~ November 2012 ~
Yesterday’s Noise by John Glenday
Another in the Absent Voices series of seven filmpoems from Alastair Cook “focused on the celebration of the vast and semi-derelict Greenock Sugar Sheds,” as he put it in the description of a previous film. Scottish poet John Glenday reads his poem (which, I have to say, I absolutely adore).
All seven films will be premiered at the Scottish Poetry Library on December 6:
This performance event features music from Luca Nasciuti and Rita Bradd, along with readings from Vicki Feaver, Brian Johnstone, Sheree Mack and Jennifer Williams, each reading over their film to live accompaniment.
Ardenter by David Tomaloff
Another fun videopoem collaboration from David Tomaloff (voice and “poem written especially for this project”) and Swoon (concept, editing and music).
Footage: ‘How to make perfect hard boiled eggs’ (Food wishes video recipes – Chef John) provided by allrecipes.com
‘undercover investigation at Hy-line hatchery’ (mercyforanimals.org)
This is part of an international project among 14 different artists, “Seven Sins / Seven Virtues,” as Swoon explains in a blog post. He used C.S. Lewis’ definition of gluttony in The Screwtape Letters as a guide.
We might complain about unimportant defects in a product, the temperature in the room, or the color of a laundry basket. There is a certain amount of discomfort to be expected in life, but the Glutton will have none of it. Instead of becoming strong by suffering the minor inconveniences of life, the Glutton insists on being pampered. No one dares to point out how petty or foolish they are. In fact, some celebrities are praised for their excessive perfectionism, as though it were a virtue.
Arte Poética (The Art of Poetry) by Jorge Luis Borges
“A journey around Argentina and Uruguay to illustrate words of Jorge Luis Borges,” says the Paris-based director, Neels Castillon. The soundtrack includes Borges’ own reading of the poem, as well as music by Yann Scott. The cinematography is by Kévin Michel.
Here’s the English translation Castillon supplied in the description at Vimeo:
To gaze at a river made of time and water
And remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water.To feel that waking is another dream
that dreams of not dreaming and that the death
we fear in our bones is the death
that every night we call a dream.To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
into music, a sound, and a symbol.To see in death a dream, in the sunset
a golden sadness–such is poetry,
humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.Sometimes in the evening there’s a face
that sees us from the depths of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love on seeing Ithaca,
humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,
a green eternity, not wonders.Art is endless like a river flowing,
passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same
inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
and yet another, like the river flowing.
Turbines in January by Colette Bryce
Another of the Dove Marine Lab poetry films from UK poet Colette Bryce and artist Kate Sweeney. (See “Ballasting the Ark” for more details on the project.) On her website, Sweeney notes:
Building upon some of the challenges I found with the earlier films, I wanted to almost ignore the text and sideline the structure of the recording. I put up a kind of mental block between me and the text and ‘drew’ the shapes of the sentences. These small drawings, or plans made the basic structures of the animated sequences.
Sweeney goes on to reflect on the project as a whole — the first venture into poetry film for either of them:
While working with Colette on visual responses to her poetry, I have increasingly realized that the three films are a response not just to the three poems, but more specifically, the recordings of the three poems. I am not only responding to the content and motifs contained in the poems (as one would if responding to a single word, an idea, or a title) but also directly to the length of the poem, the rhythm, spacing and sounds of the words as they are delivered in the recording.
The poems have been, to a greater or lesser extent, a script. We have found a lot of questions have arisen about how the task of making a film in this way is different to less time-based parameters of more abstract types of collaborations. It highlights the difference between spatial and time-based video and film work, and has sparked an interest for both of us in how this brief could work in reverse – a poet creating text to a finished film or video, for example. This collaboration feels like a starting point, and we would be keen to collaborate further in different contexts. In the present context, the response to the science was the poet’s, while in a future context, we would be interested to explore what happens when both the artist and the poet are responding to the science and somehow bringing the results together in a collaborative work.
Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986 by William S. Burroughs
According to Open Culture,
“Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986” first appeared in print in Tornado Alley, a chapbook published by William S. Burroughs in 1989. Two years later, Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, My Own Private Idaho, Milk) shot a montage that brought the poem to film, making it at least the second time the director adapted the beat writer to film.
Lulu Gay by Wallace Stevens
Othniel Smith used a reading by Alan Davis Drake for Librivox and public-domain images from the Prelinger Archive to make this short film.
Ballasting the Ark by Colette Bryce
A terrific videopoem addressing the invasive species epidemic. This is one of three Dove Marine Lab poetry films:
Three films made by artist Kate Sweeney and poet Colette Bryce in 2012 inspired by the poetry Colette produced as part of her Leverhulme residency at The Dove Marine Lab in Cullercoats, Tyne and Wear, UK.
On her website, Kate Sweeney describes her general approach to the project:
I am using photography, drawings, video and sound taken in and around the Dove Marine Laboratory to explore some of the motifs, rhythms, ideas and patterns that arise in Colette’s poems. In the poems, Colette to some extent celebrates the act of looking, for the poet and the scientist: the films take this visual thread forward into a new realm. I am trying to create a tension between the words and accentuate the rhythm and sounds of the spoken word through imagery without becoming distracting or merely illustrative.
“Ballasting the Ark,” she writes,
involves drawing, copying, inventing, imagining and re-imagining of some of the activity taking place in the poem. I wanted this film to begin as a sketch, or workings-out on paper; like a god sketching out an ‘Ark’; divine imagination, moving toward an opposing set of ideas – the science of observing ‘reality’, and of a scientist looking, counting, analysing, removing, deleting.
For more on Colette Bryce, see her Wikipedia page. And check out the Dove Marine Laboratory website.
[UPDATE] The three films were shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Prize for new works in poetry in 2013.
