Another MotionPoems production, designed and animated by Angella Kassube with a reading by the poet.
Alexander Pulido calls this film American Disillusion:
The now-famous (thank you Levi’s) wax cylinder recording of Walt Whitman reading the first verse of his famous poem ‘America’, juxtaposed against imagery of America in reality.
Philip Binder is credited with the cinematography. (For the Levi’s ad using the same wax recording, see here.)
“A blend of rotoscope animation, stop-motion animation, and live action video … Directed and animated by Tom McPhee. Written and spoken by Francesca Eva Ashcroft.” This was the first-place winner of the 2010 Poetry in Film competition.
Another “teleportal reading“:
When Dean Young came to the East Austin warehouse where we film our videos, the sky was threatening. By the time he got started, a biblical downpour was underway. You can hear the rain on the tin roof as he reads. Of course, as these things tend to go, it cleared up the second the shoot was finished. Still, we like the way the atmospheric sound plays off of Scott Gelber’s animation, which alters live footage of Dean reading in front of a green screen and layers it with gorgeous hand-painted imagery. Dean’s most recent book, a work of prose on poetry titled The Art of Recklessness, is available from Graywolf Press.
This is one case where a literal interpretation of the poem really works!
As long as I’ve been doing this site, I still haven’t posted quite all the videos from the “Poetry Everywhere” series of animations by students at docUWM, the documentary media center based in the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Film Department, produced under the aegis of the Poetry Foundation. As usual with this series, the poet himself is the reader here.
