Yhä hiljalleen hämärtyvässä maailmassa (In a world still slowly dimming) by Saila Susiluoto

On 5 February, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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This recent videopeom by Swoon (Marc Neys) uses a text and reading from the fantastic online audiopoetry site Lyrikline.org by Finnish poet Saila Susiluoto. A little background from Swoon’s blog:

This summer I’m invited to the The Annikki Poetry Festival in Tampere (Finland)
Really looking forward to that. Giving a workshop and having a talk with JP Sipilä about videopoetry.

One of the poets performing at the festival is Saila Susiluoto and I found a gourgeous poem by her on Lyrikline to work with.

Click through to read the text in Finnish and in English translation (by Pirkko Talvio-Jaatinen and Saila Susiluoto), as well as few process notes.

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Diagnostic by Laura M Kaminski

On 4 February, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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A collage videopoem by Dale Wisely using a text by Laura M Kaminski from The Poetry Storehouse. The voices in the soundtrack are Nic S.’s and Eric Burke’s. The poem originally appeared in One Sentence Poems, which Wisely co-edits with Robert Scotellaro.

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Song for Awe & Dread by Tommy Becker

On 3 February, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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Tommy Becker is “A poet trapped in a camcorder [who] continues to feed video, music and poems into his never-ending saga, ‘TAPE NUMBER ONE’. Often Becker’s single channel works are translated to live performance.” Discovering new-to-me videopoets of such originality is what makes all the work of publishing Moving Poems worthwhile. Here’s the Vimeo description:

Song for Awe & Dread is a contemporary take on the vanitas paintings of the 17th century and an investigation into the emotional duality of our existence. It is AWEsome to be human and to be alive, but the evolution of human intelligence has also burdened our species with a self-awareness of life’s impermanence. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard called these two uniquely human emotions, awe and dread. Through its symbolic meditation on mortality, this work attempts to find meaning between the fleeting flavors of bubblegum and cultural programming that entrenches us in our denial of death.

Music & Text & Video: written, recorded, performed and edited by Tommy Becker ©2015
instructional poetry read by – Don Johnson
skeleton characters performed by – Billy Mark
backing vocals – Rosie Harald
public domain footage – collected from the Prelinger Archives.

A huge THANK YOU!!! to all my students for their enthusiastic participation.
soundcloud.com/tapenumberone/song-for-awe-dread

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The Imagined by Stephen Dunn

On 2 February, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 1 Comments - Animation
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A terrific animated film by Matt Craig for Motionpoems, influenced by “a lot of really early animation films,” as he told interviewer Michael Dechane.

I knew I wanted to stay away from illustrating the words or being too literal with the imagery. I wanted to create something that would be its own thing but would be a perfect companion to the poem. I spent a lot of time making these decisions before I got into the work, and I’m glad I did it that way. I was able to steer my own direction because of the rules I had laid out for myself early on.

MOPO: What are some of the stylistic influences you saw coming to bear on the film?

CRAIG: I had been watching a lot of really early animation films, one in particular called “The Idea” by Berthold Bartosch. It was based on a woodcut graphic novel by Frans Masereel. I had been watching that kind of work coming into this project. When I start a project I tend to pull a lot of artwork, paintings and things that I can respond to in some way. That helps me get towards ideas I like.

Do read the whole interview; Craig makes a lot of interesting points. And there’s an interview with Stephen Dunn on the same page which is also worth checking out. The last question concerns the film:

MOPO: I’m wondering about the whole idea of taking a poem and making a short film out of it, and this sort of hybrid art that Motionpoems is pioneering. Is presenting a work in a different medium akin to the difficulty of linguistic translation in your opinion? What would you share with us about why you consented to be a part of this Motionpoems season and growing body of art — what were you hoping or wanting?

DUNN: I have no expectations. My poem itself is a translation of experience. I would hope that you all would try to be true to the poem’s spirit and tone, but I also know that another medium will interpret in ways I can’t foresee.

Bryan Hanna composed the score.

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Crows by Lori Lamothe

On 30 January, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 2 Comments - Videopoems
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Lori Lamothe is the latest poet to have work added to The Poetry Storehouse, which is where Australian multimedia artist Jutta Pryor found this poem (originally published in Third Coast) and the reading by Nic S.. Pryor is responsible not only for the cinematography and direction but also for the very effective soundtrack.

Kobe by Chaucer Cameron

On 29 January, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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A film about the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995 from Elephant’s Footprint—the collaborative team of Chaucer Cameron and Helen Dewbery, with Cameron contributing the poem and the two of them co-directing.

Deze zachte witte kamer / Our padded white rooms: six poems by Runa Svetlikova

On 28 January, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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Belgian poet Runa Svetlikova‘s collection, Deze zachte witte kamer, has just won the 2015 Herman de Coninck Debut Prize. Here’s a film Swoon (Marc Neys) made a few months ago with help from the Spanish filmmaker Eduardo Yagüe. (Be sure to watch on a laptop or desktop computer and expand to full screen so the English subtitles are legible.) Marc described their process in a blog post:

Early this summer Runa Svetlikova asked me if I would be interested in creating a video for some poems from her debut ‘Deze zachte witte kamer’ (Uitgeverij Marmer, 2014)
“The beating heart of that new collection is a series of six poems that would fit perfectly in one video”
She was right.

The collection appears to consist of no more than a handful of atoms that randomly traverse space. Against that cosmic and sometimes comical background Runa explores the alienation she feels at the birth of a child, the difficult maintenance of a love without knowing whether there is such a thing as love, the urge to give a voice to a dead father… Yet the poems do tell a story. Especially the middle six; Vogeltje / Birdie – Verzorging / Care – Habitat / Habitat – Classificatie / Classification – Conceptie / Conception – Draagtijd / Gestation.

[…]

For this project I asked the help of Eduardo Yague. I felt these poems could use the visual approach of Eduardo. We mailed back and forth on a concept. On what kind of images to use, on colours, a vision. I was lucky he said yes.

I created a track with a reading from Runa;
[listen on SoundCloud]

I gave the recording to Eduardo along with a fantastic translation by Willem Groenewegen.
During a stay in Stockholm he filmed different scenes and improvisations with an actress (Gabriella Roy) and sent me the footage. I asked more or suggested different stuff.

In a final stage I chose and edited the different piece of footage to the track. I am very happy the way this turned out. Working with Eduardo was rewarding and there might follow more…

This easily would’ve qualified for inclusion in my list of Top Ten Multi-Poem Films and Videopoems, had I not already included two other Swoon films. It’s interesting to see how differently he approaches the challenge of melding multiple poems into a single work for each project.

Deaf Brown Gurl (La Morena Sorda) by Sabina England

On 27 January, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 2 Comments - Author-made videopoems, Performance Poetry
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This is

a film written, directed, shot, performed, and edited by Sabina England.

-Voice Over & Sound Design by Micropixie.
-Music by Om/Off (Paco Seren and Pablo Alvarez)
-V.O Recording by Elliott Peltzman.

Filmed in India (Old Delhi, India and Patna, Bihar, India)

Though England grew up in the UK, the sign language here is ASL. She notes in her bio (which is so interesting, I almost hate to excerpt it):

I use a combination of American Sign Language, mime, poetry, voice-over, multimedia, and/or music in my stage performances. I am always looking for more opportunities to expand my works, and I love meeting new people from different cultures. I believe that art and culture can bring people together in spite of differences and issues.

I have been profoundly deaf since I was two years old. I am fluent in English, Spanish, and American Sign Language.

Click through and scroll down to the Long Biography to read about some of England’s other films. In a blog post announcing this film’s release, she wrote:

After one year in the making, it’s here for public viewing. ENGLISH & SPANISH subtitles are available for your watching. My film shows the diversity of Indian society (in Patna) and I wanted to show a variety of Indian groups (Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists), including Deaf Indians (and myself as a Deaf Indian).


(Hat-tip: Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel at the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival group page on Facebook)

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Temporary Poem of My Time by Yehuda Amichai

On 26 January, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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This is System Error, a film by Guli Silberstein. Here’s how he describes it:

Pixelated, glitchy desert images from the disputed Israeli-Palestinian region and electronic soundscape are integrated with a poem by the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, and read by the actress Gila Almagor, transmitting an urgent message to stop the continuing violence by all sides in the Middle East. The work highlights the absurdity and pain of repeating human patterns of error, turmoil and destruction, and the difficulties of communication in deaf, chaotic world.

The English translation used in the film is by Barabara and Banjamin Harshav.

Monster Movie by Matt Mullins

On 23 January, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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A new author-made videopoem from Matt Mullins. Poet as Godzilla (rather than poet as god, à la Vicente Huidobro) is definitely a concept I can get behind. For the first couple of minutes, I was puzzled by all the different screen arrangements, but it eventually made sense… in fact, using videopoetry to critique movie making and movie watching is something that should happen more often, I think.

A Man’s a Man for a’ That by Robert Burns

On 22 January, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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https://vimeo.com/116846135

A new poetry film by Alastair Cook and Luca Nasciuti is always worth celebrating. This is one of three:

Filmpoem director Alastair Cook invited Makar Liz Lochhead, the National Poet of Scotland, to read three of Robert Burns’s poems and together with Italian composer Luca Nasciuti they have created three beautiful interpretations of some of Burns’s most loved works: I Murder Hate, Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation and A Man’s a Man for a’ That.

Watch all three films on the Filmpoem website. For more on Liz Lochhead, see her page at the Scottish Poetry Library.

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when by Ottar Ormstad

On 21 January, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 4 Comments - Author-made videopoems, Concrete and visual poetry
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Experimental poetry can sometimes seem excessively cerebral and lacking in emotion, but Norwegian visual poet Ottar Ormstad escapes that trap here with the help of terrific still images and a compelling score. The description from Ormstad’s upload to Vimeo is worth quoting at length:

In the film “when” Ottar Ormstad is transferring his practice as concrete poet to the realm of a programmable networked space, blending his poetry with specially composed modern music and electronic elements. His photographs are presented in combination with words in different languages, most of them presented as “letter-carpets”. Some sentences are from well known songs or films, other letter-combinations are invented by the author.

The film is telling a story about life and death, basically from the standpoint of cars, rotten in a field in Sweden. The narrative is open, and each viewer may experience the film very differently. It is also dependent upon the viewer’s language background, any translation is – intentionally – not given.
This experimental film cannot be translated in a traditional way. The words in different languages are integrated in the poetic expression. Subtitles are irrelevant.

The music and the animation was created in close cooperation with the author.
Music: Hagen & Nilsen from Xploding Plastix
Animation: Ina Pillat
Script, photographs, visual poetry by director & producer: Ottar Ormstad

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