Fragmented

Cape Town
Co-director / Poet / Choreographer: Khanyisile Mbongwa
Co-director / Camera / editor: James Tayler
Performers: Zenande Mankayi, Nicole Olsen
4'53’’
2009

In Cape Town, a city divided along race and class lines, two women can't quite meet and can't quite let go. One gay, one straight, one black, one coloured, the spaces they inhabit connect them, and yet become the thing that separates them from each other. "Fragmented" is a dance poem about the physical and psychological identity of women in the city. They dance in urban spaces marked by masculine architecture that denies the organic curves of their bodies. They venture into marginal areas in which they are subject to intimidation or violation, areas marked by gang graffitti where only men walk safely. Their silhouettes become windows into the cityscape, in a film that dreams of a place where, in a line from the hushed internal monologue of the poem, "I forget your sex and your skin colour".

Circles

Cape Town
Writer / director: Terry Westby-Nunn
01’54’’
2009

The circle is a prevalent symbol within the city - hardwired for signage, transport and mechanical efficiency. Our lives are ordered by the circle, both externally and internally. This video poem asks viewers whether they too are running rings around their city lives.

Between

Johannesburg
Artist / poet: Colleen Alborough
Sound artist / voice: João Orecchia
2'51’’
2009

Between is an exploration of Johannesburg city space. It considers how daily movement through exterior city space infiltrates and affects your interior world. Between tracks a turbulent journey along a tarred road. It traces the tarmac and the road-markings along the way. Its pace is fast and creates a disorienting viewing experience, as the road-markings and sounds are animated in sync with the speed of the journey. It explores the pace of Johannesburg and the constant, dizzying speed that embodies our way of being in this city.

This Place Forever (excerpt)

Pretoria
Artist / director: Fabian Oliver Wargau
Composer: Hedley Vincent
2009

This excerpt from This Place Forever is a broken debate between two twenty-somethings about insecurity, love affairs and the environment of the city. The video drastically abbreviates their reflections on the permanence versus non-permanence of life as well as compatibility versus incompatibility between people, becoming in itself something transitory, to be used like the city. The film draws on a combination of poetic visual texts which are displayed as subtitles against the raw sound of passing vehicles and the hushed underlying original score.

Player 1.1

Port Elizabeth / Grahamstown
Artist / director: Mark Wilby
Performer: Gary Gordon
4'00''
2008

A man in a desolate warehouse landscape mutters the obsessive rhythms of share prices and stock market reports. It is an accountant’s incantation of shock, the nightmare of a stockbroker, evidence of an addiction that has erased him, adding up to nothing.

Walking in Plastic

Cape Town
Choreographer / performer: Mduduzi Nyembe
Poet / voice: Bandile Gumbi
Artist / director: Kai Lossgott
2009

Performance artist Mduduzi Nyembe presents a memory of a wounded woman, a dream for an absent father, and a dance in a street market for survival. They are ritual stories of the heartache of the slums – substance abuse, violence, gender inequalities, chronic unemployment, families’ incapacity to provide for and protect their children. Each of Nyembe’s characters, taken from his daily interactions in the township, is left, in the words of poet Bandile Gumbi, "a constant wanderer / always at the beginning of complete circles", trapped in the existential cycle of poverty.

The Electrician

Cape Town
Artist / director: Terry Westby-Nunn
Poet / voice / performer: Tanya van Schalkwyk
2'5''
2009

Cities are the dressing rooms of our dreams / fantasies. "The Electrician" romps through another side of Cape Town's blackouts and energy crises, as well as the mind of a city dweller. Is the electrician a figment of her imagination or is she part of an underground city - alternate to the one we read about in the papers and believe to be true? Reality or imaginary, the city plays dress up with our minds.

Omdat ek die stadsrumoer (Because I chose the city noise)

Cape Town
Artist / director: Koeka Stander
Poet: William Rowland
Voice: Helene Rowland
03'21''
2009

A video poem that evokes the silent, boxed-in world of creatures living in aquarium tanks, viewed by casual tourists. In them we see our mirrored selves, trapped inside the noisy city landscape. The writer of the poem and song in this film was blinded at age four, but at 69 still has vivid memories of visiting an aquarium.

Waiting

Johannesburg
Artist / director: Rat Western
05’16’’
2007

Waiting is a lonely, domestic experience of urban, inner-city living as told from the perspective of a particular inhabitant. Waiting was originally designed as a comic/graphic story and was printed in book form, but was converted to a film for exhibition purposes.

I lost a poem

Johannesburg
Artist / director: Erica Luttich
Poet / artist: Anni Snyman
3'00''
2009

This video poem laments the loss of slow significant contact that a vehicle bound city inhabitant experiences, but also exalts in the infinitely interesting stream of image, noise and thought that flows by. In the timeframe of the automobile, images, moments and themes repeat continually. This transforms the city into an experience of motion and rhythm, rather than locality.

Orfea Outin by frankblame

Not a video poem, but an eerie, urban and gritty dance/performance film.

Green Grass by Michelle Firment Reid

http://www.michellefirmentreid.com

A superb example of a video poem by someone working across genres, as the artist is a painter and a poet and acted as producer of the video, but not as camera person or editor.

MTV Night Painter

This global MTV branding campaign by the South African production company Fly On The Wall uses poetry and video art techniques.

MTV Night Swimmer

This global MTV branding campaign by the South African production company Fly On The Wall uses poetry and video art techniques.

Julian Grey. Billy Collins. Forgetfulness. video poem. 2006

An awesome video poem by the US Poet Laureate and Julian Grey of Headgear. Big time inspiration.

Kai Lossgott. Melissa Butler. parentheses. video poem. 2008.

A video poem about Cape Town by the South African video artist Kai Lossgott and the American poet Melissa Butler, created to kickstart the City Breath project.