~ Nationality: U.K. ~

The City Inside, Part 2 by Tim Cumming

The conclusion of poet-filmmaker Tim Cumming’s new film of a poem about London. Though the entire film is over 13 minutes long, the repetition of certain images and tropes serves as a connective glue, and the language has sufficient energy to make the film seem much shorter than it is. (Watch Part 1.)

The City Inside, Part 1 by Tim Cumming

A new film from UK poet and filmmaker Tim Cumming, who notes on Vimeo:

First part of a two-part film of a London poem The City Inside. You could call it an inner city revealed.
Every metropolis dweller has their own inner city, an internal map organism that grows through space and time. This is work in progress. Status may change.

Sottoripa by Julian Stannard

An award-winning filmpoem produced, directed and edited by Guglielmo Trupia (ENECEfilm) in collaboration with the UK poet Julian Stannard, Sottoripa is especially notable for its imaginative and seamless blend of archival footage from 11 different private and documentary films. The voiceover is by Antonio Carletti and the music by Barrie Bignold.

Without War by Gerry King

This author-made filmpoem by Gerry King in collaboration with videographer Gregory Rose is reminiscent of the most powerful political campaign ads, but with a more timeless message. The use of multiple readers, each situated in a particular place, lends additional veracity to the message—and I like the idea of a performance poet standing aside to let others take the mike. Here’s the YouTube description:

More than twenty years ago Gerry King wrote Without War and performed it to audiences across England. Now in a collaboration with his friend and Dartington College of Arts collaborator Gregory Rose the text is given a new life while the theme continues to steal lives all over the world….
Text © Gerry King, Images and soundtrack © King and Rose 2016.

Pearls by Chaucer Cameron

An author-made videopoem by Chaucer Cameron that was sparked by an image in a Swoon videopoem. Pearls was recently featured at Atticus Review, accompanied by some process notes:

Symbolically, Pearls provides a vehicle for wisdom as well as providing a mirror in which to see ourselves, giving us insight into how we appear to others.

In a more literal sense, the “Mother” in the poem is on a mission to ‘find herself’ through some pearls that she thinks are hidden in the rocks. Her son, who is watching from down below, is trying desperately to communicate, to gain her attention, her love. In fact, he is trying to tell her that she already has pearls, if only she could see them.

The first line of the poem was inspired by a poetry-film on Moving Poems site, so it seemed appropriate to explore my text further through film. I sent the poem to Voiceover Artist and Broadcaster David Wartnaby. A few weeks later, I found exactly the right footage, music and sound and the poetry-film fell into place.

Noman’s Land Common by Robert Peake

A new videopoem by Robert Peake (poem, concept) and Valerie Kampmeier (original music). With all the thousands of poetry videos I’ve watched over the years, I’ve never seen someone use footage shot through a kaleidoscope before—leave it to an endlessly inventive tech geek and poet like Peake to come up with it. I find the effect mesmerizing and an apt complement to the text. As usual, he’s posted the poem at his blog, along with some process notes:

With the tenth anniversary of the birth and death of our son James fast approaching, I find myself writing about the ongoing effects, including sudden and overpowering moments of grief. The text came first. I then shot time-lapse of clouds through an inexpensive toy kaleidoscope using a Raspberry Pi camera. I also shot real-time nature footage through the same kaleidoscope by holding it up to my smartphone camera. Valerie composed and performed the music. The title refers to a nearby patch of common land in North Hertfordshire that we frequent. One year, after extensive tilling, a field adjacent to the common erupted in red poppies, not unlike the no-man’s land of the First World War.

The Expiration by John Donne

‘Breake off this last lamenting kisse, which sucks two soules and vapors both away.’ Inspired by John Donne’s poem, The Expiration is a beautiful, evocative, depiction of two secret lovers as they accept they must reluctantly part forever. This adaptation embraces the Renaissance concept of la petite mort that ‘to die’ was ‘to orgasm’ and explores the bittersweet moments of a love’s last breath.

That’s the description on the exemplary website for this new film by British director Lotus Hannon, released on the web today in honor of John Donne’s birthday. He’d be 544, which seems incredible to me because in so many ways his work seems so modern. As the greatest of the metaphysical poets, he’s been an indispensable touchstone for metaphor-obsessed 20th and 21st century poets in a way that most of his contemporaries have not. Oddly, however, I haven’t run across very many film or video adaptations of his works online, so let’s hope this one will inspire other poetry filmmakers to try their hand at a John Donne poem.

The Expiration was filmed by BAFTA Breakthrough Brit 2015 Cinematographer Anna Valdez Hanks and has so far been selected for the BFI LOVE season as part of the Cornwall Film Festival and for the StAnza International Poetry Festival in March. The actors are Azzurra Caccetta and Olivier Hubband.

In her director’s statement on the website, Hannon goes into some detail about how she came to make the film and why she chose the shots and setting that she did:

I was introduced to the love poetry of John Donne at high school and suddenly my literature class became a lot more interesting…suddenly his words made ‘one little room an everywhere’. I was able to channel my awakening teenage sexuality into becoming a metaphor sleuth, eagerly stripping away the layers of his work to discover hidden meanings. I found his observations of lovers and loving so beautiful, and The Good Morrow became one of my favourite poems.

John Donne’s honest exploration of life, love, sex, death – la petite mort, fascinates me. When I recently read The Expiration, I was captivated. There is nothing more charged than a ‘…last lamenting kisse,..’ nothing more precious than a love, ‘…which sucks two soules, and vapors both away.’ It was the sobering line “Turn thou ghost that one, and let me turn this,” that instantly brought an image of a couple that can no longer love one another, awkwardly lying close, sharing a bed, knowing they can no longer be connected. An overhead wide shot of a couple turning away from each other, lying back to back became imprinted in my mind,..from this, my ambition to bring it to the screen grew…

Originally I thought we’d shoot in an enclosed environment, inside a bedroom or a beach hut but as my vision for the piece developed, the poem’s earthiness, its grittiness demanded it be located outside. The title and the poem itself made me think of ‘lifeforce,’ or ‘chi’, which literally means breath, air, or gas. And as trees give us the oxygen that we cannot live without, I wanted to set it in the woods.

I wanted to capture the metamorphosis of a couple’s intoxicating sexual euphoria into a clear-headed, post-coital reality: Despite their passionate love, their relationship just cannot be. For me, The Expiration is not about a love that has just fizzled out. There is too much full-blooded passion, anger and too much raw pain. The act of passion creates life itself, and yet this is a love that has to be killed off. This led me to interpret the poem in the way I have. I hope to evoke the emotional effect this poem has on me, and to honour the wonder of loving and the bittersweet joy and pain it can bring.

Be sure to visit the Behind the Scenes page for the full credits list, complete with web links, and a series of snapshots of the filming. The website also includes a good biography of Donne as well as the text of the poem.

National Service (with added talky bits) by Luke Wright

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CItv206HE_Q

British performance poet Luke Wright notes on YouTube,

Four months into my six month driving ban I’m getting nostalgic about motorway service stations. I miss rating my toilet experience.

This very basic video shot with a stationary camera is rendered thoroughly engrossing by Wright’s entertaining performance and the innovative (though deliberately not seamless) co-mingling of rhyming poetry and explication.

For women who are difficult to love by Warsan Shire

An atmospheric video by New York-based artist BriAnna Olson for Warsan Shire‘s widely circulated poem.

Relativity by Sarah Howe

I wanted to share something by Sarah Howe today to celebrate her winning the TS Eliot prize with her collection Loop of Jade, “the first debut poetry collection to win the British prize since it was inaugurated in 1993” as the Guardian pointed out. YouTube has a couple of good videos of her reading her work, but the only videopoem is this one by Bridget Smith, produced for National Poetry Day 2015. The renowned physicist Stephen Hawking reads a poem Howe wrote especially for him. He praised the poem on Facebook:

Physicists and poets may differ in discipline, but both seek to communicate the beauty of the world around us. … Sarah Howe brings light to life in her poem “Relativity.”

It sounds as if this video, or one very like it, will be part of an upcoming Bridget Smith exhibition at the Frith Street Gallery in London, The Eye Needs a Horizon:

A high definition video installation shows a beam of light emanating from an unseen projector. The film shows nothing but light and particles of dust, yet it evokes a sense of drama and indeed of immensity using the sparest of means.

An Interview: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

This film by Maggie Bailey blends interpretative dance with snippets of a 1961 interview with Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Here’s the description from Vimeo:

An Interview stems from a desire to explore the life of Sylvia Plath. This short film analyzes Plath’s feelings about her relationship with her husband, daily life, and raising her children, through dance and gesture work, paired with excerpts of an interview with Plath and her husband, Ted Hughes. Though she says quite the opposite in this interview, we can infer that she feels a loss of identity and purpose in life, in the midst of caring for a new baby. The year of the interview is 1961, two years prior to Plath’s suicide. Directed & filmed by Maggie Bailey. Edited by Maggie Bailey and Tyler Rubin. Performed by Heather Bybee. Music by Michael Wall. Interview with Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.

Winning by Jade Anouka

A new performance poetry video from director Sabrina Grant and actor and poet Jade Anouka, with original music by Grace Savage.