~ Video Library ~
Piedra negra sobre una piedra blanca / Black Stone on a White Stone by César Vallejo
A new Moving Poems production, remixing Vallejo’s classic poem prognosticating his own death with time-lapse photography and Creative Commons-licensed music (from Magna Ingress). For the translation, I enlisted the help of some friends with better Spanish than mine: Jean Morris and Natalie d’Arbeloff, among others, on the Poetry from the Other Americas Facebook group. Another member of the group, the Spanish filmmaker and actor Eduardo Yagüe, was kind enough to supply the voiceover.
Shockingly, this is the first Vallejo poem on Moving Poems. I can’t think of any other Latin American poet of his stature whom I’ve so neglected. I did make one other video for a poem of his some years ago, but I guess I must’ve decided it wasn’t quite up to snuff.
Word: Collected Poetry (Makayla Posley, Trace DePass, Nkosi Nkululeko and Esther Aloba)
Directed by Jamil McGinnis and Pat Heywood, Word: Collected Poetry is an exemplary poetry-film anthology that conveys a real sense of the unique character of a vital, passionate community of poets. Jamil and Pat call it
A collection of spoken word poems brought to life, adapted from the work of four poets living in New York City.
FEATURING:
“Untitled” by Makayla Posley (0:09)
“band-aids & other temporary healings” by Trace DePass (4:01)
“From the Inside” by Nkosi Nkululeko (7:23)
“Rule #1” by Esther Aloba (11:09)
It was produced in association with Urban Word NYC, and grew out of an earlier project for Motionpoems (Things I Carry Into the World, featuring Cynthia Manick), as they explained in an email:
Essentially, the film is a work of collected poems brought to life. The featured poems’ authors are young poets from New York City. We wanted the film to feel as if someone had wandered into a bookstore and began flipping through a book of poems. […] It’s essentially an extension of the Motionpoem we did (but produced independently of them).
We partnered with a nonprofit called Urban Word NYC, who introduced us to the poets. We wanted to dive into the same themes and ideas that their poetry does, so naturally, collaborating closely with the poets was an essential part of the process. We didn’t want to assume anything about their experiences, but rather create a visual space to explore them further. We raised these questions about the school-to-prison pipeline, the problematic side of creative expression, and queerness, amongst others because they did. They gave us that space.
The film premiered online in Booooooom, which noted that “The film’s production was entirely crowdfunded through Kickstarter, raising over $15,000 through nearly 200 donations in 30 days.” Jamil and Pat told them that
Adapting poetry to film was a lot closer to putting together a thematic puzzle than it is building any kind of narrative. All sorts of space for us as filmmakers opened up to explore their language. Juxtaposing images, observing, asking questions rather than giving answers. We wanted a film that was challenging and abstract, but at the same time, presented moments of meditation.
Click through for photos from the shooting of the film as well as for the full, extensive credits.
Säv, säv, susa / Sigh, Rushes, Sigh by Gustaf Fröding
A haunting Swedish poem brought to life by the German director Patrick Müller. Here’s the English portion of his Vimeo description:
SIGH, RUSHES, SIGH: In his tale of passionate love and heartbreaking grief, Swedish poet Gustaf Fröding (1860–1911) explains the drowning of the beautiful Ingalill. The words find its counterpart in black and white images, shot with an old 16mm film camera.
Film by Patrick Müller. Germany, 2018, 3 Min, 16mm.
Poem: Gustaf Fröding, Narrator: Klaus-Rüdiger Utschick, Camera: Krasnogorsk 3, Film stock: Fomapan R100, Processing: Andec Filmtechnik, Telecine 4K: Ochoypico, Madrid. Filmed at Rügen, 2018.
There was a lively discussion on the Poetry Film Live Facebook group the other day about whether and when it’s appropriate to use illustration in a poetry film. I think this film strikes the perfect balance between illustration (it wouldn’t have made sense not to begin and end with rushes on a lake shore) and suggestion (the girl’s drowning is only briefly hinted at in the visuals). The film with its black-and-white, 16mm graininess not only conveys but intensifies the melancholy mood of the text. Such illustration as it includes doesn’t tame or trivialize the poem but contributes to an over-all ostranenie.
America by Gertrude Stein
A brilliant remix by Miss Muffet AKA Lisa Seidenberg. The Vimeo description:
A poetry film re-invents a stylised text by author Gertrude Stein as a reflection on the current national zeitgeist using visuals from Charlottesville and other assorted Americana.
Light Ghazal by Matt Hetherington
Some gorgeous new work from Australian poetry-film collaborators Marie Craven (video concept, edit, effects) and Matt Hetherington (poem and voice), with music by Masonik and film sourced from Mono No Aware. Marie’s process notes (with links added):
‘Light Ghazal’ is the third video collaboration with poet, Matt Hetherington. From across the world, Dave Bonta put us in email contact for the first of these, ‘Orphanage‘. Since then Matt, who lives not far from me here in Australia, has been coming up this way to meet and collaborate in person. This process resulted in the second piece, ‘Everything sleeps but the night‘, and now this latest. It’s kind of radical for me to collaborate in the flesh these days, as most of my collaborations for the past decade, video and music alike, have been net-based. I welcome this recent development. For the soundtrack I selected ‘Inna Sky’ from the ‘Sutol’ album by Fremantle-based Masonik, whose sounds I have also worked with before in my poetry videos. The source footage for the image track is from Mono No Aware in New York, whose films are available on Creative Commons licence at Vimeo. I selected the sections of footage most fitting for this new video and created two layers on top of each other. This was so I could add dimensionality and fx to bring out the hand-processed film textures, as well as bring into sharper presence the ghostly, underlying images on the original film. I love hand-processed film. It seems to emphasise the direct chemical expression of light hitting celluloid and focus us on the materiality of that process. Thus the footage seemed especially relevant to the poem here, which is all about light.
جَمر الزّيتون / The Stone of The Olive by Saurav Dutt
A poem by British Bengali author Saurav Dutt animated by Egyptian filmmaker Nissmah Roshdy, whose film The Dice Player took top honors at the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in 2014. The Stone of The Olive was screened at ZEBRA 2106; here’s the description from a YouTube upload of the trailer:
A young man’s soul struggles to stay attached to his homeland after the destruction of war and occupation takes over his country. As he faces violence, the only thing that ties his soul to the land is the olive tree. The film visualizes the poem “The Stone of The Olive” by british author Saurav Dutt and adopts a fantasy-like portrayal of the struggle of Palestinian refugees.
Mahmoud Taji recites the poem, and the music is by Aaron Mist. The translation in subtitles is credited to World Translation Center.
Meditations of an Old Woman (excerpt) by Theodore Roethke
https://vimeo.com/37148226
This is Lost Acres, part of director/composer Jennifer Stock’s Poetry Illumination Project. Though it contains just two lines from Roethke’s long poem “Meditations of an Old Woman”, it does manage to convey something of the poem’s aesthetic and mood. The description reads:
An illumination of lines from Theodore Roethke, centered around abstracted nightscapes. Original music comprised of processed piano sounds.
What is the Word by Samuel Beckett
This is Qué Palabra, directed by Eduardo Yagüe: a Spanish-language interpretation of Samuel Beckett’s poem “What is the Word” with the original text in subtitles. Jenaro Talens is the translator, and Sergio Cabello the actor. It’s been screened at the 6th International Video Poetry Festival 2018 (Athens) and Festival Silêncio 2017 (Lisbon). I think it’s fair to say that it is very, very Beckettesque. Also, the closing shot is brilliant.
On the Other Side by Natalie H. Rogers
A multi-voiced poetry film by writer and filmmaker Tova Beck-Friedman. From its webpage:
ON THE OTHER SIDE is a portrait of an aging woman as her “youngness” slips away. Based on a poem by Natalie H. Rogers, the film interweaves voice, animation and music to lay bare the essence of a woman’s vanishing youth; her aging process is irrevocable revealing a deeply fragile and touching reality.
The three narrators are Avis Boone, Duvall O’Steen, and Natalie H. Rogers. Their repetition of lines wouldn’t work for every poetry film, but it’s a good fit for this poem’s disbelieving, incredulous tone.
was by Mischa Pearlman
Videographer Kerstin Ebert calls this
A montage about New York City, a faded relationship, a guy on a bus and a note on his hand.
This is my visualization of Mischa Pearlman’s poem “was”, alongside the beautiful song “Maelstrom” by shipwrecks-music.com.
Camera & Editing – Kerstin Ebert
Him – Casey Skodnek
Her – Freeda Lou
Poem – “was”, by Mischa Pearlman
Read by – Kurt Lash
Music – “Maelstrom”, by ShipwrecksFilmed on Sony a7sii during the cold month of December 2017 in New York City.
Mischa Pearlman is a British music journalist and poet based in New York City.
I Know a Man by Robert Creeley
This is Drive, a remix by Daniel Cantagallo of Robert Creeley’s poem I Know a Man. The poet’s reading is a bit stilted, pausing for the enjambed line breaks (not reproduced by the text on screen here) that were so central to his style, but somehow it makes a perfect fit with the music (“Red Tide” by loscil) and the full-tilt footage. Quoting Cantagallo’s description:
There’s always been something deeply existential about driving…the open road, the possibilty of escape from identity…and of course the threat of death by accident.
In Robert Creeley’s most famous poem, “I Know A Man”, the speaker contemplates what we can do against the darkness and chaos of modern life.
In this cheeky and moody remix, I use a recording of Robert Creeley reading his poem juxtaposed with a 1951 government public information series on automobile safety and the dangers of driving at night.
Driving on the Highway can be watched in all its glory on the Internet Archive. The National Archives description:
TRAINING FILM: On techniques on driving on highway. Sixty percent of all accidents happen at night because of poor visability and fatigue. Reduce speed, use headlights and avoid using interior lights at night.
Saturday by Lucy English
A video remix by Othniel Smith for Lucy English’s Book of Hours project, with her reading as the only soundtrack. Smith notes in the description that he sourced the imagery from a 1961 film produced by General Motors called A Touch of Magic. Intrigued, I found a Wikipedia page for it. It included the immortal lines:
This dream house you and I will share
Was planned for us by Frigidaire.
A half-century from now, will our contemporary techno-utopian fantasies seem as corn-ball and melancholy as this does now? Nothing ages as poorly as modernism — or is better suited for recycling into poems, especially one as wistful and gently ironic as this.
