Monika Lind directs a shared reading/dramatization of the sonnet by five young actresses: Sascha Alexander, Katherine DuBois, Lee Hanson, Adrienne Marquand, and Daniele Watts.
Don’t be put off by the title: Craig Allen Conoley, the director, told me, “We chose to use the cliche title in an ironic manner… we wanted to subvert the cliche!” If you watch this through till the end, that should become abundantly clear.
This was screened at Visible Verse 2011 and the 2011 Ottawa International Film Festival. For the full credits, see the page at Vimeo, which also includes this description:
The short film/music video provides a visceral account of a poet’s mind/body relationship, mediated through his prose and the language of story. Shot in the subways and busy streets of Montreal, the video was designed to subvert a voyeuristic and often conforming societal gaze by placing Brandon’s point of view in direct contest with everyday motion and its marriage to the status-quo. The video features Claude Munson on guitar.
For more about the Ottawa-based spoken word artist, writer and singer Brandon Wint, see the bio on his website.
This appeared at HTML Giant almost a year ago, but I just found out about it from berfrois. The accompanying text at HTML Giant provides not only context but invaluable commentary by Jackie Wang, worth reading in full. I’ll just quote from the first paragraphs:
We are very proud to house Untitled, a film of pornstars reading poems, directed by Laurel Nakadate, based on text by Dora Malech. [...]
Poetry readings. Whether you love them or hate them, they can sometimes be an uncomfortable or bland affair. Some contemporary authors are committed to reinventing the format of “the reading”—using vulnerability, performance, and other attention-grabbing techniques to pump a little life into these often humdrum happenings. But video artist Laurel Nakadate takes the “the reading” to a whole new level.
In the video Untitled, Laurel has porn actresses read poems by Dora Malech. The interplay between Dora’s poems and the premise of the video is brilliant. The poems grapple with the tension between corporeality and disembodied intellect—being pure body or pure voice, being of the flesh or of the mind, but they settle on neither. Laurel’s video project and Dora’s text collapses those distinctions, using the body itself to speak. “If you give me a dollar I’ll take my top off / and let you see my heart,” reads actress Robbye Bentley. The body is not that which is mute, but that which sings. Another poem speaks to the ecstasy of being an embodied human with the line, “Believe me / when I tell you I’m kept / awake by the light / from my body, splayed star.”
The porn actresses in the video were asked to come to the “audition” (the audition being the final video itself) wearing their usually business attire: lacy lingerie, bright color bras. One woman — Robbye Bentley — even delivers her poems topless, covering her breasts with the poem “script” about a woman taking her top off for money. In recontextualizing the poetry reading event by having porn actresses read poems in settings like bathrooms and bedrooms, the video also dashes another expectation: that the porn actress is somehow less intellectual than the poet. The pairing of poetry and porn initially seemed unnatural to me. On the phone I asked Laurel, “Did the actresses think it was weird to be asked to read poems? How did they react?” She said no, that they loved it, that they were excited to be a part of the project.
Read the rest. Here’s my own reaction: 1) These are very good poems, and most of the actresses do an outstanding job of reading them. 2) Like all actors, these women are very comfortable in front of an audience. If poets want to be better readers, they should take public performance seriously. Instead, most MFA programs I’m aware of still don’t even require a class in speech communications, let alone in theater. A good slam poet with no higher education whatsoever can kick the ass of almost any academic poet at live events. (See the group blog Voice Alpha for much more on the art reading poems for an audience.) 3.) I’m thinking of giving my next poetry reading wearing nothing but a hat (to cover my baldness).
For more on Dora Malech, do visit her website.
O.K., this is something different for Moving Poems — a videopoem made to embody the mission of a university. Marquette University is a Jesuit school whose motto is “Be the Difference.” (Gotta love Jesuits!) The filmmaker is James P. O’Malley of Carnaval Pictures. Here’s what he says in the description at Vimeo:
Using Mary Oliver’s inspirational poem as a script, I created this Poem-Videoclip for the inauguration ceremony of Marquette University’s new president.
I shot all the images solo with my Canon 5D Mark2, using Nikkor and Canon lenses and available light. The sync sound day included John Egan, of Egan Audio Services, and Patrick O’Malley as assistant. Patrick composed, recorded and mastered the piano solo, and John Egan created the sound design and audio master.
The readers are Marquette University students, and all on-camera performers are “non-pro” or “real-people”.
I edited and mastered on FCP, except for the simple graphic call to action I exported from After Effects.
The result is lightly branded enough, I think, to engage Oliver fans unconnected with Marquette. I know I enjoyed it.
This new film from Bloodaxe Books, one of Tranströmer’s English-language publishers, incorporates footage of the Nobel Prize announcement and the Tranströmers’ reaction, as well as footage of Tranströmer playing the piano which Pamela Robertson-Pearce had just shot in August. Robin Fulton’s translations appear as subtitles for the Swedish-language readings, which include “The Nightingale in Badelunda,” “Allegro,” “From the Thaw on 1966,” “The Half-Finished Heaven,” “April and Silence,” “From March 1979,” and “Tracks.” This is of course something that the film/video medium is particularly well suited for: it’s wonderful to hear the poet reading in Swedish and know (more or less) what he is saying.
Do read the extensive notes on the Vimeo page. The detail that “Swedish composers have written several left-hand piano pieces especially for him to play” speaks volumes about his status in his homeland. (Hat-tip: Teju Cole on Twitter)
A motionpoem created by Michael Guncheon and Ben O’Brien.
And speaking of Motionpoems, if you can get to Minneapolis on October 25, they’re planning to screen a whole new season’s worth of films, which will include poems by Jane Hirshfield, Mark Strand, Richard Wilbur and others — a dozen in all, produced to accompany the Best American Poetry 2011 anthology From Scribner. See their website for details.
