“Sleepdancing (Giddoo)” is the latest collaboration between Belgian artist and composer Swoon and expatriate Egyptian poet Yahia Lababidi, and is as different from its predecessors as can be (while still remaining recognizably a Swoon video). The decision not to include a reading of the text in the soundtrack seems appropriate for the subject matter.
Kind of a video game feel but interesting nonetheless. Vasileios Matsoukas is the filmmaker. Kate Ruse is an English poet whose “Puritan Black” was featured here last June.
I’m having a hard time keeping up with the videos Swoon has been making for Lababidi’s poems. This one incorporates Dutch sign language by Marjan De Cuyper and painting by Arlekeno Anselmo for a truly multimedia and multinational exploration of, and exploring through, language.
http://www.vimeo.com/21089942
Another film by Marcin Konrad Malinowski for a poem by his mother, the late Bozena Urszula Malinowska. Here’s the translation Marcin supplied. I think he’s open to suggestions on how it might be improved, but this is certainly enough to let the non-Polish viewer understand how the film images relate to, and play off of, the text:
Expelled from paradise
by me
by me alone
expelled
I’ll bury my sin in my heart
I won’t drop to my knees
in hope, that there
behind the gates
I’ll find silence and peace
Today I expel myself from paradise
With a curse
that’ll crush my heart
and I won’t yearn,
cry, wait and dream
I expel myself from paradise
So I can
live again
The post about the video on Marcin’s project blog reproduces a hand-written draft of the poem.
Like our own videopoem contest, PIFF 2011 challenges filmmakers to make a short film in response to the same poem — in their case, “Four Letters, Three Words” by Brenda Hilton. But their contest is a much more high-powered affair with entry fees and screenings and whatnot, and they also don’t require that the poem be incorporated into the film, only that the film should be a response to it. Here are the rules and regulations.