~ Nationality: U.K. ~
was by Mischa Pearlman
Videographer Kerstin Ebert calls this
A montage about New York City, a faded relationship, a guy on a bus and a note on his hand.
This is my visualization of Mischa Pearlman’s poem “was”, alongside the beautiful song “Maelstrom” by shipwrecks-music.com.
Camera & Editing – Kerstin Ebert
Him – Casey Skodnek
Her – Freeda Lou
Poem – “was”, by Mischa Pearlman
Read by – Kurt Lash
Music – “Maelstrom”, by ShipwrecksFilmed on Sony a7sii during the cold month of December 2017 in New York City.
Mischa Pearlman is a British music journalist and poet based in New York City.
Saturday by Lucy English
A video remix by Othniel Smith for Lucy English’s Book of Hours project, with her reading as the only soundtrack. Smith notes in the description that he sourced the imagery from a 1961 film produced by General Motors called A Touch of Magic. Intrigued, I found a Wikipedia page for it. It included the immortal lines:
This dream house you and I will share
Was planned for us by Frigidaire.
A half-century from now, will our contemporary techno-utopian fantasies seem as corn-ball and melancholy as this does now? Nothing ages as poorly as modernism — or is better suited for recycling into poems, especially one as wistful and gently ironic as this.
Dear Progress by Micah Purnell
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A pair of videos by Mark “Sparky” Tuson documenting a fascinating public poetry-ish project in Manchester a few years ago.
Artist Micah Purnell writes an ‘open letter’ on billboards to make you think. Twenty-one billboards in Manchester will display artwork that discuss some of the challenges facing consumers of Western progress. 24 March 2014 – 7 April 2014
Sadly, the project’s website is no longer online, but you can still read an article about the installation by Kate Feld at creativetourist.com.
[Purnell’s] messages draw a lot of their inspiration from Oliver James’ book Affluenza: How to Be Successful and Stay Sane, a bleakly brilliant polemic against a society infected by rampant capitalism. Basically, James says, the richer we get, the unhappier and more anxious we become. The more things we have, the less we value ourselves, the more we seek satisfaction through buying stuff and attempting to conform to impossible aspirations, put in our minds with the express purpose of turning a profit. To see these messages sprout in advertising space seems deliciously provocative.
Read the rest. (And visit Micah Purnell’s website.) Although Purnell does not claim his brief “letters” are poetry, the first video could easily qualify as a videopoem, I think.
Stone Life by Lucy English
Words and voice are by Lucy English; film, grading, editing and music by Marc Neys AKA Swoon — his most recent contribution to The Book of Hours project. It features orphaned home movie footage from IICADOM (The International Institute for the Conservation, Archiving and Distribution of Other People’s Memories).
Mr. Sky by Lucy English
From dawn to nightfall, the sky reflects a couple’s relationship.
(don’t forget to look for the face in the clouds)
A recent addition to Lucy English‘s Book of Hours project, this time by her collaborator at Liberated Words, Sarah Tremlett, who’s credited as photographer and director, with James Symonds as editor and music by Kevin MacLeod.
Update (30 March 2018)
Sarah sent along these process notes:
Lucy and I had two separate ideas in parallel. In terms of the visuals – I get up early and noticed the dramatic colours playing out in the winter sky. Actually a mystical orange glow appeared through the window one morning! I wanted to capture the sky at brief intervals from dawn to dusk (with a history as a painter always fascinated by changing patterns of light) and spent a day doing so. Lucy then mentioned she had a new poem – Mr Sky – which was one of those wonderful coincidences. I like to work from nature or live footage where possible and you can wait a long time for the right image to turn up, or just be too preoccupied to see it … and then you need just the right poem and soundscape!
The Fauvist In Spring by Daniel Cockrill
https://vimeo.com/40280198
Poetry by the UK performance poet Daniel Cockrill animated by Richard Jackson (Plume Animation) with music by Julian Ward. Jackson does a marvelous job of expanding and extending the images in the texts, connecting what appear to be two separate poems, and concluding with a purely visual epilogue after the credits. Uploaded to Vimeo six years ago, it came to my attention just the other week when it was shared on YouTube by Muddy Feet Poetry.
This is one of at least four animations that Cockrill and Jackson have collaborated on. I see too that both of Cockrill’s books with Burning Eye have been produced collaboratively with visual artists: Sellotaping Rain to My Cheek with the cartoonist Tony Husband, and In The Beginning Was The Word, Then A Drawing, Then More Words, Another Drawing, And So On, And So On with illustrator Damien Weighill. Very cool.
Bird by Haide Rollo
A videopoem of the purest sort, meaning that poem and video are one and the same, by filmmaker Helmie Stil with Haide Rollo assisted by Denise Saul. The project from which it and two others emerged sounds fascinating:
Silent Room: A Journey of Language is a collaborative video poem project funded by Arts Council England. Denise Saul, project founder and poet, and Helmie Stil, filmmaker, work with individuals who have the speech disability, aphasia, to produce a series of video poems. This second video poem is Haide Rollo’s Bird.
That’s the Vimeo description. Here’s the Silent Room website. About this film, it says:
Haide Rollo is a workshop participant and emerging poet. … Haide used prompts, writing and hand gesture to create a poem about silent places.
shhh! by Leah Thorn
A dance-infused poetry film by Leah Thorn and filmmaker Clare Unsworth about the systematic silencing of women — and the need to rebel against it. Leah told me in an email,
The poem was written out of a passion to challenge the invisibility of the many ways women are silenced and I tried it out in performance with many different audiences of women – in schools, universities, feminist groups, at poetry events and in prison. Clare and I then collaborated with three drama students at the University of Kent, Canterbury, England who interpreted the poem through movement.
This locally-produced, no-budget film has been screened internationally at feminist film festivals.
The dancer/choreographers are Kristin Bacheva, Vanessa Owusu and Elle Payne. The sound is by Daniel Battersby, with music by Jahzzar and Ars Sonor.
Quiet Sounds by Lucy English
The second collaboration between Marie Craven and Lucy English for The Book of Hours. Marie recently blogged some process notes:
‘Quiet Sounds’ is my second video collaboration with the marvelous UK poet and performer, Lucy English. Both have been made as part of her great, multi-artist project, ‘The Book of Hours‘. The earlier video, ‘The Last Days‘, started with images. This one started with the poem and sound. The soundscape is comprised entirely of Lucy’s voice and small noises in the environment. I wanted the ‘bed’ of the soundscape to be quietly musical and constructed it from a collection of sounds recorded by various artists, and found on Creative Commons licences at Freesound. The central element is the metronomic sound of a clock ticking. I edited Lucy’s voice in loose rhythm with the clock, elongating the pace of her reading and leaving spaces for the various other sounds to have their ‘solo’ moments: a pheasant and a wood pigeon, a sheep, a cow, an old fridge, air traffic. I carefully built up the soundtrack piece by piece until I had a complete first draft. Then I looked for images that might add further to the audiovisual experience of the poem. The poem describes a moment of solitude, a hush when a woman becomes aware of the little sounds in her environment. It is implied she is inside a domestic space at the time. In my net wanderings, I found a marvelous series of interior shots by Carol Blyberg (aka Smilla4 on Flickr), also available on a Creative Commons licence. I worked with the images using zooms and slow dissolves that changed in rhythm with Lucy’s voice. For such an apparently simple piece, it was time-intensive to make, especially in the refining process that saw both sound and image go through many drafts. I gave a lot of attention to subtle details, in a meditative way. Maureen Doallas has since featured ‘Quiet Sounds’ on her wonderful blog, Writing Without Paper.
See Vimeo for the text of the poem, as well as links to all the soundtrack sources.
