Project

Poetry of Urban Existence  ::  Video Poetry Project

The purpose of this project is to create a mosaic of poetical videos about New York to present a personal memory of the collective BEING happening in the present day city.

Video poetry is a convenient means of combining the best in poetry and video to reflect on and represent personal understanding of the bigger environs. Approximately 20 videos, each 1-5 minutes long, will comprise this project with each video dealing with different aspects of the present time city seen through the personal eye and expressed in a poetic way.

Video poetry has characteristics of both, the visual image and spoken word. As video it relies on such structural elements as composition, movement, rhythm, sound, expressive visuals, graphical text, animation, and still images. It also employs versatile viewing angles, explores creative use of camera, montage and editing techniques. As a spoken word, it can employ the rhyme, melody, repetition, emotional content stylistic devises (like allegory or metaphor), and follow the structural framework of a poem.

Poetic video is related to a music video or cinematic essay, whose predecessors in cinema history include Chris Marker or Georges Melies (see more in The Cinematic Essay). For example, Chris Marker’s film ‘La Jetee’ is a highly poetic sequence of still black and white images, each image being a poem in itself, intensified by a hypnotic narration. The film is poetic, reflexive, inventive, and introspective.

A poetic video can skip lyrics altogether. It can be poetic in itself, like graphic and rhythmic videos by Norman McLaren, Len Lye, Walter Ruttmann, or Dziga Vertov. It does not even have to employ sound like old silent cinema.  It can combine text and images in the most unexpected way like in films by Dadaist and surrealist Marcel Duchamp.

Our video project “Poetry of Urban Existence” to some extend continues the cinematic tradition of of city symphony (such as Walter Ruttmann’s ‘Berlin: Symphony of a Great City’), but mainly is meant to express our personal feelings about and reflections on living in the big city.

The range of emotions and explored topics includes detachment from nature and sense of alienation (Inside/Outside), impossibility of intimate contact between people (MARINA), anxiety and tension of the night city expressed through scattered jumpy images and sounds of the neighborhood (Lights of Chinatown) and attempt at registering some fleeting moment through concentrated and meditative look (Firefly).