~ Filmmaker: Marc Neys ~
Oir by Luisa A. Igloria
This new videopoem by Marc Neys, A.K.A. Swoon, is one of his best, I think. Somehow the poem and reading by Luisa A. Igloria are just a perfect fit with the images and music.
As with his previous collaboration with Luisa, Mortal Ghazal, Marc has blogged some process notes incorporating remarks from Luisa. I’ll just quote from the first part of his post:
Some weeks ago we’ve had a thunderstorm at night. I recorded it, added some sounds and improvised piano…
For some reason I thought about the recording of ‘Oir’ Luisa sent me earlier. I combined them all and forwarded the result to Luisa.I very much love the broody thunderstorm background and the improvised piano. I like the sound of rain very much. A hard rain on tin roofs is a particularly strong memory trace I have from my growing up in a tropical country. Anyway, for me rain has the capacity for both amplifying and muffling/softening the atmosphere. It’s full of emotional portent,
she replied.
Luisa also gave me the idea of using ‘café-ambient’ noises and provided me with some insights about the poem;
…but in part the poem is partly triggered by a conversation I had in a cafe. We talked about work, creative nonfiction essays, family…
As usual the cafe was crowded and noisy. it struck me then but perhaps more afterward, when I was writing the poem, that in the spaces that teem with so much everyday life, activity, business as usual, we strive to hollow out spaces for the intimate to be enacted and reenacted.
Kiss the Cobra by Michael Annis
A Swoon (Marc Neys) film for a text by U.S. poet Michael Annis, translated into Spanish with the help of Gabriela Perez and recited by Sitara Monica Perez, with music by Sonologyst. I am deeply impressed by Swoon’s choice of imagery to accompany the sexual, conjugal language of the poem. The whole story of how this videopoem came to be made is interesting, but I’ll just quote the latter part of Swoon’s blog post about it:
Michael then gave me ‘Kiss the Cobra’, in his own words:
“It’s a passionate piece written from the perspective of a woman’s desires. It’s not overtly sentimental; rather, bold and lusty with unbridled passions.”
The poem was recorded in Spanish. I loved the sound and the melody of the Spanish version and I immediately got an idea for the images.
Sonologyst, again, delivered a fantastic soundtrack to curl around the reading of Sitara Monica Perez.The images I used and edited came from an Russian ASMR-Artist called Air Light.
I took a few samples of her scratching and tapping with bright red nails and started working with that.
The video ended up like an abstract cascade of colour and movement, giving the voice and the words enough room to crawl in and out of the piece. Something to stare at…
The video premiered at ‘1.000 poets for change’ in Denver (28/09/2013)
The Perseids by Lucy English
While most of what I categorize as videopoetry here comes about as the result of a filmmaker (who may also be the poet) making a video version of a preexisting text, in this case, filmmaker/musician Swoon (Marc Neys) sent British poet Lucy English a couple of musical prompts and asked her to write a poem in response. The music she chose then became the soundtrack for a videopoem using her reading and some found footage. Swoon blogged about the process, quoting English at length:
Rather than Marc supplying images to an existing poem or me creating a poem in response to images. Marc suggested that I choose a sound track from a few he had chosen. The one I liked sounded mysterious. The tension also built up as the track progressed. I didn’t force the image but what I saw in my mind was a starry sky. I decided to follow my emotional response. The feeling the track created in me was one of wistfulness and sadness.
The previous weekend I had watched the Persieds meteor shower, from a hotel room in Stratford on Avon. This experience, so different from a youthful experience of being outside on a summer’s evening, blended with the soundtrack. What I wanted to write about was how difficult it is to be spontaneous, and indeed naively optimistic, when we are older.
When I was younger I didn’t seem to worry about logistics, such as how was I going to get to a place, or how was I going to get back, I just went somewhere. I also had a baby in my early twenties and I used to take him with me as well.
So the poems is wistful. It is about wanting to feel that carelessness and optimism. It’s about being young and what gets lost when you get older.
I sent the poem to Marc and let him have free range about the images to choose. I liked what he selected. He didn’t focus on the night sky and the meteor shower but instead he used images of children playing in the summer. The repeated sections of film, were to me, like the repetition of memory itself. The summer day and the summer night become blended and the colour changes from yellow to dark blue. His first version was more about the day time and less about the night and I suggested that the final merge into the starry night/ specks of dust could be longer. He agreed with this and now the film ends with this longer sequence.
I find the final result moving. There is a strange tension between the words of the poem and the flickering images. The sound track offers a level of emotional depth to the wistfulness of the poem. This is my first poetry film collaboration and I have found the process inspiring. More!!!
Uite cum ne mai rotunjim / See how we complete ourselves by Doina Ioanid
Marc Neys (A.K.A. Swoon) writes in a blog post about this video that it grew out of a face-to-face meeting with the author, Romanian poet Doina Ioanid, at the Felix Poetry Festival in Antwerp earlier this year.
After the festival I asked her and her translator Jan Mysjkin if I could make a video for one of my favourites of her performance […] The images of this piece were taken from ‘Lost landscapes of Detroit’ (Prelinger Archives) and I re-edited them, adding an extra layer of colour and light.
The result is a short (moody) piece.
The reading is by the author, the English translation is by Jan H. Mysjkin, and there are two other versions, one with Dutch titling and one with French.
To me, the ability to present a poem in multiple languages is one of the best and most under-appreciated uses for videopoetry/filmpoetry, which is itself already something of a translation. I’ve always loved bilingual editions of poetry with the original language on the facing page, but it’s so much better to be able to hear the original while seeing an English version, the two linked and in some ways brought closer together by a filmmaker’s vision (usually including a good soundtrack, as here).
Mortal Ghazal by Luisa A. Igloria
Filipina American poet Luisa A. Igloria took an active role in collaborating with Swoon (Marc Neys) on this film in support of her new collection, The Saints of Streets, as Marc describes in a blog post. Much of the footage comes from a film Luisa found on YouTube,
part of a collection of motion picture films that John Van Antwerp MacMurray shot during the time he served as American Minister to China (1925-1929).
The 16mm silent movie was shot during a trip to the Philippines in October 1926, where MacMurray and his wife spent a few days at Camp John Hay, Baguio.
In the same post, Luisa has this to say about the poem and Marc’s film:
The poem’s recurrent rhyme is the word “everlasting” — it had started out as a meditation of sorts on a flower indigenous to Baguio, the mountain city where I grew up in the Philippines. The locals refer to them as “everlasting” flowers, but they are strawflowers or Helichrysum bracteatum (family Asteraceae). Locals wind them into leis and sell them to tourists. One of my dearest friends from childhood recently returned from a trip to Baguio, and brought a lei back for me.
Around ten years ago, this friend lost her only son, who grew up with my daughters in Baguio; and she has never really recovered from that grief; she has also just had surgery, and thinking about her and about our lives in that small mountain city so long ago, before we became what we are now, led me to writing this poem which is also a meditation on time/temporality, passage, absence and presence.
When I write poems, I am often guided first by images and their interior “sound” or texture, even before I can bring them to bear upon each other in some totally explicable way… What draws me in the first place to poetry is the sense it offers of mystery, of how not everything in language can be completely grasped, so that we can continue to think of possibility.
Therefore I love so much how Marc has been able to intuit the poem’s themes of recurrence and memory and render them in such a way that both sound and imagery, artifact and dream, loop one into the other in the video poem.
A Westray Prayer by John Glenday
A Westray Prayer by C.J. Hurst
http://vimeo.com/69640126
Filmpoem 32/A Westray Prayer by Alastair Cook
A Westray Prayer by Marc Neys (aka Swoon)
(See Marc’s blog for some process notes.)
One of the highlights of the Filmpoem Festival earlier this month in Dunbar, Scotland, was a screening of five films by five different filmmakers for this same poem, all of them employing the same reading by the author, which they were not allowed to cut up. This meant that each of the filmmakers had to decide how to fill the silence before and after the short text. John Glenday himself attended the screening, reading and introducing his poem, which, he pointed out, is partly about silence. “When we’re silent, we’re letting the world in,” he said, adding: “Silence gets all the best phrases.”
The other two filmmakers who contributed work for the screening, Ian Henderson and James Norton, don’t appear to have uploaded their films to the web, though Norton has shared his audio track at SoundCloud:
https://soundcloud.com/james-w-norton/a-westray-prayer
The Pioneer Wife Speaks in Tongues by Donna Vorreyer
Swoon‘s latest film features Donna Vorreyer reading a poem from her new collection The Imagined Life of the Pioneer Wife. The footage is from a public-domain documentary. As Swoon says in a blog post:
Sometimes I collect images, keep them with me until the right poem comes along.
The same with certain tracks I create.
‘And So They Live’ (John Ferno, Julian Roffman, 1940) is a piece of archive showing poorly educated “mountain peoples” living in poverty and stricken with disease, it’s a public-domain documentary about life in the Appalachian mountains with some great looking shots but a typical and very patronizing narration.
I used some parts before more than a year ago in ‘Odds and Ends’. The images stayed on my ‘shelf’ since then…In came Donna Vorreyer. We worked together before and I think she’s a very fine poet.
Donna has got a new collection out: ‘The Imagined Life of the Pioneer Wife’ (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2013)
Almost every poem in that collection could have been used for this videopoem. Not because they’re all the same. Because they’re all so good![…]
There was one sequence in the film I really loved. Can’t explain why, but the feet in the snow worked on a whole other level. When I placed that sequence on the basis, the rest came naturally.
Ve znaku (In the Sign) by Jaromír Typlt
Swoon‘s latest videopoem is a testimony to the way the web can break down differences of geography and language. He writes,
If there’s one thing I really like about the internet, it got to be the possibility and speed in how we can ‘meet’ and collaborate with people everywhere.
Throught the fiber I ‘met’ Jaromír Typlt.
At a certain point we started to write about poetry and videopoems and the possibility of working together.
On his website there were English translations of some of his poems.
We decided on one of them …
The translator is David Vichnar, and the poem is dedicated to the late poet and translator Ludvík Kundera. See Swoon’s blog post for the complete text in Czech and English, as well as the rest of his process notes.
Witness by Lissa Kiernan
A film by Swoon for the poem “Witness” by Lissa Kiernan, recorded for qarrtsiluni‘s Animals in the City issue. This is Swoon’s 11th film for a qarrtsiluni poem. A couple of snippets from his blog post about it:
The track I wanted to lay this podcast in had to be a bit dreamy but also suspenseful and foreboding (with a small hint of mysteriousness) […]
The images had to be lush, but with a hint of decay. I had a vase with tulips, way past their ideal point of freshness. The petals falling gave me the idea for this video…
The first time I watched this, the images Swoon chose to accompany the text struck me as possibly a bit too random. But now they strike me as a subtle but inspired match. And the poem is, after all, directly concerned with how we might view an odd conjunction.
The Shipwright’s Love Song by Jo Bell
A new film by Swoon, who blogged some process notes. Here’s a snippet:
Reading this poem I immediately knew (felt) what I wanted for this video.
I had images made last year (visiting old boats with Alastair Cook) in Antwerp (left screen) and earlier this year on St. Andrew’s beach (right screen)
The images were ‘tested’ on several tracks.
‘Maximum Suspicion‘ worked the best with the images, but I still needed a voice.Nic S. (still the most spot-on reader I know) was willing to participate and she provided me with a great recording almost the same day.
This is Swoon’s entry in the Liberated Words Poetry Film Festival Competition‘s “Four by Four” contest, in which filmmakers are invited to make a video of three minutes or less in response to one of four poems, “The Shipwright’s Love Song” among them. Jo Bell is — I love this — “the UK’s Canal Laureate, appointed by the Poetry Society and the Canal and River Trust.”
I’m sorry but I’ve witnessed what’s under your suburban bruises by Meg Tuite
Meg Tuite reads her poem in this collaboration with Swoon (Marc Neys) for the inaugural issue of Awkword Paper Cut [auto-playing audio alert]. Marc blogged about the making of the film. A snippet:
Something in the combination of her words/voice and these sounds led me back to a movie I used in another video, FF Coppola’s ‘Dementia 13’
I picked out a few scenes and faces and started editing. Looked for the right movements that I could feature as some kind of recurring visual chorus.
In the end I added a layer of lights and colours.
Born to Die by Zaher Mousa
One poem, one cameraman, two films! Reel Festivals commissioned both Alastair Cook and Swoon (Marc Neys) to make films for a piece by the Iraqi poet Zaher Mousa, using footage shot in Iraq by American poet Ryan Van Winkle. Here’s how Alastair introduced his film (the first one above) on Vimeo:
Born to Die is a poem by Iraqi poet Zaher Mousa and is in his native Arabic. There are no subtitles, as I want you to hear to the emotion in this great poet’s voice. The English text of the poem is available on the Vimeo site if you click through. Born to Die was a commission from Reel Festivals and was shot in Iraq for Filmpoem by Ryan van Winkle. It is a pair with Swoon, with him making the English language counterpart translated by Lauren Pyott and read by Jen Hadfield; this is the second film we have paired, the first being Aan Het Water.
These films are part of a larger collaboration between Reel Festivals and Zaher Mousa. Check out Mousa’s essay, “Reel Festivals – Dialogue through Poetry.”
