~ Nationality: Wales ~
Lights Out by Edward Thomas
This is Home to the Hangers, a 2017 film adaptation of Edward Thomas’ “Lights Out” by A D Cooper, newly released for free online after a highly successful tour of the festival circuit. “A traumatised soldier runs away from the World War 1 trenches and finds healing in his old haunts,” reads the description. I asked Cooper how it came to be made, and she told me,
The film was created on the theme of ‘anniversary’ for the Directors UK Alexa Challenge. Since the makers of the Alexa camera (ARRI) were celebrating their centenary, I looked for another centenary from 1917 as my entry into the competition, and found Edward Thomas’ death. It was more practical than the Russian Revolution or the French Army mutiny. It’s been interesting to find that people make entirely different interpretations of the film – all of them valid.
See its project page on the Hurcheon Films website for a full list of honors and awards. They include the reaction of Edward Thomas’ great granddaughter, Julia Maxted of the Edward Thomas Fellowship:
It is strikingly beautiful and Alex Bartram portrays and reads him wonderfully. A refreshingly hopeful reading of ‘Lights Out’ too, and I loved the attention to the small, intimate parts of his life and landscape together with the spaciousness of the vistas – both very much part of his symbolic topographies.
This is a wonderful example of an unarguably appropriate use of narrative filmmaking in a lyric poetry film. Although “Lights Out” doesn’t mention war, Thomas’ brief but amazingly productive writing career, cut short by his death on the battlefield, is notable for the intensity of his vision and the way in which his nature poetry transcends the merely pastoral. You’d be hard-pressed to find a better introduction to his life and work, in the classroom or out of it, than Home to the Hangers.
Song of the Soil by Jessica Mookherjee
Jessica Mookherjee‘s poem “Song of the Soil”, from her collection, Tigress (Nine Arches Press, 2019), is given heartfelt filmic treatment by Helen Dewbery and Chaucer Cameron, under the auspices of their production house, Elephant’s Footprint. According to the book’s webpage,
Jess Mookherjee is of Bengali heritage and grew up in Swansea. She has been widely published in magazines, including Under the Radar, Agenda, The North, Rialto, Antiphon and Ink, Sweat & Tears. She is author of The Swell (Telltale Press) and Joyride (Black Light Engine Room Press) and Flood (Cultured Llama). She was highly commended in the Forward Prize 2017 for best single poem. Jessica works in Public Health and lives in Kent.
The poem expresses a deep connection to the Earth in an elegy of lost origins and disappearing ground. Giving further voice to these themes, the film is imbued with overexposed images of a natural world scorched yellow and burnt brown, and a soundtrack made ominous by ambient bass. Mookherjee’s solemn, rich narration rounds the elements of this powerfully organic piece.
The film is part of a series Helen and Chaucer have been doing for Nine Arches Press. They note that “The film-poems are not only viewed by Nine Arches’ existing readers and online audiences, but are a tool for their poets to engage more easily with their existing and new audiences.” The press, however, does not appear to embed any of the videos on the books’ pages, which is kind of baffling.
Leisure by W. H. Davies
UK director A D Cooper‘s short for the Visible Poetry Project adapts a poem by the early 20th-century Welsh “supertramp” W. H. Davies. I had the pleasure of seeing the film, and meeting the director, last Saturday at a special curation of VPP films at London’s Poetry Cafe. Cooper said her decision to film in London, rather than in some more pastoral setting as the text might seem to suggest, was driven in part by filming logistics and in part by the desire to avoid naive illustration, and that some of the shots were unplanned and serendipitous. I told her it really worked for me, both as a tourist in London and as a country person in cities generally, where I often wonder why no one else seems inclined to pause and gawk at the amazing surroundings. So for me, the text and the video seem tailor-made for each other.
For full credits, stills, and other information about the film, see its page on the Hurcheon Films website.
And Death Shall Hall No Dominion (excerpt) by Dylan Thomas
This is Aum Shinrikyo, directed by Noah Conopask. On Vimeo, he describes how he came to make it:
On a recent shoot in Tokyo I was incredibly inspired by Japan and everything I was seeing around me visually. The streets, the people and the fashion. I learned about a doomsday cult called Aum Shinrikyo (Japanese オウム真理教) that let off deadly sarin nerve gas in Tokyo’s subway system 20 years ago. The attack was the worst in modern Japanese history. It made me think of Dylan Thomas poems about life and death. It was something I wanted to bring to life cinematically. I had a vision of a few of the cult members walking around Tokyo. Staking out the attack, the way thieves would a bank heist.
Poem: ‘And Death Shall Hall No Dominion’ Excerpt by Dylan Thomas
Directed by: Noah Conopask
Production Company: The Sweet Shop
Cinematography: Garrett Hardy Davis
Edit: James Dierx at Whitehouse Post
Music: Traces
Voice Over: Vivian
Color: Seth Ricart at RCO
Producer: Larissa Tiffin
Talent: KO3UKE Onishi, Kenji Araki, Percy
Millionaire by Mab Jones
This animation by Lauren Orme and Jordan Brookes is described by the poet, Mab Jones, as
A poem about love, in the form of a list.
Dedicated to (about) the poet Johnny Giles.
The film has just taken top honors at the 2015 Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival, winning for Best Animation, Best Valentine, and Best Overall Production. It was also shortlisted in the Southbank Centre’s Shot Through The Heart poetry film competition in 2014.
Map of the Underground by Ifor ap Glyn
A terrific animated film from 2005 directed by Hywel Griffith of Griffilms Animation Studio, featuring a poem by Ifor ap Glyn, two-time winner of the National Eisteddfod of Wales. Music and dub are by Meilyr Tomos.
The Spotted Leaves of Some Marsh Orchids by Steve Griffiths
If you haven’t been keeping up with the Late Love Poems film project (30 films featuring the poetry of Steve Griffiths in 30 weeks), you’re in for a particular treat this week, with the debut of Film 7. Griffiths comments:
This is an important poem for me, about an extraordinary moment of realisation when you fully see the individuality of the person you love. I read it at our wedding for that reason. What’s been done to it in this film is something else. It was the first poem I worked on really hard after unhappy trials in front of the camera, and I rediscovered levels, nuances, turns of rhythm and pace that I’d forgotten since I wrote it. Then there’s Eamon Bourke’s film work, and the first substantial, astonishingly sensitive, musical input from Ivan “Ogmios” Owen, of battlerap fame on YouTube, who I’ve known since he was two. The way it falls together feels special.
Late Love Poems 1: Spring by Steve Griffiths
This performance-style poetry film is interesting not just for its content (which, as someone who just fell in love in my late 40s, I kind of identify with), but also for the very well thought-out publication strategy of which it is a part. As the YouTube description says:
‘Spring’ is the first of 30 Late Love Poems by Steve Griffiths going up on YouTube weekly from 27 July, culminating in the book of the same name to be published by Cinnamon Press in time for Valentine’s 2016. Find out more from www.latelovepoems.com.
‘Spring’ is filmed in the Mortimer Forest in Shropshire, in the very landscape of the poem’s beginning, and at the same time of the year.
Funded by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
Eamon Bourke (Park6 Productions) directed and edited, with sound, camera assisting and photography by Jules May. There’s a good biography of Griffiths on the Late Love Poems website, which also features his thoughts about the project on the About page. This is especially interesting because of what it suggests about the power of active collaborations between poets and filmmakers:
The feeling that I’d made something life-enhancing fed my desire to share these poems in a new way. I hope that with these films we’ve created a format with an intimacy, an immediacy, and something of the quality of a live reading, but which is retrievable and can be savoured and shared.
Thanks to the support of Arts Council England, I’ve had a great team for this project – and it’s certainly been a voyage of discovery for us. My initial flatness in our first experiments in front of a camera made me work hard once again on my poems, and I rediscovered intonations, insights, glancing emphases, that were there when I first worked on the lines, but had somehow gone missing over time. I’ll always be grateful for that: after all the preparation for standing in front of a camera, I can’t say how much I learned about the quality of attention to a line of poetry in performance. And hearing my wife read my poems naturally and beautifully in rehearsal as I worked to learn them reminded me of the multiplicity of voices that can own a poem – but of course, especially hers.
Over months, it took on new forms, with the visual dimensions and echoes glancing off the poems’ imagery from film-maker Eamon Bourke – and glancing off the map of my face in close-up – and the unexpected gifts of music from two friends I’d known for more than thirty years – one old, one young, and their meeting again in these films, responding to my poems, bringing sensitivities from spectacularly different worlds to enrich my work.
Finally, I must say I’m impressed with Cinnamon Press‘ commitment to this project, going so far as to hire an excellent PR consultant to get the word out. I wish that more of the really ambitious poetry-film and videopoetry projects that I’ve seen in recent years had had that kind of backing. The trouble is, most poets, filmmakers and video artists I know are really crap at promotion. It’s the one area where the DIY ethos isn’t of very much use.
To A Young Poet by R. S. Thomas
Othniel Smith notes:
An interpretation of a poem by Welsh writer R. S. Thomas (1913-2000), made entirely using material taken from the public domain Prelinger Archive. Contains brief nudity.
See Smith’s Vimeo channel for many more classic poetry mashups with Prelinger films and Librivox recordings.
