Jordan T. Caylor writes in the video description,
I recorded my dad reciting his poem “Uncle Harry’s Tombstone” at the end of his stint as the poet laureate of Madison, Wisconsin- this is my visual interpretation of his words.
Remember only that I was innocent
and, just like you, mortal on that day,
I, too, had had a face marked by rage, by pity and joy,
quite simply, a human face!
A striking, abstract envideoing of the excerpt from Fondane’s Exodus inscribed at the Hall of Names at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. Hadas Zarbiv, the filmmaker, said she produced this in collaboration with Yad Vashem, which would account for the language choice.
Benjamin Fondane was a surrealist poet and existentialist philosopher in France, part of what the English translator of Exodus calls “the extensive Rumanian contribution to French intellectual life” in the 20th Century, which includes such luminaries as Tristan Tzara, Constantin Brancusi, E. M. Cioran, Mircea Eliade and Eugene Ionesco. The Wikipedia article is also quite extensive.
Film by Jessica Bass; poem and performance by Katie Frank.
Swoon turned the tables on the renowned videopoet Tom Konyves here, making a video with a text and reading by Konyves. “Channeling Gertrude” was published in qarrtsiluni at the end of February, as part of our Imitation issue (which is still being serialized). Konyves’ description of how the text came about is worth quoting in full, I think:
An unusual experience prompted the writing of this poem — hearing the voice of someone we have never met. For me, it was the voice of Gertrude Stein. I managed to capture only one brief statement: ‘make a name for yourself.’ What followed was a torrent of words that astonished me; it was like being caught up in a whirlwind. Almost faster than I could record them, repeated phrases — with minute modifications — swirled through my mind and onto the page. When it was done, it was as if the words had been written by another. I then truly understood Rimbaud’s famous phrase, ‘Je est un autre.’
Swoon said a little bit about his process in a blog post:
I used recordings of reflections on the window of a train in a tunnel, mixed with an excerpt of recycled images from a video I had made a half years ago.
This is You and Me by Karsten Krause, which uses footage of her taken by Hans Krause. As the description at Vimeo puts it: “A woman is walking towards her husband’s camera for four decades. A love story on small gauge film.”
See here for the text of the poem.
