~ Nationality: United States ~
Alone by Yvor Winters
http://vimeo.com/33484094
A recent video by Nic S. for a poem included in her online audio collection Pizzicati of Hosanna.
Sandpiper by Elizabeth Bishop
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZyj3gXEUis
Filmmaker and television producer John Scott is working on a feature-length documentary called Elizabeth Bishop and the Art of Losing, which will include a number of videos like this one illustrating her poems. He wrote about the project at length for the Elizabeth Bishop Centenary blog.
Each scene will end on a poem whose inspiration comes from the tensions of the time period being described. And thus the poetry will not only be an aesthetically pleasing and rewarding study of genius, it will deepen the emotional content of her life-story.
I learned about the project from a feature at VidPoFilm back on Nov. 18. Brenda Clews sent Scott a couple questions via email. Quoting from his answers:
I am not interested solely in being illustrative — I am interested in at times being playful with the way the visuals/sounds and the words come together in an effort to use the expressive powers of visuals and sounds. There’s lots of potential in the medium itself that I think might otherwise be lost if it is simply slaved word for word to the text. […]
I believe the beauty of Bishop’s poetry is that it is so loaded with the spirit of the moment, in the fragmentary, in the lush, in the juxtaposition of contrasting images and in the point of view of its subjects.
Do read the rest. About this videopoem in particular, Scott noted on YouTube:
“Sandpiper” is a poem that was written by Elizabeth Bishop in 1965 and it is believed that it was based on observations she made on a trip she made as an adult back to Nova Scotia. Bishop’s adult life took her in many directions and places, and she has explicitly compared herself to the sandpiper and (presumably) both of their quests to endlessly seek (enlightenment?) through careful observation.
PROOF triptych: three poems by David Tomaloff
Swoon Bildos and David Tomaloff collaborated on a videopoetry triptych called PROOF, which has its own website. I didn’t want to split it into three posts since I think the videos are best watched together and in the intended sequence:
_object{-ions in the mirror
Thespianic Mythology No. 4
Proof
The first two poems were originally published (in text form) in the online magazine >kill author (here and here) while the third was written especially for this triptych.
Update (1/5/12): Swoon and Tomaloff are the featured artists of the month at CoronationPress.com for their creation of this triptych. The accompanying interview is full of fascinating details about their collaboration and methodology.
Andrew Wyeth, Painter, Dies at 91 by L.S. Klatt
Tom Jacobsen made this latest animation for Motionpoems, illustrating a poem by L.S. Klatt which was included in his collection Cloud of Ink as well as in Best American Poems 2011. According to a blog post from Pixel Farm, the production studio where he works, Jacobsen based his animation on a series of photos of landscapes reminiscent of Wyeth paintings: “On a 9-day Dakota road trip with his son, Jacobsen snapped photos of the Midwest landscape that were inspired by the painter and then incorporated into the finished piece.”
Peter Quince at the Clavier by Wallace Stevens
A new film by the indefatigable Swoon (which he blogged about here). The inspiration and reading came once again from Nic S.’s new site Pizzicati of Hosanna… which takes its title from a line in this very poem.
French Movie by David Lehman
A poem from Yeshiva Boys (Scribner, 2009), produced to honor the general editor of the Best American Poems series at Motionpoems‘ first screening of films produced for this year’s anthology:
Scott Wenner surprised audiences at the Motionpoems Festival in Fall 2011 by unveiling this motionpoem adaptation of David Lehman’s poem, “French Movie.” In it, the narrator is depicted as an old-school movie camera, and the inevitability of the poem is like a bullet.
(From the description at Vimeo.)
Love Poem by Richard Brautigan
A mash-up of Richard Brautigan‘s “Love Poem,” recited in different voices, with excerpts from Samuel Beckett’s novel Molloy presented as text in English and Korean translation. Titled Love Poem, this was shown at three festivals last year: the 10th Seoul International New Media Festival, the 7th Experimental Film and Video Festival in Seoul, and the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin.
Mirror by Sylvia Plath
A brilliant text animation of Plath’s 1961 poem with images from vintage print advertisements. It’s the work of the New Zealand-based designer Kylie May, née Kylie Hibbert — the name under which she made this film and another in 2005, part of a “postgraduate study exploring the visual language of poetry” she called the Belles Lettres project.
By transforming the written words of poetry into choreographed kinetic performance the project seeks to expand typographical conventions of traditional published poetry. The research project utilises the poetry of Emily Dickinson’s (1862) I died for beauty and Sylvia Plath’s (1961) Mirror, to explore the potential of paralinguistics and poetry as emotive narrative. These two poetic voices are fused by intimate revelations of anxiety, which have relevance in today’s society.
Both films were shortlisted for the 2006 Berlin ZEBRA Poetry Film Awards, Mirror attracting a finalist placing.
PLEASE NOTE: Music used under the AUT screenrights license. For academic research purposes only.
