~ Nationality: U.K. ~
Mile End Pugatorio by Martin Doyle
Poet Martin Doyle and filmmaker Guy Sherwin collaborated on this 1991 film-poem, produced (so the credits inform us) for the Arts Council of Great Britain and BBC 2’s The Late Show, and uploaded to YouTube for Luxonline, “the single most extensive publicly available resource devoted to British film and video artists.”
I Accelerate by Musa Okwonga
According to a bio at The Independent,
Musa Okwonga is a football writer, poet and musician of Ugandan descent. In 2008 his first football book, A Cultured Left Foot, was nominated for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award. He is one half of The King’s Will, an electronica outfit that blends poetry, music, and animated videos.
Various “poetry in motion” projects on buses, trains and subways have been a staple of public poetry campaigns in cities around the world since at least the 1980s. Smile for London is taking this a step further by bringing poetry animation to the tube. The above animation by Amy Thornley and Louise Lawlor (Collective of two) is one example of what Underground riders will see, though I gather it will be shown without audio accompaniment. Let me paste in the text from the Smile for London website:
Our Mission is to bring the talent, creativity and culture of London to the digital screens on the Underground.
We LOVE London. That’s why we’re turning the cross track projection screens on the London Underground into a digital playground by exhibiting moving image by the best emerging and established artists around. Our mission is to unleash these creative minds to explore the medium of silent digital film with the aim of engaging, uplifting and inspiring commuters.
Following the great support and feedback from our pilot exhibition in 2011, we’re back to proudly present Word in Motion, our upcoming exhibition that blends the world of literature with the world of art.
A number of this year’s animations have been popping up on Vimeo. I’ll share some more of them here in the weeks to come.
Not Waving but Drowning by Stevie Smith
http://vimeo.com/35205909
Video and reading by Nic S. for her site Pizzicati of Hosanna. Though sometimes I don’t quite share Nic’s enthusiasm for outer-space imagery, I thought it really worked here.
Nicholas Was… by Neil Gaiman
It would be hard to top last year’s animation of “Nicholas Was…” by Beijing motion graphics studio 39 Degrees North, but Trine Malde and narrator Aaron Kay took this in a completely different direction with “a mixture of rotoscoped animation, live action and found footage to comment on the stress and evil of christmas consumerism.”
Slow Wave Through The City by Jacq Kelly
The latest filmpoem from Alastair Cook, who describes it on Vimeo as follows:
Slow Wave Through The City is a poem by Jacq Kelly, published by Colin Herd this year. It crossed my path digitally and I watched the film in my head as I read, my adopted city of Edinburgh speeding by.
Jacq lives in Edinburgh but dreams of moving to Sweden and becoming a viking. Until this happens, she spends her time writing poetry, fiction and trying to make a difference in politics as a campaigner.
Slow Wave Through the City was filmed in Edinburgh on 8mm film in Summer 2011 on a long walk with the poet; it was shot using Ektachrome Super8, processed in Kansas by Dwaynes.
By way of a coda, this is a first, a Scottish Filmpoem. Looking through all 15 films, this is the only one which has only Scots contributors for the film, narrative and music. This was not deliberate, but is fitting, since it’s devoted to Edinburgh.
What Draws Us To The Sea? by John Siddique
http://vimeo.com/26261699
This is “Holly Moon” from John Siddique‘s Thirteen Moons series. The paintings are by Dania Strong, Clarpupia Hernandez did the animation, and credit for direction and supervision is given to Walter Santucci. As with the others in the series, the original music was composed by Katie Chatburn in response to the video.
Song for a Towerblock by Michelle Green
A collaboration between filmmaker Glenn-emlyn Richards and Manchester-based poet Michelle Green for Comma Film. For more on Green, see her section on Poetry International Web (which includes the text of this poem).
Let it be dark, and it was dark by John Siddique
http://vimeo.com/30260208
This is from a series of animations called Thirteen Moons. I’ll let the author, bestselling U.K. poet John Siddique, explain:
A series of 13 animated films based on a sequence of poems from Recital — An Almanac (Salt). The poems are based on the Full Moons of the year and the Celtic mythology which names each moon after a letter in the ancient tree alphabet.
The films were created when I was British Council Poet in Residence at California State University in Los Angeles. Made with determination, love, and goodwill. Animation director Walter Santucci, his students, friends and myself set to work before passing the pieces to composer Katie Chatburn. My aim was to gave each artist a free hand in what they came up with in response to the poems, interjecting as lightly as possible.
The paintings in this one are by Dania Strong. I’ll be sharing more of these in the coming weeks, but if you’re impatient, you can browse them all — or twelve of them, at any rate — at the album Siddique has set up for them on Vimeo (whence the above quote).
Ground by Alastair Cook
I’ve shared a lot of filmpoems here made by the Scottish artist and filmmaker Alastair Cook, but this one’s the work of someone else: Ginnetta Correli directed and edited this film using Alastair’s reading of some haiku he wrote for a multi-author linked verse sequence. He blogged about the film:
I don’t write terribly much (as you may have noted) and am perhaps unnecessarily precious about what I do write (see Abachan, for instance) and am pleased to see what such a wonderful, dark filmmaker can make of my words. Filmpoem is filmpoemed!
This was featured in VidPoFilm a few weeks ago.
Ground has an impenetrable quality. The film imagery, poem and reading approach each other without quite meeting. In that circle of visual and verbal imagery and the emotion of the voice of the reader, we witness a flame dancing without knowing who lit it, who blows on it, or why it goes out, if it does.
Something profound happens. But what? Is the poem notes on death and what resurrects us through life? Or the dream of a life?
