Posts in Category: Videopoems
Potets (The Sweater) by Alexander Vvedensky
This masterful animation by Alexander Fedulov is of the Russian Absurdist Alexander Vvedensky’s poem “Potets,” “The Sweater” or, rather, a neologism for “He Who Sweats,” referring to “death’s dew.” I had previously translated Vvedensky’s powerful prison prose (which stands up well, I think, in comparison to Kafka and Camus) as well as a different long poem, “The Meaning of the Sea” (as yet unpublished). I suggest reading the former to get a sense of the proto-existential themes particular to all of Vvedensky’s work (“I’m dying…. I’m dying.”) From his late 20s, Vvedensky (1904-1941) faced repeated arrest, perishing in transport to one of Stalin’s Gulag concentration camps. His insistent trochees of course represent a sense of the absurdity and powerlessness before such impersonal forces of doom.
Fedulov’s work here is a prime example of Russian animation’s long and honored tradition. His imagery, inspired by Vvedensky’s other poems, such as “The Meaning of the Sea,” speaks well for the work as a whole and I will only offer my translation of a few of the beginning verses (through minute 3:00 of film) as a way into the poem; its insistent driving rhythms, what Frost had called “sound sense,” say most of what can be said about life’s irrevocability.
“The sons cease their dancing — you can’t have fun forever, and quieting down sit silently by the father’s extinguished bedside. They look into his fading eyes. They want to repeat everything. The father expires. He becomes engorged like a cluster of grapes. We are afraid to keep looking at what is called his face. The sons covertly and silently enter each into his own superstitious wall.” So ends Part 1 (of 3) at minute 7:00 with the following message slowly revealed in materializing letters: “The Sweat is the cold perspiration that is produced on the forehead of a dying man. It is the dew of death; that is the meaning of The Sweat.”
And here is the beginning of Part 1:
The sons stood by the wall, their feet sparkling
shod in spurs. They turned joyful and intoned:Divulge to us, oh dearest father,
What is the meaning of a Sweater.The father, sparkling with his eyes, replied:
My sons I say, do not confuse
Day’s end with daughter of spring.
The Sweat is terrible, grey and blue.
I’m your father, angel, and saint.
I’m acquainted with his cruelty,
My own death is drawing near,
On my head can be seen gaping
Tufts of hair, bald spots, melancholy.
And if life continues then soon enough
None of the following will remain,
Neither falcon nor a single hair.
Just to know that death is nigh,
Knowledge, sight is woe and blight.The sons, having rung the church bells,
Began to thunder into their tongues.
We’re asking about something else entirely!
We are wearing out our thoughts like imps.
Will you just tell us already father,
What is the meaning of a Sweater.And the father exclaimed: the Prologue!
In the Prologue, the main thing is God.
Now my sons you must go to sleep
So that your answer comes in dreams….
The verse sections alternate with scenario-like prose paragraphs in the manner of a play (which are acted out as interludes in the animated film without being sounded). An example from the beginning of part 2: “The father hovers over the writing table, but do not think that he’s a spirit.” And a bit later: “The father ceases to speak in verses and lights up a candle, holding it in his teeth like a flute. At the same time he slides into the armchair like a pillow.” And so forth; until the final words: “But of course, we knew all this from the beginning.”
See the complete text of “Potets” in Russian. For full credits on the film, see the notes at Vimeo. For more on Vvedensky, in addition to Alex’s translation of his prison prose mentioned above, see also “Vvedensky in Love” by Thomas Epstein and Eugene Ostashevsky’s translation of “The Demise of the Sea.” And for more on Alexander Fedulov, see the Russian-language blog maintained by his son, Kirill Fedulov.
Music, When Soft Voices Die by Percy Bysshe Shelley
A kinetic text piece called “In the Memory” by Hyunjoo Oh, who writes, “I wanted to talk about how longing and yearning become stronger as the relationship fades away. Through the process of blowing away and forming typography in various ways, I tried to express Shelly’s poem ‘Music, When Soft Voice Die’ visually; existing permanent values among many things that fade out in this world.”
November Graveyard by Sylvia Plath
Update: Video has been made private.
A new videopoem by Swoon titled “Red Lost Ghosts” remixes an old audio recording of Plath with other audio samples, video and stills to very good effect in what he calls
A remembrance-piece for Birkenau.
Not the blunt and awful images of the place, but the those images of horror hidden behind the automation of a wind-up-toy and the slight hope of some ‘forget-me-nots’
For the hope we will not forget that awful ‘machine’
A Nephilim Grieves by Vignette-Noelle Lammott
http://www.vimeo.com/16896497
Anna Patel, the director, says, “How often do you let something consume you? This film was about setting aside our instincts of closure and being open to a wide variety of emotions.”
Jellyfish by Andrea Gibson
This video by Daizy Zhou is pretty effective, I thought — but then, so is the original video on YouTube of the poet herself, from which she took the reading:
In fact, this may be one of the most gorgeous spoken-word videos I’ve seen, both for the floating-seed imagery and for the background of Swainson’s thrush song. Gibson has what appears to be a thrush on the footer of her website, which makes me like her right away.
A Sound (from Objects) by Gertrude Stein
Art student Marika Cowan says:
A cutout animation project. Music by Kimya Dawson, voice by Cory Hill, poem by Gertrude Stein, sound effects from freesound.org.
The cat puppet and its skull mask is paper painted with acrylics. The tiger is cut out from some tiger-printed patterned paper. All of the backgrounds are paper as well.
This is from the opening piece in Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914), available as an e-book from Project Gutenberg.
Black Swan by Amir Sulaiman
Amir Sulaiman writes,
This an installment of our new art series called VisualVerse. Mustafa and are collaborating on short 24hr mash-ups of his filming and my poetry. sometimes i will write and record something and he shoots to it. other times, he’ll shoot and ill write to it. all done in 24hrs
Click through for poem-text and explication — unnecessary, in my opinion. But Mustafa Davis’ description of the filming process is interesting:
I shot this on f/1.4 – 50mm prime lens overcranked at 60fps (slow motion) using a single tungsten light. I moistened the warehouse floor to get the mirrored look in the video. The entire video is in reverse. I decided to pour ash down over the frame to trick the eye into thinking the video was playing correctly (as the ashes appeared like smoke rising when played back in reverse). This is a single continuous shot. The flames and water are real. This is the RAW out of camera footage. No effects.
For more on Amir Sulaiman, visit his website. And Mustafa Davis is here.
Evidently Chickentown by John Cooper Clarke
Update: Video has been made private.
A film called Ochlofobie by Belgian artist Swoon, who also supplied the music. British performance poet John Cooper Clarke is responsible for text and voice.
Here’s a video of Clarke doing the poem at a live reading from 2008:
Paradoxes and Oxymorons by John Ashbery
http://vimeo.com/18034144
Art student Al Belancourt made this film of Ashbery’s poem as an assignment for a poetry class, he tells me, inspired by viewing Moving Poems in class. Cool! We definitely need more Ashbery videopoems, and this is a great start.
