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on starting out in poetry video:
a call for advice... part 2

If your group are going to be a self-contained poetry video production team, you will need to cultivate a deep and lively dialogue about your ideas. I suspect you enjoy that already, given Pan Left's quality output. But now, as opposed to representing those ideas more literally, you will have to engineer your group to render them on screen, in sound, and in language in much more figurative terms. This aspect of poetry video leaves a lot more of the project open to interpretation than a documentary would.

Cinematic language for poetry video can be far more sketchy, arbitrary, and subjective. So the lead-times (preproduction) for such a project can get quite long as you simply figure out what you want to do, even for short pieces running no more than three or five minutes. A lot of labor goes into matters of representation. Finding an apt metaphor for something is not so hard, but cultivating the group's agreement of interpretation for that metaphor can be astoundingly hard. You will have to do this while being cooperative and not hegemonic, because the common will of your group is the fuel that propels them toward a finished poetry video.

... convening a poetry video production team also means defining the terms of engagement, as well as the terms of the genre...

Adding to this paradox of creativity versus control is the need to define editorial prerogatives among your partners -- being able to say who is responsible for decisions to cut, add, and alter the production in specific regards, and knowing that the members of the group will be OK with those decisions. As a working documentary group, you already have much familiarity with that. But the tensions in a poetry video may rise due to the subjectivity of the content and the passions of people advocating particular elements in the production. They elevate particularly when you are cutting, adding, or altering creative ideas instead of factual reportage you've collected from the world as a third-person observer. You can distribute the decision powers to whomever you like among your partners. But aquiescing to the decisions of others is rarely an easy thing for creative minds, and therein lies the potential for much chafing between your team members. When you have six poets in a room, you'll have eight opinions, and it gets no better when you swap out a few poets for filmmakers. And when even a few of those minds see their identities at stake, as their personal creative investments rise or fall with the editing of the production, the scene can get pretty hot.

However, there are rewards in this, allowing the elements of your video to be vulnerable to one another through creative dialogue. You'll see how the image impinges upon the text, how the text reacts and then impinges upon the sound, and how the sound reacts to impinge upon the image. And so on. All this can take place at aesthetic and conceptual levels, not just literally. You could call this a dialectic, but it's a multipolar debate, strung between the competing needs of the poem's language, the ear's ambience, and the eye's gaze. If you allow these elements (and others) to play off each other as you negotiate how your poetry video is rendered, it will be the product of a true collaboration, and the video will communicate that to the viewer in its many channels. Because your aesthetic expression will be coming at the viewer from multiple directions, the viewer may not have words to express their appreciation. And if your production is really seamless, they'll simply digest this whole experience as one idea. But they will appreciate what you've done. The wholeness of such a video creates its own compelling experience that stays with the viewer when the clip is long over.

If you restrain this interaction, on the other hand, you may still get good results, merely more predictable or "safe" ones owing to the limits of the mutual interactions (directly correlated to mutual inspirations) among the partners. That's the tendency, at least, as I've seen it. The viewer will be able to tell which parts of the video came first in the production, instead of experiencing it as a subtly layered whole. An autocratic producer can have an extraordinary vision, too, and carry a poetry video off to success. However, she or he will have to be very inspired and very energetic to do so for very long. The burden of the autocrat is that they have to personally ruminate over all those interactions of language, sound, and text, they still have to be the boss, too. Not easy.

Obviously, it's much more desirable to go for the more layered and multipolar rendering than a more discreetly stratified one, because the viewer tends to get a lot more to think about in the end. (Maya Deren had a lot to say about this once, when she said that such filmmaking was vertical, that the significances stacked upon each other, instead of being laid out horizontally, in sequence, as a less poetic film would do.) Such videos tend to have a wholeness to them that uses the negotiated blend of image, sound, and text to aesthetic advantage. Politely segregating or structuring the creative influences from one another will probably give you more results in less time, but they'll be diminished results.

Past this, there is one other tactic you can employ for effective poetry video. One might call it the "gun and run" method. It goes like this...

Find a poet. Put a wire on them. You should make sure that your poet is good at performing in a pinch. Take the poet to a location that's apt for the poem they intend to perform. Get out of the car, roll tape, and get them performing in situ. Do as many takes as your guts and manners allow you to get away with. If the poet is a little outrageous, circumstances may not allow for very many takes. If you can shoot B-roll material before your poet has to perform, or even has to be with you, do so.

... putting the "gun and run" method of poetry video-making to work...

Then get back in the car and leave. Where possible, be as legal as you can. (I personally never encourage people to break the law, not even for art.) If police impede you -- and this is entirely possible in tense situations where activists and filmmakers find themselves in the same moment, such as in Haskell Wexler's film Medium Cool -- use discretion in rolling tape on the police. You do not want your tape be confiscated as evidence and therefore leave your production in jeopardy.

Review the tape at home. Edit the take you like the best, dropping in B-roll for those gaffes that you couldn't quite cover when you were shooting live. Finish the video to a disc or cassette, and make duplicates then and there if you can. Hold onto one copy for safekeeping. Hand another copy to your poet. Go out for beers or coffee to celebrate. Sleep well that night.

The scheme above relies on two things: your ability to wrangle a camera and gear on the spot, and the poet's ability to perform there. But such productions can work like one-take wonders if you get in a good groove with a poet.

A dilemma can arise sometimes, depending upon the strength of your poet's charisma and their ability to carry the moment. Slam poets these days seem to exude charisma as a professional courtesy. Don't be afraid to use charisma, just don't rely on it, because when a performance poet goes flat on camera, it's ugly. And with too much charisma there may come pathos, which can turn off the audience. Skepticism may ensue, too, which an audience may feel as a direct result of having their buttons pushed, their emotions played over their common sense. A real masterpiece-quality poetry video may get away with this and still not look dogmatic or didactic, particularly if the video makers have political aspirations. You want the audience to feel engaged as they receive your message, and not feel scolded, or like they've been condescended to.

That's all I can type in one morning, so I hope it will suffice. Again, thanks for asking about poetry video. It's a real passion for me. This exciting genre is still wide open. Make the best of it!

much respect -
- Kurt Heintz
e-poets network, Chicago

for further reading online:

Follow these links that relate to the discussion:

Medium Cool, a film by Haskell Wexler (1969)

This movie was shot during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, wherein anti-war riots erupted in Grant Park and elsewhere across the city. Scenes were filmed in Grant Park, among protesters and police in action. For futher reading, see the Internet Movie Database and VideoFlicks.ca.

TVTV (Top-Value Television)

Guerilla videomaking has roots extending well into the 1970s and earlier. Read about TVTV and Paper Tiger Television, independent video artists in New York, as showcased by WNET/13, and survey indie video through Image Union, the longest-running program on US television to showcase independent productions.

Maya Deren

One of the United States' first true independent filmmakers, Maya Deren made art films that prefigure poetry video through her concept of "verticality" -- how ideas compound one another through simultaneous signification and contextualization, versus narrative's tendency toward "linearity." Read about Deren's own significance in early American experimental film through this authoritative website by Moira and Jay Sullivan.

To see the start of the discussion between Ryn Shane Armstrong and Kurt Heintz... read the first half of the correspondence.

Kurt Heintz is founder of the e-poets network, a writer and media artist living in Chicago.

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