Posts By Dave Bonta
Shuttered Windows by Yahia Lababidi
Update: Video has been made private.
Swoon has been busy lately, so again we end the week with one of his creations. This one’s based on a poem by Yahia Lababidi — a collaboration sparked, I think, by this very blog. Which makes me happy.
Subway by Charles Reznikoff
http://www.vimeo.com/20036498
I’ve been surprised to run across several videos for Reznikoff poems at Vimeo in the past month. This one’s by Canadian film student Alan Sencich with Jonny Page, Luke Banville and KinHang Ho.
Dwa Nieba by Bożena Urszula Malinowska
http://vimeo.com/20305333
Filmmaker Marcin Konrad Malinowski‘s first videopoem, for a poem by his mother. Here’s the English translation he provided:
You and me,
Two heavens,
With a little bit of hell,
With the energy of a volcano
That has gone somewhere,
You and me.
His mother passed away four years ago, he told me in an email, leaving behind a box of poems.
UPDATE: Marcin has started a blog on Tumblr about the project, which hopefully will give rise to many more videopoems of this caliber: Dwa Nieba. (It’s in Polish, but Google Translate can give a pretty good idea of the contents.)
Gaia by Stan Skinny
Stan Skinny wrote and performed the music as well as the poem. Filmed, edited and mixed by Laklop.
Lament by Dylan Thomas
Update: Video has been made private.
Swoon is at it again with a compelling contrast of public and private moods.
Based on the poem ‘Lament’ by Dylan Thomas (read by himself)
The lament for (his) decay together with the lament for growing protests (Prague 68 – Cairo 11) against the positive growth in nature. Everything in life evolves…hopefully for the best.
Street Boy by Gareth Owen
An interesting performance by Paul Townsend in a brief film directed and edited by Lewis Albrow. Gareth Owen is a British playright, novelist, children’s author, actor and director.
I Have a Rendezvous with Death by Alan Seeger
Zooey Park made this four-minute short in NYC for a 72-hour contest for Asian-American filmmakers with the theme “Time’s Up.” I like the way Park recontextualized what is traditionally seen as a war poem, and I liked the moments of dead silence throughout the film.
Fear of Snakes by Lorna Crozier
Canadian filmmaker Andreas Mendritzki (GreenGround Productions) has done a very difficult thing here: made an videopoem for a narrative poem by suggesting the action described in the poem without directly showing it. The result is extremely effective, in my opinion. Evidently I’m not the only one who thinks so — it won first prize at the 2009 Chicago International Children’s Film Festival.
Lorna Crozier is a major Canadian poet. Here’s her website.
Murder (Two voices at dawn on Riverside Drive) by Federico Garcia Lorca
Asesinato, directed by Javier Gómez Serrano for elegant mob films, is an adaptation of a poem from Poeta en Nueva York (Poet in New York), which may be read at Google Books in both Spanish and English (translation by Pablo Medina and Mark Statman).
Siren Song by Margaret Atwood
A new videopoem by Belgian artist and composer Swoon. According to the notes at his blog, he first composed the music and found film images to match, then decided to add the poem:
I took some time working on a piece of music (first hunted, frightened. Melancholic other) with matching images.
Memories of what never was. The attraction between man and woman. A farewell. The impossibility of things undone.
A rabbit.Somehow the words of Atwood gave the necessary lightness (counterweight) and they added an extra layer.
(Thus, at any rate, Google Translate.) Who knew a pet rabbit could be capable of such gravitas?
Poem of Jealousy by Sappho
This is the Sappho poem preserved because Longinus included it in his famous treatise On the Sublime. And indeed, film student and surfer Matt Ching says he made this “for my aesthetics class project on the Sublime.” He used the translation by Horace Gregory; you can browse through a huge number of other versions on this webpage.
I like the psychadelic approach here, though the abrupt ending is unfortunate.
