~ Nationality: Germany ~
[meine heimat] by Ulrike Almut Sandig (6)
A film by Beate Kunath and Marlen Pelny of b-k productions in Germany. The synopsis on YouTube, rendered into English with the help of Google Translate, says something to the effect of
Where is home when she feels nowhere? For some, searching and finding the home is an evolving process, not a self-evident accessory from birth.
This is probably the last film adaptation of Sandig’s poem I’ll be sharing here, though there are certainly some others online that also have points to recommend them. Challenging filmmakers to work with a supplied text does make for an interesting contest; we even did it at Moving Poems back in 2011, with a poem by Howie Good (contest winners here and here). But such an approach tends to favor the merely illustrative, as I think we’ve seen this week with the difficulty filmmakers have had escaping the orbit of the text’s avian imagery. I would instead encourage festival organizers to consider the opposite sort of contest: supply a couple of minutes of footage and challenge filmmakers and writers to make a videopoem out of it. The results would likely be much more varied.
[meine heimat] by Ulrike Almut Sandig (5)
A Berlin-centric reimagining of Sandig’s poem by Nigerian-German animator Ebele Okoye. Her description of the film at Vimeo is unusually complete; here’s most of the first half (minus production notes, credits and such):
SYNOPSIS
Berlin Tempelhof, years after 2017: an old woman in the face of advanced recreational activities at the old
airport grounds confusedly recalls her growing-up years and life in a post war Berlin.BACKGROUND
The old Tempelhof Airport, one of Europe’s iconic pre-world war II airports ceased operating in 2008. Since then it is being used for recreational activities like windsurfing, kiting etc.
However, before the Airport was built in the mid twenties, it was a vast farmland which played a big role in the life of the inhabitants of Tempelhof. It was the center of their sunday recreational activities which included dog-races etc.Today, in 2012, the city of Berlin plans to restructure the landscape of the old airport ground and install very modern recreational facilities and one of these is a hill (hence the interpretation of the “bird man” sport)
So conclusively, only MOSTLY people from Berlin will be able to understand it beyond the presented visual abstract, thus making this remain predominantly a Berlin-related interpretation.
[meine heimat] by Ulrike Almut Sandig (4)
http://vimeo.com/49039837
(English subtitles)
(German subtitles)
This film interpretation of Sandig’s poem was made in Mexico by Stephanie Brewster, with a Spanish translation by Aram Vidal in the soundtrack. Heimat is translated as patria, homeland. I like everything about this except for the inclusion of piano music.
[meine heimat] by Ulrike Almut Sandig (3)
This take on Sandig’s poem is by the Belgian filmmaker Jan Peeters.
In his artistic practice, Jan Peeters currently focuses on so-called ‘iconotextual’ works: he merges words (and more precisely, texts that are set typographically) and moving images (with emphasis on filmic images) to form visual-textual unities of content, which cannot be categorised as either pure image or pure text. In these ‘reading films’ he brings together the languages of literature and visual art, without focussing necessarily on certain implicit elements of mainstream film, such as narration, acting or characters.
For full credits and screening information, see the relevant page on his website. The summary reads:
While a university librarian struggles with words at lonely heights,
an old pigeon fancier awaits the homecoming of his pigeons …
[meine heimat] by Ulrike Almut Sandig (2)
For the 2012 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin, filmmakers were challenged to make a film using a text and reading by the German poet Ulrike Almut Sandig: “[meine heimat]” (“[my home/homeland/native land]”). In all, they received 33 films from 13 countries. Some of them are up on the web, but to date I’ve only shared one, the entry by Belgian filmmaker Swoon (Marc Neys). This week I’ll be posting a few others I like. (Some are fairly long, so it didn’t make sense to cram them all into one post as I did for “A Westray Prayer.”) The animation above is by the always wonderful Susanne Wiegner, who notes:
[meine heimat] is a poem by Ulrike Almut Sandig, that describes a space of memories or a landscape, that is not clearly defined.
“Heimat” is a very special German word, that can’t be translated into other languages, because it means as well a specific place, as a certain landscape or an abstract feeling. During the Third Reich in Germany, the word “Heimat” was barbarously and fanatically glorified and misused with the result that many people lost their “Heimat” and their lives.
In the video a picture of a concentration camp is projected on the letters of the words [meine heimat] blended with a train ride through my own homeland that reminds also of the terrible deportations to show the ambiguity, that you feel as a German when you think about your “Heimat”.
Ursonate (excerpt) by Kurt Schwitters
http://vimeo.com/66612735
William Shum says about his film,
A short excerpt from Kurt Schwitters sound poem, “Ursonate”. The typeface was created from scratch and inspired by the “Merz” art Schwitters created, hence the name, “Merzy”.
This may be the first example of a typeface invented for a videopoem.
The Wikipedia article on Kurt Schwitters includes a paragraph on Ursonate:
Schwitters composed and performed an early example of sound poetry, Ursonate (1922–32; a translation of the title is Original Sonata or Primeval Sonata). The poem was influenced by Raoul Hausmann’s poem “fmsbw” which Schwitters heard recited by Hausmann in Prague, 1921. Schwitters first performed the piece on 14 February 1925 at the home of Irmgard Kiepenheuer in Potsdam. He subsequently performed it regularly, both developing and extending it. He published his notations for the recital in the last Merz periodical in 1932, although he would continue to develop the piece for at least the next ten years.
An Anna Blume (To Anna Flower) by Kurt Schwitters
“An Anna Blume,” says the Wikipedia, is “a poem written by the German artist Kurt Schwitters in 1919. It has been described as a parody of a love poem, an emblem of the chaos and madness of the era, and as a harbinger of a new poetic language.” This film adaptation, a German-Bulgarian production, won the the Ritter-Sport Prize at the 5th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in 2010. Here’s the description at Vimeo:
Anna Blume is a visual poetry about the lust of a man chasing a woman. The story takes on surreal journey dictated by the mind of the poet. Lust and ingestion, disguised in love, drive the two characters to an end where love turns to be a very lonesome and strange place. The film is based on and inspired by the emblematic love poem from 1919 “An Anna Blume” by Kurt Schwitters.
CREDITS:
director Vessela Dantcheva
art director Ivan Bogdanov
screenplay Vessela Dantcheva & Ebele Okoye
main animator Ebele Okoye
music composer Petar Dundakov
sound designer Emil Iliev
compositing & edit Ivan Bogdanov
storyboard & layouts Vessela Dantcheva
produced by Ebele Okoye & FINFILM
supported by Robert Bosch Stiftung & National Film Center
Orpheus’ Pony by Lisa Tuyula
Departing from the usual relationship between poetry and animation in which the latter illustrates the former, this animation may be said to exist in dynamic tension or conversation with the text and music. The director, Michael Fragstein of Büro Achter April, told me in an email that his animation came first, and the German-Congolese jazz singer Lisa Tuyula wrote her spoken-word composition in response, following which Marc Fragstein wrote the music that ties it all together.
While I think this was intended more as a music video than a poetry video, the ekphrastic approach is one that poets and animators ought to consider experimenting with.
Syrinx by Norbert Hummelt
A very successful example of a poem used as dialogue between characters in a familiar movie set-up — a surprisingly uncommon tactic for videopoem makers. This was uploaded to YouTube by the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival folks, who solicited it for this year’s festival:
For the 6th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival Polish film makers Maciek Majewski, Łukasz Twarkowski and Wiola Sowa have collaborated with German poets Norbert Hummelt, Nico Bleutge and Christian Filips to make film versions of poems of theirs. Together they chose the poems and worked on turning them into scripts. In the run-up to the festival the pairs of artists were meeting up in Berlin to turn their ideas into films within six days. The short films that have been created in this way were premièred in the fesival. This is Maciek Majewski’s film-version of Norbert Hummelt’s poem “Syrinx”.
The translation is by Christina Hales and the poet, who is also known for his translations.
Clearance by Tom Schilling
http://vimeo.com/47808467
Directed and produced by Jan Walentek, this was shown at the 2010 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin. There’s also a version in German:
Without You (Ohne Dich) by Hermann Hesse
http://vimeo.com/47438051
A very minimalist take on the Hesse poem by Philip David Edson. It uses the classic James Wright translation for the titling, with punctuation and capitalization removed.
Schöne Jugend (A Fine Childhood) by Gottfried Benn
The Gottfried Benn Electronic Library includes an English translation of this poem (click through to read it side-by-side with the original):
A Fine Childhood
The mouth of a girl who had long lain in the reeds
looked so chewed up.
When we broke open the torso, the esophagus was so full of holes.
Finally in a bower under the diaphragm
we found a nest of young rats.
One little sister rat lay dead.
The others were living off liver and kidney,
drinking the cold blood and enjoying
a fine childhood.
And fine and fast was their death too:
we threw the whole bunch into water.
Oh, how those little snouts squeaked!
As for the film, this is a bit of a remake with extra audio effects added. Here’s what Lasse Kuhlmann posted in the description at Vimeo (italics added):
Schöne Jugend (A Beautiful Youth) is an award winning 60 seconds short film based on the same-titled poem by Gottfried Benn. This modern interpretation of Benn’s classic (poem) illustrates today’s society in a clear-cut formal structure. It is shot in only one take, one steady camera-spin of 360 degrees. The PoV (point of view) is thought to be in the middle of a table, around which eight people are eating in a gross manner. The well-thought-out visual concept is both enhanced and contrasted by the raw cruelty of human disgust.
Schöne Jugend was entirely reworked for the KLX 3D Sound format. While the original clip features only a narrative voice and “silent” pictures, Lasse Kuhlmann and Patrick Leuchter enriched the soundtrack by breathing life to those eight people shown in the frame. And while the camera spins around, the sound will spin AROUND YOU just accordingly.
Schöne Jugend wonderfully demonstrates the immersive real-life experience of the KLX sound format and was kindly provided by the director himself, who is highly enthusiastic about the new version.
