~ Nationality: United States ~
The Conqueror Worm by Edgar Allan Poe
Poe would’ve loved this! It was directed by Aurélie Godefroy with music by the band Les Pleureuses, whose keyboard player and art director, Yannis Lo Pellegrino, is the main actor/reciter here, and shares credit with Godefoy for the making of the film.
Martyr by Danielle Nicole Burgess
Model/actress/writer Danielle Nicole Burgess stars in this video adaptation of her poem by Austin, Texas-based filmmaker J.J. Castillo of Jose Jones Films. Castillo writes in a recent update on the Jose Jones Films Facebook page:
Really happy with “Martyr” the short poem film I made with Danielle Nicole Burgess, just need to finalize the music…Now I’m thinking about starting an entire series where filmmakers put imagery to other peoples poems. It would be great exposure for the filmmaker and the poet. More to come…
Wax Ear by Alice Lyons
A short poem by Alice Lyons made into a film by Orla Mc Hardy. As with The Polish Language, this appears to have been a collaboration: Lyons is credited with 2-D animation, and Mc Hardy with photography, compositing, computer animation and sound.
Quartet by Howie Good
http://vimeo.com/46184070
Another of Swoon‘s adaptations of poems from the qarrtsiluni podcast, this one by Howie Good from the Fragments issue currently in serialization. (Read the text here.) It was screened at “Filmscape” in Dunbar, Scotland on July 30. Here’s what Swoon said about it in a recent blog post:
I had a track (‘Gaze‘) that I used before for an older videopoem that I wasn’t to happy with.
But I still love the track.
‘Gaze’, by the way is on ‘Pathways’, a great sampler on netlabel NSI. You can get that just for free.I made use of some great footage I found on Prelinger from a guy Ivan Besse, who filmed everyday life in South Dakota somewhere in ’38 ’39…
I combined that footage with layers of recordings I made myself to add a ghostlike atmosphere (to fit the soundscape) and a bit of colour and depth.
The poem also appears in a brand-new collection from Fowlpox Press, Desecrations by Howie Good, available through Smashwords.
Qua Insurrection by Brian Ang and Mayakov+sky
I find this to be a visually witty commentary on Marxist cant; your milage may vary. The text is computer-generated, from Theory Arsenal, programmed by Ryan Loewen and based on the poem “Free Sets” by Brian Ang, who’s also responsible for the recitation here. The filmmaker and composer is N.O. Koumoundouros, A.K.A. Nicholas Komodore, who shares attribution with his experimental poetry project Mayakov+sky, a “Polemical Platform Constructing Potent Poetics.” What the credits call a dialogical montage includes text, so it seemed appropriate to designate Mayakov+sky as co-author in my fusty cataloguing system. Ang and Koumoundouros are both based in Oakland, California, ground zero for the cinepoetry movement.
American Haikus (excerpt) by Jack Kerouac
http://vimeo.com/10469119
A brilliant, if much too short, film by Irish artist Orla Mc Hardy.
For audio of Kerouac reading a number of his haiku (which are unusually fine examples of the form, in my opinon), see the six-minute track from the album 100 Great Poems — Classic Poets & Beatnik Freaks which someone has also thoughtfully uploaded to YouTube.
You Are Here to Receive This Prophecy by Hannah Stephenson
http://vimeo.com/44861361
The poem by Hannah Stephenson appeared in qarrtsiluni‘s Worship issue (whence the reading in the soundtrack). Swoon notes in his blog post about the film,
For me, the videopoem had to have a seventies-summer-childhood-anything-is-possible-nostalgia feel…
I wanted to say thanks to my father and mother who gave me a good childhood…But I also wanted to recycle.
Recently I had an interesting talk about recycling parts of ones own creations.
Writers can use the same words, phrases even…so why not try to create a new videopoem with exisiting and used material
(exept for the poem, I hadn’t used that before)
The music is a remix of a very short track I made for a commissioned one minute-film.The images I shot myself (from a train, through the trees, into the sun) were also the base for this videopoem (although for that one I abstracted those images, but the basis is the same)
The footage of the boy trying to climb the fence (thanks to an old family film of the Harris Family from 1975) comes from the same youtube video I used images from for this videopoem.
The blips and cuts from the sculpted head (of my father) and the hands holding it (my mother’s) were also used in this videopoem.
So, I think I was able to create a new videopoem (thanks to a poem and a reading I hadn’t used before, I do realise that) with bricks and mortar that I used elsewhere before.
For more of Stephenson’s work, visit her daily ekphrastic poetry blog, The Storialist.
Having intended to merely pick on an oil company, the poem goes awry, by Bob Hicok
“An ounce of humility goes a long way in this grounded adaptation of Bob Hicok’s runaway musings on big oil by documentarian Joanna Kohler,” say the folks at Motionpoems. Visit their website for the text of the poem and seven snapshots from behind the scenes in the production of the film. (My favorite is captioned: “Everyone waits and works with the cow’s mood in a single-car garage.”) In this month’s Motionpoems newsletter, Kohler says:
This poem’s most important moment for me was the invitation to being honest with ourselves. I was attracted to this poem’s critical reflection and struggle to put all the pieces together.
My biggest challenge in turning this piece into a film was getting a cow into a South Minneapolis Garage. I had a kick-butt crew who worked some film magic!
I thought it was critical to have a moment in the film that shows the “mass” of what I felt Bob was holding in his words. From a distance a cow is pretty and fun to look at. Up close they are huge, breathing, dirty, sweating and alive. Which is an example of the effort I thought the speaker was trying to make at seeing himself closer.
It’s great to see Motionpoems branching out beyond animation. This is a true videopoem, and a very successful one indeed.
