~ Animation ~
Los Nadies (The Nobodies) by Eduardo Galeano
Spanish director and designer Carlos Salgado made this film for the NGO Africa Directo, evidence of the nearly universal appeal of Eduardo Galeano‘s writing. (Judging at least from my Facebook feed, Galeano’s death on April 13 occasioned much more widespread mourning than the death the same day of the Nobel prizewinner Günter Grass.) “Los Nadies” appears in Galeano’s 1989 collection El libro de los abrazos, translated by Cedric Belfrage and Mark Schafer as The Book of Embraces and described by Library Journal as a “literary scrapbook, mixing memoir, documentary, essay, and prose poem, [which] defies clear-cut genre classification.”
Salgado notes, “The project came through the agency Sra Rushmore to USER T38, which was where we did the animation and post production.” The credits given in the Vimeo description include 2D Animation: Raúl Echegaray and Alberto Sánchez; Additional 2D Animators: Rubén Fernández and Raúl Monge; 3D Artist: Alex Baqué; Compositing: Ezequiel Bluvstein, Eloy Gazol and Roi Prada; Sound: Sonomedia; and Music: José Battaglio.
This take on the poem by German animator Laura Saenger was much more simply produced (“Animation in After Effects, Music editing in Logic Pro”) but is equally beautiful and imaginative, I think.
Common Room by Talia Randall
This animation of a poem by UK artist and performance poet Talia Randall was one of the 29 competition films (selected from among 770 submissions) at the 7th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival last October. It’s also a staff pick at Vimeo, where it’s amassed more than 58 thousand plays. Here’s the description at Randall’s website:
The Common Room Animation Project is a collaboration between 13 animators, based on Talia Randall’s spoken-word poem Common Room. Each of the animators chose a segment of the poem that inspired them the most, and brought their own unique style, technique and interpretation to the poem.
The film has been shown at film festivals and events across the world including Argentina, Germany, Brazil, Russia, America and the UK.
The animators are (in order of appearance) Yael Ozsinay, Nir Philosof, Maayan Moreno Erlich, Shimi Asresay, Inabl Breda, Noa Evron, Inbal Ochyon, Yuzefovic Valery, Dekel Oved, Adva Rodan, Dan Berger, Sivan Kotek and Tal Rachmin.
(Click through to read the text.) Watching this again, I’m even more impressed than I was the first time I saw it, on the big screen in Berlin. It’s like a master class in poetry animation; very few of the quite distinct segments veer too close to literal illustration. Instead, they each expand upon the text in a different way, yet somehow we are not distracted from the poem’s argument and music. And it’s the sort of poem that really benefits from this kind of treatment, having a strong message and a fairly discursive style. Had it been denser and more allusive in the manner of much contemporary lyric poetry, I don’t think it would’ve so easily permitted the animators’ imaginations to run riot. In effect, they are supplying much of the allusive power here, in a sort of conversation among artists that makes the whole succeed as something greater than the sum of its parts: a true videopoem or filmpoem, in other words, and not merely a poetry film.
The Lake Isle of Innisfree by William Butler Yeats
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey…
By situating the action of this animated short in the “pavements grey” rather than the “bee-loud glade,” director, scriptwriter and editor Don Carey was able to avoid the trap of too-literal illustration while drawing attention to the poem’s longing and suggestion of despair. The ending is brilliantly ambiguous.
According to the Vimeo description, Innisfree was “produced by the students of the animation department at the Irish School of Animation, Ballyfermot College of Further Education, 2013.” It won best animation at the 2014 Royal Television Society awards, and has been screened at several festivals, including the Cork Spring Poetry Festival, the 7th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin, and the Liberated Words Poetry Film Festival 2014 in Bristol (and again last week at their “Reflections” screening in Bath).
Trein by Astrid Haerens
Flemish poet Astrid Haerens‘ poem “Trein” in a film by American animators Annelyse Gelman and Auden Lincoln-Vogel, commissioned last year by Filmpoem and included in Deus ex Machina‘s “Filmpoem Album” DVD (which I reviewed here). Now it’s available with English subtitling.
The Art of Poetry Film with Cheryl Gross: “Hurricane”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo3nurjgADY
Hurricane
Poem and video by Doctor Buckles aka Tattooedloverman
This video is about a dream I had this year that impacted my life immensely. It is experimental. It took me weeks to get it made using iMovie and is quite a bit different from how it started and I envisioned.
Doctor Buckles aka Tattooedloverman is quite the artist and poet. His drawings are spectacular and are a welcome addition to the video. I also love the combination of the little bits of video he incorporates.
The problem I have with Hurricane is the software used. iMovie is O.K. for fooling around and quick editing, but as the main base of movement, doesn’t do the rest of the project justice. The use of fades, ripples and whatnot is a bit cheesy. Using these effects at times makes the words hard to read. In some cases they fly by too fast and it doesn’t give the reader enough time to read the text. The timing could be better as well.
At first I couldn’t see the value of the mixed media. Then after watching it a few times I started to get into the actual video/drawing mix. As I said before I do love the videos. They give the viewer a nice break from the seriousness of the poem.
Just because something is available, keep in mind that throwing in everything but the kitchen sink doesn’t necessarily make for good art. It’s fun to fool around and watch the your images spin, but I would rather focus on the drawings and video with no or limited effects. I think the transitions could match up better as well. Also, I’m not too keen on filters on the photos either. If the photos were sketched out, it would give the piece a whole different feel. I would rather see the drawings and words done in a simple fashion.
In my humble opinion, leave the bells and whistles at home and get back to your core. I know it’s fun to play around, but decent art is the key. If one is seriously going to expose their soul to the world, why not make it a more worthy piece. I look forward to the next one with more drawings and less iMovie clutter.
Poetry at the movies: “Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet” and “Endless Poetry”
There was news this week of two more feature-length movies in which poets and poetry play a leading role. The animated film Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet is due to be released in North American theaters next summer, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Animation distributor GKIDS has acquired North American rights to Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, the animated featured produced by Salma Hayek that is based on the well-known book by Kahlil Gibran. The film, which was introduced at Cannes and made its North American premiere in Toronto, will be released this summer.
The film features a narrative story written and directed by Roger Allers with individual sections based on Gibran’s poems that were designed and directed by animation directors from around the world, including Tomm Moore (an Oscar nominee this year for Song of the Sea), Joan Gratz, Bill Plympton, Nina Paley, Joann Sfar, Paul and Gaetan Brizzi, Michael Socha and Mohammed Harib.
Its voice cast includes Hayek, Liam Neeson, Quvenzhane Wallis, John Krasinski, Frank Langella and Alfred Molina. The score is by Gabriel Yared, with additional music by songwriters Damien Rice, Glenn Hansard and Lisa Hannigan and performances by cellist Yo-Yo Ma.
And the Chilean poet Alejandro Jodorowsky will sit in the director’s seat for a movie based on his autobiography, Endless Poetry (Poesia sin Fin), as Variety explains:
Alejandro Jodorowsky is set to produce and direct “Endless Poetry,” the continuation of his latest film “The Dance of Reality,” which played at Cannes’ Directors Fortnight.
A Chilean-French-Japanese production, “Endless Poetry” is a fantasy-filled autobiographical tale based on the last chapters of Jodorowsky’s book “The Dance of Reality.”
[…]
The film recounts Jodorowsky’s teenage years in Santiago, Chile, and chronicles his struggle to overcome family pressure and find his path as an artist and a poet. Jodorowsky emerged along with Enrique Linh, Nicanor Parra and Stella Diaz as one of the most influential poets of Chile in the 1940s.
“In my memories, my years in Chile had long been associated with suffering and loneliness… but today, at my 85 years of age I have not the least doubt that my encounter with poetry justifies my emergence in that country,” said Jodorowsky.
The producers are planning a Kickstarter campaign, to be launched on February 15.
The Imagined by Stephen Dunn
A terrific animated film by Matt Craig for Motionpoems, influenced by “a lot of really early animation films,” as he told interviewer Michael Dechane.
I knew I wanted to stay away from illustrating the words or being too literal with the imagery. I wanted to create something that would be its own thing but would be a perfect companion to the poem. I spent a lot of time making these decisions before I got into the work, and I’m glad I did it that way. I was able to steer my own direction because of the rules I had laid out for myself early on.
MOPO: What are some of the stylistic influences you saw coming to bear on the film?
CRAIG: I had been watching a lot of really early animation films, one in particular called “The Idea” by Berthold Bartosch. It was based on a woodcut graphic novel by Frans Masereel. I had been watching that kind of work coming into this project. When I start a project I tend to pull a lot of artwork, paintings and things that I can respond to in some way. That helps me get towards ideas I like.
Do read the whole interview; Craig makes a lot of interesting points. And there’s an interview with Stephen Dunn on the same page which is also worth checking out. The last question concerns the film:
MOPO: I’m wondering about the whole idea of taking a poem and making a short film out of it, and this sort of hybrid art that Motionpoems is pioneering. Is presenting a work in a different medium akin to the difficulty of linguistic translation in your opinion? What would you share with us about why you consented to be a part of this Motionpoems season and growing body of art — what were you hoping or wanting?
DUNN: I have no expectations. My poem itself is a translation of experience. I would hope that you all would try to be true to the poem’s spirit and tone, but I also know that another medium will interpret in ways I can’t foresee.
Bryan Hanna composed the score.
The Art of Poetry Film with Cheryl Gross: “Despot’s Progress”
I’m still looking for collaborations to write about, so poetry filmmakers and videopoets: please send me links to your work! Today’s collaboration involved two different filmmakers’ responses to the same poem. First, propaganda cartoons (thank you Walt Disney) compiled by Othniel Smith make a stirring backdrop for Robert Peake‘s poem “Despot’s Progress.”
I would like to begin with a bit of history. Walt Disney was pro-American and produced a number of propaganda animations depicting Hitler and the Nazi party as buffoons. Unfortunately his patriotism irrationally carried over into the 1960s. This resulted in not allowing people to enter Disneyland if their hair was too long. (This was sparked by protests against the Vietnam War that I believe he felt were anti-American.) If memory serves me correctly, Disney enforced a rule limiting the length a man’s hair could to be in order to enter the theme park. Call it discrimination, but it’s an interesting example of what the times were like, and I believe makes the interplay of audio and visuals here even more poignant. Since Disney was calling the shots, does that mean he was right in inflicting this regulation on his clientele? If he had prejudice against hippies with long hair, I wonder who else he didn’t like?
I happen to love cartoons, especially old Disney and Warner Brothers. This blended with Peake’s poetry makes a brilliantly chilling observation of injustice and intolerance. The poem speaks sarcastically of totalitarianism as something we must adhere to. Images of Donald Duck saluting and trying to conform “comically” support this theory, but as you can see it is not funny. The cartoons just make it palatable and easy to swallow. This piece points us in the direction of taking an otherwise unrealistic depiction (the actual animation) to reveal the nightmare that eventually came to fruition. I think the question that should be asked is, when it comes to being prejudiced, what is the real difference between Disney and Hitler? I suppose we can say it was six million Jews, but what about the haircut? The atrocities committed by Hitler were undeniably more severe than Disney’s point of view and perhaps I should not compare the two, but let’s not dismiss the last section of the cartoon, when the baby duck bursts out of the egg saluting “Sieg Heil!” To me that’s where it actually begins.
No matter what kind of discipline you practice, art is a very powerful medium. This couldn’t be more relevant to what happened at Charlie Hebdo last week. Je Suis Charlie!
Music/concept/editing by Swoon; footage: coxyde 1951 AB (IICADOM 903 at the Internet Archive).
Then we have Mark Neys A.K.A. Swoon‘s interpretation, which is equally chilling. The use of vintage footage puts me on the edge of my seat. The music gets under my skin and I can’t help but feel this is the second before a disaster is about to occur. I find in Swoon’s piece the end is very different. There is no baby Hitler being born, just anticipation. What is next? And is there a next? Perhaps a bomb will drop or a tsunami will wash away the mother and child, leaving us with basically the same outcome. The world has changed and continues to change.
See also Robert Peake’s blog post, “Two Views of ‘Despot’s Progress’ (Film-Poems).”
