~ Videopoems ~
Videopoetry, filmpoetry, cinepoetry, poetry-film… the label doesn’t matter. What matters is that text and images enter into dialogue, creating a new, poetic whole.
Seafarer: a tiny novella in verse by David Tomaloff
Swoon‘s video for a micro-chapbook [PDF] by David Tomaloff uses public-domain footage from the Ivan Besse Collection at the Prelinger Archives, shot in Britton, South Dakota in the late 1930s. Tomaloff contributed the reading, while the concept, editing and music were all Swoon’s work. He posted some process notes at his blog:
Origami Poems Project is fun. You get all these great poems in a highly original form.
But in this case it was not only the form.‘Seafarer’ struck me immediately as a piece that I wanted to do something with.
[…]
For the images I wanted to use the superb footage of Ivan Besse again.
I wanted to tell a story with the footage. A story that touches some parts of ‘Seafarer’ but could also open up completely different interpretations of the work as a whole or some of its details.
somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond by e.e. cummings
Another Josep Porcar videopoem. If I understand the credits correctly, the filming is by Brenno Castro. Susanne Abbuehl contributed the entire soundtrack, music and voice. The Catalan translation in the subtitles is by Isabel Robles Gómez and Jaume Pérez Montaner. I particularly like the decision to have a female reader — it gives an already great poem a new dimension.
The Applicant by Sylvia Plath
A four-year-old video montage by Josep Porcar, using Plath’s own reading, with subtitles in Catalan by Montserrat Abelló.
The Pilgrim is Bridled and Bespectacled by Bridget Lowe
The September offering from Motionpoems is an animation by the co-director herself, Angella Kassube. Visit their website for the text. This is another selction from Best American Poetry 2011. Bridget Lowe is a young poet from Kansas City with a first book due out next year from Carnegie Mellon University Press.
Motionpoems’ free email newsletter quoted Kassube on the making of the film:
“From the beginning I knew I had to use the correct face and the correct eyes. But the line ‘World, there are two baskets / on my back’ – I didn’t know what to do with that. I built the section several times. I knew I didn’t want to use images of two baskets and fill them with something. I had already thought about how many definitions there are for the word ‘WORLD,’ and I had decided that World should be inside her head. There are the city and other images that represent outside influences on her world, but it is how she reacts to those things that creates her World. I realized she could look in two different directions and that could be a way to interpret the two baskets.”
The use of those eyes also stood out to Bridget: “The beautiful illustrations Angella used to tell the story (the eyes–so perfect!) balance explanation and mystery impeccably. Her timing as a director is likewise inarguably impeccable. Angella’s vision has compelled me to rethink how I read, and therefore present, my own work. What a gift.”
Here at Motionpoems, we’re always excited when we learn one of our films has inspired a poet to consider her work in a new light. Bridget continued, “The thing that most surprised and excited me about Angella’s interpretation was her ability to illuminate a playfulness in the poem that I hadn’t previously noticed fully. I knew the poem was one of pleading and desperation, but Angella’s version cut through some of that heaviness and landed in a place more like wondrous awe, which is what the poem announces itself to be from the beginning. I thought that was brilliant.”
Mirror by Sally Evans
Alastair Cook‘s 23rd filmpoem uses a text and reading by Sally Evans, an English poet living in Scotland.
“Much Madness is divinest Sense…” by Emily Dickinson
I watched this when it was first uploaded to Vimeo two years ago, but for whatever reason didn’t share it then. Perhaps I felt it was too far from the spirit of the poem as I understood it. Be that as it may, however, I think it’s important as an international and pop-cultural interpretation of Dickinson, and also may help clarify some of the differences between the related genres of music video and videopoetry.
Michal Jaskulski directs. The music is by Polish composer Andrzej Bonarek, who specializes in music for theater and film. The video garnered several awards, according to the description in Vimeo:
Los Angeles Movie Awards 2010 – Best Visual Effects in a music video, Award of Excellence
Canada International Film Festival 2010 – Royal Reel Award VSM 2010 festival – Special Recognition
Yach Film 2008 – Grand Prix nominee
Idioticon by Peter Wullen
Animator Kris J. Yves Verdonck performs a kind of open-heart surgery on Peter Wullen’s text (or an English translation of it). The author’s reaction on his blog is worth quoting in full:
With the videopoem ‘Idioticon’ Kris J. Yves Verdonck created something really special. Together with Ian Kubra and Marc Neys this is exactly what I had in mind when I started this. Poets are egotistical and selfish creatures. They don’t like others to play with their words. But in these videopoems the ego is finally abolished. The words stay visible and primary but somehow they disappear inside the videopoem. The viewer or reader has to look very carefully to find them. The meaning of the videopoem is the perfect integration of word, sound and image.
1 November by Bernard Dewulf: Remembering Lidice
Swoon used a small piece of footage from the documentary Lidice Lives by James Truswell, as well as a loop of his own images, for this memorial film. “Repetition was the key word here,” he notes. He was moved to search for a poem to envideo after reading a book about Lidice, and discovered “November 1” by the Belgian poet Bernard Dewulf, also available in an English translation by Sapphire/Ramona Lofton. Even before that, though, his first step had been to compose the music later incorporated into the soundtrack.
From the Wikipedia:
Lidice is a village in the Czech Republic just northwest of Prague. It is built near the site of the previous village of the same name which, as part of the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, was on orders from Adolf Hitler and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, completely destroyed by German forces in reprisal for the assassination of Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich in the late spring of 1942. On 10 June 1942, all 173 men over 16 years of age from the village were murdered. Another 11 men who were not in the village were arrested and murdered soon afterwards along with several others already under arrest. Several hundred women and over 100 children were deported to concentration camps; a few children considered racially suitable for Germanisation were handed over to SS families and the rest were sent to the Chełmno extermination camp where they were gassed to death. After the war ended, only 153 women and 17 children returned.
And Sometimes by Christian Bök
The London-based graphic/digital/motion designer Tom Martin says,
MA project looking at visualising the spoken word using kinetic typography. I chose the poem ‘And Sometimes’, which itemises every English word that contains only consonants, as hearing it spoken is an entirely different experience to reading it.
It was published in the book ‘Eunoia’, designed by its author – so in order to best capture his voice I based the video on his design. To capture the rhythm of the poem, I redesigned the type based on the wave pattern of the audio.
As the object of this exercise was to recreate the spoken word, I then distorted the audio so it does not clearly repeat the visuals, yet still enhances the unusual atmosphere of the piece.
Christian Bök is a contemporary Canadian poet, whose book Eunoia “won the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize, and which has been said to be ‘Canada’s best-selling poetry book ever,'” according to the Wikipedia, which also includes this charming detail: “He was born ‘Christian Book’, but changed his last name ‘to avoid unseemly confusion with the Bible.'” There’s a Flash version of Chapter e from Eunoia at Ubuweb.
