~ Video Library ~
Watershed by Tania Haberland
Watershed is a fusion of abstract music video and poetic text. Its maker, Carine Iriarte, calls this electropoetry. As with ambient electronic music, the piece is minimal, with mantric repetition of a fragment of a poem by Tania Haberland, whose spoken voice within the music is lush and lulling to the ear. The images meet the sound in fluid digital layers. The hypnotic experience of the video is like a trance meditation.
The Torrid Zone is another video from these artists featured before at Moving Poems, in that instance from a complete poem by Haberland.
Music and film are credited to Poetics of Reverie, a collaborative project of Iriarte.
Weighing In by Rhina Espaillat
An uplifting animation about age, gravity and being human, Weighing In is from a poem by Dominican-American writer Rhina Espaillat. The film was directed by Casey McIntyre for MPC Creative in Los Angeles in partnership with Motionpoems. It was especially designed as a film for children. The poem can be read on the page here.
Сезонът на печалните кентаври / The Season of the Sorrowful Centaurs by Marion Koleva
A poem in the voice of Clio/Kleio, the muse of history, by Bulgarian journalist and poet Marion Koleva in a 2021 film by Vladimir Mihaylov, AKA poe3, supported by funding from the Bulgarian Ministry of Culture. The poem appears in Koleva’s 2014 collection, Спомен за тропик (Memory of Tropic).
Like Копнеж каквото е… / What Craving Is… by Dessislava Nedelcheva, which I shared two weeks ago, this film is part of Mihaylov’s project 10 Short Films of Videopoetry.
Childhood’s End by Howie Good
I LOVE this new videopoem! Belgian artist-composer Marc Neys (aka Swoon) is of course a Moving Poems regular, as is retired journalism professor Howie Good — one of the most productive poets I know. The fit of images to words hits that sweet spot half-way between random and literal, and the font seems chosen for maximum contrast in feeling with the dark content of the text.
The video does double duty as a trailer for Good’s new collection, a chapbook/pamphlet from Laughing Ronin Press called Heart-Shaped Hole.
Foxtrot by Rosemary Norman
A fun text animation by long-time videopoem collaborators Stuart Pound and Rosemary Norman, who appear also to have a new videopoetry collection out, though I haven’t seen it yet.
Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley
From the brief and powerful poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), this animated version of his Ozymandias is directed by Alvaro Lamarche-Toloza in France.
The soundtrack features the richly dramatic voice of Bryan Cranston reciting the poem in a 2013 trailer for Breaking Bad. The compelling voice is accompanied only by a thrilling heavy heartbeat, also from the original soundtrack.
Wash drawings in the animation are by Estelle Chauvard. More about the project can be read in the notes beneath the player at Vimeo.
This is another strong piece to be found in a Top Ten of films from classic poems selected for Moving Poems by Paul Casey and Colm Scully.
Копнеж каквото е… / What Craving Is… by Dessislava Nedelcheva
Four poems from a 2012 collection called Eastern Time (Източно време/Iztochno vreme) by Bulgarian poet Десислава Неделчева/Dessislava Nedelcheva, about whom I can glean nothing in the Anglophone web. But I love this film by Vladimir Mihaylov, AKA poe3. According to Google Translate, ‘The video was realized with the support of the National Fund “Culture” 2020.’ Glad to hear that the government of Bulgaria has money for poetry film! Mihaylov’s entire playlist of subtitled videopoetry is worth a watch.
The Torrid Zone by Tania Haberland
The Torrid Zone is a strong and beautiful video, the first one up in my Vimeo feed today.
The poem is by Tania Haberland. It can be read on the page below the video at Vimeo. Her voicing of it is marvelous: slow in rhythm, minimal, richly-toned, and affecting. From a bio for her:
…a tri-national poet (German-South African-Mauritian)… born in Africa, raised in Arabia and matured in Europe. She publishes, performs and exhibits her poetry and multi-media collaborations across the globe.
The abstract moving images and the soundtrack are credited to Poetics of Reverie. This is French artist Carine Iriarte and her collaborators in various media. She describes this project in her bio:
…a collaborative artistic project mixing poetry, electro music, painting, short films, movement and nature…
