SEE OR BE SEEN.

The Second Vancouver Videopoem Festival

Pacific Cinematheque 

Vancouver, British Columbia 

November 2-4, 2000

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

As a poet, I was both curious and apprehensive to see how a poem, which needs to be responded to subjectively, would be interpreted and made concrete through actual images--what would be interdisciplinary or remain an organic form? What I found during the three-day festival is that the condensed form of a poem makes it ideal for delivery through a short film or video; the union of forms allows viewers, through superimposed words over images, to build their own poem.

The festival was hosted by The Edgewise Electrolit Centre, a non-profit multi-media organization whose stated mandate is to observe 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 second year, the festival featured mostly Canadian works, though there were several international submissions, each representing diverse spoken word, visuals and style.

The three-day event began with a poetry and video workshop hosted 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 two 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 poem can lessen the effectiveness of the film if both are not unified. Successful works like In My Car (1999) by Mike Hoolboom, a narrative poem about a six-year-old Catholic boy hiding from his family, allowed the poetic content to be beautifully defined by haunting black and white images. Ebonic Plague (1998) by Ian Moore, is a filmed spoken-word piece by poet James Cagney Jr., and offers a scathing discourse on stereotypes of race and of co-opting language in American English.

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

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

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