~ Poet: Lennart Lundh ~
Elegy by Lennart Lundh
This is The Wrong Film (Elegy) by Swoon (Marc Neys), which he blogged about here:
I have been working on ‘Poetry Storehouse’ videos in between workshops and commissioned projects. Perfect way to create a (much needed) distance from one project while playing around with another one (with less pressure)
As I said before The Poetry Storehouse is a great place to browse.
This videopoem started out with ‘loose’ footage I shot in Athens (during a workshop for Frown. More on that in a later post). I wanted parts of a ping pong table almost to feel other-worldly.
Back at home I stumbled on this great instrument: http://www.femurdesign.com/theremin/
The selection of poems in the Storehouse is evidently large and diverse enough that a filmmaker with some footage and music already in hand can locate a suitable text, as Swoon did:
Somehow I thought the feel of the poem and the alienating music fitted well together and were a great ‘match’ with the ping pong footage. When I say ‘match’, I mean there’s a lovely friction between it all. It seems wrong (hence the title) and strangely suitable at the same time…
Sandburg and Photograph by Lennart Lundh
https://vimeo.com/84858997
A simple but effective videopoem. Nic S. used a text from The Poetry Storehouse contributed by Illinois-based writer and photographer Lennart Lundh, but as she notes at her blog, the video imagery came first.
For this one, I started with the footage and then searched for the poem.
One of the challenges for a videopoem maker not yet handy with his or her own camera (that would be me) is finding video footage that a) works and b) is copyright-free and c) is either free or inexpensive. There are a few sites (eg Motion Elements or OrangeHD) that put up video clips for free use, and I trawl them regularly, downloading and saving footage against future need. The clip subjects are super-odd and almost comically random and nearly always fall in the ‘you never know’ category.
In this case, I found a series of shots taken of and through the side rear view mirror of a car. They struck me as metaphorically powerful and I went back through the Storehouse poems, deliberately looking for one which would match the metaphor. Lennart’s elegantly tragic simple/complicated piece, with its telescoping rearward/forward depiction of time and space jumped out at me very quickly.
