~ 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.
Ground by Alastair Cook
I’ve shared a lot of filmpoems here made by the Scottish artist and filmmaker Alastair Cook, but this one’s the work of someone else: Ginnetta Correli directed and edited this film using Alastair’s reading of some haiku he wrote for a multi-author linked verse sequence. He blogged about the film:
I don’t write terribly much (as you may have noted) and am perhaps unnecessarily precious about what I do write (see Abachan, for instance) and am pleased to see what such a wonderful, dark filmmaker can make of my words. Filmpoem is filmpoemed!
This was featured in VidPoFilm a few weeks ago.
Ground has an impenetrable quality. The film imagery, poem and reading approach each other without quite meeting. In that circle of visual and verbal imagery and the emotion of the voice of the reader, we witness a flame dancing without knowing who lit it, who blows on it, or why it goes out, if it does.
Something profound happens. But what? Is the poem notes on death and what resurrects us through life? Or the dream of a life?
Chanson d’automne (Autumn Song) by Paul Verlaine
When a sighing begins
In the violins
Of the autumn-song,My heart is drowned
In the slow sound
Languorous and longPale as with pain,
Breath fails me when
The hours tolls deep.
My thoughts recover
The days that are over
And I weep.And I go
Where the winds know,
Broken and brief,
To and fro,
As the winds blow
A dead leaf.(trans. by Arthur Symons, 1902)
For alternate translations and analysis of the original, see textetc.com.
British filmmaker Rachel Laine shot this on a Canaon 600D and edited in Fainl Cut Pro and Logic. It uses music by Carillion and Nic S.’s reading from Pizzicati of Hosanna.
Norangsdalen by Erlend O. Nødtvedt
A wonderfully abstract animation by Kristian Pedersen of Gasspedal Animert, who say in their Vimeo description:
Norangsdalen is one of Norways most narrow and steep valleys. It is notorious for its frequent avalanches and landslides. In 1912, an enormous landslide dammed the valley river, causing it to flood and submerge a farm and a small forest. This is today known as the lake Lyngstøylsvatnet – a popular expedition spot for divers.
According to the Norwegian Wikipedia and Google Translate,
Erlend O. Nødtvedt (b. 1984) is a Norwegian poet from Fyllingsdalen and the winner of the Youth Poetry Prize in 2008. He now lives in the city of Bergen, where he studies at the University of Bergen. Nødtvedt previously attended the Skrivekunstakademiet (Writing Academy) and is on the editorial board of the journal Vagant.
Philosophy by Jo Bell
Alastair Cook came out of a six-month filmpoem hiatus ten days ago with this new film for a piece by the English poet and poetry promoter Jo Bell. Quoting Alastair’s description on Vimeo:
It’s been swirling around my head all summer, while baby Rose has been born and grown; Philosophy is a joy, bright and full of life, bursting.
It has been long in gestation but it has been a real pleasure to make this one; the entire film was shot on Ektachrome Super 8 and processed at Dwaynes in Kansas, whose praises I cannot sing high enough.
And it has also been a pleasure to be able to include Vladimir Kryutchev’s incredible sound work again. His site at oontz is a wonder for binaural loving sound folks.
This one’s for my boy, Charlie.
Jo Bell blogged about the new videopoem here.
Eu (não) me resigno (I (don’t) give up) by Fernando Pessoa
Alexandre Braga directed this film for BASE Comunicação Audiovisual, who uploaded it to Vimeo:
From the poetry of Fernando Pessoa, this visual message proposes a moment of introspection and places us in a universe of thought: The man, once again trying to reach the divine.
All this happens in a kind of sanctuary: The top of the highest mountains in a small island in the middle of the Atlantic.
Of particular interest to me here was the way the filmmaker went beyond the usual subtitle approach for the English translations of each line, and integrated them into the film as text animations, resulting in one of the more thoroughly bilingual poetry films I’ve seen.
Saltwater by Eleanor Rees
Glenn-emlyn Richards‘ latest animation was produced in collaboration with poet Eleanor Rees. (See also their earlier collaboration, Night Vision.) Rees is a Liverpudlian and author of the collection Andraste’s Hair (Salt, 2007), who “often collaborates with other writers, musicians and artists,” according to her online biography.
I Will Greet The Sun Again by Forough Farrokhzad
Turkish filmmaker Candeniz Erun seems at home in multiple languages; the effect of the rapid-fire text in this video is mesmerizing. Forough Farrokhzād was one of the most influential female Iranian poets of the 20th century.
De droom van de trappen (Staircase Dream) by Michaël Vandebril
http://vimeo.com/31862171
This poem was part of BOEST back in autumn 2009,
a dynamic poetry project with nine poets: Antoine Boute, Andy Fierens, Jess De Gruyter, Els Moors, Mauro Pawlowski, Xavier Roelens, Michael Vandebril, Christophe Vekeman and Stijn Vranken … a poet show on the road from Antwerp to The Hague, with the sound of gluemaster Carlo Andriani and visuals of Jess De Gruyter. Director: Charles and Max Temmerman Clemminck … a book, an anthology of new work by nine poets … [and] a vinyl record.
(auto-translation from the Dutch by Google)
The same website also includes a bio of Vandebril:
Michael Vandebril (1972): Lawyer by training. Debuted in 1998 as a poet in the poetry & straight jazz tradition of the beat poets. In 2000, he founded the collective Le Tigre Unick with literary events which he organized in Antwerp and Amsterdam. At the end of 2002 he was appointed coordinator of Antwerp Book City, and Antwerp earned the title of UNESCO World Book Captital 2004. BOEST marked the end of a year-long break from writing poetry.
(translation prarphrased from Google)
Brian Doyle did the English translation in the video. The reading is by the author. Swoon Bildos handled everything else: concept, camera, editing, and music. I thought the shots of dancers and pigeons startling into flight made an effective pairing with the text, intermixed as they were with blurred shots of ascending motion.
Personal Duty by Mahmoud Darwish
http://vimeo.com/32009181
Talal Khoury’s dramatization of a poem by Mahmoud Darwish won a Special Jury Prize at the 2009 Dubai International Film Festival. In the Vimeo description, he writes:
The film is an illustration of a poem by Mahmoud Darwish, who focuses on the tragic side of the human personality of a martyr.
It is a visual journey that combines the public experience and the personal one and follows a couple separated by a death called “heroic”.
It is a tribute to Arabic poetry through the combination of the cinematography and music with the music within the poem.
The Interrogation of the Good by Bertolt Brecht
“This short animation features a collaged portrait composed of various contemporary world leaders reciting Bertolt Brecht’s poem ‘The Interrogation of the Good,” says Esteban del Valle in the description at Vimeo.
Walking in Plastic by Bandile Gumbi
Another unique video collaboration from South African artist, poet and filmmaker Kai Lossgott, who sets it up for us as follows:
Slums are rapidly becoming the defining landscape of the twenty-first century, both in the developed as well as the developing world. One out of every three city dwellers worldwide nearly a billion people lives in a slum. Performance artist Mduduzi Nyembe presents a memory of a wounded woman, a dream for an absent father, and a dance in a street market for survival. They are ritual stories of the heartache of the slums substance abuse, violence, gender inequalities, chronic unemployment, families incapacity to provide for and protect their children. Each of Nyembe’s characters, taken from his daily interactions in the township, is left, in the words of poet Bandile Gumbi, “a constant wanderer / always at the beginning of complete circles”, trapped in the existential cycle of poverty.
For more on Bandile Gumbi, see her page on the Creative Africa Network.
