Posts By Dave Bonta
Every Memory by Sheree Mack
http://vimeo.com/55172122
This is #6 in Alastair Cook‘s Absent Voices series “celebrating the legacy of the Greenock Sugar Sheds, vast Category A listed hulking relics of the sugar trade, a dark and sweet slice of Scots history.” Sheree Mack reads her poem as part of a soundtrack by Luca Nasciuti, with cinematography by Swoon (Mark Neys). This is one of several filmpoem collaborations between Cook and Neys, and you can catch both men along with Nasciuti live in London tomorrow night, February 16, as part of the London Poetry Systems anniversary bash.
Alastair Cook, Mark Neys and Luca Nasciuti are also all directors — along with yours truly — of the first Filmpoem Festival to be held in Dunbar, Scotland in early August. We’ve just posted the call.
America by Allen Ginsberg
An impressive videopoem apparently made for a high school English class. I particularly like how the young filmmaker asserts herself as a kind of alternate-history author of the poem. It seems in keeping with the poem’s own speculative interests.
poem “America” by Allen Ginsberg
directed by Sydney Gross
starring Sydney Gross
special thanks to Sabah Light and Ashley Langley
project for Mr. Locke’s class
To A Young Poet by R. S. Thomas
Othniel Smith notes:
An interpretation of a poem by Welsh writer R. S. Thomas (1913-2000), made entirely using material taken from the public domain Prelinger Archive. Contains brief nudity.
See Smith’s Vimeo channel for many more classic poetry mashups with Prelinger films and Librivox recordings.
something I remember by Robert Lax
The third in a trilogy of animations for Robert Lax poems by the German architect and artist Susanne Wiegner.
“something I remember” is a poem by Robert Lax that describes a certain moment outside of time and space during a rainy night. For the film the letters of the poem are divided in a large amount of layers. These layers become spaces, streets and the falling rain.
And at the end … “there is nothing particular about it to recall.”
B Movie by Luke Wright
A wildly entertaining performance video, augmented by visual text drawn by Sam Ratcliffe. This is from British poet and broadcaster Luke Wright, found via Viral Verse. Here’s the description at YouTube:
BARRY vs THE BLOB – a B Movie set in Brentwood, Essex.
Poet Luke Wright felt bad that Brentwood had the singular reputation of being the home of TOWIE. So he’s set another cinematic event in Brentwood — Essex’s first B movie. On a budget, like all the best B movies, the only special effect he had at his disposal was ALLITERATION. This is literally a B movie.
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
Day is Done by Johan de Boose
Swoon‘s latest videopoem features a text, reading and English translation by Belgian author Johan de Boose. As Swoon wrote in a blog post introducing the film:
For poetry day & week (here in Belgium & The Netherlands) Johan de Boose wrote a poem.
The ‘Provincie Oost-Vlaanderen‘ and ‘Het Poëziecentrum‘ gave me a commission to make a videopoem for it.During these days filled with poetry, Johan is visiting schools, showing the video, reading the poem and talking with the students…
Some things speak for themselves.
Loud and like crystal.[…]
It was clear from the beginning that I wanted someone young to feature in this video. And I found the perfect one. Filming and editing was made easy with her natural expression and Johan’s strong words.
Dutch and Flemish Poetry Day is the fourth Thursday of January (January 24th this year).
Click through to the post to read the poem in both languages.
Kliniken (The Clinic) by Annelie Axén
A newly subtitled animation by Kristian Pedersen for Gasspedal Animert. Words and voice are by Annelie Axén. There’s also an unsubtitled version.
According to the Gasspedal website (with the help of Google Translate), Annelie Axén was born in 1975 and is an author and critic. Raised in Falun, Sweden, she graduated from the Author Program at Telemark University College in Bø, Norway, and went on to the University of Copenhagen where she studied journalism. Her book Langz was published by Gasspedal in 2005.
Erica Goss on how poets experience videopoems
This month in her Third Form column at Connotation Press, Erica Goss takes a look at how videopoems made by others are seen by the poets whose texts they use.
“Sometimes I feel like I have to watch the videos between my fingers,” says Howie Good. “I don’t feel like it’s my poem anymore.” Howie is a professor of journalism at SUNY New Paltz, and the author of four poetry collections, most recently Dreaming in Red from Right Hand Pointing. “It’s flattering, and brings recognition for the poet, but the poem is a creation in itself. I want it to generate its own pictures in the reader’s mind.”
Howie told me that “the poet and the filmmaker have different goals. The video is a separate object. It’s good that a poem inspires the filmmaker, but then it’s not my poem. Now it’s out in the world, away from me.” Howie doesn’t feel that videos diminish poetry. “They don’t enhance poems either. They are simply different things.” The worst thing that might happen would be if the video “pre-empted the imagination. We need our consciousness liberated. Poetry does that.”
