A piece by Belgian poet Jan H. Mysjkin, ably translated into English by John Irons, supplied the inspiration for Swoon’s first videopoem of 2014. Check out his process notes, where he talks about how the soundtrack took shape and what led him to settle on the footage he used from the Prelinger Archives.
First, a translation by Manolis Aligizakis included in the Vimeo description:
There is a door in the night that only the blind see,
darkness makes the animals hear better,
and him, staggered, not from being drunk,
but from his futile effort to climb
up to the tower we once lost.
And now for the rest of the description:
An animated interpretation of the Greek poet Tasos Livaditis’s “Night,” Afroditi Bitzouni conceived her video “when my laptop was broken.” “At that time,” she explains, “there was nothing better to do other than flipping the pages of my fairytales and reading my favorite poems. I was reading [the poem ‘Night,’] every night for months. The illustrations [in my video] were based on a drawing I had done on the bottom of the poem in the book.”
[…]
Afroditi Bitzouni is a member of Indyvisuals Design Collective. She studied Product and Systems Design Engineering at The University of the Aegean, as well as Animation at The Glasgow School of Art. Her work has appeared in the Athens Video Art Festival, LPM (Live Performers Meeting), the Athens and Epidaurus Festival, and other venues.
The sound was produced by DJ Enthro of Psyclinic Tactix.
There isn’t much about Livaditis on the web in English, but I found this blog post helpful.
Tasos Livaditis (Athens, 1922-1988) was a Greek poet. Livaditis studied law at Athens University, but soon his gift for creating poetry was discovered. He had a strong political commitment in the political left movement, and because of that he was condemned, led to exile and has been kept in prison from 1947 till 1951, among others on the island of torture Makronisos, together with Yannis Ritsos, Mikis Theodorakis and Manos Katrakis.
In 1946 the journal Elefthera Grammata published a first article . In 1952 his first volume of poems appeared battle on the edge of the night. Between 1954 and 1980 he worked as a literary critic for the newspaper Avgi. Some of his books were banned in the 1950s because of their seditious content.
Tasos Livaditis got a number of national and international awards for his poetry and was considered one of the outstanding Greek poets of the last century.
The video was uploaded by Tin House, a well-regarded print literary magazine with a growing online component, including a weekly series called Tin House Reels, where this video was featured on January 9th. Tin House Reels features “videos by artists who are forming interesting new relationships between images and words,” and is open to video submissions (though for some reason only of work that has not previously appeared on the web).
A terrific remix by Mexican filmmaker Tania Hernández Velasco of a poem by Farzaneh Khojandi, Tajikistan’s foremost living poet, with footage from an unfinished French film from 1964, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno (L’Enfer).
A film by Geoff Gilson and Keith Allott (BadshoesFilm), who writes in the YouTube description:
Originally filmed and edited by me and Geoff Gilson in 48 hours for the Leicester DocFest 48 hour doco challenge in November 2012. We took one of Dave Dhonau’s beautiful tracks and applied it to the visual. After further thought we felt we needed some spoken word material too so we asked the massively talented poet Nathan Lunt to write and perform an original piece. This is the result.
A fascinating process, which I think illustrates 1) how close documentary and videopoem can be; and 2) what good results can come from presenting a poet with film footage and asking him or her to write an original text in response. I wish more videopoems and filmpoems were made in this manner.
I found a description of the 48 Hour Documentary Film Competition at the website for the 2013 Leicester DocFilm Festival:
The mission is simple, to encourage new and established documentary filmmakers to get out there and make something, as well giving you a platform from which to showcase your talents. What makes the competition such a challenge is the 48 hour timeframe. It’s deliberately tough because we want to show just what’s possible when you put your mind to it.
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We’ll announce the subject for the films at Phoenix Square 5pm, Friday 1st November and you’ll then have 48 hours to use however you’d like to produce, film & edit a short documentary up to 10 mins in length.
For more on Nathan Lunt, see this webpage from the University of Leicester.
A film by Maia Porcaro.
I’m a little slow in noticing this announcement from January 7 on the Vimeo staff blog. But it’s exciting stuff, with big consequences both for filmmakers and publishers who rely on Vimeo for video hosting.
A lot has changed since we launched the last all-new version of our player, two and a half years ago:
- Browser innovation has brought new HTML5 capabilities (full-screen viewing is now available on every major desktop browser).
- Smartphones have gotten more powerful (and in many cases, bigger), and the variety of smartphones has increased tremendously (three years ago, when we debuted the HTML player, there were only a handful in existence.)
- Firefox added support for H.264 on mobile, Windows, and Linux (with OS X support on the horizon).
- The introduction of devices that support multiple kinds of inputs (e.g., touch, mouse, and pen) at the same time.
With all these advancements, it was clear that we needed a more flexible and accommodating base for our player. So we did the only thing that made sense: we rebuilt the whole thing from scratch.
The player may look (mostly) the same on the surface, but behind the scenes we rethought everything from the ground up. Our re-engineered back end means that videos load twice as fast, and we simplified the front end to make it compatible with way more devices.
New features outlined in the post include faster playback, in-player purchasing, a redesigned share screen, new accessibility features, HTML5 by default (about time!), more responsiveness, and perhaps most significantly, closed captions/subtitles support.
This last is especially important for poetry films, I think, because many of us have tended to feel that putting words on the screen by default when the poem is already included in the soundtrack is redundant and distracting… for people who don’t have hearing problems. But those who do haven’t been very well served by this approach. It should also be a lot easier to reach readers in foreign languages now (given good translations, of course).
Read the whole post, and check out the new FAQ page on Captions and Subtitles.
A film by Judith Dekker, who notes in the description at Vimeo that it was
Made as a part of my residency in Dunbar, Scotland for North Light.
This footage was shot during my time there, most of it even on my first evening. Dunbar has a working harbour which brings movement and sounds. But there are moments when there’s a stillness. I asked fellow resident and poet Sheree Mack if she had words for those times and she did. Her words compliment the images and Luca Nasciuti created another great soundtrack.
Haar is a Scots word which translates in English to “coastal fog.” In Dekker’s native Dutch, it can mean “her” or “hair.”
Sheree Mack writes about her own time in Dunbar in a post at her great new blog, adrift in the wilderness. She also kept a blog during her residency: Walking Our Way Home.
https://vimeo.com/83938341
A videopoem remix of a text at The Poetry Storehouse. Nic S. used footage from NASA and the Prelinger Archives, music by Matt Samolis, and her own reading of the poem by Bill Yarrow.
A film by Anthony Brown and Ashley Blakeney. Eden Jeffries is a creative writer, visual artist and activist.