White Fur by Mark Wunderlich
Motionpoems‘ latest production was directed by Georgia Tribuiani, an adaptation of a poem by Mark Wunderlich. The Motionpoems website includes bonus materials for the video: interviews with the filmmaker and poet by Jeannie E. Roberts, who writes:
As I watched Georgia Tribuiani’s motionpoem, “White Fur,” I was instantly drawn into her world of light, color, and contrast. Tribuiani sets the scene beautifully and powerfully within Switzer Falls, a wooded area in the San Gabriel Mountains, Los Angeles County. The albino deer, depicted as an African-American albino man, runs barefoot through the woods, where he follows the banks of a stream, eventually stopping to look at his reflection within a pool of water. Tribuiani imagines a story that is, in her own words, suggested: She envisions the albino deer as Narcissus: a young man, mesmerized by his own reflection, who falls in love with it and eventually drowns. Though not necessarily the intent of Mark Wunderlich’s poem, Tribuiani creates a stunning metaphor, a poem within a poem. All great poetry has layers, and this director has found another layer with thought-provoking elegance and creativity.
Mostly about a color by Jenene Ravesloot
This film by Jutta Pryor is especially interesting for what it does with the soundtrack, a psychedelic interweaving of the reading by Nic S. and a track called “The Ritual and the Delusion Part 1,” by the musicians’ collective Masonik. The poem, by Chicago-based poet Jenene Ravesloot and first published in CC&D Magazine, is from the Poetry Storehouse.
Stimuli by Helen Vitoria
A poem by Helen Vitoria at the Poetry Storehouse gets the Swoon treatment. Marc Neys writes,
As long as The Poetry Storehouse stock keeps growing with more and interesting poems and writers, I’ll keep coming back.
For this work I picked out a poem by Helen Vitoria. I worked with Helen before a few years back and I love her choice of words. Pure and rich.[…]
Those who have been watching my last series of videos know that I’m a fan of the ‘home movies’ that are collected
at IICADOM. It’s such a rich and beautiful collection. To be able to take a peek in all those lives… Create your own stories… I truly enjoy that.
For this poem I wanted footage from a wedding.
Young people in love on the beginning of their journey.
A lot of wedding footage on IICADOM, but this stood out (for me) Beautiful B/W, brutal cuts. Faces full of joy and hope.I thought these images would make a great pairing with Helen’s poem.
The High Hills Have A Bitterness by Ivor Gurney
Filmmaker Othniel Smith combines a 1946 recording of Pygmy music, “Chant Magique en Partant pour la Chasse au Filet,” with footage from a 1936 movie, Millions of Us, for an evocative remix of a brief poem by the early 20th-century English poet Ivor Gurney.
Sorry, Google Doesn’t Know Jealousy by Denise Duhamel
Producer Didi Menendez found the perfect way to translate a Google search poem into video: have a different person read each line.
Poem by Denise Duhamel read by 65 poets including Terrance Hayes, Richard Blanco, Collin Kelley, Michelle Buchanan, Diego Quiros, Emma Trelles, Amy Gerstler, Maureen Seaton, Matthew Hittinger, Stephen Mills, Major Jackson, Duriel Harris, more. Video is part of the FIXATION gallery event taking place at the Zhou B Art Center April 2014.
Poet Denise Duhamel explains in a note at the end of the video that
I chose for my “Fixation” entry jealousy, a very human reaction under certain circumstances, but one that I am embarassed to have. I used “googlism” to search Jealousy, as though it were a person or place. There are four googlism choices: who, what, where, and when. When I searched Jealousy under “when,” there was nothing, only this message: Sorry, Google doesn’t know Jealousy. I knew instantly this would be my title. I collaged the lines from the other three googlisms for jealousy, pruning away the repeats. Many of the lines that pop up on googlism are truncated in some way, and I let those stand, as it seems to me they imply a hesitation, a shame in finishing the thought about this very vexing emotion.
For more about Fixation, see poetsandartists.com.
The Mad Gardener’s Song by Lewis Carroll
This is The Gardener’s Dream, a terrific poetry film by the Moscow-based animator Valeriy Kozhin. It was recently featured in a post by Alison Pezanoski-Browne at Tin House Reels. As Pezanoski-Browne writes,
Kozhin’s film transforms Lewis Carroll’s poem “The Mad Gardener’s Song” into a surrealist adventure that maintains the spirit of the poet’s work and incorporates a wildness that is all Kozhin’s.
The film conveys an abstracted conceit of a logic game. Using paper cut-outs and puppets, porcelain dolls, and minuscule objects, Kozhin draws on images of childhood. Using a color palate rich in natural pigments, his work also feels like more classic animation–a mixture of Marc Davis era Disney and Jan Svankmajer, one of Valeriy’s favorite filmmakers.
“I see a new world with my eyes when I am inside a film,” Kozhin said. “I think that cinema is a young art. We have the great opportunity to make more than we can imagine in animation.”
That imagination, which seems to be equally enamored with the romantic and grotesque, has created an alluring lullaby for those boys and girls who still read under the covers after the lights have been turned off.
Click through for a bio of the filmmaker. Kozhin has also uploaded a version in Russian, Сон Садовника.
The Convert by Eric Burke
https://vimeo.com/93042677
A Nic S. video based on a poem at the Poetry Storehouse. Eric Burke is based in Columbus, Ohio and blogs at Anomalocrinus Incurvus. The music is from Soundcloud user Elan Hickler.
The poem originally appeared in qarrtsiluni.
ہمارے گھر کوئی آتا نہیں ہے / Nobody comes to our home by Abrar Ahmad
Pakistani poet Abrar Ahmad reads his poem in this video from Umang, directed by Ammar Aziz. Press the CC (closed captioning) icon for the English translation by Zahra Sabri, and visit the video’s page on the Umang site for the complete original Urdu text as well as the translation.
Two Miles After the Gravel Road Ends by Sherry O’Keefe
This video based on a poem by Sherry O’Keefe uses public-domain footage shot in South Dakota in the late 1930s, as Marc Neys (Swoon) explains:
Promises are there to be broken (the ones I make to myself, that is)
I’ve said never to use the footage of Ivan Besse again. I didn’t.
Not until I came across ‘Two Miles After the Gravel Road Ends’ by Sherry O’Keefe in The Poetry Storehouse.
Sherry was one of the poets I did a video for in ‘my early days’. A videopoem and a collab that is still dear to my heart.
It was a pleasure to find her words on the shelves of the warehouse. Such beautiful words.A lot of her poems tell stories. Great chunks of life wrapped in words and images. And these were just a perfect match for the storytelling images of Ivan Besse.
