Asesinato, directed by Javier Gómez Serrano for elegant mob films, is an adaptation of a poem from Poeta en Nueva York (Poet in New York), which may be read at Google Books in both Spanish and English (translation by Pablo Medina and Mark Statman).
Machado is one of my favorite poets, so I was excited to see this from award-winning filmmaker Chel White, and with the recitation by none other than Alec Baldwin. Here’s White’s description from the Vimeo page:
Based on a one-hundred-year-old poem by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado, “Wind” is an allegorical perspective on climate change. In recent years, a number of films have been made on the topic of global climate change, but few have addressed the issue from a poetic perspective.
“Wind” is constructed with the poem as the film’s nucleus, book-ended by montages of astonishing time-lapse sequences by photographer Mark Eifert. In the film, scenes of the earth, weather, and human interaction, both negative and positive, dominate the film’s imagery. The music consists of a lesser known piece by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, with solo piano played by Thomas Lauderdale (of Pink Martini.)
Though written in the early 20th century, the Machado poem is particularly poignant today, bearing an uncanny relevance for climate change and planet stewardship. This film was commissioned by the environmental organization Live Earth, and is narrated by Alec Baldwin. The English translation is by Robert Bly.
(Thanks to Viral Verse for the introduction to Chel White’s work.)
I’m rarely satisfied with my own efforts, but I do like this one. (Which is not to say it couldn’t be improved.) I blogged a bit about the poem at Via Negativa last month.
A splendid little animation, which Laen Sanches has also made available with French subtitles and without any subtitles. (The original is in Spanish, not in Catalan.) Ines Cuesta helped with the illustrations (and provides additional credits at the link).
One of my own videos, using footage I shot last spring of a garter snake mating ball to illustrate a favorite poem from the great 20th-century Spanish poet Pedro Salinas. I recently found an audio track of Salinas himself reading the poem, and dubbed that over some public-domain electronica from the Internet Archive.
Salinas left out one phrase from the printed version of the poem, which I’ve represented in the subtitles with an ellipsis: “que… [es la nada]” — “which… [is the nothing].”
Poem by Fernando Sarría
Video by sonolopez (Javier López Clemente)
El lenguaje de las hormigas es húmedo, constante,
ligero pero lleno de matices y sabores.
Nada se determina de antemano,
reconocen las sendas claras y oscuras de la tierra,
de un cuerpo sonrosado y de un anhelo.
Su murmullo es la marca de su saliva,
la piel siempre deseándolas
y aunque cierren los oídos, las ventanas,
las puertas de la cama,
ellas, pacientes, sabrán esperar.
