The Dice Player

Closed wounds

On Loop

The Thing With Feathers

Your memory is my freedom

essen – stück mit aufblick

Guest: The Zebra Poetry Film Festival
Two art forms create a new genre: the poetry film

The poetry film is as old as the movies. Edwin S. Porter made the first poetry in the world based on Clement Clark Moore’s ‘The Night before Christmas’ (1822) in 1905 in Thomas Edison’s New York studios.

Poetry film could be defined as a short film based on a poem. In this genre film as an art form proceeds no differently than other art forms, whether music, dance or the visual or digital arts. All found and still find in poems something that inspires and challenges them artistically. Poetry film was developed by avant-gardists in film and poetry who struggled to join the new medium – film – with the older literary art. Apollinaire and Man Ray were two of them, as were writers of the Wiener Gruppe around Ernst Jandl, including Gerhard Rühm, H.C. Artmann, and also Friederike Mayröcker, all of whom went to great effort and expense to create thrilling poetry films in the 1950s.

Only with the arrival of computers in our homes in the 1980s and 90s did poetry film enjoy a boom and develop rapidly around the world. After evolving over 100 years and with the help of new technical resources, film is now in a position to respond structurally to a 5000 year-old poetic tradition: to switch from reality to virtual reality, to spirituality, etc. thanks to editing techniques that correspond to instantaneousness and to poetic writing without simply illustrating it.

The Zebra Poetry Film Festival was founded 2002. It is held every two years and is the largest communication platform for poetry film worldwide. Its archive contains more than 5000 films.

The programme has been specially curated for Leukerbad and presents fascinating aspects of international poetry film.

For times and venue
see the detailed programme.

www.zebrapoetryfilm.org