click on the image to view the video
Creators
Jack Cochran & Pamela Falkenberg, film-makers, USA
Jack Cochran, writer, USA
Synopsis
The recent death of Jack's older brother and a photo of the tomb he received from his sister-in-law, the finality of the names and dates, occasions Bereavement, a lament via a family history photo review, at once personal and universal. This is the first of what has become an occasional series of short film poems, twitterpoems.
Text
Bereavement
A lament
melancholy
& woebegone
I see
my siblings'
names
etched into marble
Jack Cochran & Pamela Falkenberg on the project
We are making personal films together again under the name Outlier Moving Pictures. We hope our new films will be worthy of the name -- avoiding the usual patterns and approaching their subject matter from the margins (which sounds better than saying that as filmmakers we're oddballs and cranks).
We met in graduate school and made films together when we were young. Jack went on to become a professional cinematographer working out of LA and London, while Pam stayed in the Midwest, where she was a college professor and independent filmmaker before dropping out to work in visual display.
Bereavement is our first poetry film of a #twitterpoem. What is a twitterpoem? Our definition is a poem, poem series, or film poem constrained by Twitter's 140 character limit and posted on Twitter. Bereavement was first posted on our tweetpoems site, so it meets our own definition.
#twitterpoem was already a thing long before we started our twitterpoem project, which became evident as soon as we searched Twitter for that hashtag, but our usage is somewhat more rigorous, as Twitter users of the #twitterpoem often flout the character limit by attaching a photo of a typed or handwritten poem that is longer than the 140 Twitter character limit.
After Bereavement was completed, Twitter (on 7 Nov 2017) revised the maximum length of tweets to 280 characters for almost all of the 40 languages it supports. So our definition now should read, "constrained by Twitter's maximum character limit (originally 140, currently 280 for most languages)." Jack has not yet written a #twitterpoem that takes advantage of the new longer length, but he may someday.
Jack Cochran
Pamela Falkenberg
Bios
Jack Cochran is a poet and independent filmmaker who worked as a professional cinematographer. As a DP, his work has shown at the Sundance, Raindance, Telluride, Tribeca, Edinburgh, Chicago, Houston, and Taos film festivals, and has won Silver Lions from Cannes, a BAFTA, Peabody Awards, and Cable Aces. Some notable credits: DP on Brian Griffin's Claustrofoamia, Antony Thomas' Tank Man, and Ramin Niami's Paris, and Director/DP of Viento Nocturno. Jack trained at the University of Iowa Creative Writers Workshop, as well as the University of Iowa film studies program.
Pamela Falkenberg is an independent filmmaker with a PhD from the University of Iowa, who taught at Northern Illinois University, St.Mary's College, and the University of Notre Dame. She directed the largest student film society in the US while at Iowa, and film series for the Snite Museum of Art in South Bend, IN. Her experimental film with Dan Curry, Open Territory, received an individual filmmaker grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and grants from the Center for New Television and the Indiana Arts Council. 'OT' screened at the Pacific Film Archives, as well as numerous festivals, including the AFI Video Festival, and was nominated for a regional Emmy.
