Private Project

Four Video-Poems from The Junicho Video-Renku Book

The Junicho Video-Renku Book is a series of 12 "twelve-tone" video-poems (1:45- 3 minutes each) based on a form of 17th century Japanese poetry.

From a centipede trapped in a sink to a man singing karaoke to his pet love-birds, The Junicho Video-Renku Book creates a richly layered collage of moving image, sound, and text that journeys through the everyday.

By using an observational stance and reframing conventional narrative, these videos challenge the tropes of realism and "perform" the contingent and impermanent actuality of existence .

Similar to an exquisite corpse, renku is composed according to a complex set of rules based on the structural devices of “link and shift”. Each verse in a renku "links" to the next, sometimes in close connection, sometimes in more remote ways; however, no more than two verses may ever relate to each other. In addition to many other parameters, the verses of a renku must "shift" to cover a diversity of topics while they travel through all four seasons, comment on love, and address both the moon and blossom.

  • Eve Luckring
    Director
  • Eve Luckring
    Writer
  • Eve Luckring
    Producer
  • Project Type:
    Experimental
  • Runtime:
    8 minutes
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    Japan, United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    4:3
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA
  • Test Exposure: The 16th Media Art Biennale, Wroclaw, Poland
  • Visible Verse, Pacific Cinémathéque, Vancouver, Canada
  • Video Bardo, Buenos Aires, Argentina
  • &NOW Festival: Blast Radius, Valencia, CA
  • @Sea #2: Conversions, Poetic Research Bureau, Los Angeles, CA
  • Truth: Whitespace Gallery, Atlanta, GA
Distribution Information
  • Eve Luckring
    Country: Worldwide
    Rights: All Rights
Director Biography - Eve Luckring

Eve Luckring (Los Angeles, CA) began working with the moving image in 1990. For the last decade, she has been translating traditional Japanese poetic forms into the visual realm. Her work questions the assumptions–– and experiments with the boundaries–– that define place, body, and habit.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

I have invented video-renku as a framework to explore the “link” between the ephemeral and the concrete, and the perpetual “shift” in defining boundaries between the “natural” world and the culturally constructed. In this way, the work renegotiates the binaries of subject/object and self/world.