Posts By Dave Bonta
Was it I by Sheila Packa
It’s been too long since I last featured one of Kathy McTavish‘s lovely pieces of cello-accompanied video art for a poem by her regular collaborator, poet Sheila Packa. This is a piece from Packa’s new collection, Cloud Birds.
Most of the time, videos that consist only of still images don’t seem like a good fit for a site called Moving Poems, but McTavish’s videos are too full of life and movement to exclude.
One Art by Elizabeth Bishop
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAiik7SKXX8
Another videopoem from John Scott‘s projected feature-length documentary, Elizabeth Bishop and the Art of Losing. See “Sandpiper” for more information and links. Jason Harrington supplied the animation here.
Nicholas Was… by Neil Gaiman
It would be hard to top last year’s animation of “Nicholas Was…” by Beijing motion graphics studio 39 Degrees North, but Trine Malde and narrator Aaron Kay took this in a completely different direction with “a mixture of rotoscoped animation, live action and found footage to comment on the stress and evil of christmas consumerism.”
Slow Wave Through The City by Jacq Kelly
The latest filmpoem from Alastair Cook, who describes it on Vimeo as follows:
Slow Wave Through The City is a poem by Jacq Kelly, published by Colin Herd this year. It crossed my path digitally and I watched the film in my head as I read, my adopted city of Edinburgh speeding by.
Jacq lives in Edinburgh but dreams of moving to Sweden and becoming a viking. Until this happens, she spends her time writing poetry, fiction and trying to make a difference in politics as a campaigner.
Slow Wave Through the City was filmed in Edinburgh on 8mm film in Summer 2011 on a long walk with the poet; it was shot using Ektachrome Super8, processed in Kansas by Dwaynes.
By way of a coda, this is a first, a Scottish Filmpoem. Looking through all 15 films, this is the only one which has only Scots contributors for the film, narrative and music. This was not deliberate, but is fitting, since it’s devoted to Edinburgh.
The Letters by Sigurd Tenningen
Another of Kristian Pedersen’s excellent animations for Gasspedal Animert. The sound effects are nearly are crucial as the images here. In some ways this is closer to a concrete poetry experiment than a kinetic type film.
Odds and Ends by Joseph Harker
Joseph Harker‘s poem appeared in qarrtsiluni back in October (whence the recording of his reading). Swoon blogged (in Dutch) about the making of the video here.
For a long time, I’ve wanted to make a film for my father, who died last year. Plenty of ideas. Especially ideas about how things are definitely not allowed to look. Or sound. The epitaph could not be more than a tribute to his own simplicity.
In the poem “Odds and Ends” (Qarrtsiluni Podcast 28.10.2011) by Joseph Harker, I found the words summoned up the right atmosphere for me. I was even more excited when Joseph gave permission to use his poem.
[…]
For the images I wanted a split. 2 tracks of images. Two streams of thought.
I used footage from “And So They Live,” a documentary from 1940 by John Ferno and Julian Roffman. Simplicity and warmth were the central concepts that I was looking at in these images. I also used (self-filmed) images from the train to my hometown. The contrast of the warmth and tranquility in the nostalgic images with the blurred images of the train rushing forward to my roots is, for me, successful evocation.
(Translation by Google and guesswork)
What Draws Us To The Sea? by John Siddique
http://vimeo.com/26261699
This is “Holly Moon” from John Siddique‘s Thirteen Moons series. The paintings are by Dania Strong, Clarpupia Hernandez did the animation, and credit for direction and supervision is given to Walter Santucci. As with the others in the series, the original music was composed by Katie Chatburn in response to the video.
Song for a Towerblock by Michelle Green
A collaboration between filmmaker Glenn-emlyn Richards and Manchester-based poet Michelle Green for Comma Film. For more on Green, see her section on Poetry International Web (which includes the text of this poem).
Alone by Yvor Winters
http://vimeo.com/33484094
A recent video by Nic S. for a poem included in her online audio collection Pizzicati of Hosanna.
Martin Earle on Tranströmer and the Making of “A Galaxy Over There”
Juliane Otto interviewed Martin Earle, creator of “A Galaxy Over There” — a filmpoem for Tomas Tranströmer’s “Schubertiana” — for the lyrikline.org blog. A couple of snips:
LB: Do you think poetic images are of another quality than images in film?
ME: There is this very obvious difference that we normally read poems in books and always watch videos or films on some kind of screen. And in our culture the screen has become the all pervasive and restless mediator of information and entertainment – most of which we consume inattentively and forget after a few minutes. I don’t know if we’ve found a way to use the screen or the internet to take things in slowly and chew over them… as we can when we read a poem in a book.
LB: Does Tranströmer know your film? Did he let you know if he likes it?
ME: I was in contact with Monica Tranströmer who was very generous with her time and in arranging contracts and things. They both seemed to like the animation although Tomas Tranströmer wasn’t keen on the translation of the last word ‘djupen’, which we’d translated as ‘abyss’. He thought that ‘the depths’ would have been much more appropriate… and this seems to me very revealing of the attitude to the world that permeates his work. There is very little sense of alienation or existential tragedy that the world ‘abyss’ might suggest and which is not hard to detect in much modern poetry (and in much ancient poetry too). No, for Tranströmer behind and in everything there is a tremendously positive ‘something’, a great ‘yes’ – ‘the depths’. It’s really a shame that it was too late to rerecord the audio track.
