Posts By Dave Bonta
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.
Sandpiper by Elizabeth Bishop
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZyj3gXEUis
Filmmaker and television producer John Scott is working on a feature-length documentary called Elizabeth Bishop and the Art of Losing, which will include a number of videos like this one illustrating her poems. He wrote about the project at length for the Elizabeth Bishop Centenary blog.
Each scene will end on a poem whose inspiration comes from the tensions of the time period being described. And thus the poetry will not only be an aesthetically pleasing and rewarding study of genius, it will deepen the emotional content of her life-story.
I learned about the project from a feature at VidPoFilm back on Nov. 18. Brenda Clews sent Scott a couple questions via email. Quoting from his answers:
I am not interested solely in being illustrative — I am interested in at times being playful with the way the visuals/sounds and the words come together in an effort to use the expressive powers of visuals and sounds. There’s lots of potential in the medium itself that I think might otherwise be lost if it is simply slaved word for word to the text. […]
I believe the beauty of Bishop’s poetry is that it is so loaded with the spirit of the moment, in the fragmentary, in the lush, in the juxtaposition of contrasting images and in the point of view of its subjects.
Do read the rest. About this videopoem in particular, Scott noted on YouTube:
“Sandpiper” is a poem that was written by Elizabeth Bishop in 1965 and it is believed that it was based on observations she made on a trip she made as an adult back to Nova Scotia. Bishop’s adult life took her in many directions and places, and she has explicitly compared herself to the sandpiper and (presumably) both of their quests to endlessly seek (enlightenment?) through careful observation.
PROOF triptych: three poems by David Tomaloff
Swoon Bildos and David Tomaloff collaborated on a videopoetry triptych called PROOF, which has its own website. I didn’t want to split it into three posts since I think the videos are best watched together and in the intended sequence:
_object{-ions in the mirror
Thespianic Mythology No. 4
Proof
The first two poems were originally published (in text form) in the online magazine >kill author (here and here) while the third was written especially for this triptych.
Update (1/5/12): Swoon and Tomaloff are the featured artists of the month at CoronationPress.com for their creation of this triptych. The accompanying interview is full of fascinating details about their collaboration and methodology.
Andrew Wyeth, Painter, Dies at 91 by L.S. Klatt
Tom Jacobsen made this latest animation for Motionpoems, illustrating a poem by L.S. Klatt which was included in his collection Cloud of Ink as well as in Best American Poems 2011. According to a blog post from Pixel Farm, the production studio where he works, Jacobsen based his animation on a series of photos of landscapes reminiscent of Wyeth paintings: “On a 9-day Dakota road trip with his son, Jacobsen snapped photos of the Midwest landscape that were inspired by the painter and then incorporated into the finished piece.”
Submissions are open for the 6th ZEBRA film festival
Poetry-filmmakers have until May 2 to submit works to be screened at the world’s premiere poetry film festival, held biannually in Berlin. The guidelines and entry forms are now online in English and German.
The ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival is calling for entries for the 6th competition to find the best poetry films! Entries should be short films based on poems. Prizes in the competition will be awarded to a total value of €10,000. From all films submitted, a Programme Commission will nominate the films for the competition and select the programme contributions. The winners will be selected by an international jury.
The prizes that will be awarded are:
– ZEBRA Prize for the Best Poetry Film, donated by the Literaturwerkstatt Berlin
– Goethe Film Prize, donated by the Goethe Institute
– Ritter Sport Film Prize, donated by Alfred Ritter GmbH & Co KG
– Audience Prize awarded by the radioeins juryThis year, for the first time, the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival will also be making awards for poetry films in the categories »Best First Film«, »Best Film for Tolerance« and »Best Poem Performance on Film«.
The festival is also for the first time inviting everyone to make a film based on the poem [meine heimat] ([my home]) by Ulrike Almut Sandig. The directors of the three best film versions will be invited to Berlin to meet the poet and have the opportunity to present and discuss their films. You can find the poem with audio and translations here.
ZEBRINO – the prize for the best film for children and young people: Children and young people award their own prize. The young viewers will be deciding on the winner of the ZEBRINO, the best poetry film for eight-to-twelve-year-olds.
Closing date for entries for all competitions is 2 May 2012.
All films that are submitted will automatically be entered for all selection procedures!
The 6th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival will be held from 18 to 21 October 2012 in the Babylon Cinema in Berlin.
Let it be dark, and it was dark by John Siddique
http://vimeo.com/30260208
This is from a series of animations called Thirteen Moons. I’ll let the author, bestselling U.K. poet John Siddique, explain:
A series of 13 animated films based on a sequence of poems from Recital — An Almanac (Salt). The poems are based on the Full Moons of the year and the Celtic mythology which names each moon after a letter in the ancient tree alphabet.
The films were created when I was British Council Poet in Residence at California State University in Los Angeles. Made with determination, love, and goodwill. Animation director Walter Santucci, his students, friends and myself set to work before passing the pieces to composer Katie Chatburn. My aim was to gave each artist a free hand in what they came up with in response to the poems, interjecting as lightly as possible.
The paintings in this one are by Dania Strong. I’ll be sharing more of these in the coming weeks, but if you’re impatient, you can browse them all — or twelve of them, at any rate — at the album Siddique has set up for them on Vimeo (whence the above quote).
Ground by Alastair Cook
I’ve shared a lot of filmpoems here made by the Scottish artist and filmmaker Alastair Cook, but this one’s the work of someone else: Ginnetta Correli directed and edited this film using Alastair’s reading of some haiku he wrote for a multi-author linked verse sequence. He blogged about the film:
I don’t write terribly much (as you may have noted) and am perhaps unnecessarily precious about what I do write (see Abachan, for instance) and am pleased to see what such a wonderful, dark filmmaker can make of my words. Filmpoem is filmpoemed!
This was featured in VidPoFilm a few weeks ago.
Ground has an impenetrable quality. The film imagery, poem and reading approach each other without quite meeting. In that circle of visual and verbal imagery and the emotion of the voice of the reader, we witness a flame dancing without knowing who lit it, who blows on it, or why it goes out, if it does.
Something profound happens. But what? Is the poem notes on death and what resurrects us through life? Or the dream of a life?
