From ‘Liberated Words’ (2020)

Re: Videopoetry / Vidéopoésie Interview with Catherine Parayre.
Sarah Tremlett posted the following text on the Liberated Words website:
BY SARAH TREMLETT · PUBLISHED OCTOBER 8, 2020
http://liberatedwords.com/2020/10/08/videopoetry-videopoesie-interview-with-catherine-parayre-2020/

A while ago I mentioned the launch of the must-have publication on videopoetry ¬¬– Videopoetry / Videopoésie by pioneer Canadian practitioners Daniel H. Dugas and Valerie LeBlanc (Basic Bruegel). Valerie and Daniel have now conducted a really delightful, succinct and revealing interview see https://vimeo.com/447315272 with Catherine Parayre, editor at the book’s publishing house The Small Walker Press, Brock University, Ontario.

I am of course not impartial to their work since I was fortunate enough to be invited to write an essay for the book. In doing so I was able to excavate pure gold in terms of the history of videopoetry. This relatively short interview gives a glimpse into their world and how they work together. There are also some clever green screen projections and visually playful (I love the captioned birds behind them!) videos, which seem to have their own voice, almost stealing the thunder from their makers.
Some nuggets include their views on collaboration or shared vision: ‘when we witness the same events … reprocessing what we are seeing in different ways’; and their understanding of the term ‘videopoetry’ as opposed to referencing film, even though ‘the two are permeable today’. For them, they have always used video cameras (changing format across the decades) and worked with video as an accessible medium unlike film. Ultimately Daniel says he likes the term ‘video’ which comes from the Latin videre ‘to see’.

Catherine made a very poignant point about their video images; that though captured in a book, they seem to contain movement, as opposed to the still photograph. She emphasized that they weren’t ‘quite stable’. Daniel pointed out that often they were using older technology; or low grade consumer equipment that creates a ‘ghost’. But I feel there was more to that point, and I have noted how they work with time over and over again in their practice. This sense of passing through with video; the temporal philosophical estrangement of the moment, can become a rich metanarrative in the right hands. For Valerie and Daniel, time falters but does not stop.

Video Interview Videopoetry / Vidéopoésie (2020)

Here is our interview with Catherine Parayre of The Small Walker Press about our book Videopoetry / Vidéopoésie. Enjoy!

1 :07 min
Why this book?

2:33 min
Many of your works are collaborative, how do you work together on projects?

8:40 min
Your book is called Videopoetry / Vidéopoésie. Many people talk about film poems or cine poetry, what guides your choice of words?

11:44 min
How does a printed text do justice to time-based material?

15:55 min
In your practice of videopoetry, in what ways is the writing of poetry inspired or directed by the video component? What is the creative-writing process?

17: 45 min
How would you say that the end product, the published book with still images, is changing or not your videopoetry work?

20:04 min
A question about the movement in the images + conclusion

Interview with Catherine Parayre (2020)

Videopoetry / Videopoésie by Daniel H. Dugas and Valerie LeBlanc has been launched through the Small Walker Press, Centre for Studies in Arts and Culture, Brock University, St. Catharines, ON. Here are some still images from our recent conversation with Dr. Catherine Parayre, Editor at The Small Walker Press. The interview will be released next week!

The online version of the book can be downloaded for free at the following address: https://dr.library.brocku.ca/handle/10464/14790

The book is also available in paper version. Purchase inquiries: basicbrugel@gmail.com

We would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts for assistance through an Explore and Create Grant. Due to COVID 19 restrictions, we are presenting the interview in lieu of an onsite launch at Brock University.

Videopoetry = Vidéopoésie by Sarah Tremlett (2020)

Videopoetry = Vidéopoésie
by Sarah Tremlett, published april 21, 2020 – updated april 23, 2020

Wonderful news that the mammoth – over 400 pages – publication Videopoetry = Vidéopoésie by leading Canadian videopoets Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel H. Dugas is now out online https://dr.library.brocku.ca/handle/10464/14790

Published by Brock University’s Small Walker Press it is a comprehensive survey of their collaboration over a thirty-year period. Catherine Parayre has written the French introduction, with Lucy English writing in English. It has also been my pleasure to contribute an essay on their extraordinary body of work. In my research it took me a long time to get to know (and relish) all their developments. I am particularly fond of their use of documenting first-hand experience as in ‘Slices of Life’ from the nineties for example; as well as their finely crafted and important ecopoetry films of more recent years. For my in-depth analysis on their filmic and poetic techniques please check out the book itself.

But I would just like to say that what adds to the poetry (that is always succinct, and of its time and place whilst setting us on a philosophical path), is the fact that it is bilingual. This can create comparisons (visual as well as verbal), as one language is typeset next to the other, but also reminds us of their Canadian roots, and all its associations and influences (geographic, artistic and political). The poetry and the videos emanate not just from the combining of two creative fields, and the collaboration and consequent creative marriage of two people, but two significant cultures. This ‘bilinguality’ extends our understanding of what it means to be not just poetically engaged and enlightened but politically aware in the 21st century. Go Read!!!!

http://liberatedwords.com/2020/04/21/videopoetry-videopoesie/