds”, along with eerie melodic water sounds, industrial noise, and a symphony of insects.
Pam explains, “Another reason we like to make soundscapes to accompany our poetry films is that they function like a musical score. A lot of our poetry films involve the natural world, and we like the idea of using natural sounds in a musical way to create a soundscape. Our soundscapes are composed from imagined diegetic sounds. We think about what we want to hear, and go looking for it, and sometimes we find it. Other times, we find stuff we weren’t exactly looking for, but is unexpectedly evocative. Sometimes serendipity works for us, so we try to stay open to it.”
Unseen
This breathtakingly powerful film by Helmie Stil, with a soundscape by Lennert Busch, is based on a poem by spoken word artist Sjaan Flikweert.
The poem is inspired by women who have endured domestic violence. The power of the film’s soundscape lies in its quietness, a direct contrast with the ear-splitting loudness of domestic violence. The whispered words and underwater-muffled sounds speak to silencing and suppression.
Helmie says, “The idea of whispering the poem came from interviews I had with women in a safe house. Some of them told me they whispered to their children and in general they had the feeling they should whisper in the house so they didn’t upset their husbands.
“Personally I think you listen more carefully to the poem because of the whispering. You really want to hear what is said, so the voice gets a stronger position. The whispering also gives a feeling of intimacy, it draws you into the inner world of the woman. It symbolises that the women are heard and seen.
“The underwater sounds emphasise the isolation. When you are underwater, the sounds are subdued and you get in your own world. Your inner world becomes more important, and it’s just yourself. You hold your breath. Women who experience domestic violence always hold their breath, but in their day to day life. I wanted to give the audience the same feeling (of holding your breath) while watching the film.”
Future Perfect
Ian Gibbins is renowned for his propulsive soundtracks and this film is no exception. It harnesses the energy of a music video while simultaneously subverting that energy with dystopian messages from a futuristic Babel. The language in the film is not so much deconstructed as blasted apart, accompanied by a terrifically exciting maximalist soundtrack.
Ian says, “I recorded the voice first: it’s one of the Apple text-to-voice readers that comes with the system. I liked the American tinge to the accent for some reason. The main text is so abbreviated that it’s actually hard to read in real life, so I wanted to see how the text-to-speech would work. Ususally I have to tweak the text a bit when I do this so that the machine reading says the right things, but this time I just went with whatever it produced.
“I wanted the soundtrack to be loud and aggressive, so then I wrote the music and fitted the vocal around it. As is my usual process, the tempo was set to make synchonising the video and audio edits easier – 120 bpm. Once the basic audio was done, I did the text animations to match it. As the video came together, I went back and redid some of the audio – eg the rising tones that come in during the word lists. Getting the final sound mix was tricky: I wanted the vocals to be clear but well embedded in all the noise of the backing.”
Swallow #8
I’m a huge fan of Kristy Bowen’s videopoems, and there are several I could have chosen. I chose this one partly because it sits at the opposite end of the maximalist-minimalist spectrum to Ian’s Future Perfect, but mainly because when I first saw it (courtesy of the Moving Poems newsletter), it stopped me in my tracks.
When I found out that Kristy made it when she had zero experience of poetry film, I was even more impressed. As well as being a great poet, she is also a natural at creating the ‘new poetic experience’ Tom Konyves says a poetry film should be.
Kristy says, “When I was working on the series, I was very new to making video poems, so I was sort of all over the place. I used public domain music for some, my own voiceovers for others. This particular piece felt like the visuals carried most of the weight, so I went with something that allowed them a bit more room and attention. I found it on archive.org which had many recordings of natural sounds that were free to use. It is probably the most silent of the SWALLOW pieces, but it may be my favorite because of that. That spareness was something I kept in mind going forward and as I worked on other series.”
Demi Demons
While there is no ‘official’ poetry in this film by Martin Gerigk, there is language, in both the chapter headings (commandments from the ‘Book of the Eel’) and the distorted words, cries, whispers, murmurs and hums that shimmer through Martin’s masterful soundscape.
At REELpoetry, Chris Pacheco, the director of Festival Fotogenia, talked about the diverse ways in which poetry can be found in film, not always in words. I feel that the combination of iconography and sound in this film creates its own poetic narrative. As he explains below, Martin has synaesthesia, as do I, although we experience it in different ways. In poetry and literature, synaesthesia is a rhetorical device or figure of speech where one sense is described in terms of another. It’s used to great effect in poetry, and poetry film, with crossings-over of visual/text/sound, is a great vehicle for it.
The soundscape in Demi-Demons is mind-blowing, an epic poem in itself, underpinning a momentous film that is currently earning accolades from many festivals as it does the rounds of the experimental film circuit.
Martin says, “I am a synesthete by birth, which means that I experience specific colors, shapes, and movements when I listen to music, speech, or sounds. As a professional music composer, I use this ability to enhance the visual elements of my films by creating soundscapes that synesthetically align with what is shown on screen.
“For Demi-Demons, I sought out particular sounds and noises that synesthetically correspond to every element in the overall visual composition of each scene, combining them into a complex, narratively driven audible landscape. Often, I position these sounds within a virtual space to express the three-dimensional structures I perceive in the scenes. For the vocal elements, I created specific spoken, whispered, shouted, murmured, and sung patterns, which were recorded, edited, and integrated into the soundscapes to achieve the distinct demonic quality required for the film.
“Each sound element is treated like a musical note in a conventional composition – a technique I developed a few years ago. As a result, the soundscape of Demi-Demons, in combination with the film’s visual style, is not merely a soundtrack but rather an orchestral audiovisual composition.”
Demi-Demons is not yet on general release, but the trailer more than gives a flavour.
I c
A clock ticks, a heart beats, and the whole film ‘blinks’. This perfect marriage of sound and vision is a terrific way of introducing the film as a sentient being, a conceit which Helene Moltke-Leth pulls off with great skill, wit and elan in this hugely engaging and powerful film.
Voice is at the heart of I c’s compelling soundscape. The first voice we hear – the ‘I’ voice of the film – is intimate, seductive, pulling you in. From there we switch to another voice, then another, then the voices speaking together. The voice changes keep you hooked, as do the tick and the heartbeat that sound throughout the film.
Helene says, “It is the film itself that is the protagonist in ‘I c’. Usually, the film is the form and the illusion we buy into through which we follow a main protagonist and supporting characters who must undergo a development. In ‘I c’ it is the film itself, which develops from woman to man, from younger to older, from individual to a multi-gendered ‘we’ – from the individual’s questions of identity to the survival of the planet. This ‘we’ is ultimately an omniscient voice coming from within Mother Earth, which articulates the serious climate crises that all of humanity is facing now, no matter who you are. I believe it is important to raise questions in art and this film is one long line of questions.
“Right from the onset and ideation of ‘I c’ I wanted the sound image to consist of a heartbeat and a ticking bell. These sounds symbolically fit well with the narration of the voices. A heart that beats is an absolute necessity for us to be alive. The ticking bell indicates that we need to change our behaviour in this world, otherwise the heart will stop. Both sounds also give the narrative momentum. The rhythmic heartbeat acts as a bass drum, and the ticking bell as a hi-hat. As the work evolved, I also wanted to incorporate the sound of water into the work – both the notion of being below the water surface as well as in the middle of dripping rain. The sound of water gives a dynamic to the soundscape, and water is a common thread in humanity. We cannot live without water, and if we continue life in the way we do now, consistently warming the earth, then large masses of ice will melt, and many people and communities will be flooded by water.”
Build me a Cottage
The soundscape of this beautiful film by Pat Van Boeckel, based on a poem by the legendary Fernando Pessoa, is simple. A straightforward combination of natural sounds, a relatively spare musical score, and voice. Straightforward, yet perfectly balanced. Sometimes there’s just too much going on sound-wise in poetry films. While maximalism can be brilliantly effective when handled well, it can sometimes be intrusive, drowning out the poem and the visuals, preventing you hearing, seeing and feeling them.
Because of that perfectly balanced simplicity, this soundscape lodged itself in my consciousness the first time I saw the film two years ago, and stayed there. Like a river, it brings with it the poem and the beautiful and astonishing visuals, in a work of art that for me is unforgettable. The two-note refrain that sounds throughout the film set up a permanent echo in me; when I think of those two notes they bring back the entire film in vivid clarity. This is one of those rare poetry films that cracks my heart wide open. I think that is a lot to do with the choice of music and how it layers with the natural sounds and the deep, resonant voice, ending with a descent into silence.
Pat says, “From experience, I’ve learned never to choose a poem in advance and then look for images. During the filming of this project, I was invited as a visual artist. I first created a house made of white fabric in an old, abandoned factory where they used to process wool.
It was in Portugal, so naturally, I had brought a collection of Pessoa’s poetry with me. I had already filmed everything except the naked man at the end. I only shot that scene after I was certain I wanted to use this specific poem.”
The way Pat describes his editing process, in terms of the part music plays in it, coincides exactly with mine.
“Once home, I could gain some distance with time. Searching for and finding music gives me a sense of direction and hope that it might become something worthwhile. Music raises the bar because I often find it so beautiful and powerful – it helps me push past my occasional bouts of insecurity.
“When I have the music, I usually let it guide me entirely. The music ‘dictates’ the editing process. I then add the background and consider where the emphasis should lie. In this case, the sheep and how the silence builds toward the end, making the stillness even more profound.”
For those who are not familiar with REELpoetry, it is one of the highlights of the international poetry film festival circuit.
This year the festival ran between 31 March and 12 April, expanding its online presence to show a huge range of films, including juried submissions from 14 countries, many of them premieres, as well as themed programmes curated by invited directors. An addition for 2025 was a series of poetry videos created by young artists aged 18 and under.
Every year the festival also features the vibrant REELcafé, hosted daily by Fran Sanders. This virtual space provides a platform for filmmakers, poets, videographers, viewers, curators, creatives, submission judges, and friends both old and new to connect, converse, and network.
Review: In an Ideal World I’d Not be Murdered
A perfect title to a magnificent piece of work by Chaucer Cameron and Helen Dewbery. On Wednesday 30 October I was fortunate to be able to attend the live event at The Club for Acts and Actors in Soho (London UK).
The evening began with a support act – Rishika Williams, performing a long poem called to be heard. I knew trauma and violence to be the theme of the night, and Rishika performed beautifully and delicately, conveying her writing with a powerful yet quiet presence on the stage.
Then after a short break, the audience were presented with a 10-minute ‘making of’ film about In an Ideal World I’d Not be Murdered that introduced the audience to the hard facts that the film deals with prostitution and sex work and that the work was based on Chaucer’s direct experience of that world.
In an Ideal World I’d Not be Murdered is described as a film that is:
“…both a fictional and re-enacted story, and contains fragments of memory from London’s underworld of prostitution in the 1980s. Told in 12 poems and 3 voices.”
Then in the ‘making of’ film, both women express some of the thoughts and processes that went into the development of this piece as a work of poetry film, Chaucer talking about the writing and her experiences, and Helen talking about her approach to filmmaking and the decisions she made with this film.
This was an unexpected way to start their presentation, revealing some of the film before the actual event and discussing what it does and how, before watching. A ‘York Notes’ if you like (for many years the classic book series for UK school students to cram their English Literature study for exams without necessarily reading the actual literature).
But on reflection now, I think it was a masterstroke. It gently eased the viewer into the themes and the subject matter and gave context and purpose from the creators themselves. This is a film not aiming to shock or illicit debate. Helen’s website explains:
”Prostitution is often depicted as a spectacle. What’s not represented enough, particularly in film, is the mundane. The mundane together with the constant stress of anticipation. So, I wanted the film not to screech ‘this is my traumatised, victimised body’, but more simply ‘these are my wounds, my ordinary body wounds’. Prostitution narratives often end in some kind of triumph or rescue, but life is more nuanced, and can’t be neatly captured, it’s often not quite legible. The realities for anyone in these situations are constantly gaslit by others who tell a different story or who don’t allow them to tell their own stories. The realities expressed in this poetry film-collection are ongoing. The end leaves the living and the dead side by side. It’s not concluded, the narrator is ‘hooked’ – somewhere, somehow, we are not told.”
So then, onto the film itself, presented next. It is a stunning success. I was very excited to see the finished work because I’d been present at an early reading of some of the poems given by Chaucer at the International Poetry Film Festival in Athens in 2019. Then I had seen an early draft, and then a later version, of one segment – Hooked – which I was honoured to curate into a screening of films last summer. So I felt I was celebrating the end of a long creative journey.
The film exceeded my expectations. For me, Helen’s aesthetic treatment for the film, the variations she introduces into her imagery, and the pace, work effectively. A favourite moment is when Helen combines text and image into the digital advertising screens seen in the film. The film is long for poetry film, at 32 and a half minutes. But it doesn’t feel that long. It feels like it achieves what Chaucer Cameron has set out to do, and left me wanting more or to see it a second time.
The trauma in this film is a difficult theme to discuss or respond to as someone who has experienced nothing comparable. But it is a valuable film to be absorbed, and if not understood fully because it is so far removed from personal experience, then it is to be drawn from. Delivering more compassion for others in extremely difficult or harrowing situations would be a start. While for those who do understand the kinds of burden represented, I imagine the film has something priceless to give.
I can, however, reflect on a comparison with the work of Mike Kelley which I saw recently (a major retrospective exhibition is at the Tate Modern, London UK until 9 March 2025). Kelley has made many works that I confess I love. More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin (1987) was as compelling to see in reality as it had been in images. Kelley has made works that explore memory, repressed memory syndrome, and traumatic experience (including Educational Complex, 1995 and Sublevel, 1998) and has stated: ‘We’re living in a period in which victim culture and trauma [are said to be] the motivation behind every action.’ (Interview with the writer Dennis Cooper, 2000)
At one level, Kelley’s work examines and challenges popular culture and its treatment of trauma experiences and the expectations that popular culture generates. He questions, not validates, repressed memories and trauma. I understand Kelley to have been, therefore, on a wholly different track to Chaucer and Helen. But it feels pertinent to consider his work in relation to In an Ideal World I’d Not be Murdered. Kelley’s work highlights the problematics of trauma ‘culture’, while this film has been sensitively and successfully navigated to avoid those problematics. This film isn’t a provocation.
But I’d also like to offer the contrast that Kelley’s work is often literally big and loud. He achieved a big art world career, now firmly underlined by that Tate Modern retrospective – putting him alongside Picasso and whoever else you might think to name. The assured, bold approach is easily available to many men. Yet so many women creatives I speak to are so often quieter, less confident to take up space in the world with their work (literal or metaphoric space), yet their work is no less important. As when I chose to screen a segment of what became ‘In an Ideal World …’ in my curated programme in Cambridge last year, inspired by what is so illuminatingly described by Mary Ann Sieghart in her book The Authority Gap, the opportunity for women to tell their own stories with assurance, with confidence that they will be heard, and knowledge that their authority to do so will be respected, is still limited.
‘In an Ideal World …’ is currently existing largely under the radar and, sadly, unlikely to be screened in Tate Modern any time soon (There might be a more appropriate venue but equally why not there or somewhere similar? You take my point at least). The inappropriate popular culture around traumatic personal experience has not yet been blown apart, and the authors of this film understandably feel they need to tread extremely carefully and lightly.
This film deserves to be seen widely, and I wish Chaucer and Helen every strength to find (and show it to) more audiences, because the opportunities to do so likely won’t fall in their laps. It doesn’t fit the profile of most poetry film festivals who principally show shorter films with wide appeal. I wish too, that we had an art world that opened its doors more readily and more supportively to work like this one, and was less filled by the large or loud.
Review of Cadence 2024 for SeattleDances
A new online review of the Cadence Video Poetry Festival takes a deep dive into poetry films that incorporate dancing for SeattleDances, “an advocacy organization dedicated to supporting Seattle-area dance performance through in-depth journalism and free resources to dance artists and audiences.” Author Kari Tai took advantage of the festival’s hybrid format to engage with the films at home—an experience I’ve always likened to solitary reading, since the viewer can pause and/or re-watch as often as she likes. For example:
Each time I watch Antipodes, I glean something more of the yin and yang of relationships the poem describes. The scenes toggle between black and white and color underscoring the complementary interconnectedness the poem expresses. The choreography amplifies this tension as dancers pace facing each other across a field to the line The ebony magnetism of existence binds poles. Throughout the video, the spoken words rise and fall with the crescendo of the music and crashing of the surf as the dancers feet tattoo the earth–a demonstration of how choreography and poetry use repetition, theme and variation that stimulates empathetic waves of emotion in the viewer. The pace of the video editing between scenes acts like poetic punctuation or choreographic choices for stillness amid frenetic movement.
Another film prompts this observation:
The festival literature remarks that throughout history poets have been persecuted for not writing the party line and it strikes me that dance also has often been outlawed as a subversive form of expression. When I think about how video is instantly shareable across the world via social media and how, like dance, it offers a form of communication that transcends spoken language, it is understandable how video has become a powerful tool of modern revolt. Exiles combines all three—video, dance, and poetry—a triple threat, an amplified way to shout out to the world.
Why does dance work so well in videopoetry? Tai has some ideas:
I think one thing that is key to illuminating my empathetic response to watching Only is a principle I learned through my training as a Dance for Parkinson’s instructor. Scientists have discovered that watching someone dance pleasurably activates the brain’s movement areas. In the classes I teach, the participants feel a fuller movement experience just by watching the teacher even if they don’t express it on the outside.
Perhaps that is why when we watch dance, even about topics we have not personally experienced, we can feel aligned with the “otherness” dancers can express. This happened for me watching Fairies, a video poem about growing up queer on a farm in the Netherlands.
Review: 10th Ó Bhéal Poetry Film Competition & Winner
Lockdown and pandemic experiences have thoroughly honed and expanded Ó Bhéal’s experience of presenting events online (helped by their growing collection of technical kit that they have been fortunate to acquire over the last few years). The 10th International Poetry-Film Competition, and the wider Winter Warmer Festival it is now part of, was fully hybrid with all events running in-person at the beautiful Nano Nagle Place in Cork (Ireland), and simultaneously live-streamed. All events are available to watch indefinitely online.
The competition selected 30 films shown in two screenings. I left each screening with excitement, and a variety of films and filmmakers that I wanted to watch again or know more about. These are some of my personal highlights:
Selkie (Director Marry Waterson) had an unusual approach to image repetition. Rockin’ Bus Driver (Directors Mary Tighe and Cormac Culkeen) had a very satisfying, meaty voice in the soundtrack and a simple but effective graphic treatment of the visual material, while Borne by James E. Kenward had an incredible delivery of the voice – the pace and the pairing with the music were brilliant. The success of this partnership is perhaps explained by a YouTube of the recording session where you can watch James performing the text alongside the pianist. A brilliant way to create the soundtrack if feasible for a project. I particularly liked the lettering in There’s a Certain Slant of light (Director Susan McCann) – text cut from leaves and cast by shadows, and the words accompanied by just music. And as a final contrast to the varied treatments of sound in the selected films, there was Janet Lees’ powerful but silent film Descent.
The effort involved in putting together a festival can never be underestimated, and Paul Casey and Colm Scully have done a brilliant job of making the selections as well as organising the event and keeping everything running smoothly and technically well throughout the day. My only desire as an in-person attendee is to be able to have more awareness of who in the room were filmmakers (name badges, stickers, or something more imaginative perhaps?) and little bit more time specifically programmed in to be able to meet and chat to them. Filmmakers were introduced and invited to stand at the end of the screening, but it is difficult to register everyone’s face (especially in a semi-dark room) and I think attendees do need the reward of interaction to make the in-person experience special. I noticed that the finalists of the All-Ireland Poetry Slam later in the day had the opportunity for a group photograph, and I think this would be an appreciated chance for the film competition too, for those that were there on the day.
The winner of the competition was announced as La luna asoma (The moon appears), an animation by Jelle Meys of a poem by Federico García Lorca. I contacted Jelle to congratulate him on his win and ask him a few questions …
ME: The poem is read in Spanish, was subtitled in English, and you are Belgian. How fluent are you in Spanish? Were you aware of Federico García Lorca’s poem in a translation in your mother tongue, or in English? Which language version of the poem did you go to in your mind when you were thinking about the imagery for your animation?
JELLE: My mother tongue is Dutch, as I’m from the Flemish part of Belgium. When I decided to animate a poem, as a kind of practice, I hadn’t chosen a specific poem yet. So I just browsed through the poetry collections I own. One of those is an anthology of Federico García Lorca, with both the original poems in Spanish and their Dutch translations on the opposite pages. It was necessary to have the Dutch translation to ‘get the meaning’ (which is obviously relative with such metaphoric poetry), but I also wanted to stay true to the rhythm and the sounds of the original Spanish version. I can grasp quite a bit of Spanish, especially when written, because of my knowledge of French.
ME: In a YouTube video I saw, where you talk about your work (for another festival I think?), you mention that you are relatively new to animation but you have long been an illustrator … the sequence with the sea and the swimmers was just beautiful. Did you have a clear idea of how you wanted the movement of the bodies to happen before you began the animation?
JELLE: That YouTube talk was indeed for another festival, in Mumbai. Before getting into the animation, I drew a simple storyboard. So I did have some idea of what I wanted it to look like. But in the making of this film I learned a lot about animating, technically, which altered and influenced the final look. The swimmers sequence was a particularly tough one, because for that part I did have a clear vision in mind, and I didn’t want to compromise on it.
ME: What was your thought process on the colour palette that you chose?
JELLE: The colour palette was also very clear to me, pretty much right from the start. I’ve always loved the combination of brown and blue and considered it fitting for the somewhat melancholic tone of the poem. I also thought that a limited colour palette wouldn’t distract the viewer too much from the actual poem.
ME: The music is a perfect accompaniment. Was this pre-existing and if so, how difficult was it to find? Or was the music written or adapted for the film?
JELLE: My cousin, Michiel De Malsche, happens to be a composer and sound artist. He used samples and recordings from music workshops he had done in the past (hence why he didn’t ask for his name in the credits) and puzzled them together into a mesmerizing soundscape, which perfectly blends with that deep and warm voice of Joaquin Muñoz Benitez (a Spanish man living in Gent, Belgium).
***
Biography: Jelle Meys lives and works in Sint-Niklaas, Belgium. He studied Illustration and Graphic Design at School of Arts Ghent (2005-2009), where he also got his Teacher’s degree (2010). He currently teaches graphic design and illustration in high school, and works as a freelance illustrator, graphic designer and visual artist. He started taking film and animation classes in 2017, and has been infected with the animation bug ever since.
ZEBRA 2022: The Cannes of Poetry Film Turns 20
Four days of events, readings and film screenings in one of the cultural hearts of Berlin was completed with the awards ceremony on Sunday 6 November 2022. In the fabulous venue of the Kino in der Kulturbrauerei, filmmakers and poets attended ZEBRA from far and wide – from Brazil to Ukraine by way of Ireland, UK and Switzerland to name but a few.
A wide-ranging and well-attended festival dedicated to poetry film is a marvelous thing. ZEBRA is the largest and longest-running festival of its kind, and the hosts were delighted to be fully in-person and without restrictions again. The event is welcoming, friendly and in a brilliant venue in a great part of a great city.
Film is often the first impression we get of a city in the world, and being from the UK, it took me a couple of days to get over the feeling of being in every Cold War spy movie I’ve ever seen that has passed through East Berlin. But I was lucky enough to be able to attend ZEBRA throughout the four days and soon felt relaxed and at home in this exciting, culturally rich city. It’s not physically possible to see all that ZEBRA has to offer because there are often events or screenings that take place simultaneously, but the film selection I enjoyed included animations, documentaries, spoken word films, and sign language poetry film. The programme committee want to represent the world in the films they choose for the International Competition, as well as a range of genres within films connected by the common thread of poetry or a poetic approach. They chose to have a focus on Ukraine with both films and poetry readings, and a retrospective of Maya Deren (born in Kyiv), but beyond the dreadful situation faced by Ukrainians, ZEBRA seem keen to use their platform to screen films that have pertinent and important messages to convey.
In the programme, the new director of ZEBRA, Katharina Schultens, said:
“Poetry and poetry films do not have a lot in common with the escapism of the entertainment industry and the consolation its products may offer. They reach much further than that. Yes, they can offer us comfort, too, but while doing so, they also pose the difficult questions we have to face… [such as] war and displacement … exclusion in societies … climate catastrophe…”
At this point in the week afterwards, reflecting on the films I have seen and the films I have missed, or been forced to miss because of simultaneous programming – this is where an online component would be hugely valuable, and I urge ZEBRA and all other festivals to consider the approach taken by the Women Over 50 Film Festival (WOFFF) in Lewes (UK) this year. WOFFF took place in a hybrid format. All films could be watched in the online festival leading up to the in-person event. But the really valuable bit is that attendees of the in-person event were offered a voucher to watch more of the films throughout the week AFTER the in-person event. Talking to people during the in-person event, and through the connections you make, you meet or discover writers and filmmakers whose work you have missed, hear recommendations for someone else’s favourite film, see a film of a type that you didn’t know you were going to love and you want to explore more of, or recall something that sticks in your mind and you want to watch again to appreciate fully. Or simply your appetite has been awakened for the very first time and you want to see more than you thought you would …
The winners of Zebra 2022 seem to reflect an overall philosophy of championing weighty subject matter. Or perhaps they reflect an understandable mood of seriousness in the world. (The list of winners and judges’ comments are available on the ZEBRA website and in their press release.) Personally, I was disappointed by the choice of both Black. British. Muslim. Other. and Terra Dei Padri (Fathers’ Land). While each had a very strong story to tell, one through a very immediate approach in the poet’s performance and direction, and the other through the use of archive images, I did not think either was a great example of their type. Far stronger in the use of language, image and filmmaking technique was the film given a special mention, Zyclus (Cycle).
The strongest film receiving an award was Imaginings. Written and performed by a collective of deaf poets, the film is poetry in sign language. The direction of the film by Anja Hiddinga and the energy given to it by the poet performers themselves made this an extremely compelling film to watch. I give a personal special mention to the typographic choices made for the subtitling. The words were placed over the centre of the chest of each performer as they signed. This meant that you did not need to take your eyes away from their hands and their signing. At times the type could be slightly difficult to read because it bobbed about as the poet’s body moved, but this added to the physicality of the language because their bodies moved more in, for example, moments of frustration.
The most interesting poetry film I saw was one of the selected three best interpretations of the festival poem Anderkat by Georg Leß. The poem is fascinating but very oblique. I personally found it impenetrable when I tried to imagine a treatment. At the Festival Poem event, when Georg Leß was introduced and he talked about his poem, his fascination and work with horror films came to light which then made a lot of sense in relation to his writing. I could let myself off the hook a little because I can rarely find a connection with horror in film. One of the filmmakers talked about expressing the uncanny and I think this was the key to this poem. The longlisted films shown before the three best failed to do this and, as a result, felt very unsatisfactory and weak in their choice of images. But I thought the film by Beate Gördes was stunning. Notable because it used no words, only very peculiar, uncanny images, it is one of the films I really want to watch several times over to appreciate its subtleties.
Two very enjoyable films in the event were documentaries. Spatzen und Spaziergänge (Sparrows and Strolls) was the beautifully shot and framed film by Maria Mohr with the poet Marko Pogačar, and the other was The Last Cuckoo by Mark Chaudoir about the poet Dennis Gould which managed to capture the personality of the poet’s life in a hugely engaging way. Also pleasing was the community project from Dublin, Dance till Dán which fused choreography with collectively created poetry.
Overall however, I would have liked to have seen more films that interpreted poems of the very highest quality with visual results that are more intrinsically a fused filmic/poetic experience in themselves than they are illustrative or performative. Perhaps those are the ones I happened to miss? On that note, I reiterate, please ZEBRA, do consider an online offering that extends after the in-person event.
Absurd Art House film festival 2022: review
The 2nd Absurd Art House film festival took place on Saturday 9th July, in Blue Town – a small area of Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey which borders the Thames Estuary and the Kent coast in southeast England. There was so much that was wonderful about the event but much was frustrating too.
First the wonderful – this festival encompassed a variety of categories including poetry film and the film selections were varied and there was plenty to enjoy. The event was hosted by a compere who introduced the categories and awards between each selection of films, and the interjection of a live person into the programme really helped the evening to feel engaging. The trophies were fab – each were topped by a banana because all the bananas for the UK are imported through the next door port.
The venue was just brilliant – historic and intimate: The Criterion Blue Town:
“Originally the “New Inn” in 1868 the site became “The Royal Oxford Music Hall”. The following year the building became The Criterion public house, with a music hall called ‘The Palace of Varieties’ situated immediately to its rear. This offered “rational amusement for all classes” including in April 1876, a one armed juggler!”
Now it’s a community heritage centre and cinema where volunteers are welcoming and knowledgeable and intriguing artefacts abound. A friendly bar/cafe provided drinks and refreshments available all evening.
Now for the frustrating … the time between notification of a successful entry and the event date itself was less than a week. It was luck that I was free to attend, but without some lead in time it can make it more difficult or impossible for many to come along. Or in fact, invite anyone else who might want to join. It’s a big shame the audience wasn’t larger – but you can’t just ‘build it and they will come’. Perhaps unsurprisingly therefore (as of writing this) the website is not up-to-date for 2022 and at present the only complete list of films that were screened is from an Instagram post – which frustratingly doesn’t give a filmmaker name. So I can’t even go back and find people/films quickly by googling.
I know there was me with ‘Because Goddess is Never Enough’, Lee Campbell with ‘The Perfect Crime: A doggy whodunnit’ (because I follow him on Instagram, I spotted his post that he was selected and we met on the night), and Sarah Tremlett with ‘Villanelle for Elizabeth not Ophelia’ (because we’ve met before and I know her work). But I’d like to be telling you more about the other films that I liked – forgive me, I wasn’t taking notes and it’s not worth the detective work.
I can show you the winners – again from an Instagram post:
As for poetry film, the winning film was beautifully shot, read and performed. But it felt more like an advert for the Catalonia tourist board, with what looked like a very large budget (guessing from its numerous sponsors and associations), and the film felt out of place in this quirky Absurd Art House festival.
I would far rather events happen than not, and all of the frustrations are fixable while the core of the event is excellent. I understand the huge volume of tasks that pile up on the organiser of any event and there is always more to be done in less time than is available. I very much hope that Absurd Art House goes onward and upwards and builds a bigger audience for 2023 – the event and the venue deserve it.
Unseen Forces and the Protagonist’s Point of View
presentation at ZEBRA 2019
Whilst subjectivity often lies in the hands of the poet, the film-maker can double the affect. This can be through their narrative use of the lens in relation to the position of the protagonist, or narrator, particularly in response to unseen forces; placing the viewer or camera in interesting and even culpable positions. I have selected three pairs of films that utilize contrasting approaches to this technique. The first two generate comic pathos; the second two focus on man’s inhumanity to man; and the final pair on the difficult dramatic technique of intimating freedom from negative forces beyond the screen (this world which is not that world).
The Desktop Metaphor (2017), by British poet Caleb Parkin, with filmic interpretation by Dutch film-maker Helmie Stil, centres in content and form on the subtly humorous juxtaposition of the prosaic with the profound and mythical in relation to man’s position in a desktop universe. The light from a steadily repetitive photocopier plays central stage in this film, accenting the repetitions in the poem, where office products alongside Stil’s photocopied face are interwoven with concepts of the infinite – ‘The Great Stapler which attaches the night to us’.
On Loop (2013), one of the funniest films in recent years by British film-maker and animator Christine Hooper, also focuses on the impotence of man’s condition in order to create humour. However, in this case the viewer is given the point of view of the invisible protagonist, who is in bed and tossing and turning with insomnia. In a short space of time we get to know exactly who the protagonist is, without ever seeing her, since an imagination in overdrive lets slip the jumbled contents of her thoughts. These are married with a visually fractured room, and a hyper-alert voice-over (Susan Calman) that is so well chosen to dramatically accentuate, through the sharply rising and falling tones of the melodic accent, a disjointed, racing imagination. Placing the viewer in the physical and mental position of the protagonist is a clever device, the comic pathos doubled in affect.
Two contrasting filmic approaches to man’s inhumanity to man are found in Numbers (English and Piatek, 2016) and Hopscotch (Vilk and Aisha 2017). Numbers begins with the film-maker and the footage itself. Maciej Piatek asked Lucy English to write a poem to the footage centering broadly on someone trying to find their way in society. Lucy arrived at the refugee survivor’s narrative, which Maciej paired with a voice-over by a survivor herself.
The black-and-white footage is from a laboratory, and I quote Maciej: ‘showing each stage of death of a human white blood cell, revealing the dying cells apparently trying to alert their immune system allies that they are dying’. He says he ‘looped and delayed in time the same piece of found footage to make it look like a disease outbreak. At the end of the film one can see in the left top corner the cell is actually disappearing’.
This film rests on the visual absence of the survivors themselves. The screen and the cells as human experiment are a surface to reflect upon, in the way that a tombstone in a graveyard focuses our thoughts. We are entirely tuned to the voice and its wholly credible narrative. However, the voice slowly disappears and the liquid vibrating aspect of the cells delicately suggests the negative role of water and the ocean in the stories. Although the survivor’s voice lets us know she survived, the screen tells us a different story. The film intimates what is not shown.
The next film, Hopscotch (2017), also intimates an insidious negative force, highlighting targeted, everyday abuse, particularly against Black Asian Minority Ethnic (BAME) women in Scotland. It is based on a poem by Nadine Aisha, and is directed by leading film-maker Roxana Vilk, with executive production by AMINA – Muslim Women’s Resource Centre with support from Rape Crisis Edinburgh.
We are immediately drawn into the centre of the conflict. An invisible stalker hisses suggestive remarks to a girl who then retorts ‘he says to me’ placing us, the viewer, as her third-party confidante. At the same time the camera focuses on a girl strolling across the screen on a cold evening. Through this clever filmic device, we see from dual points of view – as both her friend and her assailant – creating dramatic tension.
We cut to daytime, on a bus, and she continues: ‘Sat on the bus with a stranger’s hot breath’ and we are there again, but from the point of view of the abuser sitting right behind her, just as Christine Hooper placed us in the mind and physical position of the insomniac. ‘I want you’ he hisses. We follow our prey through the streets, and the abuse continues ‘stuck up bitch’ ‘what’s wrong, can’t you take this’, ‘Slut, slag’.
Standing alone in a railway station as everyone else speeds past, we recognize the victim’s frozen isolation, and how such abuse robs us of an authentic, relaxed interaction in public places. She is left with the fallout of the words and an ensuing alienation: ‘clenched them tight in fists that now mark the imprint of nameless men trying to name me’. The film continues for nearly five minutes, exposing us, the viewer, to a sense of an unending and unpredictable persecution. Ultimately the stalking camera reaches a climax where the victim turns, takes the camera, and starts filming herself. For a moment she, as in everywoman, triumphs; but through the majority of the narrative Vilk has expertly drawn us in, to inhabit the obsessive mind of the perpetrator.
Roxana told me (email 11 December 2019):
One of the reasons I was drawn to the style I used was also about reflecting on the “male gaze” in cinema in the sense that it is often male directors behind the lens; and I wanted to parallel that to this harassment of women in public spaces. Then to give the poet/ protagonist the chance at the end to grab the camera and turn the lens on herself… so she could speak to the audience without the male gaze and take back ownership of the story.
Freedom from unseen forces beyond the screen provides the central tenet in the final two films. In Quarry (2019) with poem by American poet Melissa Stein and animated line drawing by British artist animator Josh Saunders, a dramatic narrative is placed squarely in front of us. With a delicate and charming line illustration, a girl and boy swim naked in a quarry. However, through the concise and well-placed choice of words which indicate brooding danger – for example ‘a girl is swimming naked in dark water’ – an undercurrent of impending loss of innocence emerges.
The narrative is told as if in the third person, but as it reaches the denouement the narrator enters the first person. It is at this point that we sense that the earlier controlled use of language might indicate a personal psychological burial, now being exhumed. Within the developing drama, Saunders’ figures swim with innocence and a fragile, vibratory naivety; dipping into and below the surface – at one with the water, the rocks and each other. As we realize this event actually happened to the author, so we adjust, and mentally include the invasive eye of an intruder. Achieving delicacy and innocence in a film is a difficult feat; however, with such restraint, both visual and verbal, the result is powerful and memorable, and shows how animation can add to narrative in dramatic ways beyond live footage.
Storm Song (2019) by young British artist (and Central St Martins graduate) Rebecca Hilton is also set in water, but underwater, accompanied by two poems. On the surface, it appears to be a lyric, moving abstract painting where mermaid-like figures (some fully clothed and with long trailing fabric) unwind and intertwine, being both the ink and the brush. However, this film contains an underlying tension, and, rather than making a loud political statement, uses space, language and embodied gesture to subtly deny the constricts on the surface of enforced identities and ideologies from the powers that be – ‘for all we understand is power’.
Alongside an enigmatic voice-over, the viewer’s gaze finds itself broken by frequent black ‘rests’ – a technique I haven’t seen except with intertitles. These black spaces, in a ‘ma’-like way, inspire reflection on what has just been said. And just over halfway through the two poems interweave with each other. The themes in ‘Ghost Ribbon’ (2019) explore return from failure, whilst ‘Cataclysmic Storm’ (2019) investigates the weight of authoritarian power and control ‘Suspended up up up until you breathe’.
Whilst in Quarry we are taken on a developing narrative that intimates in its dramatic unselfconscious innocence a dark denouement, in Storm Song, the darkness gradually filters through, as a continuous invisible, quiescent force.
An earlier version of this essay appeared on Liberated Words.
REELpoetry 2019: Review and Compendium
REEL poetry/Houston TX 2019, Houston’s first international poetry film festival, produced by Public Poetry, was impressive in its inaugural year, and already promises to be back next year, and then either annually or biannually after that. The three-day event included live poetry performances, a panel discussion, and a workshop, in addition to featuring more than fifty films, ranging from documentaries and poetry films to videos extending poetry in all directions, from calligraphy and graphic design to dance and art performances, wordless narratives, concrete poetry, and abstract animation. Rather than trying to distinguish poetry films (films of poems) from film poetry (whose lineage derives from early 20th century experimental film and the “pure cinema” of dadaists and surrealists, such as Man Ray), REELpoetry advocates a big-tent approach, preferring an expansive canon rather than a narrow one.
REELpoetry’s eclectic curatorial vision produced a diverse and lively program of 36 films, some of which have already been featured on Moving Poems, or in other poetry film festivals, but also others that highlight new voices and disparate inspirations. Most of the films are available on the web, so what follows is a compendium with links, so that you can watch them in one place. When a particular film is unavailable, a link to the filmmaker/poet’s website or social media is provided instead.
The festival itself commissioned one film, which opened the cinepoetry screenings: 7 Seas, by Kyra Clegg, based on excerpts from Emily Dickinson’s poems about bodies of water.
The festival also gave out two awards with cash prizes, the judges award, which went to The Opened Field (Helmie Stills, filmmaker; Don Bury, poet), and an audience choice award, which went to I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast (Dan Sickles, filmmaker; Melissa Studdard, poet).
Houston is a diverse and eclectic city that is proud of its support for the arts, and both REELpoetry and Public Poetry benefit from that climate, enjoying strong community interest, institutional support, and grant funding. Media coverage for REELpoetry 2019 was impressive, including articles in the Houston Chronicle, Houston Public Media, and Arts and Culture Texas. The festival also provided lodging for poets/filmmakers who attended the event, and the schedule included times and places for mingling and sharing ideas. The inaugural festival set a high bar, and promises even better next year.
Cinepoetry festival program
7 Seas, Kyra Clegg, UK, artist and cinepoet
I could not locate 7 Seas on the web, but there are some short videos on her Vimeo page.
Shiver, Mark Niehus, Australia, filmmaker, composer, and poet
Watch on YouTube.
The Shadow, US, Jack Cochran and Pamela Falkenberg, filmmakers; Lucy English, UK, poet
Watch at Moving Poems.
Echoes, Finland, Hanna-Mari Ojala, cinepoet
Watch on Vimeo.
America Is Hiding Under My Bed, David Mai, director; Barbara West, performer; Julia Vinograd, poet
Watch on YouTube.
Mrigtrishna (Mirage), India, Rantu Chetia, director and poet
I could not locate this film on the web, nor much information about the filmmaker/poet, but I did learn that the film has shown at non-poetry film festivals, and located this brief write-up:
“Mumbai has been the city of dreams for ages. Millions, from every nook and corner of India, come here every day to try their luck in the film world of Bollywood. Only a handful gets their dreams realised though. The rest are left to face the harsh realities of life and the dilemma of their existence. The primary question that constantly hounds them is the motive of their life in Mumbai. The poem tries to portray this very existential query of the protagonist, who is a struggling actor and has left behind the joyous and playful life of the village,” said the director about the film.
Semechki, UK, Eta Dahlia, filmmaker; Iris Colomb, gestural drawings
Watch at Moving Poems.
Wishing Well, Canada, Mary McDonald, filmmaker; Penn Kemp, poet
Watch on YouTube.
Moments, UK, Brett Chapman, director and writer
Watch on Vimeo.
I Remember, US, Lisa Seidenberg, filmmaker
I could not locate I Remember on the web, but you can learn more about the filmmaker on her website.
As We Embrace, Taiwan, Amang Hung, filmmaker and poet
The runtime for the version shown at the festival is listed as 4:36; this longer version is available at Vimeo.
Turkey Teacher, US, David Mai, Director; Barbara West, performer and poet
Watch on YouTube.
14 Sentences, US, Carolyn Guinzio, filmmaker and poet
Watch on YouTube.
Scarce Shelter in the Red Storm, UA, Cindy St. Onge, multimedia artist
Watch on Vimeo.
Home, Ireland, David Knox, filmmaker; Erin Fornoff, poet
Watch on YouTube.
Body Language, US, Margo Stutts Toombs, filmmaker; Roslyn (Cookie) Wells, graphic artist; Lydia Hance, dancer and choreographer; Loueva Smith, poet
Watch on Vimeo.
Ice Fog, US, Vanessa Zimmer-Powell, filmmaker and poet
I could not locate this film on the web, but you can visit her Facebook page, check out her book, or hear her read a poem in Houston for National Poetry month.
I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast, US, Dan Sickles, filmmaker; Melissa Studdard, poet
Watch at Moving Poems.
A Lost Penny, France, Madeleine Clair, cinepoet
Watch on YouTube.
The Names of Trees, US, Pamela Falkenberg and Jack Cochran, filmmakers; Lucy English, UK, poet
Watch on Vimeo.
Plasticnic, Canada, Fiona Tinwei Lam, producer, narrator, and writer; Tisha Deb Pillai, animator; Tinjun Niu, sound designer
Watch on Vimeo.
The Wanderers, US, Ted Fisher, filmmaker; Aoife Lysol, poet
Watch on YouTube.
Hanging, Finland, Hanna-Mari Ojala, cinepoet
Watch on YouTube.
The Opened Field, UK, Helmie Stil, filmmaker; Dom Burt, poet
Watch at Moving Poems.
America, US, Lisa Seidenberg, filmmaker; text by Gertrude Stein
Watch at Moving Poems.
Wind and Plaster, Germany, Burak Kum, filmmaker; Nazim Hikmet Ran, poet
Watch on Vimeo.
Capricorn, UK, Eta Dahlia, filmmaker; Andrey Novikov, original score; Nik Nightingale, calligraphy
I could not locate a film with this title, but you can watch three films on Dahlia’s Vimeo page.
Silicon Valley, Canada, Mary McDonald, filmmaker; Penn Kemp, poet
Watch on YouTube.
Instructions for Soldiers Back From War, US, Jed Bell, director; David Mai, cinematography and editing; Barbara West, performer; Julia Vinograd, poet
Watch on Vimeo.
New Note, US, Ally Christmas, cinepoet
Watch on Vimeo.
Aral, UK, Eta Dahlia, filmmaker and poet
This title could not be located on the web, but the filmmaker does have a Vimeo page.
Without Distortion, Australia, Mark Niehus, director, producer, composer, and poet
Watch on YouTube.
My Cloverfield, Finland, Hanna-Mari Ojala, cinepoet
Watch on YouTube.
Untitled, US, Lisa Maione
I was unable to find this film on the web, but there is a Vimeo page, a website, and an artist’s page where you can learn more about the filmmaker.
Leisure, UK, Derk Russell, cinematographer; Al Barclay, actor; A D Cooper, writer
Watch on Vimeo.
A Family Recipe That Cannot Be Followed or Written Down, US, Elaine Zhang, Director; Tiana Wang, poet
I was unable to locate the film itself on the web, but the project does have a Facebook page.
Wings of Desire is a Poetry Film
Every Angel is terror. And yet,
ah, knowing you, I invoke you, almost deadly
birds of the soul.
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies
When I read that Swiss actor Bruno Ganz died on February 15 of this year, I immediately recalled the iconic photograph of him as the angel Damiel, the character Ganz played in Wim Wenders’ 1987 film, Wings of Desire. Dressed in a black trench coat that hangs past his knees, Damiel stands on the edge of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, looking down on the city of Berlin. Huge white wings erupt from his back.
Wings of Desire is an extraordinary film on many levels – the cinematography, acting, and directing are all of the highest quality. The film’s success, however, is not the result of any of these. The film succeeds because it’s based on poetry.
Poetry determined the film from the beginning. In an article published in the Criterion Collection, Wenders states
I really don’t know what gave me the idea of angels. One day I wrote ‘angels’ in my notebook…Maybe it was because I was reading Rilke at the time—nothing to do with films—and realizing as I read how much of his writing is inhabited by angels. Reading Rilke every night, perhaps I got used to the idea of angels being around.
Needing a screenplay, Wenders approached his old friend and frequent collaborator, Austrian writer and poet Peter Handke. Handke, worn out from having just completing a novel, told Wenders, “I’m completely drained. I don’t have any words left in me. Maybe if you come down here and tell me your story, then I can help you out with a few scenes. But no more; nothing structural, no screenplay.” Wenders and Handke “spent a week thinking up a dozen key situations in a possible plot, and Peter started writing on the basis of that.”
From that initial meeting, the screenplay evolved from weekly dispatches Handke sent to Wenders: “I would get an envelope full of dialogue, without any direction or description, like in a stage play. There was no contact between us; he wrote, and I prepared the film.” Their process sounds remarkably similar to the way in which many video poems arise: one person, usually the filmmaker, creates a film using an existing poem. There is generally little or no contact between the poet and the filmmaker until the film is completed.
Wings of Desire starts with Damiel writing and reciting the opening lines from Handke’s poem, “Song of Childhood:”
When the child was a child
it walked with its arms swinging,
wanted the brook to be a river,
the river to be a torrent,
and this puddle to be the sea.When the child was a child,
it didn’t know that it was a child,
everything was soulful,
and all souls were one.
Gradually, the plot emerges: Damiel (Ganz), weary of his existence as a supernatural being, longs for the messy, sweaty world of humanity. Sitting in a car with his friend, the angel Cassiel (Otto Sander) Damiel imagines what life would be like as a human: “To come home after a long day and feed the cat like Philip Marlowe,” – “to have a fever” – “to get your fingers black from the newspaper” – “to lie – through the teeth!” None of these is enough to convince Damiel to make the plunge; that decision comes when he falls in love with the beautiful Marion, an angel-winged trapeze artist performing in a cheesy, one-ring circus.
As Damiel becomes infatuated with Marion, he begins to hover, unseen, around her, influencing her thoughts and moods (the angels in Wings of Desire possess the ability to read people’s minds). In a couple of unsettling scenes, he enters her circus trailer and watches her undress, once reaching to touch her bare shoulder. Since he’s an angel, we assume that he is completely harmless, but once he’s developed feelings for Marion, his presence in her private sphere seems at least somewhat improper. In abandoning his immortality for the love of Marion, Damiel demonstrates that he shares that view: he can’t keep hovering around, spying on her. He must take his chances in the real world.
Wings of Desire is not only a love story between angel and human, but also a film-poem of place: Berlin in the late 1980s. Angels move freely on either side of the Berlin Wall, a privilege not allowed the city’s human population until two years later. Considering its affect on both the film and the city, the Wall imposes limitations as if it were a poetic form, forcing the filmmakers to create within its boundaries. As Nick Bugeja writes in “Discord and new beginnings in Wings of Desire,” “the Wall towers over the lives of those living in Berlin and Germany, physically and metaphorically constraining them.”
Handke’s “envelope(s) full of dialogue, without any direction or description,” form the overheard thoughts of Berlin’s citizens, edited into poetic snippets. I.e., in one scene, a man with a baby in a backpack thinks, “The delight of lifting one’s head out here in the open” while in another, we hear the thoughts of a woman riding a bicycle: “At last mad, at last redeemed.” When Damiel and Cassiel communicate vocally, it’s in elevated, cryptic speech. To quote Bugeja again, “The effect of Wings of Desire is startling. Its poetry seeps from every frame, as feelings of loss, impotency, and later renewal and warmth spill out.”
Poetry gives Wings of Desire its intuitive leaps and eccentric charm. Poetry elevates Damiel’s decision to leave immortality for love beyond cliché and into the sublime.
When he says, “Now I know what no angel knows,” he means he has found his humanity. This is the value of poetry, and all the arts: they awaken the shared sense of what it means to be human. That seems a fitting way to end a film that began with the word angel scribbled in a notebook.
Film Ab!: A personal report on the Zebra Poetry Film Festival 2018
ARRIVAL
September is coming to an end and the falling temperatures leave north-east England sharp but bright. I am on a train from my home town in Northumberland en route to Münster in the German province of Westphalia. The 2018 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival awaits at the end of my long train ride: three days of poetry and film in a city reaching summer’s end. It is a good time of the year for poems, I think, and a good time of the year for films.
My excitement is tinged with the knowledge that this may be my last visit to the continent as a fully-fledged citizen of the EU. I’ve always wanted to visit ZEBRA. It seems to be an important place for poetry and film but when one of my films screened here four years ago, I couldn’t afford to come. I’m expecting an international affair: a reminder that, regardless of who is playing games with our borders and our nationhood, people will get together with others to write poems and make films. I am heartened by the fact that the very act of making a poetry film defies and challenges creative and political borders.
As I trundle my way through France and Belgium, I reflect on how the poetry film community is naturally collaborative. It needs more than the single artist in order to exist. That’s not to say that a person can’t make a poetry film on their own – I have done this and many of the films at the festival will surely be author made – but rather that if everyone worked in isolation, as much of the UK’s mainstream poetry world does, the world of poetry film would not be so rich and diverse. Part of this seems inherent in the medium: the juxtaposition gap often works best with two other-thinking minds. It sits at an intersection between several worlds: those of poetry, film-making, television, experimental art, music, sound art and artist’s moving image. Arguably, the poem is the only essential ingredient because without it, the form does not exist.
ZEBRA Festival runs from Thursday evening through to Sunday evening. My train pulls in late on Thursday evening so I miss the opening ceremony and head straight to my Airbnb in the city’s quiet, affluent and leafy suburbs. The next day I set out on foot to the festival venue, Münster’s Schloßtheater. I arrive there late on Friday afternoon after a walk into the city through the woodlands that skirt the Aasee, a picturesque lake and park full of cyclists and groups of chattering school children.
Schloßtheater is a friendly, 1950s art deco venue busy with locals and festival visitors. My first task is to pick up my accreditation lanyard from the festival desk in the foyer and then I settle down, nursing a coffee at a table in the theatre’s street café. On the train I had read Annelyse Gelman’s review of her first visit here and as I plot a path through the various screenings on offer I am aware of her advice not to overwhelm myself with too many films. I’ve experienced this before at literary festivals, where reading after reading tires the brain until it becomes difficult to engage with the work in any meaningful way. Poems demand a particular sort of attention.
The films are screening in blocks of around ten poetry films, which are either part of one of the festival’s prize competitions or part of the curated side programme. Some of this side programme revolves around the festival’s main themes (this year they are The USA and Spoken Word) and some of it is organised into five thematically-linked blocks under the title Prisma. There are other screenings, readings and discussions too: the results of a series of hip hop poetry film workshops made in collaboration with local young people, a panel discussion on the disadvantages for women in the poetry film and wider film worlds and the premiere of the poems submitted to this year’s festival poem competition. I pick out seven blocks on Friday and Saturday in the hope that this will give me a broad spectrum of the films at ZEBRA without burning me out before I catch a train back to the UK on Sunday.
As the time for my first screening of the festival approaches, the café begins to buzz with an interesting mix of film-makers and poets from all over the world. Thankfully, ZEBRA has neither the hard-sell atmosphere of a film festival nor the tribalistic feel of a poetry festival. People are approachable and friendly and before long I’ve met several poets and film-makers, some of whom are new to me and some of whom I have already met virtually through the online community. Poetry film is rare insofar as it affords much more prominence to the writer than other forms of film. At ZEBRA, poet and film-maker are given equal billing. My first impressions are a confirmation that the symbiosis at the medium’s heart cultivates a presumed harmony between these two separate worlds.
SOME OF THE FILMS
Animation was big at the festival with films ranging from the highly polished productions made for French TV as part of the En sortant de l’école series through Georges Schwizbegel’s stunning (and wordless) painted rendition of Goethe’s classic poem Erlkönig to Amhed Saleh’s moving stop-motion animation Ayny – My Second Eye, which dealt with the disturbing story of a family displaced by war. I think one of the reasons animation works so well when combined with poems is that it opens up the possibilities for the impossible: an essential attribute of a strong poem. Anna Eijsbout’s silhouette animation of Neil Gaiman’s Hate for Sale, which picked up the prize for ‘Best Film for Tolerance’, is a good example of animation’s ability to employ the impossible in a way that would be very difficult to achieve through other means.
Several of the animated films didn’t take full advantage of this aspect of the medium and merely visually represented the content of the poem on screen. For me the most successful films (animated or otherwise) were those that went beyond mere representation towards abstraction or a suggested narrative leading me into an unexpected reading of the poem. Noch am Leben from Anita Lester was a good example of how a film-maker can reach beneath the surface of the poem and enhance it through the use of moving images and sound.
Interestingly, in this example the film and the poem were both made by Lester and I wonder how I would have responded to the poem outside the context of the film. I also wonder whether this is at all relevant as the poetry film worked for me in its own right. With this film, like with many others that I found myself particularly lost in, it felt as if both poem and film needed each other to exist.
In the screening blocks I saw, the majority of the films were highly polished and had access to budgets that were way beyond my wildest dreams. I had expected to see more experimental, low budget films from film-makers and poets that I knew. This is not necessarily a criticism of the selection committee’s choices. Perhaps it is more a realisation on my part that up to now I have subconsciously sought out work that fits into the same niche as the poetry films I have been involved in making myself.
Of course, there were several films that I had seen before that were a delight to see screening at the festival (a good poetry film keeps on giving after all). I hadn’t seen Kate Sweeney and Anna Woodford’s Work (although I knew the poem on the page). The weaving of Sweeney’s Post-it animation with Woodford’s words reminded me how important it is to have a strong poem for a poetry film to be truly effective.
The Focus USA block deserves a mention for its political veracity alone. Caroline Rumley’s Shoes without Feet brought home the devastating chaos of Charlottesville.
Lisa Seidenberg’s America touched on Charlottesville too, remixing Gertrude Stein’s 1929 poem with collaged footage and drums to not make sense in a good way.
Many of the American films I saw across the festival came from the Motionpoems series. They are well produced and slick, sometimes to devastating effect as in How to Raise a Black Child, Seyi Peter-Thomas’ narrative adaptation of Courtney Lamar-Charleston’s thought-provoking poem.
AFTERTHOUGHTS
My overwhelming memory of ZEBRA will be of a well run and friendly festival that showcases a diverse range of poetry films. I was exposed to films that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise, particularly the bigger budget films not available online or those films in languages that I don’t understand. The presenters for each block of films had done their homework, introducing each film by talking about techniques, the film-makers and the poems in a way that enhanced my viewing of the films. The little pauses in between each film for these introductions felt necessary in order to absorb what had come before. And if the film-maker or poet was present, we were also treated to a short Q&A after the film, which further enhanced the experience.
From my first block of films at the festival through to my last, I was struck by the magic of the cinema. I am used to viewing poetry films online, generally on my laptop through vimeo or youtube (and of course via movingpoems.com!). I often screen my own films in galleries or in little projector rooms at literary festivals. There’s something particularly exciting about the cinema though: the way it holds your attention through the lighting, the sound and the imposing presence of the screen. As David Lynch so eloquently puts it in ‘Curtains Up’: “It’s so magical, I don’t know why, to go into a theatre and have the lights go down, it’s very quiet and then the curtains start to open and you go into a world.”
It wouldn’t seem right not to acknowledge something raised in Marc Neys’ judges report on the 2016 festival. I couldn’t help but think that more poets and film-makers would have been there if they had been supported financially in order to attend. I know that it is difficult to raise funds for festivals such as this but I wonder if there is leeway for some of the prize funds to be redirected towards a travel grant distributed on the basis of financial need? It would have been great to have seen more of the film-makers and poets there. As a freelance artist with three little mouths to feed, I must choose carefully which unpaid flights of madness I indulge in. Having said that, there are plenty of cheap Airbnbs in Münster and according to the online guidebooks couchsurfing is big there. Free tickets for the screening for accredited poets and film-makers was an unexpected bonus too. For those of us in Europe at least, the cost of travel shouldn’t be too prohibitive and if you are at all interested in the genre of poetry film then there is a lot to be gained from a trip to ZEBRA. When the next festival is announced, I know that I will be counting my pennies and trying to find some way of making the journey back to Münster.
The Juteback Poetry Film Festival 2018: a review and compilation
The power and importance of curation is once again demonstrated by the eclectic and compelling selections included in the 2018 Juteback Poetry Film Festival, which was held at the Wolverine Farm Publishing’s Letterpress and Publick House in Ft. Collins, CO on Friday, October 19, 2018. Organizers R.W. Perkins (poet, writer, and filmmaker from Loveland, CO) and Matt Mullins (writer, musician, experimental filmmaker, and multimedia artist who teaches creative writing at Ball State University and is the mixed media editor of Atticus Review) have put together a program that surveys the breadth and depth of film poetry rather than attempting to construct or validate some narrow canon. From animated calligraphy to found footage, from flicker film techniques to metamorphosing animation, from abstracting digital layering to Hollywood narrative techniques, from dreamlike transitions and juxtapositions to post-apocalyptic mise-en-scene, from beauty in a broken world to cultural and political critique, from digital image fracturing and recombination to stark, off-balance, black-and-white compositions harking back to Man Ray, from silent film techniques to spoken word poetry, from digital remixing to music video techniques, and from preschool poets to poetic giants from the past to unpublished poets who are also filmmakers, the selections survey the state of video poetry and yet reflect the tastes and inclinations of Perkins and Mullins, who hopefully will keep this festival going for years to come.
One interesting feature of Juteback 2018 was live poetry readings by the 2018 poet laureate of Ft. Collins, Natalie Giarratano, and 2013 Ft. Collins poet laureate, Jason Hardung. If you don’t know them, both of them are poets worth exploring.
Also worth mentioning is that both Perkins and Mullins each showed one of their own poetry films to open the festival, in order to demonstrate that they are poetry film practitioners as well as curators. Perkins’ film is Visions of Snow, and Mullins’ film is One/Another.
As Perkins noted in his closing comments, most of the films in the festival are available openly, and he encouraged the festival audience to share what they liked as widely as possible. With that in mind, here are links to the poetry films (where possible), and to trailers for the films or links to the filmmakers’ websites (where the films themselves could not be found).
Perkins and Mullins are seeking to expand the audience for the Juteback Poetry Film Festival. If anyone has any suggestions, you can contact them.
(Full disclosure: Pamela Falkenberg and Jack Cochran’s The Names of Trees was one of the poetry films included in the 2018 Juteback Poetry Film Festival.)
Carolyn Rumley
One Step Away
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Rita Mae Reese
Alphabet Conspiracy
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Jutta Pryor
Poet Matt Dennison
The Bird
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Cindy St. Onge
My Lover’s Pretty Mouth
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Ellen Hemphill and Jim Haverkamp
Poet Marc Zegans
The Danger Meditations
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Kate Sweeney
Poet Anna Woodford
Work
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Mohammad Enamul and Haque Kha
Poet Sadi Taif
A Vagabond Wind
(this is a 50-second trailer for the film poem)
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Pam Falkenberg and Jack Cochran
Poet Lucy English
The Names of Trees
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Marie Craven
Poet Matt Hetherington
Light Ghazal
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Dan Douglas
Poet Paul Summers
Bun Stop
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Vivek Jain
Poet Kirti Pherwani
I Don’t Know
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Mark Niehus
Shiver
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Eduardo Yagüe
Poet Samuel Beckett
Qué Palabra
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Eliot Michl
Don’t Tell Me I’m Beautiful
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Gilbert Sevigny
Poet Jean Coulombe
Au Jardin Bleu (In the Blue Garden)
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Lisa Seidenberg
Poet Gertrude Stein
America
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Merissa Victor
Poet Angelica Poversky
The Entropy of Forgiveness
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Kathryn Darnell
Poet Bertolt Brecht
Motto: A Poem by Bertolt Brecht
Visit her Vimeo page, where you can watch 14 videos using similar animated calligraphy techniques, though Motto is not among them.
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Kidst Ayalew Abebe
Poet Femi Bájúlayé
Bámidélé
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A. D. Cooper
Home to the Hangers
(this is a 48 second trailer for the 5-minute film, which is behind a password to protect its film festival qualifications)
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Luna Ontenegro, Ginés Olivares, and Adrian Fisher (mmmmmfilms collective)
Fatal When They Touch
Visit the collective’s webpage for the film (which does not include the film itself).
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Jane Glennie
Poet Brittani Sonnenberg
Coyote Wedding
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Nancy Kangas
Preschool Poets: An Animated Series
Visit the Vimeo page for the Preschool Poets project, which has the eight films compiled for Juteback, as well as some behind-the-scenes video.
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Steven Fox
Alone
There’s a Facebook page for the local actor and filmmaker, but there does not seem to be any online link to the film.
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Team BTSD
Perpetuum
(Special screening)
