More examples, please. I think these would be right up my alley.
Manhatta, Berlin: Symphony of a City, Opus 1, L’Etoile de mer come to mind first. Not a whole lot of people called their movies “cinepoems” and it’s a rather arbitrary term that I give more focus to than I think anybody else, but it’s basically non-narrative films generally from the silent era and shortly afterward that are not strictly surrealist or experimental. Many Dadaist filmmakers successfully managed to make cinepoem-like movies like Ballet Mechanique, but there are also those documentaries that revel in the simple image of things, like Ralph Steiner’s H20 and Joris Ivens Rain. Many of these I’m citing directly from the Avant-Garde set from Kino, but I’ve seen them appear throughout early film collections and in the occasional film history course/festival. After synchronized sound, however, nobody called them cinepoems. They became “underground cinema” “experimental cinema” “avant-garde cinema” whether they were truly underground, experimenting with anything, or at the forefront of any type of thought. I think they are the films that exist without a necessary need to explanation and can be taken at their rote visual value. Ingenius eye-candy. At any rate, I want more of them.
—PolarisDiB
Wow. I have my work cut out for me. That Kino set looks exhaustive (just glanced at it on Netflix). How many discs is it in all?
I’ve just recently gotten into avant-garde cinema (having had a breakthrough experience with Wavelength ), and this is probably where I need to go to better understand the history of the genre.
The Kino sets are nowhere near exhaustive.
Unseen Cinema. Look into that set.
The Kino sets are two discs each.
Get By Brakhage, too.
Some other neat things I like are the Experiments in Terror discs and Anxious Animation from Other Cinema.
Hit up Grey Daisies’ profile, it’s full of more information than I’ve ever managed to compile on my own.
Wavelength is awesome. How did you see it? I was in a class and got a 16mm presentation of it. I would recommend Serene Velocity, another amazing and yet amazingly simple concept avant-garde film.
There’s an entire thread for avant-garde but this thread is half a call to arms as much as it is a revelation into alternative cinema. I’m saying people ought to start making this shit again. I will.
—PolarisDiB
I feel Koyaanisqatsi as a very poetic film. Do you think it qualify as a film poem?
Good point, and the other Qatsi movies, as well as Baraka, I would definitely place in that category.
—DiB
Interesting. The Fountain and The Mirror are two of my all time favourite films so I’m definitley going to have to check these cinepoems out (as if my to watch list wasn’t long enough…).
DiB, thanks for every recommendation above. Where available (and most are) I’ve added them to my Q.
Avant-garde cinema hits something primal in me. I don’t even really want to talk about it, but it’s very close to home for me and my creative spirit right now.
Since you asked, I saw Wavelength on You Tube, which I realize is shite. If I had the means, I would buy a local theater and show that film immediately. I HAVE to see it with an audience. Till then, I’m glad I’ve at least seen it.
I agree that Tarkovsky’s Mirror is definitely similar in many ways to the cinepoem. The work I’m currently doing and the work of many of the other Remodernist filmmakers would definitely be connected to cinepoetry- and I agree- it would be nice if more of this kind of work were being done.
I got third place in the Criterion haiku contest and won a free t-shirt.
Would this qualify like an early example of “cinepoetry”?
What about Roy Andersson? I’m not familiar with cinepoetry but some of his work seems to fit my interpretation of what you’re talking about.
I love Roy Andersson.
DAvril: Actually, I’d say so. Except the “early” part. Cinepoetry seems, to me, to be a mostly silent era, we’re not concerned just yet with coming up with an original story just look at what we can do, type of thing. I love the classical allusions in this.
Matt: Hoy boy. Now that I’ve basically arbitrary picked a word from some early shorts I’ve seen casually and turned it into a genre, I probably need to do some research into what I’m trying to express, huh? Refer me to some Roy Andersson and I’ll certainly get back to you, the point of this thread is I’m interested in exploring this concept.
Jesse: Can I see some of your work and some of this “Remodernist” filmmaking you’ve spoken of?
—PolarisDiB
You know Jesse Richards is famous? I knew who he was before I came on this site. Respect remodernism!
Roy Andersson – You, The Living (Netflix WI), Songs from the Second Floor
Pleased to meet you and this could indeed be very useful to getting to the root of what I’m trying to figure out, here.
Doing a bit of general i-research now on the remodernists. Seems it’s been surrounding me (a show in me hometown) for quite a while and I’ve just never noticed it before.
Jesse, about your Manifesto: where is it published so that I may read it? I will warn you, however, that I am not a huge fan of manifestoes of any type. I find them curious but I rarely follow them.
I look forward to discussing this further but I just got invited to food and drink. Hard to turn down when I’ve been on the computer all day. However, remodernism might be interesting to one of my old professors who seems to be doing the same thing when he talks about “undependent cinema”.
—PolarisDiB
@PolarisDiB Are you talking about the show ReMo? I don’t know much about that show. About the manifesto, it’s not really meant to be “followed” in the normal sense- more of its purpose was to inspire filmmakers to think about how to find new freedoms in the creative/filmmaking process. I don’t know if I explained that well… They’re suggestions, ideas- not rules. I wrote it after being asked by lots of people to clarify the idea of “remodernist film”- which is essentially a call for a return to personal, spiritual, and emotionally authentic filmmaking- something which the larger machine of filmmaking in many ways ends up discouraging.
My manifesto (written in 2008) can be read here on my blog (the other publications of it sometimes leave the lists out):
http://jesse-richards.blogspot.com/2008/08/remodernist-film-manifesto.html
and here are some newer essays by myself and two others that expand and redefine a few things (5 pages, links are at the top):
http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_28.html?page=31#2219
Here are a few remodernist short films that might considered connected to cinepoetry:
Also a lot of remodernist filmmaker Rouzbeh Rashidi’s stuff I think is related to cinepoetry:
http://www.youtube.com/user/RouzbehRashidi
Anyway I don’t want to hijack this thread any more than this post because I think we should explore 1920’s cinepoetry a lot more- but if you want to discuss remodernist film further, a new thread on that might be better.
I think we should explore 1920’s cinepoetry a lot more
The last five minutes of Waxworks (1924) look like an animated Expressionist painting. (the poetic sequence actually begins around 8:20 of part 8/9.
PolarisDiB
Man, you know what I miss? “Cinepoems”, “film poems”, those early 1910s-1930s movies that weren’t quite “experimental” but certainly weren’t narrative and that indulged in the movement and rhythmic cutting of celluloid. Cinepoems are a dead art, unfortunately, as underground filmmakers started getting full of themselves and “saying things” with their movies, and synchronized sound took away the rhythmic editing style and replaced it with the needs of audio-to-visual matching editing. I think the last true cinepoem was Tarkovsky’s Mirror, but that there’s a hint of its underlying survival in such things as Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain.
I just watched a film poem by Herman G. Weinberg called Autumn Fire, and it was just amazing. There ought to still be more of this—it’s time to revive it.
—PolarisDiB