Posts Tagged: ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival
15th February by Peter Reading
This 1995 poetry film classic won the main prize at the very first ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in 2002, as well as an Arts Council of England Animate Award and 1995 ICA Dick Award as “the most provocative, innovative and subversive short film of the year.” Director Tim Webb uploaded this version to Vimeo himself, and the description there is exhaustive. Click through for the full credits. Here’s a snippet:
15th February mixes live action and animation to describe a symbolic rejection and its sadistic outcome, as related in the poem by Peter Reading.
Love gone wrong in 294 cuts. From a poem by Peter Reading, symbolism and sadism meet live action and stop motion in this tale of rhythmic rejection and its aftermath. The 15th February is from Reading’s book Diplopic. In explaining the title, Reading wrote, ‘Diplopic means pertaining to double vision. Every subject is treated from two sides. The funny and the ghastly are symbiotic.’ The 15th February is from one side.
Technical informationThe film mixes 16mm live action, stop-frame and drawn animation.
The late Peter Reading’s poetry was described by The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry as “strongly anti-romantic, disenchanted and usually satirical.”
The Gun by Vicki Feaver
A terrific poem and film that should appeal to gun-toting meat-eaters and vegan gun-control advocates alike. (And what else but art or poetry could bridge such a chasm?) Director Alastair Cook writes,
I have admired Vicki Feaver and her words for some time. I recorded this in 2011 and kept it safe, finally entrusting the sound to Luca Nasciuti and the cinematography to James William Norton, our core Filmpoem team. I’ve worked with Vicki on the amazing community arts project in Greenock, Absent Voices and also Empire Cafe, Louise Welsh and Jude Barber’s Commonwealth 2014 project, looking at the unbearable links between slavery and Scotland.
So, the Gun. I may stop now, because (forgive the immodesty) I love this one. Love it. The timbre in Vicki’s voice is dry, broken, words delivered with such a punch. I enjoyed editing this one, it’s why I do this, it was so very difficult to get right, but I do hope you enjoy it. The Gun has now screened at Felix (Antwerp), Poetry International (London) and will screen at ZEBRA (Berlin). [links added]
Był sobie król / Once there was a King by Janina Porazińska
The ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival has just announced the 29 nominees for its 2014 competition, and this is one of them. It’s also a Vimeo Staff Pick — testimony to the high quality of the animation and production. Tytus Majerski’s description reads:
Stop-motion mixed with CG, short film based on a polish lullaby written by Janina Porazińska. Author of original music unknown. Performed by Maria Peszek.
A home made project, which I graduated with at my film school in Poland.
It combines cut out animation and 3d set-ups.
Janina Porazińska (1888-1971) specialized in children’s poetry, fairy tales and other folkloric material. The translation used in the titling is by Magda Bryll.
Mar Belle reviewed the film for the blog No Film School:
Have you ever noticed how parents seem to delight in terrifying their children? Whether it’s old wives tales of wind changes leaving their faces contorted or the devil stealing their souls post-sneeze, there are endless ways for adults to keep children in a perpetual state of fear. However, the cruelest has to be those moments before bed, when they’ll soon to be abandoned to a long, dark night with tales of cannibal witches or bone grinding giants stalking through their heads. Depicting the tragic story of a love triangle between a king, a princess and a page, Tytus Majerski’s atmospheric adaptation of Polish writer Janina Porazińska’s lullaby Once There Was a King, is cut from the same gruesome cloth that keeps nightlight companies in business.
Homenaxe ao mineral do repolo (Homage to the Mineral of Cabbage) by Erín Moure
This is Little Theatres, a jaw-droppingly good stop-motion short directed and animated by Stephanie Dudley. It’s based on a poem in Galician, the language of northwest Spain, by the Canadian poet Erín Moure, from her book, Little Theatres (Teatriños).
The film has its own website. According to the About page,
The poem is the second in a series of six by Erín in her award-winning book, Little Theatres. Each poem is an homage to a simple, humble food, such as potatoes, onions, and cabbage. The poems examine our relationship to food, and draw new insights to how these basic foods relate to life, as well as how we relate to each other. In looking more closely at the simple, everyday elements of life, we learn to appreciate their beauty.
The film Little Theatres is an interpretation of what Little Theatres are. It is an exploration of layers: layers of space, and layers of words, both spoken and written. The exploration begins and ends with a simple cabbage.
The film is also available with subtitles in French. (Moure’s multilingual abilities were a source of confusion for me at first, since the Wikipedia article about her mentions that her mother is from the part of western Ukraine known as Galicia — unrelated to the Galicia in the Iberian peninsula except inasmuch as both regions were originally settled by Celts. To compound the confusion, I’ve filed this film under both Canada and Galicia in the index, since the poem, if not the poet, is clearly Galician.)
An Anna Blume (To Anna Flower) by Kurt Schwitters
“An Anna Blume,” says the Wikipedia, is “a poem written by the German artist Kurt Schwitters in 1919. It has been described as a parody of a love poem, an emblem of the chaos and madness of the era, and as a harbinger of a new poetic language.” This film adaptation, a German-Bulgarian production, won the the Ritter-Sport Prize at the 5th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in 2010. Here’s the description at Vimeo:
Anna Blume is a visual poetry about the lust of a man chasing a woman. The story takes on surreal journey dictated by the mind of the poet. Lust and ingestion, disguised in love, drive the two characters to an end where love turns to be a very lonesome and strange place. The film is based on and inspired by the emblematic love poem from 1919 “An Anna Blume” by Kurt Schwitters.
CREDITS:
director Vessela Dantcheva
art director Ivan Bogdanov
screenplay Vessela Dantcheva & Ebele Okoye
main animator Ebele Okoye
music composer Petar Dundakov
sound designer Emil Iliev
compositing & edit Ivan Bogdanov
storyboard & layouts Vessela Dantcheva
produced by Ebele Okoye & FINFILM
supported by Robert Bosch Stiftung & National Film Center
Poem About Big BIGMOUSE by Ludmila Ulanova
I’m spotlighting children’s poetry films and videos this week, a diverse collection of works by children as well as film-poems made by adults for children. This is an outstanding example of the latter. About BIGMOUSE (Про Мыху), animated by Constantin Arephyeff (or Arefiev, in a more standard Romanization) won the award of the children’s jury at the 5th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in 2010. This is the English version narrated by Stephen Coates, who collaborated with the author and a couple of other people on the translation. There’s also a Russian version.
As in many Eastern European poetry animations, the text is used as a jumping-off point for a different, more elaborate story-line. However, this also feels very familiar in the context of children’s literature, where the artwork in illustrated books often does much more than just illustrate.
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