~ Video Library ~
Housekeeping by Donna Vorreyer
https://vimeo.com/80140293
This Nic S. video remix of a poem from The Poetry Storehouse uses unexpected imagery to suggest perhaps some different things about God from what the author of the text, Donna Vorreyer, had in mind — but that’s as it should be, I think. (Vorreyer called the video “haunting.”)
Melancholia by Jacob Balde
A videopoem with a decidedly neo-classical feel by German filmmaker Patrick Müller, who sets it up in the Vimeo description as follows:
MELANCHOLIA (Melancholie/Melancholy) A short silent film by Patrick Müller after the poem by German Latinist Jacob Balde (1604–1668). This film was entirely shot in Ingolstadt, Germany, where Balde was a professor of rhetoric from 1635. He was widely known as the “German Horaz”.
(Horaz = Horace.) The attention and care Müller brought to the project even extended to the credits, where he had the filming details translated into Latin — a nice touch. For more on Balde, see the Catholic Encyclopedia.
Lisp of Cloud by Leila Wilson
The Motionpoem for December is by David P. Hanson. The text is from Leila Wilson’s new collection The Hundred Grasses. The Motionpoems email newsletter quotes her reaction to the film:
I’m really pleased with the results of David’s piece—in terms of its quality of production and fullness of vision—and I’m honored that he examined and expanded my poem with such attentiveness to detail. The film captures the speaker’s dependence on her surroundings to make sense of her sensual experience, and it offers surprising visual nuance.
The unfurling of color and movement that the amaryllis provides feels necessary. Though in many ways the amaryllis serves to represent the lyrical speaker driving the poem, it feels like a surreal presence, which I quite like. I’m also really interested in the quivering soundtrack. It expresses the omnipresence of the snow and seems to hold the melt within it. Kellie Fitzgerald’s lush reading captures a longing that’s definitely present in the poem, and she gives it a force that makes me blush!
The Crowning of Jesters by David Tomaloff
This appeared when Moving Poems was on hiatus this past summer, but I got to see it on the big screen at the Filmpoem Festival in August, where it was shown as an example of filmmaker-poet collaboration where the images preceded and inspired the poetic text. It’s part of a growing body of collaborations between Swoon (Marc Neys) and the American poet David Tomaloff (see his Moving Poems archive page for more). Neys blogged some rather extensive process notes in the form of a conversation with Tomaloff:
[Swoon]: Images will come from this video: http://archive.org/details/Mommartz_3_Glaser_1968
I’m doing a re-edit of that archive material and Maybe I want to add excerpts from ‘Das Kapital’ by Marx as titles. One thing missing: a poem that reflects greed, money – power, crisis, banks, the whole bubble of money driven economics that led to the different crises we had,…
Nothing literally…hints, atmosphere… Are you up for it? Let me know what you think…”
– TIME –[David]: “…As for the new prompt, I can definitely give it a shot. I’ll see if I can conjure up a draft within the next couple of days. Is that ok?”
– TIME –S: “Yes, sure. Take your time…I’m happy you want to go for it…”
– TIME –D: “So, this is a draft. It’s a little more upfront than some of the other stuff I’ve written for you, I think. That said, it’s still pretty surreal. I want to still tweak it a bit, read it aloud a few times, etc”
– TIME –S: “Yes! Yes. Fantastic title. Love the quotes.
Good imaging. The last line ‘Currency is a plot of land to which the wingless birds have marched us—on which we are sold the means to dig ourselves a more efficient kind of grave’ is spot on…
So yes, you’re definitely on to something. Tweak as you like and see fit.”
Giacometti’s Pears by Donna Vorreyer
I couldn’t resist making a video for one of Donna Vorreyer‘s poems at The Poetry Storehouse myself. “Giacometti’s Pears” was originally published in Weave magazine. I blogged about my process a bit at Via Negativa last week.
The Royal Oak by Benedict Newbery
An award-winning watercolor animation by Sandra Salter, with additional animation by Meg Bisineer, for a poem by Benedict Newbery (read here by Tony Fish). For additional credits, see Vimeo, which includes this description:
A local pub, despite it’s refit continues to be a bolt-hole, refuge and home to its regulars. An animated poetry film.
Channel 4 commissioned Sandra Salter and Benedict Newbery to make a film for its first Random Acts Season. The film was broadcast on Channel 4 in October 2012. The animation is based on the poem The Royal Oak which was published in Magma, and this film sees a further evolution of Newbery and Salter’s poetry film style using watercolour and transitions.
The Royal Oak won the Best Animation Audience Choice Award at the Purbeck Shorts competition at the Purbeck Film Festival held on 18 October 2013. It was described by the Festival as ‘a beautifully observed, watercolour, animated poem.’
The film was also exhibited in the 2013 Ludlow Open Rural Contemporary Art Showcase, and chosen as the opening film for the Filmpoem Festival in Dunbar, Scotland, in August 2013.
Trauermantel by Luisa A. Igloria
Along with Mortal Ghazal and Oir, this forms the third in what has turned out to be a triptych of Luisa A. Igloria videopoems, says its maker Swoon (Marc Neys).
People who have been following my works a bit, know I have a thing with artworks in a triptych.
When Luisa approached me to make a video for one of the poems in her book ‘The Saints of Streets‘, I was not thinking triptych.
Yet Luisa sent me several recordings and as it happens I liked her poems (and her readings for that matter) a lot. So in the end I made three videopoems […] and because of her voice and her style these do belong together. To me anyway.
The trauermantel is the same species of butterfly known as mourning cloak in North American and Camberwell beauty in the U.K. Swoon writes,
I wanted light, colours and an abstract spirit-like feel for this one.
Only at the end of the video (after the poem) I come up with a concrete image.
These images are also my first attempt to create something of an animated sequence. The image of the butterfly was made by Katrijn Clemer using the outlines of a real Trauermantel and one of the faces of the video for Oir.
Meek by Harry Martinson
A poem by the 20th-century Swedish poet Harry Martinson, one of three recently animated by Ana Perez Lopez, who writes:
Olofström is nature: tall trees, infinite lakes and the echoing voice of Harry Martinson. But Olofström grew with a factory, a building where everything from pots, bullets and cars can be made.
After spending a month as an art resident in Nabbeboda Skola I tried to combine this three elements in one project. I interview Johnny Carlson and wondered around the town. I stuck my nose into Harry Martinson’s poems and left pen be taken by his imagination.
I illustrated three of his poems and brought them to life with animation. I hope you enjoy these bits of Olofström through the penetrating voice of Johnny Carlson.
