~ October 2011 ~
Schubertiana by Tomas Tranströmer
This is A Galaxy Over There — a lavishly produced film by British director Martin Earle, illustrating excerpts from Tranströmer’s poem “Schubertiana,” as translated by Jöns Mellgren and narrated by Graham Sharpe in a kind of bedtime-stories voice. Though much of it is rather too literal for my taste, it’s hard to find fault with such beautiful filmmaking. The flying household objects in the first part seem in keeping with the spirit of Tranströmer’s “miracle speech,” and I love the scene where the landscape turns into a bed quilt. It’s also hard to see how they could’ve used anything other than a Schubert string quartet for the soundtrack!
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by William Carlos Williams
http://www.vimeo.com/28799428
Making a videopoem for a poem that was written in response to a painting is always a challenge. Nic S. used footage of a California forest fire from 1914 in what strikes me as a fairly successful pairing.
In other Nic S.-related news, she has just launched a new venture that should be of interest to anyone making poetry videos — Pizzicati of Hosanna: dead poets’ poems read by Nic S. in English & other languages. According to a note in the sidebar, “These recordings may be used for any type of creative non-commercial project. No need to ask permission.” Poets recorded so far include Stevens, Baudelaire, Quasimodo and Neruda, all in the original languages.
one moment passes by Robert Lax
German animator Susanne Wiegner made this film with audio from the late poet, who “did nothing to court publicity or expand his literary career or reputation,” according to the Wikipedia. A man after my own heart!
Where Sins Are More Sinful by Heather Haley
Canadian poet, musician and filmmaker Heather Haley‘s poem (from her first spoken-word album, Surfing Season) gets the Swoon treatment. Marc blogged about it (in Dutch) here and here:
The ideas for these images came fairly quickly. For “sins,” I had the associative thought, “wash in innocence.” So I went searching for “shower” images and found one by Erica Scourti.
Then I made a “rushing” background by processing images from recordings I made half a year ago from a boat, plus a bunch of Ghent pictures of the most diverse things, faces, and symbols.
Kurt Heintz interviewed Heather about Surfing Season after it was released in 2004. Start here.
Icicles by Todd Boss
A motionpoem created by Michael Guncheon and Ben O’Brien.
And speaking of Motionpoems, if you can get to Minneapolis on October 25, they’re planning to screen a whole new season’s worth of films, which will include poems by Jane Hirshfield, Mark Strand, Richard Wilbur and others — a dozen in all, produced to accompany the Best American Poetry 2011 anthology From Scribner. See their website for details.
Sonnet 65 by William Shakespeare
A timeless meditation on time gets the film noir treatment. Moving Poems’ latest production uses footage from two films in the public domain at the Prelinger Archives and a Creative Commons-licenced William Byrd piece by Vicente Parrilla and company.
