Related Articles • “Busted For Poetry,” an account of the 1999 Chicago Videopoem Festival • Our library of poetry video links

Elsewhere on the Web • Zebra International Poetry Film Festival • literaturWERKstatt Berlin • Review of Zebra festival by Ulrike Jung in e-poets.net's Plain Text series • Vancouver Videopoem Festival

The literaturWERKstatt in Berlin is the most progressive poetry organization in the world. Under the tireless visionary leadership of Thomas Wohlfahrt and a dedicated crew of staff and volunteers, the WERKstatt has grown from the official keeper of the propaganda flame on Mayakovskiringe in East Berlin to a capitalist Utopia that has sent a trainload of international poets across the TranSiberian Railroad and recently hosted the Zebra Awards & International Poetry Film Festival.

It was the scale of the event that impressed most: over 300 entrants, directors flown in from Malaysia, the US and India, taking over the Alexanderplatz Hotel… And a grand prize of 5,000 Euros to the winning film, the hilarious, moving “15th of February” by director Tim Webb and poet Peter Reading -- a true collaboration between the uneasy arts of po and film. Zebra invoked a deep belief that Something New was being birthed, and whether it was a hybrid, or a new type of poem, or a way for poetry to get to the cinema audience, was beside the point. The energy was the point, the debate was the point, and the art was right there in the middle.

The literaturWERKstatt is the centerpiece of the Kulturbrauerei, an old brewery with great East brick buildings and cobbled streets, fitted out with a contemporary eight-screen cineplex, restaurants, shops, a recording studio, and three stages. It is a perfect trope: culture is definitely brewing here. Wohlfahrt also is the director of the larger entity, but maybe not for much longer. Although he was able to pull off this huge venture with extraordinary support from international telecom giant ZBD and Mercedes, among others, the Berlin city government is still threatening to cut funding. The ZBD support is especially interesting. Wohlfahrt has shown that the open imagery of poetry films is an excellent opening for dialogue with oral cultures, putting into practice many of the ideas in Walter Ong's seminal Orality and Literacy (the subject of a feature article I've written to be posted here at About Poetry next month).

Poetry works. It communicates at levels that subvert the systems of follow-up studies and statistics. And the prizewinners at Zebra prove this.

What is a poetry film? is still up for grabs, but the main theater at the Kulturbrauerei was filled with people who wanted to see the work, and then debate it at the panels and parties. The first prize winner used film, stop action, animation, and juicy vocal cutups to get across a poem of an Everything-ventured-Nothing-gained hilarious heartbreak. Using the oral poetic techniques of repetition and the very real voice of the poet, avant garde techniques of speeding up the camera and crosscutting the vocals into an orgasmic mash, and brilliantly filmed, “15th of February” is both an instant classic and a mega crowd-pleaser. It also has the sense of detail (some of the shoppers in the line-drawn section have genitalia visible, if your eyes are fast enough to outdistance your imagination) so that, like any good poem, repeated viewings offer deeper readings.

In second place was a Greek film, black and white, called “Global Positioning System,” by George Drivas and Maria Antelman. Stills of highway driving, the detritus of the freeways, the boredom of the toll booth, are undercut by cyber-stylized subtitles of an abused partner questioning a recently ended love affair. Meanwhile a brilliant soundtrack of whizzing auto noises adds a symphony meaning -– everything jelling at the final O. Henry line, where the speaker is revealed as Your Car.

Controversy ruled over the third place decision. The camera is locked on a woman gesturing at the lens. Wordlessly, but with guttural hisses and erratic breaths, the gestures take on urgency and seem to define characters. Not everyone in the audience recognized the poet as speaking in sign, as a deaf poet presenting a poem in the only way it could be transmitted other than live. For the deaf, film is the book. For the sign-language-impaired audience, there came the realization that a poetry film can allow you the experience of not understanding, of seeing a poem in a language the way the deaf “hear” silence. The simplicity of “Unsagbar” (“the Unsayable”), the violence as the poet strode through the camera at the minute-long poem's conclusion, spoke volumes.

A special prize was given to “Gedichte von Ernst Jandl” (“Poem by Ernst Jandl”), the Austrian dada poet. Made on an Atari computer, and comprised solely of a grid of 50 mouths, this uproarious film, made in 1982, showed how the techniques of sound poetry could come marvelously alive in the medium of film. Jandl dedicated his poem to another poet and member of the Vienna group, Gerhard Ruhm, who performed and spoke at Zebra. His presence was the defining point of the event. His own writing with, for, and directly on film over 50 years ago reminded us that poets have been using film as a medium since film was created -- that the tradition of the surrealists like Cocteau and Bunuel is alive and struggling (as ever) -- not at the MTV Awards. (Quick! Music videos are commercials for music biz product; poetry films are noncommercial collaborations between the arts. MTV: cut on the Beat; Zebra: Don't you dare cut the Beat!)

To compete in the next Zebra, in 2004, you will have to have made your poetry film between 2002-04. Get busy! PTV is on the horizon.

Bob Holman

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