video poems

A project of META CULTURAL FOUNDATION
Funded by THE ROMANIAN MINISTRY OF CULTURE AND CULTS through PROMOCULT 2007 Programme and THE ROMANIAN CULTURAL INSTITUTE through CANTEMIR PROGRAMME



In 1924, Victor Brauner, the famous surrealist painter of later, and Ilarie Voronca, poet, invented, as the “avant-garde” that they were, “pictopoetry”, of which, in a manifesto, they wrote: “Pictopoetry is not painting. Pictopoetry is not poetry. Pictopoetry is pictopoetry”. Paraphrasing them, we could say that videopoetry is not video creation, videopoetry is not poetry, videopoetry is videopoetry!

A relatively new species, a “chimera”, part image, part sound, and part text, it is Protean and in continuous expansion. We have seen it in all its diversity a few years back, at a festival in Berlin (the organizers had invited American Bob Holman himself, a sort of Pope of “alternative” poetry). A throng of young people were packing a few projection rooms where tens of movies were being shown simultaneously, they were strolling from one room to another, so that, just like me, they would miss as little as they could from all that. I watched then a whole load of short films, some created by videocreators, starting from poetic texts, or from authors, poets or poetesses, others created by poets (of the visual). Sometimes, the film can be an elongation of the text, a free interpretation, the text is only a pretext for another message. The “species” of videopoetry has its individuals as different from each other as some biological species.



Eva Pervolovici's project is one of the first self-assumed attempts at videopoetry in Romania. She started it a few years ago, when she was still a student in cinema school. She picked a few well-known authors, and designed a few scripts so that the whole would also speak about her. Eva was known until now more as an excellent young prose writer (as a student, she wrote a collective novel on a forum written by young people who hadn't met, but who shared a common passion: graffiti – the novel, in fact, is called Graffiti Files). Now she starts here cinema career in an equally provocative fashion: with videopoetry.




So, it is as I've said: videopoetry is not video creation, videopoetry is not poetry, videopoetry is videopoetry!

Simona Popescu