~ Poet: Emily Dickinson ~
I haven’t told my garden yet by Emily Dickinson
A new upload from South African visual artist and animator Diek Grobler, “Animated on a Alexandre Noyer pinscreen. Music by Anne Vanschothorst,” according to the Vimeo description. Here’s the text.
As a lover of both Emily Dickinson and forests, the imagery really spoke to me. With the closing image in particular, Grobler seems perfectly attuned to the poet’s “Hint … within the Riddle,” and maintains a light touch throughout, avoiding the pitfall of over-interpretation that ruins so many poetry animations for me.
This is My Letter to the World by Emily Dickinson
This film by Shanghai-based director Luu Anh Laporte brings Dickinson’s famous words into the 21st century, hitting a bit differently in a hyper-modern context where isolation and alienation have become the norm.
“Aurora is the effort” by Emily Dickinson
A brand new videopoem by writer (and former film major) James Brush demonstrating one way to make an effective video with a very short, enigmatic text, marrying Dickinson’s cosmic lines with some footage that is literally out of this world. James put up a blog post about it, which I’ll take the liberty of quoting in full:
This is a video I made for Emily Dickinson’s “Aurora is the effort.” I stumbled on the Jupiter aurora footage at ESA/Hubble and wanted to do something with it. I had Dickinson on my mind since we share a birthday, and I often find myself turning to her work around this time of year, so I started searching for aurora-related Dickinson poems and liked this one for its simplicity and unusual syntax and wording. The sounds are radio static and me rubbing the strings and hitting the back of a bass guitar with some effects from garage band.
I’ve been wanting to do a Dickinson poem for years and even have a concept for another one that maybe someday will get done. Thanks for watching.
For an interesting perspective on what Dickinson might’ve been up to in this poem, see Jed Deppman’s Trying to Think With Emily Dickinson (University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), p. 129 ff. (via Google Books). Deppman finds that “Aurora is the effort”
features the kind of deconstructive paradox that both defines and destabilizes many of Dickinson’s definition poems: the category of “the natural” transforms into the others that philosophers have always used to define it by opposition: the “social,” “cultural” and “artificial.” The specific terms the speaker uses to transform cosmology into cosmetics and make heaven’s two-facedness the basis of a definition under erasure derive in part from the idea—circulating in Amherst thanks to Transcendentalism, Ruskin, Hitchcock, and the Hudson River school—that nature mirros God’s consciousness, that, as Barton Levi St. Armand puts it, “the sensuous veil of nature is but a protective covering over the naked creative spirit of the universe.”
It’s worth reading the analysis in full to realize just how much meaning Dickinson could pack into her gnomic verses.
Hij morrelt aan je ziel / He fumbles at your Soul by Emily Dickinson
https://vimeo.com/93230216
This is Dickinson’s poem F477 (1862)/J315, translated into Dutch by J. Eijkelboom and into film by Marc Neys, A.K.A. Swoon, who says he began with an old reading he had made of the poem, building an experimental soundtrack around it.
The track was (except for the electronic ‘drumthumbs’ in the back) completely constructed out of (altered) sounds I made with my mouth. A fun experiment. For some reason the track worked quite well with that old recording. Maybe there was a short video in it too?
Keeping a similar kind of restriction as I did with the sounds, I wanted only one short piece of footage in the video; leaves.
The whole thing was created in one afternoon (and it probably shows), but I had fun doing so. Keeping it simple and fresh.
A fun inbetweenie stuffed between longer videos and ongoing projects.
To flee from memory… by Emily Dickinson
To Flee From Memory is “A short film about being lost set to a poem by Emily Dickinson,” according to the director, Irish filmmaker Simon Eustace. Click through to Vimeo for a full list of credits. The voiceover is a bit quiet, so let me paste in the text of the poem:
To flee from memory
Had we the Wings
Many would fly
Inured to slower things
Birds with surprise
Would scan the cowering Van
Of men escaping
From the mind of man
“I like a look of agony…” by Emily Dickinson
Othniel Smith repurposes public-domain imagery from the Internet Archive to accompany Dickinson’s text, which was written in 1862, during the American Civil War.
“Much Madness is divinest Sense…” by Emily Dickinson
I watched this when it was first uploaded to Vimeo two years ago, but for whatever reason didn’t share it then. Perhaps I felt it was too far from the spirit of the poem as I understood it. Be that as it may, however, I think it’s important as an international and pop-cultural interpretation of Dickinson, and also may help clarify some of the differences between the related genres of music video and videopoetry.
Michal Jaskulski directs. The music is by Polish composer Andrzej Bonarek, who specializes in music for theater and film. The video garnered several awards, according to the description in Vimeo:
Los Angeles Movie Awards 2010 – Best Visual Effects in a music video, Award of Excellence
Canada International Film Festival 2010 – Royal Reel Award VSM 2010 festival – Special Recognition
Yach Film 2008 – Grand Prix nominee
“Wild nights…” by Emily Dickinson
Thanks to CreatureCast for licensing this wonderful undersea footage under a Creative Commons license, permitting this repurposing. I blogged about the making of it at Via Negativa. Due to the format of the original film, I was forced to learn how to make a widescreen (16:9) video, which turned out not be difficult at all (thought the standardized dimensions of videos here at Moving Poems give it an extra-wide top and bottom border).
For a very different audio interpretation of the poem, listen to videopoet Brenda Clews‘ reading on the Woodrat Podcast, Episode 31: Emily Dickinson at 180. Brenda’s reading starts just past the four-minute mark.
“Hope is the thing with feathers” by Emily Dickinson
Moving Poems’ latest in-house production attempts to put Emily Dickinson’s famous poem in its historical context. I used clips from a public-domain educational film, “Civil War,” by Encyclopaedia Brittanica Films, 1954, from the Prelinger Archives, and found an excellent recording of a wood thrush at the equally invaluable freesound.org. But the most essential ingredient here, I think, was the reading by Nic S.. As Julie Martin put it in a comment on my blog post introducing the video,
Nic’s reading is masterful. Dickinson is so condensed and elliptical that her work seems impossible to read aloud, much like the unplayable late string quartets of Beethoven. But Nic invests each word with a different weight; she doesn’t play with expectations, but transcends them.
“They dropped like Flakes” by Emily Dickinson
An adaptation of an Emily Dickinson poem. Created as a filmmaking challenge with some friends, this was made in under 20 hours, and served as a testing ground for a new camera and lenses.
Poem read by Nori Barber, music by Osmodius Bell
