Filmmaker: Alastair Cook
Ocean by David Harsent
David Harsent reads his poem over a score composed by Luca Nasciuti in this film by Alastair Cook; James William Norton contributed cinematography. According to the description on Vimeo, “Filmpoem Festival 2014 commissioned British poets David Harsent, Helen Mort, John Glenday and Michael Symmons Roberts to produce new work on the theme of migration,” and then commissioned films incorporating the poems. I hope to share the others here in the weeks ahead.
Bernard and Cerinthe by Linda France
This is the third of the three films from Filmpoem for winners of last year’s National Poetry Competition in the U.K.
Bernard and Cerinthe is a film by Alastair Cook for Linda France’s first placed poem in the National Poetry Competition 2013, commissioned by Filmpoem and Felix Poetry Festival in association with the Poetry Society.
From the National Poetry Competition judges: ‘This strange narrative of a man being seduced by a plant charmed the judges with its vivid imagery and linguistic wit. Its precisely honed couplets move from elegant description (‘the bruise of bracts, petals, purple // shrimps’) to a tragicomic climax, in which our hero finds himself ‘a buffoon in front of a saloon honey / high-kicking the can-can. Can’t-can’t’. Truly imaginative and richly musical, ‘Bernard and Cerinthe’ is as much a pleasure to read on the page as it is on the tongue, and as such was the unanimous choice of the judges for first place in this year’s National Poetry Competition.’ {Jane Yeh}
Linda France is from the northeast of England, and has published seven collections of poetry. See the story in the Guardian, “Linda France wins National Poetry Competition with erotic botany story,” as well as the page at the Poetry Society website, which includes the text of the poem and this bit of back-story:
On what inspired the poem, Linda said: ‘I remember very particularly the day I wrote this poem, actually. I went to visit a friend of mine who has the most beautiful garden. It was the end of August and there was a plant I’d never seen before: Cerinthe major ‘Purpurascens’, and I was just astonished by it. It’s a very intense blue and the leaves are a silvery green… they’re quite thick, almost waxy, fleshy. That’s one of the things I’m drawn to about plants, they express this tremendous “Otherness”, but they just stay there and let you respond to them, unlike a bird or animal that disappears. A plant remains for you to give your attention to. I love that. I got absorbed in this flower and my sense was that it was very sexy, as many of them are. Cerinthe conceals and reveals at the same time, it has a flirtatiousness about it that’s very seductive. I don’t know how Bernard came into the story, but faced with this out-and-out flirt of a plant, he doesn’t know what to do. So that’s how it happened, really. Obviously it didn’t all come fully formed, but it arose from looking at the flower.’
Grand Union Bridge by Ian Duhig
Another of Alastair Cook‘s filmpoems for the Poetry Society in partnership with the Canal and River Trust as part of the Canal Laureate 2013 project. See my post of Lifted for more details. Jo Bell writes,
Ian Duhig’s poetry combines a deep learning with a lively wit, and a strong sense of Irish heritage as well as a need to honour the workers of a former age. His poem, Grand Union Canal, takes us to Paddington Basin in London.
Ian Duhig reads his text in the soundtrack, which was composed by Luca Nasciuti.
Fallow Field by Scott Edward Anderson
This is Filmpoem 34 by Alastair Cook, who writes:
Fallow Field is a poem by Scott Edward Anderson, from his brand new eponymous collection. It’s been a pleasure to make a Filmpoem for a friend and this harks back to my earlier work, motifs I explored and delighted in a number of years ago which suit Scott’s incredible words.
Scott’s collection Fallow Field is available from Aldrich Press, Amazon and scottedwardanderson.com.
Of the various blurbs on the website, I particularly liked this one:
“Wow, Pop, I had no idea you wrote so many poems!” – Walker Anderson, the author’s 10-year-old son
Anderson blogs at The Green Skeptic and Scott Edward Anderson’s Poetry Blog.
The Black Delph Bride by Liz Berry
https://vimeo.com/75167349
Another of Alastair Cook‘s filmpoems for the Poetry Society in partnership with the Canal and River Trust as part of the Canal Laureate 2013 project. See last week’s post of Lifted for more details. Jo Bell says of this one,
Liz Berry’s film is a darker narrative, shot on location as all of these films were, at the Black Delph in the Black Country. Harking back to the canal ballads of the Victorian time, this has a Dickensian tragedy about it.
For more about Liz Berry, visit her website. Her dramatic reading is set off brilliantly by Luca Nasciuti‘s soundtrack.
Lifted by Jo Bell
A recent filmpoem by Alastair Cook, featuring the words and voice of the U.K. Canal Laureate Jo Bell. On my two-month visit to the U.K. this summer, I was charmed by the whole canal scene. We ran into canals almost everywhere we went, and the Grand Union Canal was a great place to go walking near where I was staying in London. Most fascinating of all were the locks, and this filmpoem really captures their essence, I think.
This is one of four filmpoems that Alastair Cook produced for the Poetry Society in partnership with the Canal & River Trust as part of the Canal Laureate 2013 project, all screened at London’s Southbank Centre on National Poetry Day (October 3), which this year had the theme of Water. I’ll probably post the others in due time, but if you’re impatient, all four are featured in a post at Jo Bell’s site Waterlines: Canal and River Poetry. She says, in part:
My poem, Lifted, is about canal locks in general but specifically about Lock 30 of the Trent & Mersey, near Roger Fuller’s boatyard in Stone, Staffordshire. This stretch of water is very familiar to me, and to anyone who travels that great arterial east-west waterway through the English Midlands. This footage was shot on my own boat by Alastair, who proved to be not only an artist but a keen and capable crew member.
Allow Yourself This One Day by Max Wallis
https://vimeo.com/70471428
This is Alastair Cook‘s Filmpoem 33, and departs rather significantly from his other filmpoems in its unstinting focus on the poet/narrator.
Commissioned by Harper’s Bazaar UK and poet/ model Max Wallis. Allow Yourself This One Day is the final poem in Max’s début pamphlet, Modern Love, where he traces the year-long course of a love affair and all its constituent parts: sex and sensuality, longing and loneliness, desire and disappointment, heady beginnings and inevitable endings; in a world dominated by high street brands, text messaging and social media.
Luca Nasciuti did both the photography and the music for this one.
According to Max Wallis’ website, “The Arts Council has funded Max’s new film project. He is currently Harper’s Bazaar’s ‘roaming poet’. He produces poetry videos which look at the world of modelling through a poetic lens.”
Shaking Shells by the Filmpoem Workshop children
I was privileged to watch the unveiling of this videopoem last month in Dunbar, immediately following its creation:
Shaking Shells is a Filmpoem Workshop film, made in a period of three hours with five children, the amazing children’s writer and poet Emily Dodd, composer Luca Nasciuti and artist Alastair Cook directing, filming and editing. This is part of the incredible new Filmpoem Festival, which was held at Dunbar Town House on 3rd and 4th August this year.
Emily Dodd goes into much more detail about the process on her blog:
Last month I led a 3-hour Filmpoem workshop with five children aged between five and ten as part of the first UK Filmpoem Festival in Dunbar.
The workshop started with exercises and games to get the children thinking like poets (I wrote a bit about it here). Then we spent the second half of the workshop writing a group poem on a poetry walk.
Each section of the walk involved a different poetry challenge and at the next stop we heard the results of the last challenge and I set the next challenge. For example when you’re walking:
- Explore the wall, touch it, smell it, describe it
- What sounds do you notice? Describe them
- Find your favourite object on the beach, if you find a better one, swap it. Describe it.
Each child worked independently during the challenge but we came together in a circle at the end of each challenge and each contributed one line to the poem.
[…]
During the walk artist Alastair Cook was capturing film and composer Luca Nasciuti recorded sounds. When we were down on the beach Donald (5) was in the process of finding his favourite object when he made a discovery….
“I’ve found a sound for the film!” he shouted. He was sitting down with a handful of mussel shells in his hands and he shook them to show me. He tipped his ear towards the shells again to make sure they sounded right. “That’s brilliant Donald” I said. “Let’s show Luca so he can record it” and I called Luca over and Donald shook his shells again.
Do click through and read the rest.
A Westray Prayer by John Glenday
A Westray Prayer by C.J. Hurst
http://vimeo.com/69640126
Filmpoem 32/A Westray Prayer by Alastair Cook
A Westray Prayer by Marc Neys (aka Swoon)
(See Marc’s blog for some process notes.)
One of the highlights of the Filmpoem Festival earlier this month in Dunbar, Scotland, was a screening of five films by five different filmmakers for this same poem, all of them employing the same reading by the author, which they were not allowed to cut up. This meant that each of the filmmakers had to decide how to fill the silence before and after the short text. John Glenday himself attended the screening, reading and introducing his poem, which, he pointed out, is partly about silence. “When we’re silent, we’re letting the world in,” he said, adding: “Silence gets all the best phrases.”
The other two filmmakers who contributed work for the screening, Ian Henderson and James Norton, don’t appear to have uploaded their films to the web, though Norton has shared his audio track at SoundCloud:
https://soundcloud.com/james-w-norton/a-westray-prayer
After the Robins by Angela Readman
http://vimeo.com/66227853
This is Alastair Cook‘s Filmpoem 31. He writes:
After the Robins is a magnificent tour de force of a poem by the English poet Angela Readman; Readman grew up in Middlesbrough and following university in Manchester relocated to Newcastle upon Tyne to complete a film studies MA. She completed a masters in creative writing at the University of Northumbria in 2000 and won a Waterstones prize for her distinctive poetry and prose. Her words are incredible, I think.
This film comes at a difficult time and is dedicated to my late Godfather, a real and bright presence in my young life.
The poem is read by my brother in life, Gérard Rudolf; the haunting lilting music composed by yvonnelyonmusic.com; I’m very pleased to say I’ll be working with Yvonne over the coming year with our filmpoem.com/absentvoices/ project. Please do think about following twitter.com/AbsentVoices for updates.
For more on Angela Readman, see her Wikipedia page.
