~ Nationality: U.K. ~
Imprinted by Neil Flatman
I’ll admit it: I’m a sucker for single-shot videopoems. The text (by Neil Flatman, from The Poetry Storehouse) could so easily have elicited something melodramatic. The above remix is by Charles Musser, with music by Youngest Daughter. Nic S. also did a remix of the poem:
https://vimeo.com/101175533
Still fairly low-key. I like the use of text-on-screen. The soundtrack is more subdued, with a jazz piano ballad by Fabric.
Not Talking by Chris Woods
Concept, camera, direction and editing are all credited to Christopher Hughes (Shining Tor Productions), though I can’t help thinking the content of the film might have been influenced by the title of the book in which the poem originally appeared: Dangerous Driving by Chris Woods (Comma Press, 2007). Regardless, it’s a good example of how a narrative approach to filmmaking can work with a lyric poem.
Not Talking was “Made in partnership with Bokeh Yeah and Comma Press”; Bokeh Yeah is kind of the successor to the earlier Comma Film project, as I understand it. One way or another, at least four films have now been made based on poems from Dangerous Driving, each by a different director. Manchester would seem to have a very active poetry-film community indeed.
Christopher Hughes blogged a bit about how he came to make this film:
It seems like an age since Adele Myers approached me to come along to her group, Bokeh Yeah, and join in their poetry film challenge. Even though I agreed, I was initially quite dismissive of poetry films as they didn’t appear to worry about the things I worried about with narrative short films. Things like continuity, dialogue, plot, character, etc. They could shoot any abstract images they wanted and juxtapose them in any way that took their fancy under the general heading of ‘artistic interpretation’. It all seemed a bit too easy to me – or at least, that’s what I thought.
Anyway, I’d said I’d do it so I chose a poem that I liked and came up with a concept that gave me a chance to reference my beloved spaghetti westerns and away we went. I won’t go into more detail about the film, just watch it for yourselves, except to say, that I’m quite happy with it.
Paisley Quilt by Becky Cherriman
This poem deals with sexual violence and may be triggering to some people.
How do you make a film of a poem about rape? Poet Becky Cherriman and director Pru Fowler take a minimalist approach, with an unflinching close-up on the author’s face and her impeccable, understated delivery. The result is way more than just another talking-head-style spoken-word poetry video. As Cherriman said in an email, “I realise it is not as visually diverse as some of the films you feature but that was deliberate because of the stark nature of the poem.” Her performance of the poem took 2nd prize in the 2011 Ilkley Literature Festival Open Mic competition.
Only the Lonely by Neil Flatman
The latest collaboration from Marie Craven (video) and Dementio13 (music) uses a text and reading by the Dubai-based UK poet Neil Flatman, sourced from the Poetry Storehouse. (Here’s the text.)
Proof: a poetic glimpse into the archives of Bloodaxe Books
A poetry film/documentary hybrid. The filmmaker, Kate Sweeney, describes it in the Vimeo description as
A poetic glimpse into the archives of the North East [UK] poetry publisher Bloodaxe Books, the contents of which were recently purchased by Newcastle University.
The film was made by artist Kate Sweeney in collaboration with poets Tara Bergin and Anna Woodford in spring 2013
Anna Woodford and Tara Bergin both held residencies at the archive. Bergin talks about her fondness for archives in a video introduction to the film. The same site (CAMPUS social network) gives a fuller explanation of how Proof came to be:
In 2013, Newcastle University acquired the archive of Bloodaxe Books, one of the most important
contemporary poetry publishers in the world. Two poets and recent PhD graduates, Anna Woodford and Tara Bergin, were asked to take a look into the as yet un-catalogued boxes to gain an initial sense of the archive’s scope and potential. To document their findings, they teamed up with artist Kate Sweeney to make a short ‘poem-film.’ They called it ‘Proof’.“It was very strange and very interesting,” Bergin says.
The film includes guest appearances by Bloodaxe authors Gillian Allnutt, Simon Armitage, John Hegley and Anne Stevenson.
Grandmother is a Crab by Rosemary Norman
The collaborative partnership between London-based experimental filmmaker Stuart Pound and poet Rosemary Norman dates back to 1995, and nearly twenty years later, they’re still going strong. I saw “Grandmother is a Crab” at ZEBRA. The description on Vimeo reads:
Grandmother is a Crab borrows from an earlier digital video, made fifteen years ago, that itself used footage captured from a travel advertisement on television. Black and white, and mirror effects, take the image out of time, giving it both vividness and distance. The music is played in reverse. And the voice-over and under-titles are a poem that re-enters the magic world of a child on a beach.
Simple yet ingenious. It’s not just the kids who excel at digital remix these days.
Take Me to the City by Lucy English
A film by Helen Dewbery, whose film and video poetry website with poet Chaucer Cameron is the latest addition to the Moving Poems links page: Elephant’s Footprint. Check it out. Dewbury’s bio there suggests why she might’ve been drawn to the imagery of the poem:
I grew up near Kingston Upon Thames and spent time living and working in London where I photographed urban and suburban landscapes and became fascinated by the juxtaposition of the green spaces in London’s Royal Parks, the dark muddy grey-brown waters of the Thames and the rolling chalk downs, flower rich grasslands, acid heaths and ancient woodlands of the Surrey hills.
I then moved to Pembrokeshire where I lived for 17 years spending time travelling through the Pembrokeshire countryside. It was these surroundings that inspired me to engage with the art of photography, drawn by the beautiful wild dramatic landscape with gorse strewn hedgerows, Campion covered coast paths and the moody moor land of the Preseli Mountains. These separate but interrelated landscapes played a significant role in my creative process.
The poet, Lucy English, is one of the co-founders of the Liberated Words festival. Visit her own website at lucyenglish.com. The reading is by Hebe Reilly. Megan Palmer is the actress.
15th February by Peter Reading
This 1995 poetry film classic won the main prize at the very first ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in 2002, as well as an Arts Council of England Animate Award and 1995 ICA Dick Award as “the most provocative, innovative and subversive short film of the year.” Director Tim Webb uploaded this version to Vimeo himself, and the description there is exhaustive. Click through for the full credits. Here’s a snippet:
15th February mixes live action and animation to describe a symbolic rejection and its sadistic outcome, as related in the poem by Peter Reading.
Love gone wrong in 294 cuts. From a poem by Peter Reading, symbolism and sadism meet live action and stop motion in this tale of rhythmic rejection and its aftermath. The 15th February is from Reading’s book Diplopic. In explaining the title, Reading wrote, ‘Diplopic means pertaining to double vision. Every subject is treated from two sides. The funny and the ghastly are symbiotic.’ The 15th February is from one side.
Technical informationThe film mixes 16mm live action, stop-frame and drawn animation.
The late Peter Reading’s poetry was described by The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry as “strongly anti-romantic, disenchanted and usually satirical.”
