~ Video Library ~
ROTA by Andrea De La Paz
A very clever, bilingual (Spanish and English) videopoem that I just stumbled across, with text by the director, Andrea De La Paz, a young filmmaker from Vancouver. Leah Dean Cohen is the actor and Rogan Lovse the cinematographer.
A Film About Tears by Sam Theunissen with Sean Louw
A Dutch videopoem that feels much longer than its 38-second runtime, A Film About Tears was directed by Danu Caris with text by Sam Theunissen, but was mainly the idea of the cinematographer, Sean Louw, who uploaded the video to his account with this description:
15/03/2022 – Today is a strange day. Grief comes and goes and you never really know why and how. But with time, you learn to observe it and live with it. And maybe even look back with a smile. This film is about that.
Today, exactly a year ago my mom passed away.
Her handwriting was used for the credits.This project meant a lot to me, so huge thanks to director Danu Caris for dealing with my chaotic ideas and bringing her photographic finesse to the table. Laura Bakker for taking this tiny little roll to a whole new level and breathing life into her character. Boyd Bakema for pretty much saving the day on set. Fons Beijer for making us forget all about our old temp music by creating magic. And Sam Theunissen for writing a poem that really hits home with exactly the right amounts of serious and playful. (Also for casually translating it last-minute)
Shot on a Bolex as part of a third-year project for The Netherlands Film Academy on 16mm Tri-x film supplied and hand-developed by Onno Petersen.
How to Triumph Like a Girl by Ada Limón
This is “An animation created for MTV’s Women’s History Month. It was made using watercolor cut paper stop motion” by Providence, Rhode Island-based artist and animator Hayley Morris. Ada Limón is the poet. See Vimeo for the full credit list.
Octopus Empire by Marilyn Nelson
James Dunlap animates art by Edwina White in a recent video from blogger Maria Popova’s wonderful Universe in Verse series, in collaboration with On Being, mixing science and poetry. Here’s how she sets this one up:
The octopus branched from our shared vertebrate lineage some 550 million years ago to evolve into one of this planet’s most alien intelligences, endowed with an astonishing distributed nervous system and capable of recognizing others, of forming social bonds, of navigating mazes. It is the Descartes of the oceans, learning how to live in its environment by trial and error — that is, by basic empiricism.
Meanwhile, in those 550 million years, we evolved into creatures that placed themselves at the center of the universe and atop the evolutionary ladder, only to find ourselves in an ecological furnace of our making and to reluctantly consider that we might not, after all, be the pinnacle of Earthly intelligence.
That is what Marilyn Nelson explores with great playfulness and poignancy in her poem “Octopus Empire,” originally published in the Academy of American Poets’ poem-a-day lifeline of a newsletter and now brought to life here, for this seventh installment in the animated Universe in Verse, in a reading by Sy Montgomery (author of the enchantment of a book that is The Soul of an Octopus) with life-filled art by Edwina White, set into motion by her collaborator James Dunlap, and set into soulfulness by Brooklyn-based cellist and composer Topu Lyo.
Click through to The Marginalian to read the rest (including the text of the poem). For more on Nelson, see her Poetry Foundation page.
Atlantis—A Lost Sonnet by Eavan Boland
The late Irish poet Eavan Boland’s poem “Atlantis—A Lost Sonnet” in an atmospheric poetry film by Dutch filmmaker Pat van Boeckel, whose work we’ve featured here in the past. There’s also a version in Dutch.
Be Your Dog by Mike Hoolboom
Dave Bonta and I were recently discussing via email the films of Mike Hoolboom. Mike is one of my most-admired film-makers and very highly regarded world-wide in the experimental film arena, where my own roots as a film-maker lie. I first discovered his work at an experimental film festival in Madrid in 1994 and it hit me like a revelation. So I’ve been keen to share his work here at Moving Poems, and have shared two of his films before.
Dave found this one, Be Your Dog, before I did. As is often the case with Mike’s work, there is a wrenching sense of sadness here, with dark observations about humanity and an allegorical approach that is both fantastical and deadpan, as well as absurd and tragicomic. I find the latter qualities especially in the way the main visual subject in this film is the film-maker himself, seen far in the distance, almost a speck, and steadily walking away from us without appearing to move at all.
Dave and I were both enthusiastic about the idiosyncratic way Mike makes this film almost completely from a single shot, but Dave wondered if it could be a could be called a poetry film. Indeed, every time I share one of Mike’s films with the readership of Moving Poems, I have the same hesitation.
And yet, Mike’s spoken narrations are highly poetic, and Dave and I both share an interest in stretching the boundaries of what might fit a definition of poetry film. I do get frustrated with the idea that a film in this genre needs to be faithful and subordinate to a poem that is basically traditional in form. From my point of view, we’ve had more than a hundred years of avant-garde art exploding these kinds of restrictions and so why keep poetry film inside such an old-fashioned box.
In any case, genres are ultimately just concepts, grids to place over the top of creative works in order to make them categorisable to our top-heavy minds and their craving for order, shoulds and should-nots.
As always, when writing in a personal way like this, I get to a point where I start to doubt all I have said. After all, everything I have written here indicates my own top-heavy mind, my own craving for order, along with an artist’s contrary need to rebel against a sense of limitations. In addition, I’m probably just banging on about stuff I’ve said here before.
Up until now, I have not written in this personal kind of way at Moving Poems, but Dave also reminded me recently that this site is essentially a blog where personal approaches to writing are more than permissible.
To end, here is Mike’s brief description of Be Your Dog:
A palm tree-gilded road in rural Cuba is the setting for a meditation on a dog’s life. Traffic flows accommodate the uneasy terrain, the fellow travellers, as if we were all in this together. After Iggy Pop, the balm of Adorno.
Recusio Redacted by Jacqueline Saphra
Recusio Redacted is a film by Helen Dewbery, from a poem by Jacqueline Saphra. The poem appears in the collection Dad, Remember You Are Dead, published by Nine Arches Press.
Helen will be familiar to followers of Moving Poems from her earlier films previously shared here. Aside from being a marvelous film-maker, she is co-editor with Chaucer Cameron of the online journal Poetry Film Live.
Jacqueline Saphra is a playwright as well as a poet. Her writing has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize, among other honours. She lives in London and teaches at The Poetry School.
My Father’s Bones by Zoe Paterson Macinnes
An author-made poetry film by Zoe Paterson Macinnes,
a visual artist and filmmaker from the Isle of Lewis. Zoe’s work is a result of her island heritage. She combines personal observations of land and sea with voice, memory and music from the islands to explore themes of identity and belonging. Her documentary short, Cianalas, which investigates the identity of young musicians in Lewis, was awarded Best Documentary Short by Desert Rock Film and Music Festival, and Best Student Film by Culture and Diversity Film Festival.
The music is by Lauren MacColl—the traditional fiddle tune “MacGregor of Roro’s Lament“—setting the mood for a bittersweet, meditative film which I liked well enough when I first watched it two months ago, but found incredibly moving the second time through. I suppose it helps than I can connect to it in two ways, from having visited other islands in the Hebrides, and from my own deep connection to the place where I grew up (including knowing exactly where I’ll be buried, as the poem says).
Video is such a great medium for poems of place! And despite being a professional filmmaker, Macinnes kept things simple with text on screen and slow-moving shots that aren’t redundant with the text and give the viewer’s mind permission to roam—paradoxically, a state more amenable to active engagement. It moves at a walker’s pace. I like that.
We Are The War by T&DA
A fascinating experiment in AI-generated videopoetry from an artists’ collective in Sydney, written and directed by Tyrone Estephan.
We Are The War | CLIP-Guided Storytelling & Speech Synthesis
At T&DA we have explored leveraging the latest technologies to create ‘We Are The War’, an animated graphic novella poem, where both the images and narration were generated through visual and audio synthesis.
Created using prompts inspired by children’s book illustrations and the lines of our poem, images were generated using Midjourney. The narrator was generated through speech synthesis software that only needed 15 minute sample of talking.
To add parallax and depth to the scenes we used neural Z depth extraction.
Using these tools we tell the story of children’s metaversal shenanigans as realities of recent years bleed into their locked down lives. We can think of this technology almost as if it’s a 10 year old expressing itself, which felt like the perfect means to convey the sentiments of the poem.
Tyrone Estephan – Written & Directed
Sean Simon – Visuals & Post
Josh Kell – Online Editor
The Opposites Game by Brendan Constantine (2)
A classroom erupts into a war of words as students grapple with a seemingly simple prompt: what is the opposite of a gun?
This animation of Brendan Constantine‘s poem by Anna Samo and Lisa LaBracio went viral, with more than 24,700 views on Vimeo and 364,814 views
on YouTube. It probably helps that it was a Vimeo staff pick. But it’s also
part of TED-Ed’s series, “There’s a Poem for That,” which features animated interpretations of poems both old and new that give language to some of life’s biggest feelings.
See the Vimeo description for the full credits and list of honors.
We previously shared Mike Gioia’s film adaptation of the same poem. I’m not sure which I prefer; both have their strengths.
Mist by Alice Oswald
This beautiful video of Alice Oswald‘s Mist is by Aodhagán O’Flaherty, a film-maker previously unknown to me. The poet is very well known, especially in UK, but the film is one of those random discoveries that sometimes happens when wandering the web.
I found in my searches that Aodhagán O’Flaherty is Irish-born, now Berlin-based. I found no other videos from him, and so it seems all the more surprising that this one has such an assured and affecting way with images, editing, rhythm, sound and narration. Of course, it helps as well that the poem is so wonderful. It can be read on the page here.
