The Falling Room - Nov 18th show

Halder offers these downloads of his radio show, The Falling Room, every week, and I really enjoy them during long night walks. Sharing, and not just because I'm in this one (it was a surprise this morning):

The Falling Room – November 18, 2011

This week’s show starts with three world fusion pieces; Lumin’s work “Lumin” and two compositions from Irfan titled “Salome” and “Monsalvato”.

Next is a well known Canadian artist to The Falling Room, The Violence and the Sacred, with their 1987 highly experimental piece “The Rivers of my Viscous Sperm” from the Lost Horizons CD. Another Canadian artist follows, Reinhard Von Berg with “Cult Figure” which completes the first half hour of the program.

The next half hour of The Falling Room continues with poet/artist Brenda Clews, with “What is Underground Is What Holds Us” from her Starfire album and Tetrix with “Imagination”.

I end the show with two tracks from the Polish artist Sulatus, from his new Tip album I present “Poland’s Sky” and “Not Sure”.


You can download the November 18, 2011 TFR here.

Please feel free to share the program with other artists or interested listeners.

Thank you for listening.
Joe (aka Halder)
Host and Produce of the Canadian Experimental Music Radio Program - THE FALLING ROOM
Broadcast live on Fridays at 8PM and repeated Tuesdays at Midnight on 103.7FM CFBU Radio

Royalty free music for professional licensing

Joe has played a number of poems from my Starfire album, here is the one he played last Friday (in case you don't want to download the whole hour, I wasn't sure - this player is easy to embed).

                              

Draft of an article for 'Theoretical Mondays'

A draft for an upcoming article at VidPoFilm - Mondays are Video/Filmpoetry theory.

When a filmmaker approaches a poem or the work of a poet, how does he or she interpret the verbal images visually?

I raise this question because I think a literarian (poet trained in literature) who videos/films a poem will approach it differently to a filmmaker (lover of poetry trained in film).

A poet might envision the video/filmpoem as a writer creating a videopoem for an unknown audience - from the centre outwards, or from the words to an audio visual corollary; whereas, a filmmaker, familiar with traditional filmmaking techniques and a better grasp of audience, might approach from that position to the centre - the poem itself.

Let me illustrate with a found image on which I have mapped this process (click on image for a larger view):

In my viewing and making of video/filmpoems over the past few years, I have noted differences between poets with no or little film training who make video/filmpoems and filmmakers who approach a poem with considerable experience and background in the art of filmmaking.

Yet, despite the filmmaker seeming to have the advantage of knowledge and experience and a network of contacts in the film world, all video/filmpoems, by neophytes or professionals, seem to struggle to find a large audience. Video/filmpoetry is a fairly new genre and while there are many different styles one thing common almost across the board is the minuscule audience in comparison to, say, music videos or even trailers for full-length films.

When I see the viewcounts on the filmpoems we are looking at this week, I am saddened. John Scott is a strong filmmaker who has crafted superb filmpoems, and yet the view counts are in the hundreds rather than in the tens or hundreds of thousands as these films deserve.

Personally I think it is a matter of training the public to see and understand the art form of the video/filmpoem. Difficulties viewers have with video/filmpoems is an area of focus in VidPoFilm. John himself says, "I'm interested in expanding the audience for "poetry" to people who might not normally consider poems interesting because they seem old fashioned, dry and/or intellectual."

If we go by the general view counts on YouTube or Vimeo, likely an 'expanded audience' will occur only if the video/filmpoems are aired on national television and shown and analyzed in classrooms around the world. Perhaps John Scott is in a position to enable this to happen with his Elizabeth Bishop series.

                              

FRIDAY VIDEO/FILMPOEM: Two Elizabeth Bishop poems filmed by John Scott

John Scott is an independent filmmaker and television producer. He has directed 14 projects, including documentaries, and currently is a professor in the Television-Radio Department at Ithaca College in New York. He has won many awards and his work is shown in film festivals around the world.

The question I put to John in an email on the two filmpoems (Sandpiper and One Art) he sent to VidPoFilm was, "both films have a visual narrative that connects to the poem, reflects its images, intersects with the poem without becoming simple illustration.

In creating a film poem, what is your intent? A new poem that emerges from the confluence of the art of a poet and filmmaker? Or a way to present a powerful and important poet's work to a wide audience? Your work is beautiful. A joy to watch."

He wrote:

I am not interested solely in being illustrative -- I am interested in at times being playful with the way the visuals/sounds and the words come together in an effort to use the expressive powers of visuals and sounds. There's lots of potential in the medium itself that I think might otherwise be lost if it is simply slaved word for word to the text. These two versions are especially free because they were kind of explorations in/experiments with using various techniques.

And further clarified with what he called "sort of the party line on style":

I believe the beauty of Bishop’s poetry is that it is so loaded with the spirit of the moment, in the fragmentary, in the lush, in the juxtaposition of contrasting images and in the point of view of its subjects. What’s needed to make this come alive is a lyrical visual style to re-interpret this world into the cinematic mode. The movie needs to make use of the expressive tools that can come with the cinematic voice including techniques like time exposure, time-lapse photography, play with screen size and aspect ratio, multiple-exposure and slow motion. The result will at times be highly expressive in an effort to give the world of the poetry a magical or a heightened point of view that will contrast with the more traditional feel of the narrative segments.

In these two filmpoems, you'll see many cinematic techniques, Bokeh, split screens, time lapse, different colours, but the images connect to the poems, recognizably. They are not impressionistic, abstract pieces that try to capture the mood or feeling evoked by the poems but are rooted in narrative. It is not a traditional narrative, though. Rather, we see a visual narrative that accompanies the readings of the poems but that does not literally portray or overtake the poems they are representing. There is a rhythm of camera angles and repetitions that gives a cadence or a musicality to the visual images as they unfold through the filmpoems. I particularly like the voices - the clarity of the readings in both pieces is superb, as is the timing. And the young girl's voice in Sandpiper is, of course, arresting. Also the movement of a central image, a sandpiper in Sandpiper and a dandelion seedhead in One Art, into drawing, from film photographic image to hand-drawn animated image is beautiful. These are both superb filmpoems. Do watch, and enjoy.


direct link: Sandpiper

From the notes at YouTube: ""Sandpiper" is a poem that was written by Elizabeth Bishop in 1965 and it is believed that it was based on observations she made on a trip she made as an adult back to Nova Scotia. Bishop's adult life took her in many directions and places, and she has explicitly compared herself to the sandpiper and (presumably) both of their quests to endlessly seek (enlightenment?) through careful observation."



direct link: One Art

Director’s Statement: At the age of six after losing her father and then her mother Elizabeth Bishop was forced to leave Great Village, Nova Scotia -- a town whose distinct oral traditions and whose warm and colourful characters had an affirming, restorative power on her. This shock set in motion a lifelong quest for Bishop (a woman who would become one of the twentieth century’s best poets) to find home and the peace of mind she had once experienced as a girl. Her quest had many tragic consequences in her restless adulthood, but she solves the riddle of how to lose in her old age, and in her poetry that engagingly re-imagines her early years in Nova Scotia.


John Scott says, "There's a larger project in the works here and it's spelled out completely by accident and really in too much detail here: http://elizabethbishopcentenary.blogspot.com/2011/10/filmmaker-john-d-scott-shares.html"

Please join his mailing list (click on Elizabeth Bishop Project) to be updated on the progress of this exciting filmpoetry project.