~ 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.
Peter Quince at the Clavier by Wallace Stevens
A new film by the indefatigable Swoon (which he blogged about here). The inspiration and reading came once again from Nic S.’s new site Pizzicati of Hosanna… which takes its title from a line in this very poem.
French Movie by David Lehman
A poem from Yeshiva Boys (Scribner, 2009), produced to honor the general editor of the Best American Poems series at Motionpoems‘ first screening of films produced for this year’s anthology:
Scott Wenner surprised audiences at the Motionpoems Festival in Fall 2011 by unveiling this motionpoem adaptation of David Lehman’s poem, “French Movie.” In it, the narrator is depicted as an old-school movie camera, and the inevitability of the poem is like a bullet.
(From the description at Vimeo.)
Treacle by Paul Farley
“Featured in the Museum of Liverpool. Shot by Steven Ferguson, directed and edited by Lucy Armitage,” according to the description on Vimeo. Paul Farley is a native of Liverpool, and is said to be “one of the most culturally wide-ranging of current British poets. Born in the mid-1960s, his imagination is equally likely to refer to film, television, pop music and modern art as to literature.” Armitage is a production coordinator at ITV.
Love Poem by Richard Brautigan
A mash-up of Richard Brautigan‘s “Love Poem,” recited in different voices, with excerpts from Samuel Beckett’s novel Molloy presented as text in English and Korean translation. Titled Love Poem, this was shown at three festivals last year: the 10th Seoul International New Media Festival, the 7th Experimental Film and Video Festival in Seoul, and the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin.
Mirror by Sylvia Plath
A brilliant text animation of Plath’s 1961 poem with images from vintage print advertisements. It’s the work of the New Zealand-based designer Kylie May, née Kylie Hibbert — the name under which she made this film and another in 2005, part of a “postgraduate study exploring the visual language of poetry” she called the Belles Lettres project.
By transforming the written words of poetry into choreographed kinetic performance the project seeks to expand typographical conventions of traditional published poetry. The research project utilises the poetry of Emily Dickinson’s (1862) I died for beauty and Sylvia Plath’s (1961) Mirror, to explore the potential of paralinguistics and poetry as emotive narrative. These two poetic voices are fused by intimate revelations of anxiety, which have relevance in today’s society.
Both films were shortlisted for the 2006 Berlin ZEBRA Poetry Film Awards, Mirror attracting a finalist placing.
PLEASE NOTE: Music used under the AUT screenrights license. For academic research purposes only.
Riqueza (Riches) by Gabriela Mistral
After all my web hosting woes of late, I think it’s safe to say that this site, at least, is back on an even keel. To celebrate, I made a video for one of my favorite poems, and Nic S. was gracious enough to upload a reading I could use to Pizzicati of Hosanna. I found the music on SoundCloud: “The Foggy Dew” on tin whistle by Chris Kent. I blogged a bit more about this at Via Negativa just now.
What I Have Learned So Far by Mary Oliver
http://vimeo.com/31104514
O.K., this is something different for Moving Poems — a videopoem made to embody the mission of a university. Marquette University is a Jesuit school whose motto is “Be the Difference.” (Gotta love Jesuits!) The filmmaker is James P. O’Malley of Carnaval Pictures. Here’s what he says in the description at Vimeo:
Using Mary Oliver’s inspirational poem as a script, I created this Poem-Videoclip for the inauguration ceremony of Marquette University’s new president.
I shot all the images solo with my Canon 5D Mark2, using Nikkor and Canon lenses and available light. The sync sound day included John Egan, of Egan Audio Services, and Patrick O’Malley as assistant. Patrick composed, recorded and mastered the piano solo, and John Egan created the sound design and audio master.
The readers are Marquette University students, and all on-camera performers are “non-pro” or “real-people”.
I edited and mastered on FCP, except for the simple graphic call to action I exported from After Effects.
The result is lightly branded enough, I think, to engage Oliver fans unconnected with Marquette. I know I enjoyed it.
Fábula de la Sirena y los Borrachos (Fable of the Siren and the Drunks) by Pablo Neruda
Moving Poems’ latest production takes advantage of a new free-audio site that other filmmakers might be interested in, too: pizzicati of hosanna: dead poets’ poems read by Nic S. in English & other languages. The footage is from Blackwater Falls State Park, West Virginia. I blogged all about it at Via Negativa.
No. XLII by e. e. cummings
http://vimeo.com/29969928
Another text-only videopoem, but today with a soundtrack. I’m not crazy about the font-choice — for some reason, I have trouble seeing a Cummings poem in anything but a typewriter font — but otherwise this strikes me as a highly successful re-imagining of the text.
Nic S. blogged about “using text vs voice in videopoems” the other day, and it’s sparked an interesting discussion in the comments, with videopoetry pioneer Tom Konyves weighing in.
