~ 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.
Rain by Hone Tuwhare
https://vimeo.com/25072181
This is actually the second time I’ve posted a video for this poem by the great Maori poet, and it might be worth looking at the other one — a fairly straight-forward kinetic text piece — before watching this one, where the text is whispered and fugitive. But this film is superlative in every way, an astonishingly gorgeous piece that must be watched with the volume up and the video expanded to full-screen. According to the notes at Vimeo,
Rain is the first of Maria-Elena films in which she explores our connection with Nature, human-nature and the idea that everything in the universe is interlinked……..Rain was made in 2006 as the final year project of the Graduate diploma in digital animation at Unitec Auckland…. Maria-Elena has just completed her next film Meniscus
New “motionpoems” to be unveiled October 8 in Minneapolis
“Motionpoems” is the term preferred by filmmaker Angella Kassube and poet Todd Boss at motionpoems.com for what the rest of us variously call videopoems, film poems, cinepoetry, etc. Kassube and Boss are responsible for a number of quite lovely films illustrating not only Boss’s own poems, but a growing number of others’ as well. They’re helping to raise the bar for mainstream poetry animation in the U.S.
Click through to their website for a description of the upcoming screening event (which I can’t copy-and-paste from or directly link to because it’s a Flash-based site). The list of films to be screened looks tantalizing — poems by Jane Hirshfield, Terese Svoboda, Alicia Ostriker, Thomas Lux, and Robert Bly are among those featured. I hope we can expect to see them at motionpoems.com and on YouTube after their Minneapolis debut.
(Update) Angella Kassube provided some additional detail about the event in an email. She wrote:
The really groovy thing about our screening is it is actually a great discussion about poetry and interpreting poetry. Everyone talks about how their piece came together, the audience is engaged and they ask great questions and have great comments. It’s an incredible evening—we expect about 150 people to be there.
“It is a lot of work,” she added about the motionpoems project in general, “but Todd and I just keep going.” I hope anyone in the upper Midwest who can make this screening will turn out and support them.
Peacock and Fish by Hafez
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUhaF1JI5r8
(English-dubbed excerpt)
This is Tongue of the Hidden, directed by David Alexander Anderson with calligraphy, translation and narration by Jila Peacock and animation by Florian Guibert, assisted by Jerome Dernoncourt. See the film’s webpage for complete credits, stills, storyboard, and more.
The poet Hafez, also known as the Teller of Secrets, used the language of human love and the metaphors of wine and drunkenness to describe his desire for the Divine and intoxication with the mysteries of the Universe. […]
Hand-drawn Farsi (Persian/Iranian) calligraphy is imported into the computer and forms the basis of constructed landscapes, and animals that move within landscapes. Software was Studio Max, Maya, XSI and After Effects.
According to a page on Jila Peacock’s website, “The film was premiered at the National Film Theatre in October 2007 as part of the London Film Festival and as part on Animate TV on C4 in December 2007.” See also the section of her site on her handmade artist’s book Ten Poems From Hafez.
Rush Hour by Thylias Moss
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdoZbbZfnFs
Moss writes,
A video poam that explores the simultaneous and related journeys of workers from two social strata whose need of each other does not include the exchange of essential aspects of identity.
She also uploaded another version, “Rush Hour (too).”
Ode for Ironing (Oda para planchar) by Pablo Neruda
This is a film called Saccharine, directed by Raivan Hall with camera work by Josh Hittleman.
The poem is not from Neruda’s Odas Elementales, but the later Plenos Poderos from 1962. Here’s the Spanish and here’s an English translation by Jodey Bateman. The film uses the translation by Alastair Reid, which carries a less literal title: “In Praise of Ironing.”
As with any popular poet, there are a ton of Neruda videos on YouTube, but most of them are, um, not so good. So it’s a real pleasure to see a professionally made film with a Neruda poem in the soundtrack.
Confused Rain by Nam June Paik
nam june paik’s confused rain (1967) was the chaotic distribution of the letters C-O-N-F-U-S-E on a sheet of paper.
clint enns’ confused rain (2008) is a posthumous collaboration with nam june paik that expands paik’s work into a computer program that produces an animation of the letters C-O-N-F-U-S-E falling like rain drops.
this was written in visual basic.
For more on the Korean-American artist Nam June Paik, see the Wikipedia, which says he was “considered to be the first video artist.” For more on Clint Enns, see his Vimeo page.
Coney Island by Andrew Marotta
Interesting Beat-like, collaborative approach to videopoem-making by poet Andrew Marotta and filmmaker Brandon Knopp, who captured all the material for both the poem and the film in one day, according to Brandon’s note:
Working together on a project created during a day spent at Coney Island. Filmed and written in one outing.
Same Place Different View by Anna Dickie
I’m glad to see This Collection continuing to broker and upload innovative films for its Edinburgh-centered poetry project. Oliver Benton and Stefanie Tan did the camera work and editing respectively, and “thiscollection.org was proud to collaborate with Rocio Jungenfeld to adapt Poet Anna Dickie’s work ‘Same Place Different View’ into a bricolage installation on the shores of Aberlady.”
Anna Dickie is a Scottish artist and poet now blogging at it’sabouttime. You can read the poem at thiscollection.org.
The Body Show: How to Boil an Egg by Nora Robertson
UPDATE (3 August 2015): I’ve found and swapped in the complete film.
*
This is actually a trailer for a short film by Jason Bahling called The Body Show, due out in November. The whole film is essentially a videopoem for “How to Boil an Egg,” which is from Nora Robertson’s unpublished collection Body-Making Cookery — or so I gather from Jason’s notes at Vimeo and a recent post at Nora’s blog:
About five years ago I appeared in a line-up at Borders downtown and read from my then-new collection Body-Making Cookery which is still in progress (cue internal groan). The collection is all recipe poems and explores the associations food has for us, that food is almost never just a way to keep our bodies going, that it reminds us of other things like family, personal biography, history, body image, desire, mythology, religion. When we eat, it’s my belief that we don’t just take the food into our bodies, but all of these associations into the body of our self. I was experimenting with a persona, the housewife, which later morphed into cooking show host gone awry as explored in the short film The Body Show, a collaboration with video artist Jason Bahling to be released in November 2010.
My Friend, The Parking Lot Attendant by Charles Bukowski
English film student Tom Ralph notes,
The piece is meant to be shown on two screens facing each other, one for each character in the film. This gives the impression of a conversation in which the audience can place themselves where they please. For the purpose of viewing now, both characters appear on one film. Filmed on a Kodak Zi6 and edited on Final Cut Pro. Thanks to Dennis Thompson and Roy Winspear.
