Posts By Dave Bonta
ROTA by Andrea De La Paz
A very clever, bilingual (Spanish and English) videopoem that I just stumbled across, with text by the director, Andrea De La Paz, a young filmmaker from Vancouver. Leah Dean Cohen is the actor and Rogan Lovse the cinematographer.
A Film About Tears by Sam Theunissen with Sean Louw
A Dutch videopoem that feels much longer than its 38-second runtime, A Film About Tears was directed by Danu Caris with text by Sam Theunissen, but was mainly the idea of the cinematographer, Sean Louw, who uploaded the video to his account with this description:
15/03/2022 – Today is a strange day. Grief comes and goes and you never really know why and how. But with time, you learn to observe it and live with it. And maybe even look back with a smile. This film is about that.
Today, exactly a year ago my mom passed away.
Her handwriting was used for the credits.This project meant a lot to me, so huge thanks to director Danu Caris for dealing with my chaotic ideas and bringing her photographic finesse to the table. Laura Bakker for taking this tiny little roll to a whole new level and breathing life into her character. Boyd Bakema for pretty much saving the day on set. Fons Beijer for making us forget all about our old temp music by creating magic. And Sam Theunissen for writing a poem that really hits home with exactly the right amounts of serious and playful. (Also for casually translating it last-minute)
Shot on a Bolex as part of a third-year project for The Netherlands Film Academy on 16mm Tri-x film supplied and hand-developed by Onno Petersen.
How to Triumph Like a Girl by Ada Limón
This is “An animation created for MTV’s Women’s History Month. It was made using watercolor cut paper stop motion” by Providence, Rhode Island-based artist and animator Hayley Morris. Ada Limón is the poet. See Vimeo for the full credit list.
Octopus Empire by Marilyn Nelson
James Dunlap animates art by Edwina White in a recent video from blogger Maria Popova’s wonderful Universe in Verse series, in collaboration with On Being, mixing science and poetry. Here’s how she sets this one up:
The octopus branched from our shared vertebrate lineage some 550 million years ago to evolve into one of this planet’s most alien intelligences, endowed with an astonishing distributed nervous system and capable of recognizing others, of forming social bonds, of navigating mazes. It is the Descartes of the oceans, learning how to live in its environment by trial and error — that is, by basic empiricism.
Meanwhile, in those 550 million years, we evolved into creatures that placed themselves at the center of the universe and atop the evolutionary ladder, only to find ourselves in an ecological furnace of our making and to reluctantly consider that we might not, after all, be the pinnacle of Earthly intelligence.
That is what Marilyn Nelson explores with great playfulness and poignancy in her poem “Octopus Empire,” originally published in the Academy of American Poets’ poem-a-day lifeline of a newsletter and now brought to life here, for this seventh installment in the animated Universe in Verse, in a reading by Sy Montgomery (author of the enchantment of a book that is The Soul of an Octopus) with life-filled art by Edwina White, set into motion by her collaborator James Dunlap, and set into soulfulness by Brooklyn-based cellist and composer Topu Lyo.
Click through to The Marginalian to read the rest (including the text of the poem). For more on Nelson, see her Poetry Foundation page.
Atlantis—A Lost Sonnet by Eavan Boland
The late Irish poet Eavan Boland’s poem “Atlantis—A Lost Sonnet” in an atmospheric poetry film by Dutch filmmaker Pat van Boeckel, whose work we’ve featured here in the past. There’s also a version in Dutch.
My Father’s Bones by Zoe Paterson Macinnes
An author-made poetry film by Zoe Paterson Macinnes,
a visual artist and filmmaker from the Isle of Lewis. Zoe’s work is a result of her island heritage. She combines personal observations of land and sea with voice, memory and music from the islands to explore themes of identity and belonging. Her documentary short, Cianalas, which investigates the identity of young musicians in Lewis, was awarded Best Documentary Short by Desert Rock Film and Music Festival, and Best Student Film by Culture and Diversity Film Festival.
The music is by Lauren MacColl—the traditional fiddle tune “MacGregor of Roro’s Lament“—setting the mood for a bittersweet, meditative film which I liked well enough when I first watched it two months ago, but found incredibly moving the second time through. I suppose it helps than I can connect to it in two ways, from having visited other islands in the Hebrides, and from my own deep connection to the place where I grew up (including knowing exactly where I’ll be buried, as the poem says).
Video is such a great medium for poems of place! And despite being a professional filmmaker, Macinnes kept things simple with text on screen and slow-moving shots that aren’t redundant with the text and give the viewer’s mind permission to roam—paradoxically, a state more amenable to active engagement. It moves at a walker’s pace. I like that.
We Are The War by T&DA
A fascinating experiment in AI-generated videopoetry from an artists’ collective in Sydney, written and directed by Tyrone Estephan.
We Are The War | CLIP-Guided Storytelling & Speech Synthesis
At T&DA we have explored leveraging the latest technologies to create ‘We Are The War’, an animated graphic novella poem, where both the images and narration were generated through visual and audio synthesis.
Created using prompts inspired by children’s book illustrations and the lines of our poem, images were generated using Midjourney. The narrator was generated through speech synthesis software that only needed 15 minute sample of talking.
To add parallax and depth to the scenes we used neural Z depth extraction.
Using these tools we tell the story of children’s metaversal shenanigans as realities of recent years bleed into their locked down lives. We can think of this technology almost as if it’s a 10 year old expressing itself, which felt like the perfect means to convey the sentiments of the poem.
Tyrone Estephan – Written & Directed
Sean Simon – Visuals & Post
Josh Kell – Online Editor
The Opposites Game by Brendan Constantine (2)
A classroom erupts into a war of words as students grapple with a seemingly simple prompt: what is the opposite of a gun?
This animation of Brendan Constantine‘s poem by Anna Samo and Lisa LaBracio went viral, with more than 24,700 views on Vimeo and 364,814 views
on YouTube. It probably helps that it was a Vimeo staff pick. But it’s also
part of TED-Ed’s series, “There’s a Poem for That,” which features animated interpretations of poems both old and new that give language to some of life’s biggest feelings.
See the Vimeo description for the full credits and list of honors.
We previously shared Mike Gioia’s film adaptation of the same poem. I’m not sure which I prefer; both have their strengths.
Tattoo by Wallace Stevens
Belgian composer and artist Marc Neys (A.K.A. Swoon) is back making videopoems after a lengthy hiatus, with a new website for all his output. For a sense of just how prolific he used to be, and how central his lyrical, idiosyncratic approach to filmmaking has been to the development of contemporary poetry film, this recent adaptation of a Wallace Stevens poem appears to be the 159th video of his we’ve shared at Moving Poems. Here are the credits:
film, voice & music: Marc Neys
Footage: Jan Eerala
translation: Peter Nijmeijer
Ramblings by Gabriel Rosenstock
Irish poet Gabriel Rosenstock has been collaborating with filmmakers for years, often on adaptations of his Gaelic haiku. This film finds him working with Kashmiri artist Masood Hussain on a brief anthology of four free-verse videopoems, “The Poet as Untouchable,” “Broken Bangle,” “The Dismantling of the Taj Mahal” and “White Flags.”
Ramblings is a suite of short video-poems by bilingual poet Gabriel Rosenstock (Ireland), an Indophile who has been dazzled by his contact with the literary and spiritual legacy of India, her people and landscapes, but is not blind to the darker side of India, such as the caste system, Hindutva, the violence and injustices, and so on. In previous short films with his artistic collaborator, artist and auteur Masood Hussain with whom he created the book Walk with Gandhi, he has focussed on the shabby treatment of dissident poet Varavara Rao. Ramblings ends with an anarchist poem which contains a key to universal peace.
