Posts By Marie Craven
Mirror by Sylvia Plath
Belgian artist Marc Neys adapts Sylvia Plath’s Mirror for this videopoem from mid-2022. He narrates the poem from a Dutch translation by Lucienne Stassaert, giving the video the bilingual title Spiegel/Mirror. As with most of his other films, he composed the ambient music as well.
Regular readers of Moving Poems will know the work of Marc Neys very well from the large number of posts of his work over the past decade. This video from Plath’s poem appears in some ways to be an updated version of one he made in 2014.
Plath’s writing has been adapted for film by other artists here.
La luna asoma (The moon appears) by Federico García Lorca
The winner of the 10th Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition in Ireland is La luna asoma (The moon appears). The piece is by Belgian film-maker, artist and animator Jelle Meys, from the poem by the great Spanish writer Federico García Lorca (1898-1936).
The pace of the film is slow and graceful and the animation simple and fluid, meeting well with the brevity and mystery of the poem. The film-maker talks more about his process in a brief interview with Jane Glennie as part of her overall review of the Ó Bhéal event.
Full credits:
Director and animator: Jelle Meys
Poem: Federico García Lorca
Voice: Joaquin Muñoz Benitez
Soundtrack: Nathan Alpaerts (guitar) feat. Maf! and G.L.A.S.B.A.K.
English translation editor: Christopher Maurer
Winning films from all 10 years of the Ó Bhéal competition can be seen in another post by Jane Glennie.
The posh mums are boxing in the square by Wayne Holloway-Smith
The posh mums are boxing in the square is a marvelous piece from U.K. poet Wayne Holloway-Smith and Dutch film-maker Helmie Stil, both award-winning artists. The synopsis:
The film poem is about a mother re-imagined into life and given boxing gloves to fight off cancer.
Credits:
Producer Director and Editor: Helmie Stil
Writer: Wayne Holloway-Smith
Swimmers: Adele Carlson and Katie Fried
Underwater Camera: Philip Bartropp
Underwater camera assistent: Aaron Hindes
Camera: Edmund Saunders
Soundscape: Lennert Busch
The film was made in association with the Healthy Scepticism Project, The Poetry Society and Motionpoems.
Moving Poems has previously shared several other poetry film collaborations from Helmie Stil.
Blank by Linda France
Blank is another in a series of collaborations between film-maker Kate Sweeney and poet Linda France. Sweeney’s artist statement about the film:
In the administrative section of the Bloodaxe Books Poetry Publisher’s archive, there is a post-it note stuck to an invoice. The note has slipped through the archival ‘cleaning’ process and rather than being discarded, has been preserved by accident. In 2017, I drew and digitised a font from the letters making up the short message written on the note. For every missing letter in the font, there is a dot; a hole, an ellipsis. I called the font, ‘Janet’.
‘Janet’ an ephemeral trace drawn from an archive has become a conduit for other voices and the starting point for collaboration with other artists and writers to speak, not about or for, but through ‘Janet’.
In 2019, I invited poet Linda France to write a poem using ‘Janet’. Blank is a response to both the metaphorical and the structural potential of the font, ‘Janet’. France has extracted the implicitly feminist possibility of ‘Janet’ as a tool for articulating the female experience of the effect of the male gaze (and consequently the effect of its absence).
As a printed document it is possible to see how France has utilised the concrete and structural qualities of ‘Janet’. The poem printed on the page is punctured but readable. In order to make the video, Linda and I had to translate and devise a way to ‘sound out’ the poem. And so, as a video poem, Blank becomes a playful presentation of the relationship between the visual and audible characteristics of the mark – the period, the omission – and its use within poetic texts presented on the page, the screen and in performance.
Blank is one of a series of video-poems produced in collaboration with other poets and artists. It is part of my practice-led PhD project; working with the Bloodaxe Books publisher’s archive as a site and source for my research into the ways collaborative practice can be used to look at the shape and form of the hidden archival artefact.
Both film-maker and poet have featured several times before here at Moving Poems, on projects together and and with other artists.
Haiku by Martin Gerigk
Martin Gerigk takes a highly experimental approach to the traditional literary form of Japanese haiku in his film titled Haiku.
The visual and spoken text elements include fragments from haiku by Iio Sōgi (1421-1502), Arakida Moritake (1473-1549), Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694), Yosa Buson (1716- 1784), Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828) and Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902). Additional text inspired by the ideas in these haiku is by Gerigk himself, along with Cauro Hige, who also contributes voice and performance.
In a freely contemporary manner, the traditional literary form guides the film’s structure. From the film-maker’s statement:
Following the typical structure of a traditional Japanese haiku the film contains 17 specific events divided in three parts of 5, 7 and again 5 units. All these events are built and derived from original Japanese haiku, contemporary text sequences, sound patterns or pure music sections.
The stylistic approach to text in the film seems more akin to sound poetry and concrete poetry than to traditional poetry. But regardless of approach to literary form, this is a truly outstanding piece of film-making that has been very widely screened and awarded. It displays a similar virtuosity to Gerigk’s Structures of Nature, published earlier in the year here at Moving Poems.
Martin describes himself as primarily a composer and arranger for orchestra and chamber music. Indeed, the meticulous entwining in this film of exquisite images, sounds, rhythms and words, feels more like musical composition than any ordinary film-making. Each element calls and answers the other. In the film-maker’s own words:
Haiku | 俳句 is a symphonic audiovisual project for two Japanese performers, alternating percussion groups, soundscapes and rhythmicized video sequences. The film is an experimental approach to pay tribute to the beauty of Japan and the extraordinary art of Japanese haiku poetry of 15th to early 20th century.
Letter to Fred by Mike Hoolboom & Alfred Vander
At one level, Letter to Fred is a film about the creative obsession of film-making. At another it’s about life and death beyond that frame. It’s the fifth film I’ve shared here at Moving Poems by Canadian experimental film-maker, Mike Hoolboom, so highly esteemed in the field since the 1980s.
At the film’s heart is a letter from Mike’s long-time friend, Alfred Vander aka Fred Pelon, a former film-maker. The simple words of the letter are given on screen simply as subtitles, while the sublime images, sounds and filmic rhythms invite a subtle poetic trance, a mindset of clarity in which the authenticity of what is said can better be felt and heard.
The film itself seems like Mike’s ‘letter to Fred’, as if in answer to the words received. The film-maker’s synopsis:
A letter from my friend Alfred Vander. Though when we met he was Fred Pelon, anarchist super 8 filmmaker, a prolific machine of thoughts and pictures, growing fungi on film, and on the archaic behaviours of the state. But it turned out that film was only the next stage in a life dedicated to reinvention. In this brief post, he describes his new normal, no longer living in a boat but a monastery, working as a caregiver, a gardener, a bridge keeper. As the pandemic waxes on, and my relationships to fringe movie practices and places that used to be central feel increasingly abstract, as if part of some faraway dream, these spare lines offer new hope, and the ongoing consolation of friendship.
The drawn-out opening shot startles immediately to the edge of the seat, the knifes-edge presence of death a stark reference point for what follows. The film is highly personal to the two friends and yet covers far wider ground.
Citizen Poetry by Lisa Robertson and Mike Hoolboom
The edited stream of ‘found’ moving images writes its own wordless poem in Mike Hoolboom‘s Citizen Poetry. Meticulous sound design brings another rich texture of poetry to this film. Text-on-screen offers reading of words without voice, the content adapted from Lisa Robertson’s collection of poetic-prose essays, Nilling.
There is a a difficulty in crediting Mike’s films for cataloguing purposes. For some years they have shown conscious effort to subvert authorship. Citizen Poetry’s final credit gives only a stark list of names, with Mike somewhere around the middle:
Samuel Boudier
Murasaki Encho
Jeanette Groenendaal
Mike Hoolboom
Lucia Martinez
Olivier Provily
Susanne Ohmann
Jean Perret
Liz Straitman
Leslie Supnet
Ana Taran
And yet this piece bears the indelible mark of his film-making style over the decades of a prolific and esteemed artistic life. There’s a breathtaking, dynamic and moving quality to the choice and editing of images from multiple sources, a subtle euphoria, dark and light, deftly woven through all elements of this film.
It could well be that the other names in the credits are artists who created the disparate fragments of ‘found’ media in Citizen Poetry. I wonder if Mike directly knows any of his listed collaborators or contributors. As a fellow maker of films that assemble ‘found’ media, I relate to indirect and virtual creative connections.
However Lisa Robertson is given her own solo credit as the source of Mike’s radically condensed text for the film. As its own piece of writing, Citizen Poetry could be loosely described as prose poetry. From the film’s synopsis:
This retake on belonging and boundaries imagines poetry as a capitalist salve.
The first half of the film sets context and describes mechanisms of how life is objectified in capitalism, people and all. The second half speaks beautifully about the ‘citizen poetry’ that brings hope and liberating connections below the radar.
Borders inspire crossings.
Poetry is the speech of citizenship. It keeps escaping and follows language towards an ear that could belong to anyone.
The final line – I won’t spoil it – brings inspired closure.
Vimeo shows the title of the film as Citizen Poet but I have chosen to adhere to Citizen Poetry, as it appears on the screen.
Moving Poems has before featured three other films from Mike Hoolboom.
