~ Video Library ~
Był sobie król / Once there was a King by Janina Porazińska
The ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival has just announced the 29 nominees for its 2014 competition, and this is one of them. It’s also a Vimeo Staff Pick — testimony to the high quality of the animation and production. Tytus Majerski’s description reads:
Stop-motion mixed with CG, short film based on a polish lullaby written by Janina Porazińska. Author of original music unknown. Performed by Maria Peszek.
A home made project, which I graduated with at my film school in Poland.
It combines cut out animation and 3d set-ups.
Janina Porazińska (1888-1971) specialized in children’s poetry, fairy tales and other folkloric material. The translation used in the titling is by Magda Bryll.
Mar Belle reviewed the film for the blog No Film School:
Have you ever noticed how parents seem to delight in terrifying their children? Whether it’s old wives tales of wind changes leaving their faces contorted or the devil stealing their souls post-sneeze, there are endless ways for adults to keep children in a perpetual state of fear. However, the cruelest has to be those moments before bed, when they’ll soon to be abandoned to a long, dark night with tales of cannibal witches or bone grinding giants stalking through their heads. Depicting the tragic story of a love triangle between a king, a princess and a page, Tytus Majerski’s atmospheric adaptation of Polish writer Janina Porazińska’s lullaby Once There Was a King, is cut from the same gruesome cloth that keeps nightlight companies in business.
on a prophet by Kathleen Roberts
she says that she
is learning to be immortal
although it has not
been easy
she’s trying to learn
to stop eating she says
nourishment
distracts the body
from its truth…
Indiana-based graphic designer and poet Dave Richardson, best known in the videopoetry world for his 2012 piece “The Mantis Shrimp,” combines forces with poet Kathleen Roberts to make this affecting and effective videopoem “for the upcoming show With Sirens Blaring at the Prøve Collective in Duluth, Minnesota, August 8-23, 2014.” I usually find it distracting to have a poem appear both in the soundtrack and in words on the screen simultaneously, but somehow Richardson makes it work. He gives a bit more detail about the exhibition on his blog:
Prøve Collective, in Duluth, Minnesota, will display a body of work linking poetry to visual, film, and sound art. Pursuant to a grant from the McKnight Foundation, award-winning Duluth poet Kathleen Roberts is creating an assembly of films and artwork by local and regional artists based on her words. These works will be displayed permanently on her website and in Prøve’s August exhibition, “With Sirens Blaring,” August 8-23, 2014.
Prøve Gallery is “a contemporary and experimental art gallery located in downtown Duluth.” Kathleen Roberts is the literary director.
Some small room for surprise by Jen Karetnick
https://vimeo.com/100030112
Nic S.’s latest video remix incorporating a text from the Poetry Storehouse uses a soundtrack by Elan Hickler. The poet, Jen Karetnick, blogs at A Body at Rest. See her full collection of poems at the Storehouse for a bio.
Naar Wat We Waren / For What We Were by Eric Joris
This film was selected as the winner of the Open Competition at the 2014 Filmpoem Festival in Antwerp (part of the Felix International Poetry Festival). The description accompanying Filmpoem’s upload to Vimeo:
Naar Wat We Waren, a film by Lies Van Der Auwera of the poem by Eric Joris is just terrific. We chose this as the Filmpoem Prize for reasons which will be clear as soon as you watch it – a real melding together of sound word and image. There are many beautiful poetry-films, lush and sumptuous. This is not one. This is real, alive and honest. Congratulations to all involved!
The film was produced collaboratively by the Poetry Prophets: Eric Joris (poem and voice), Kristof Van Rossem (music) and Lies Van der Auwera (camera and editing). There’s also a version without subtitles. It’s part of a collection of videopoems that emerged from a workshop led by Marc Neys (Swoon) at a creative writing program in Antwerp.
This is exciting to me because it shows that videopoetry workshops can be an integral part of writing programs, and that they can produce highly effective, publishable results. (Here’s the English translation of the writing program page from Google.) American MFA program directors, take note!
All American by David Hernandez
If the films released so far on their website are any indication, Motionpoems‘ 2014 season is their most stylistically diverse collection of poetry films to date. This film, released just before Independence Day in the U.S., builds on the poem’s challenge to any easy assumptions about American identity. (It’s also slightly NSFW, with glimpses of female nudity.) Here’s the description from the website:
Filmed near Lake Geneva Switzerland (and at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern), British filmmaker Richard Johnson and dancer Jasmine Morand present this francoperspective on California poet David Hernandez’s all-inclusive poem, “All American.”
Click through and scroll down for the text.
For more on Richard Johnson, see his pages on Cinely and IMDb. For more on the poet, visit DavidHernandez.com.
Hij morrelt aan je ziel / He fumbles at your Soul by Emily Dickinson
https://vimeo.com/93230216
This is Dickinson’s poem F477 (1862)/J315, translated into Dutch by J. Eijkelboom and into film by Marc Neys, A.K.A. Swoon, who says he began with an old reading he had made of the poem, building an experimental soundtrack around it.
The track was (except for the electronic ‘drumthumbs’ in the back) completely constructed out of (altered) sounds I made with my mouth. A fun experiment. For some reason the track worked quite well with that old recording. Maybe there was a short video in it too?
Keeping a similar kind of restriction as I did with the sounds, I wanted only one short piece of footage in the video; leaves.
The whole thing was created in one afternoon (and it probably shows), but I had fun doing so. Keeping it simple and fresh.
A fun inbetweenie stuffed between longer videos and ongoing projects.
Ocean by David Harsent
David Harsent reads his poem over a score composed by Luca Nasciuti in this film by Alastair Cook; James William Norton contributed cinematography. According to the description on Vimeo, “Filmpoem Festival 2014 commissioned British poets David Harsent, Helen Mort, John Glenday and Michael Symmons Roberts to produce new work on the theme of migration,” and then commissioned films incorporating the poems. I hope to share the others here in the weeks ahead.
I Stop Wearing the Mini-skirt, 1972 by Patricia Wooldridge
Edinburgh-based video producer Alicja Pawluczuk made this film under commission by Filmpoem and Felix Poetry Festival in association with the Poetry Society; the text by Patricia Wooldridge, read by the author, is another one of the commended poems from the 2013 National Poetry Competition. One of the judges, Jane Yeh, had this to say about the poem:
The switchbacks and disjunctions of this look back at the past give it a paradoxically contemporary style; as a portrait of the artist as a young woman, it feels both authentic and fresh. The audacious last stanza is a triumph of brevity and art, spinning off into multiple directions while drawing the poem together into a memorable finish.
Be sure to view all the National Poetry Competition 2013 Filmpoems at the Poetry Society website.
Aphorism by Eric Burke
A brief Eric Burke poem at the Poetry Storehouse made into a film by Jutta Pryor with music by Masonik. The poem originally appeared in A cappella Zoo before its second life in the Poetry Storehouse, and frequent Storehouse contributor Othniel Smith has also envideoed it.
The End or the Beginning by Jan Lauwereyns
The origin of this recent videopoem, Diving into Broken Bits (The End or the Beginning) by Marc Neys (A.K.A. Swoon), is a little complicated, so I’ll just quote his blog post about it:
A while back I made a video for ‘Het einde of het begin van een mensenleven / The end or the beginning of a human life’
This poem by Jan Lauwereyns (you can read about the videopoem) has an extended English version (published in the book ‘Three Poems To the Question of Four. 27+3 Drawings’)
Because they were so obviously connected I wanted to create a second video for the English poem; ‘The End or the Beginning’I asked Michael Dickes to read/record the poem and he delivered a perfect (dark blue with bits of fading grey) reading. I created a very slow and deep track around that recording […]
This time I didn’t want to use IICADOM footage. No family memories. The video needed to be more abstract.
The first thing I wanted to use was an experimental performance/recording by Ephemeral Rift.
The mask and movements in this short video reminded me of bunraku. It was the perfect link to Jan’s frame of mind.
(Jan lives and works as a scientist in Japan)
This video was going to be the lead in my videopoem. I added a variety of images around this storyline. Hints of science, nature, death,…
A poetic storyline through images. It’s a flow of thoughts surrounding the poem, being a flow on itself…I am very happy with this one, so was Jan. We started a journey together with this project. It will take us to other places, new ways of combining, crossing borders. More to follow in the future…
