~ Nationality: U.K. ~

Upon My Skin by Axel Kacoutié

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTDPgdVUlaQ

British composer Axel Kacoutié‘s Poe-like text is brilliantly interpreted in this film-poem, produced by Kacoutié and directed by Émile. The YouTube description reads:

Please do not touch the paintings or other exhibits, and do not cross barriers.

It was featured in the London-based “online multimedia platform” Skin Deep on March 17. Here’s what they said about it:

Axel Kacoutié’s film-poem, Upon My Skin, is an electrifying meditation on performance, desire and the ways in which art is consumed. Inspired in part by Władysław Podkowiński’s [Vadeh-swav Pod-ko-vin-ski] painting Frenzy of Exultations, the video does away with the idea of art as the consumption of objects. Instead, art is conceived of as a disorienting experience that moves beyond the confines of the gallery space and into the world, blurring the distinction between art product and reality.

Axel explains: There is a helpless mood of sometimes not knowing what you’re looking at when you are in a gallery, but that wasn’t the case for ‘Axelina’ [Aderonke Oke]. Her confident stillness and her disregard for what is happening in the room makes it so that the observer becomes the observed; we become more interested in how she perceives the audience, rather than how the audience perceives her.  We cut to see ‘Her’ [Ally Goldberg] now clothed and free in a real world full of life.

Upon My Skin is otherworldly. It creates a world that is ethereal and ready to disappear at any moment, making Axel’s poetry the only thing that grounds us in corporeal reality. Although Axel explains that his ambitions are still exclusively musical, there can be doubt that the immersive sonic experience that Axel has created is made that much more poignant by the accompanying words. Upon My Skin is a mystifying video that is so obviously about black and white, but in a way that is unexpected. [link added]

A more recent interview in MASQ Magazine goes into detail about the production of the film and Kacoutié’s influences and aesthetic preferences: “Dark Horses and Desire.”

Domingo Después del Vendaval / Sunday Morning After Gales by Jean Morris

London-based translator and poet Jean Morris provided the texts for this bilingual filmpoem by the Stockholm-based Spanish director Eduardo Yagüe. Soprano Juana Molinero sings the Pie Jesu from Fauré’s Requiem in the soundtrack, providing a pleasing contrast to Yagüe’s voiceover.

Embarrassed by Hollie McNish

https://vimeo.com/153781706

Hollie McNish is a British spoken-word poet with a very popular YouTube channel. Her description for “Embarrassed“:

This poem is taken from my book Nobody Told Me: a journey from pregnancy to pre-school in poetry and prose: http://www.blackfriarsbooks.com/book/nobody-told-me/

“The World Needs this Book” The Scotsman
“a moving and profoundly personal account” The Skinny

The video was directed by Jake Dypka with Indy 8 for Channel 4 Random Acts with help from hundreds up people via a KickStarter campaign.

Why is titillation accepted and sustenance rejected?

Nobody Told Me has just won the prestigious Ted Hughes poetry award.

Singer-songwriter Kathryn Williams, who judged the prize with poets Jo Bell and Bernard O’Donoghue, said the book “should be sold alongside Caitlin Moran and Bill Bryson. Honest and insightful, it will resonate outside the poetry world to reach a new generation of poetry readers.”

The collection covers all aspects of motherhood, challenging taboos about post-pregnancy sex and breastfeeding as well as the sense of isolation and loss many women feel after giving birth. It also celebrates the joys of having a young child. On publication, the Guardian wrote that “her poems can often sound like love letters to her daughter and each phase of babyhood”.

The Cambridge graduate has earned a reputation for breaking new ground with poetry and performances that straddle the literary and pop scenes. As well as becoming the first poet to record an album at Abbey Road, McNish has collaborated with rapper George the Poet and Kate Tempest, who won the Ted Hughes award in 2012. Her YouTube videos have been viewed more than four million times.

Haunting by Martin Evans

An author-made videopoem from Welsh writer and humorist Martin Evans, whose work was brought to my attention by the inclusion of another of his videos, “Numbers“, in the latest issue of Poetry Film Live. He describes this one as

A film-poem to revisit a childhood haunt. Filmed on Whixall, Bettisfield and Fenns mosses on the Welsh/English border.

Scratch the pastoral surface of the countryside nearly anywhere and you’ll find similar stories of violence and loss. A beautifully done evocation.

Relearning the Alphabet (excerpt) by Denise Levertov

In this Moving Poems production, a quote from Denise Levertov’s “Relearning the Alphabet” anchors a brief epistemological meditation. Or as I’ve been describing it on Facebook, this is basically a videopoem about videopoetry. The text animation, live footage and audio were all released to the public domain by their shy and selfless creators. (The poem is of course under copyright, but I think using a short quote—the “U” section—combined with what the law would probably consider a transformative use—the videopoetic treatment—would qualify this as “fair use” under U.S. copyright law.)

The Cracked Jug by Shakira Morar

There aren’t too many rules about what makes a successful poetry film, but one I tend to follow a lot when deciding what to post here is that a too-close match of imagery to text usually feels redundant and reductive, diminishing a poem rather than adding an extra dimension. But in this new film from the UK Poetry Society, somehow a teenage poet, Shakira Morar, and director Suzanne Cohen manage to break that rule, and I think it’s because the limpid quality of the text allows the illustrative imagery to attain a symbolic, even mythic weight. Watch it and judge for yourself. Here’s the description on the Poetry Society’s website:

On World Poetry Day 2017, we are delighted to present a new poetry film, produced by The Poetry Society to celebrate the overall winner of the Poetry for Peace 2016 project, chosen by Judith Palmer. The film features the winning poem by Shakira Morar, aged 17, from Headington School, Oxford, who reads the poem in the film, in English, while the Arabic translation by Manal Nakli appears as subtitles. The poem is inspired by a 4,000 year-old Mesopotamian jug in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the film is directed by Suzanne Cohen.

‘Poetry for Peace, 2016’ is part of the award winning, Arts Council-funded ‘Writing Mesopotamia’ collaboration between Oxford poet Jenny Lewis and the distinguished Iraqi poet Adnan al-Sayegh aimed at building bridges between English and Arabic-speaking communities. It involved Adnan and Jenny working with the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, The Poetry Society and more than sixty 11-17 year olds from four Oxford schools – Oxford Spires Academy, the Sudanese Saturday School, Headington School and Cherwell School – on themes of heritage and peace to produce poems for a competition judged by the poets.

Read a news story about the poem, film and winner Shakira over at the Oxford Mail.

Explore more of our poetry films on our Poetry to Watch page.

Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare

This is To The Marriage Of True Minds, a 2010 narrative short about Iraqi asylum seekers in the UK directed by Andrew Steggall. Producer Sunny Midha describes it on Vimeo as an Arabic adaptation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116. William El Gardi and Amir Boutrous are the two main actors; full credits are on the Motion Group Pictures website.

Clouds by Lucy English

This recent addition to the Book of Hours project is

A poetryfilm by Jutta Pryor (Aust) with the words of Lucy English (UK) and soundscape created for ‘CLOUDS’ by

Bruno Gussoni: Flute, Alto Flute, Tibetan Bells (Italy)
Claudio Ferrari: Electronics (Italy)
Iao Aea: Fretless Electric Bass (Italy)

Click through for the text for the poem.

Granite As Heirloom: A Portrait by Caleb Femi

https://vimeo.com/205223348

Caleb Femi, the Young People’s Laureate for London, is a poet-filmmaker whose latest film is

a deconstruction of the white gaze in the portraiture of the black British working-class face; it makes a play on the response to particular black facial features as something sinister, a Hollywoodised alien threat, a dread, out of place, an omen of destruction etc.
The marriage between the poem and the film work as a self-proclamation of the beauty in the black British face and a release from perceived validation of the external gaze.

Although the marginalisation of ‘black’ features in modern aesthetics is a global conversation, this project centres around the aesthetics in the British working-class experience as it is one whose nuances are very much understood by me.

Watch all of his films on Vimeo.

The Dreamer of Samuel Vale House by Antony Owen

I have Googled the earth and I’m tired of paradise. This city is home. I am its key and broken door.

Coventry-based poet Antony Owen performs his poem in this 2015 film by Adam Steiner (director), Brian Harley (camera and editing) and Alan van Widjgerden (sound), which kicked off a poetry-film project spearheaded by Steiner called Disappear Here. Last year they raised enough money from a crowdfunding campaign to produce a whole series of films exploring the Modernist/Brutalist superstructure of Coventry Ringroad: 27 in all, from nine writers and nine filmmakers. The launch screening is on March 16, and although it’s free, registration is required.

This sounds like a truly commendable use of film to bring the perspectives of poets and artists to bear on pressing local issues (which are also global issues, capitalism being what it is). Here’s a blog post from last year that explains what they hoped to accomplish:

The challenge of Disappear Here is to bring together artists of different stripes, some more experienced practitioners, others up and coming and hungry; native Coventrians and people who might be coming to the city for the first time and seeing it with fresh eyes; expressing the human aspect of what is so commonly seen as an inhuman structure, another one of HRH Charles’ “concrete monstrosities” – by way of contrast, witness the faux-Kensington banality of his ideal housing estate, Poundbury – but it is also fair to say that few near-monolithic concrete structures inspire such intense feelings of love and loathing.

But there is a positivity to the project. As much as it is anything, Coventry Ringroad is an archetype of reinvention. Each time the same A4053 road, but every journey around it different. It is the eye through which Coventry is (notoriously) seen, and can be seen, from above and below; a looping horizon where tarmac sea and brilliant blue sky meet and form a sinew of shuffling perspective. […]

Coventry is an ex-working-class city, chock-full with post-industrial grit from crumbling fire of red brick, after many of its 70s, 80s and 90s industries successively closed down. As such, the city has become an affordable and welcoming haven for artists with a burgeoning community of creative and socially-conscious practitioners – there is a story to be told there. I think the people and the city’s physical attitudes speak to this, guarded but protective. As both defensive wall and encircling stranglehold – the ringroad echoes this taut insularity, but also provides us with a blank canvas for reimagining public space. I think this push/pull reflex makes for an interesting tension as to how we define a city and its search for its centre.

Read the rest. According to the Disappear Here Facebook page, there are plans to tour the films across the UK after the premiere in Coventry.

these are a few of my favourite things by Janet Lees

U.K. poet Janet Lees and photographer and videographer Rooney are among my favorite poetry-film collaborative partnerships; every one of their too few videopoems is a small gem. Marc Neys profiled them back in 2014: “The Real and Pure Worlds of Janet Lees and Terry Rooney.” The above is a film he didn’t include in his piece, but to me it’s a great illustration of the poet’s dictum that less is more. Mayto Sotomayor is credited as editor.

Daisy Chain by Lucy English

A recent addition to Lucy English’s ambitious, multi-filmmaker Book of Hours project, this time from director Eduardo Yagüe—his third for the project, I think—with music by Podington Bear, voiceover by Rebecca Tantony, and an appearance by the actress Gabriella Roy. The stark contrast between the wintry footage and the summery text creates an interesting spark gap for the imagination to leap.