Poetry Screening in Brooklyn

The Picture Show presents “Video Poems & Prose Poems”

When: Friday, April 4, 2014 at 7.30pm

Where: 226 Green st. Brooklyn, NY 11222

What happens when you take poetic language and amplify it with a montage of images and sounds? Do the images and sounds suggest hidden dimensions of the text? Do they make a dense and difficult text easier to approach? When we are lucky, words, images and sounds combine to create a powerful and multidimensional experience, a magical fusion of inner and outer landscape. Here are 8 of my favorite examples. -David Finkelstein

 

Make Me a Doorway
(2012, 4 minutes)
Text: Alexzenia Davis
Film: Jesse Russell Brooks III
featuring Alexzenia Davis, Erika Ewing, Laila Petrone
Make Me A Doorway is not only an ode to love, but also an examination of self-awareness. In a true collaboration between writer and film maker, Make Me A Doorway defines the power of self discovery, considers what photography makes of lost love, and reveals how these reflections transform us. www.alexzeniadavis.com

She Learns to Lunge
(2014, 7 minutes)
Text and film: Katya Yakubov
How many shapes do the terrors of the mind take? Several transformations lead to an awakening between a modern house and a dark forest. Rooted in a short poem, the images seemed to spring up and want to attach to the state of mind found in the text; piece by piece, the film was made. www.paperfilm.org

Opal Essence
(2010, 12 minutes)
Text: Marc Arthur
Film: Mike Kuchar
featuring Marc Arthur
He sighs for strange and hidden cities whose walls are pink stone, inlaid with opals, ebony and silver, and for altars where the body is worshiped under the shrine of night. www.vdb.org/artists/mike-kuchar

Witch Burning
(1998, 4 minutes)
Text: Sylvia Plath
Film: Antero Alli
“I was passing through a bleak period in my life, where one long chapter had ended while the next one had not yet written itself. In this dark rite of passage between worlds, I found solace in Plath’s words and its luminosity unexpectedly radiating from the black hole center of depression.” www.verticalpool.com

Earth and Moon in Love
(2004, 21 minutes)
Text: Percy Shelley
Film: David Finkelstein
featuring John Collis, David Finkelstein, Randall Wong
At the climax of Percy Shelley’s lyrical drama, “Prometheus Unbound,” Mankind is delivered once and for all from tyranny, and the Universe celebrates his newfound freedom and self-mastery. As part of this celebration, the Earth and the Moon fall rapturously in love. This musical setting for acclaimed countertenors Randall Wong and John Collis places the amorous planets among floating panels of scenery which illustrate almost every line of the text, creating a visual/musical feast which is at once silly, mystical, and delirious. www.lakeivan.org

The Miami Dentist
(2011, 8 minutes)
Text and film by David Baeumler
featuring David Baeumler, Kevin Silva
You’re safe, warm and beautiful. You’re not surrounded by Chinese troops in the sub-zero battle of the Chosin Reservoir. So why not take a moment to learn some facts about the Miami Dentist? www.sometimesonsundays.com

When Walt Whitman was a Little Girl
(2012, 12 minutes)
Text: M.C. Biegrner
Film: Jim Haverkamp
This film mixes drama, dance, puppetry, and oddball humor to portray the world through the eyes of a ‘sensitive kid.’ Walt awakens to the mysteries and wonder of nature, leaves her home to seek fame and adventure, is plunged into the horror of war, and finally begins to understand the unspoken poetry of childhood. www.jimhaverkamp.com

Understory
(1997, 8.5 minutes)
Text and film by Peter Rose
Described as a cross between “a ceremony and an incantation”, the work presents us with a story-like skein of images that suggest the journey of a figure that walks in water, the speech of fire, and the mystery of vision. www.peterrosepicture.com

 

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