~ Nationality: U.K. ~
Sonnet 66 by Luke Kennard
Sonnet 66 is an animated film by Jamie MacDonald from a poem by Luke Kennard, commissioned by UK publishing and performance project Penned in the Margins.
The film was made to coincide with the launch of Kennard’s poetry collection Notes on the Sonnets, which went on to win the 2021 Forward Prize. A description of the collection:
Notes on the Sonnets… recasts Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets as a series of anarchic prose poems set in the same joyless house party.
The writing in Sonnet 66 is witty and elusive, and the film animation is cleverly simple. The whole is amusing and compelling in its short duration.
Two other films by Jamie MacDonald have previously featured here at Moving Poems.
Gethsemane by Toby Martinez de las Rivas
Gethsemane is one in an ongoing series of films from Jane Glennie, made in collaboration with fellow UK poet Toby Martinez de las Rivas, and Bulgarian sound artist Neda Milenova Mirova. This poem is from the collection Floodmeadow, published earlier in 2023 by Faber.
All films in the series take an experimental approach, including layered and truncated voices, gritty sound and music, and still images animated in darkly expressive ways. The three collaborators seem artistically well-matched, the writing, sound and film-making coherently meeting. Another highlight from the series is Psalm-for-the Sea, Little Sea-Psalm.
Jane Glennie currently has a solo exhibition happening over August and September in the Art at the ARB program of University of Cambridge. Gethsemane and the other films in the series form part of the exhibition, along with her award-winning Because Goddess is Never Enough.
We have previously featured several other of her films here. In addition, Jane regularly posts about film festivals and more at Moving Poems Magazine.
Hypnic Jerk by Alan Peat
Selected for the 2023 Haiku North America Haibun Film Festival. Browse the other selections.
An homage to Henri Rousseau by Austin-based collaborative filmmakers Pamela Falkenberg and Jack Cochran. The password is Hypn!c
British poet Alan Peat has won top awards in the Golden Haiku Contest, the New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition, the Otoroshi Rengay Contest, the BHS Ken and Norah Jones Haibun Award, the San Francisco International Haibun Contest, the Sanford Goldstein International Tanka Contest, the Heliosparrow Semagram Contest, and the Time Haiku ekphrastic haibun contest—all since 2021. He was one of three winners in the Touchstone Awards for Individual Haibun competition (2022). He is clearly on a roll.
Judges’ statement: “We loved this one in the way that one loves a children’s book even as an adult and can’t wait to share it with one’s own kids. It has a warm and playful feeling of familiarity, excitement, fun and fast-paced adventure. The idea of the moving layers of jungle and animations within, and the cuts to the paintings in a gallery are fabulous. Can poetry be a lighthearted and fun action movie? Yes, it can!”
Directors’ statement:
Hooked by the mention of Rosseau’s jungle in the first line of Allen Peat’s evocative and mysterious Haibun, “Hypnic Jerk,” we wondered if we could create a wholly imaginary world cut from the cloth of Rousseau’s fantastical paintings and the dream illogic of Peat’s brilliantly fragmented, hypnic poetic strategy. We had previously tried something with a similar kind of logic, when making a film based on Wallace Stevens’ out-of-copyright “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” another anything-goes kind of videopoetry project, where our method was to capture the startling images his words evoked for us using whatever crazy means necessary, and to manipulate those images in unexpected and visually poetic ways. Very early in the pre-production stages, we thought we might need to supplement Rousseau’s painted imagery with video of jungle plants shot in public conservatories and gardens in Illinois and Texas, which could be collaged to create a virtual jungle backdrop for the poem’s action. Then we we reviewed Rousseau’s body of paintings, which included a substantial number that we hadn’t seen before, and we realized we could go whole hog and construct an entirely imaginary Rousseau world by animating and collaging his painted imagery, coupled with an evocative soundscape score composed almost entirely from natural sounds.
Torch by Aoife Lyall
A paean to the power of the imagination from Scottish poet Aoife Lyall and her publisher Bloodaxe Books, directed by Irish poet and filmmaker Luke Morgan, with music by his brother Jake Morgan. The poem evidently appears in an upcoming collection called The Day Before:
Focusing on the earliest weeks and months of the pandemic, these intimate and meticulous poems mark the lived experience of someone who must navigate a world she no longer understands, exploring first steps and last breaths, milestones, millstones, emigration, fly-tipping and the entire world to be found in the space behind the front door.
Foxtrot by Rosemary Norman
A fun text animation by long-time videopoem collaborators Stuart Pound and Rosemary Norman, who appear also to have a new videopoetry collection out, though I haven’t seen it yet.
Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley
From the brief and powerful poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), this animated version of his Ozymandias is directed by Alvaro Lamarche-Toloza in France.
The soundtrack features the richly dramatic voice of Bryan Cranston reciting the poem in a 2013 trailer for Breaking Bad. The compelling voice is accompanied only by a thrilling heavy heartbeat, also from the original soundtrack.
Wash drawings in the animation are by Estelle Chauvard. More about the project can be read in the notes beneath the player at Vimeo.
This is another strong piece to be found in a Top Ten of films from classic poems selected for Moving Poems by Paul Casey and Colm Scully.
To John by Inua Ellams
A video animated and edited by Jamie Macdonald AKA Airship23 for the Financial Times:
FT Weekend Festival 2021 commissioned Inua Ellams to write a response to Keats’s classic work ‘To Autumn’ marking his 200th anniversary. The animated poem ‘To John’ exposes the impact of humans on nature over those 200 years.
Financial Times website
For more on Ellams, who’s something of a Renaissance man, do visit his website. He teamed up with Macdonald back in 2020 for the trailer for his book The Actual/Fuck.
Hat-tip to poet Josephine Corcoran for blogging the link.
Seven things I know by Janet Lees
Janet Lees is a poet and film-maker with a distinctive voice.
Her images are often black and white, with soft shades of grey, or tinged with the subtlest of colours. Her poetry is minimal in style, carrying quiet emotion. In counterpoint, the soundtracks are often lush in feeling. So it is in her latest film, Seven things I know.
The atmospheric music is by alt-pop duo Narrow Skies, Anita and Ben Tatlow. The song’s lyrics weave with those of the poem, which is given as text on screen. Anita Tatlow sings in an abstract way that is more musical than verbal, and so the song does not detract, but instead adds fine strands of meaning to Janet Lees’ poem.
The poem is whimsical while uncovering depth. A few of the seven things of the title:
the cadbury’s flake jingle
…
the magpie’s rough music
…
that eric morecambe
was not my uncle
Both poem and song lyrics are printed on the page with the video. This is a film in a single shot and slow motion rhythm, with breathing space for each of its elements.
More of Janet Lees’ films are to be found on her Moving Poems author page.
Spellbound by Emily Brontë
In Emily Brontë’s world, a young woman is under a spell of blind forces of compulsion acting to draw her towards an unnamed darkness from which she cannot escape.
This wonderfully atmospheric 16mm film by Patrick Müller seems perfect for the solstice. Here’s the director’s statement:
Shot on 16mm film during the pandemic lockdown in an unusual dark and freezing cold winter of 2021, I used an old Bolex camera from 1963 for my poetry film. Chemnitz-based musician Wellenvorm created an unique original music for it using only one instrument: an EMS Synthi A Portabella.
Its awards include Best Experimental Short at the 2022 Caligari – Festival Internacional de Cine de Terror, and Best Horror Short at the 14th Philadelphia Independent Film Festival in 2021. The voiceover is by Sarah Kempton. For more information, visit the film’s webpage.
