The other Vancouver Videopoem Festival Pacific Cinematheque Vancouver.

The other Vancouver Videopoem Festival

Pacific Cinematheque

Vancouver, British Columbia

November 2-4 2000

For bards and those who read verse the poetic form can be relatively unenlightened as a discipline and as an art. by means of the use of video or flash animation, combined with digital imaging, verse Web sites are exemplifying new-found accessibility to this genre The Vancouver Videopoem Festival showcases this brave of recent origin world of visual poetry. Vancouver's is individual of only four videopoem festivals in the world, the others being located in Chicago, San Francisco (the cinE-Poem Festival) and Rome

As a author of poems I was both curious and apprehensive to behold how a poem, which penurys to be responded to subjectively, would be interpreted and made harden through actual images--what would be interdisciplinary or remain an organic form? What I construct during the three-day festival is that the condens form of a metrical composition makes it ideal for delivery between the sides of a short film or video; the union of forms allows viewers, by the agency of superimposed words over images, to build their have poem.

The festival was armyed by The Edgewise Electrolit middle a non-profit multi-media organization whose stated mandate is to eye how art, technology and aesthetics interact. Their programs include a live reading series, "Telepoetics," a Web site and e-zine called The Edgewise Cafe and the Vancouver Videopoem Festival. In its other year, the festival featured mainly Canadian works, though there were several international submissions, each representing diverse parole word, visuals and style.

The three-day end began with a poetry and video workshop entertainered by poet Jill Battison and Chicago writer and media artist Kurt Heintz. The facilitators discussed developing standards for this form, defining the work and understanding the aesthetics of videopoetry. Thirty-four works were viewed the following brace nights, and a final gala involved the presentation of awards for Best Videopoem, Best Direction, Best Performance and People's Choice.

The danger of videopoetry, of course, is that a weak piece of poetry can lessen the effectiveness of the film if the two are not unified. Successful works like In My Car (1999) at Mike Hoolboom, a narrative piece of poetry about a six-year-old Catholic lad hiding from his family, allowed the poetic ease to be beautifully defined by dint of haunting black and white images. Ebonic Plague (1998) through Ian Moore, is a filmed spoken-word piece according to poet James Cagney Jr., and moves a scathing discourse on stereotype of race and of co-opting language in American English.

yet there were few, the les fortunate films suffered from an inability to engage the viewer forward the visual level. It was frustrating to be confined through a filmmaker's limited generosity, as in Singing Grace (2000) on Seema Goel. Described as "a piece forward the process of constructing and deconstructing and recognizing identity with an emphasis upon ethnic or other," the five-minute short consists of words being written upon a woman's feet with icing while a metrical composition is recited. Sinonym (1999), at Brett Kashmeren, described itself as "a pretentious collection of work"--imagine nine minutes of blurr images and electronic music superimposed with words like "text" "color" and "brightness" with nearly inaudible undecayed Videopoetry works when it recognizes the tempers evoked by the poem and adds a unifying visual backdrop. This was achieved beautifully through Marc Gagnon and Ian Ferrier's literal meanings from an Ice Age (2000) a simple piece with an expos negative of a speaking poet

In an increasingly visual society, rhyme has moved from the oral tradition to a rich multi-medium relying onward the audience to adapt to a of the present day visual literacy. However, for those participating in the festival, filmmakers and viewing audience alike, the underlying disposition of the festival was simply the excitement of discovering a of recent origin way to translate imagination into the world.

TERESA MCWHIRTER is a Vancouver, BC-based writer whose first novel any Girls Do is forthcoming.

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