Videopoetry: A Manifesto
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I can’t remember what brought it on. Writing all the chapters of an introduction to videopoetry was going to be way too much, even from April 30 until tomorrow — for the first time I had all 4 months off. SO I wrote a MANIFESTO. (It’s very popular these days, have you noticed?)
Dave Bonta 4:28 pm on September 7, 2011 Permalink |
Thanks, Tom. I think this really brings clarity to what works in videopoetry and why. A lot of what you say about juxtaposition, the role of text and sound, and other elements really jibes with my own discoveries both as a curator of poetry videos and as an amateur videopoemographer, even if not everything I like necessarily fits under the videopoem umbrella as you’re describing it here. While “manifesto” implies a certain radicalism or zealotry, I think your approach is more broadly inclusive than that. I personally feel that one-to-one matches of film imagery to textual imagery are a recipe for boredom and bad filmmaking regardless of how we characterize the results, so I guess I see what you characterize as “poetry video” as a bit of a straw man. Yes, there are some videos that fit that definition, but I’m not sure how seriously we should take them.