Nationality: Bulgaria
Сезонът на печалните кентаври / The Season of the Sorrowful Centaurs by Marion Koleva
A poem in the voice of Clio/Kleio, the muse of history, by Bulgarian journalist and poet Marion Koleva in a 2021 film by Vladimir Mihaylov, AKA poe3, supported by funding from the Bulgarian Ministry of Culture. The poem appears in Koleva’s 2014 collection, Спомен за тропик (Memory of Tropic).
Like Копнеж каквото е… / What Craving Is… by Dessislava Nedelcheva, which I shared two weeks ago, this film is part of Mihaylov’s project 10 Short Films of Videopoetry.
Копнеж каквото е… / What Craving Is… by Dessislava Nedelcheva
Four poems from a 2012 collection called Eastern Time (Източно време/Iztochno vreme) by Bulgarian poet Десислава Неделчева/Dessislava Nedelcheva, about whom I can glean nothing in the Anglophone web. But I love this film by Vladimir Mihaylov, AKA poe3. According to Google Translate, ‘The video was realized with the support of the National Fund “Culture” 2020.’ Glad to hear that the government of Bulgaria has money for poetry film! Mihaylov’s entire playlist of subtitled videopoetry is worth a watch.
A Petty Morning Crime by Georgi Gospodinov
Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov‘s poem in an utterly brilliant animation by Asparuh Petrov and the Compote Collective. Here’s the description from Vimeo:
А murder in the second degree, that doesn’t cut down the guilt…
04:01′ / DCP / 2015 / directed by Asparuh Petrov
“A Petty Morning Crime” is based on the original poem by Georgi Gospodinov of the same title. The film is part of the visual poetry project “Mark & Verse” produced by Compote Collective.
It was selected for ZEBRA 2016 and featured as a film of the month at PoetryFilm Kanal. Here’s the conclusion of their essay (worth reading in its entirety), via Google Translate:
A Petty Morning Crime convinces on all levels: from the voice, the sound design, the integration of the writing into the picture and the manner in which the poem is adapted visually. The adaptation retains a certain piece of work without falling into the illustration trap. The abstract figures, the spatial elements and the strong noises and sounds divert the attention of the viewer from the direct correspondences of word and image, and open his eyes to the special cinematic pictorial language, as much as the text also the everyday and banal pages of life poetry.
The President’s Address by Ivan Stanev
Ivan Stanev‘s Totleben TV project presents “news from yesterday,” but this is avant-garde remix videopoetry at its most relevant. The latest episode features fragments of footage of Mussolini, and it seemed appropriate for this day after the US election, for some reason.
Here’s the complete description of this video from the website:
Livestream from Todessa
Camera: Tman
Cast: Totleb & Co.
Editor: Todito
Soundmix: Todonsky Junior
Directed by: T.L.©Ivan Stanev. All Rights Reserved
Acknowledgements
archive.org; freesound.org; Benito Mussolini
There’s an equally facetious About page. According to a Google translation of a German-language biography, Ivan Stanev was
Born in 1959 in Varna (Bulgaria). Author. Director. Stanev grew up bilingual, attending a German boarding school. He has been writing poetry, prose, plays and aesthetic treatises since his childhood, which could never be published in Bulgaria. From 1978 to 1980 he was in military service, then studied directing at the Academy of Drama, Directing and Theater Science in Sofia, at the same time studying philosophy.
