~ 2016 ~
The Hero is Light by Matt Mullins
Usually, the American poet and electronic literature expert Matt Mullins makes his own poetry films, but for this one he teamed up with Spanish director Eduardo Yagüe, providing only the poem, voice and music. The poem is dedicated to the Soviet artist Eva Levina Rozengolts (1898-1975), a drawing of whose appears in the credits. According to the Museum of Russian Art website,
Eva Levina-Rozengolts was one of the few Soviet artists who managed to creatively transform and express the trauma of Stalinist repression in a striking visual language.
Trained in the celebrated VkHuTeMas, the hotbed of early Soviet avant-garde, Eva Rozengolts worked as a textile designer and later a copyist at the Soviet Artists’ Union production studios. She was arrested in 1949 and sentenced to ten years of exile in the depth of Siberia where she lived in a settlement on the Yenisei river, in the Krasnoyarsk region. She was assigned to work as a woodcutter, wall painter, and later medical assistant. After returning from exile, she regained her creativity, undeterred by age and failing health. In fact, it was after her return from Siberia, that her talent came into its own. Unknown to the broad public, her work stirred the attention of the new generation of unofficial artists that emerged after Stalin’s death. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Eva Levina-Rozengolts became recognized as one of the outstanding figures of the ‘lost’ artistic generation of the Stalin era.
Yagüe shot the film in Stockholm with actress Carolina Rosa.
Light by Ed Madden
This short video by Allen Wheeler in support of Ed Madden’s poetry collection Ark has two things I love: time-lapse photography and a single, continuous shot from one position. The flooded field in the shot is presumably even more full of light than the field referenced in the text, but given the nature of photography, it’s hard to see how anything less would have worked. The piano music by Kai Engel was found on the Free Music Archive, according to the credits.
John Scott: Ten Favorite Cinépoems
I’m a filmmaker not a poet. So for me the word “poetry” means something different I think than how poets might see it. For me the poetry part of cinépoetry is not the written part, it’s a kind of magic that can suddenly bring alive an enchanting correspondence between words, sounds and images. Given this definition, here are my current favorites put into categories.
Category 1: The Interior Dilemma Comes to Light
Once
Written and directed by Lyn Elliot, 2000
Lyn Elliot must surely be America’s most underappreciated filmmaker. Her work is so smart, so simple and often times uproariously funny. What more do you want? Ok, how about short and to the point too. I love this film. I wish I was this smart.
On Loop
Directed by Christine Hooper, 2013
Poem by Christine Hooper and Victoria Manifold
I went to the Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin in October of 2014 and I saw many great cinépoems. This was my favorite one there. I still don’t fully understand how she did it, but I think she perfectly captures that moment where we are trying to sleep but our mind seems instead to dissect us into multiple fighting personalities who churn things over endlessly.
Having Intended to Merely Pick on an Oil Company, the Poem Goes Awry
Directed by Joanna Kohler, 2010
Poem by Bob Hicok
Are all the best cinépoems directed by women? Sheesh, third in a row. I think what I really love best about this one is how it finds a way to create an enchanting dialogue between the interior voice of the poem and a kind of external visual journey of the ruminating man. Also, projecting on chest hair is a genius visual idea. I wish I’d thought of that.
Category 2: Opening up New Worlds
Closed Wounds
Directed by Lanka Haouche Perren, 2014
Poem by Michael Harding
I saw this at the Zebra Poetry Film Festival in 2014. It’s haunting. A brilliant and troubling juxtaposition of images and sounds with words. Some might call the film exploitative, but all I saw was its humanity. Also, I never would have thought of putting this poem with these images. It’s a surprising confluence of words and images that would at first seem entirely inappropriate, but here, somehow, this piece elevates both the words and the visuals to levels I’m not sure they achieve on their own.
When Walt Whitman was a Little Girl
Directed by Jim Haverkamp, 2012
Poem by M.C. Biegner
I think this film takes us down a rabbit hole into an Alice in Wonderland style visual universe that’s enchanting in way that’s both completely its own thing, but also perfectly suited to the tone of the words. I also like that I don’t think it tries to be impressive – like so many calling card short films. It just makes the original work sing again with spirit and soul, transposed into a new key.
Never Too Late
Director uncredited, 2013
Poem by Michael London
I love the poem and how it sounds when read. I think the words work cleverly to open up the difficulties, paradoxes and the potential for change in what I take to be life in inner city Chicago. Also, for me at least, it feels like I am invited to feel the breathing spirit of a personal, family space and understand its value to the poet, and to all of us. I know the piece has affected me when all the natural sound drops out at at the end and I can still feel and hear it in the poem and what it describes.
Heliotropes
Directed by Michael Langan, 2010
Poem by Brian Christian
I think the sequence from :52 to 1:09 in this film are my favorite 17 seconds in cinépoetry. It’s perfect. I’m sure there is some kind of eternal punishment for being perfect, even if it’s just for 17 seconds — maybe door to door electioneering for Donald Trump(?)
Cars Will Make You Free
Written and directed by Lyn Elliot, 1997
I don’t guffaw, or make giant snorting sounds while watching this piece (like I do while watching certain scenes from Trailer Park Boys) but I do laugh throughout it, and you can’t really wipe the stupid grin from my face. It’s simple, fun and smart.
Massacre at Murambi
Written and directed by Sam Kauffmann, 2007
I think this is a cinépoem masquerading as a documentary. One could could characterize the words here as simply poetic, rather than a poem onto itself. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. I guess I don’t care either way. But for the purists, I urge you to hang with it until its conclusion before you cinch any final judgment here. While at first the words may seem like a conventional documentary voice-over, the poetry is revealed soon enough, and the whole movie turns on a few well chosen words and their devastating reveal.
Category 3: Masterwork
La jetée
Written and directed by Chris Marker, 1962
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLfXCkFQtXw
Well, who am I to add anything more to the volumes written about this movie. It’s an acknowledged masterwork that deserves your undistracted attention for its duration. Actually, imagine you didn’t have a phone or a computer or any devices and you were in a dark cinema in Paris in 1962. It’s still great though even if you do glance at your devices once or twice. I don’t believe it has been surpassed really — an astounding blend of visuals, sounds and words. It’s a one of a kind work that, if not a cinépoem must be instead a grandfather to the genre.
A Painting by Sarah Howe
Hong Kong-born British poet Sarah Howe’s poem is brought to the screen by Amabel Stokes, credited with screenplay, directing and editing. The camerawork is by Raquel Orendain Shrestha and music by The Cinematic Orchestra. Howe shared the video in a public Facebook post, writing:
I was really touched when, out of the blue, an English student called Amabel Stokes emailed me to say she’d made a film out of my poem, ‘A Painting’. Amabel is Eurasian too, and I confess at the spot in the film when she moves the paintbrushes like chopsticks, I spontaneously burst into tears. Maybe it was just the Stephen Hawking-film music working on my heartstrings(!), but I’m really, really impressed at what the kids can do these days.
“You live…” by Anaïs Nin (diary excerpt)
A video by Lisa Seidenberg with text on screen from The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume 1. Though the text wasn’t a poem in its original context, its poetic quality taken out of that context and its juxtaposition with lyrical images and a dark ambient score make this more of a videopoem than anything else, I’d say. The Vimeo description reads:
A quote from the writing of Anais Nin, known best for her erotic memoirs is interpreted through dream-like expressionistic images and tantalising original score by composer Karl Warner. Filmed in Antibes, France.
For more of Seidenberg’s work, see her Vimeo channel.
Crow (three poems) by Ted Hughes
Ted Hughes reads “The Door,” “Crow’s Vanity,” and “Crow Hears Fate Knock on the Door”—three poems from his 1970 tour de force Crow—in this stunning animation produced and directed by Yoav Segal. The other animators were Alasdair Beckett King, Nandita Jain, and Aindri Chakraborty; Leafcutter John was the composer and Holly Waddington the art director. See Vimeo for the full credits, which include this note: “The material started life as part of the Handspring UK theatrical production ‘CROW’.” Segal has uploaded a theatre clip from that production, which is interesting for comparison’s sake:
(Hat-tip: Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival page on Facebook.)
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot (2)
The music and rhythmic recitation from Mikey Georgeson is integral to the success of this interpretation of Eliot’s classic poem by London-based filmmaker and animator Martin Pickles. His Vimeo description:
Poem by T.S. Eliot (1915)
Voice and Music by Mikey Georgeson (2015)
Produced by David M. Allen
Encouraged by Simon IndelicateFilm by Martin Pickles (2015)
The Man: Pat Reid
The Woman: Leslie Cummins
Edited from Super 8 film shot in Soho, Piccadilly and Belgravia in 1999
Film stock: 200 ASA Kodak Security Film created by Alan Doyle
Telecine by Lux
The description at a separate upload by PoetryFilm on Vimeo adds some details:
The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock was premiered at PoetryFilm Paradox at The Groucho Club on 13 December 2015, a venue in the heart of Soho where, as it happens, the work was filmed.
The poem recording was made to celebrate the 100th anniversary of T.S. Eliot’s 1915 poem. In the accompanying film, a man and a woman fail to meet, despite their paths crossing on the neon streets of Soho. The special Super 8 stock (200 ASA Kodak Security Film) was negative rather than positive, and it is this that lends the film a beige ambiance, reflecting Eliot’s “yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes.”
This is the second time I’ve shared a video of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” on Moving Poems; the first was this animation by Everett Wilson back in 2009. But that was just a selection from the text, and used the poet’s own reading, which even at 4:02 minutes dragged, to my ear, because of Eliot’s tiresome “poet voice,” which now sounds so dated.
Hypochondriac by Chris Tusa
Filmmaker Alex Zakon superimposed Flash animation on live action film for this video interpretation of a poem by New Orleans writer Chris Tusa.
Refuge by Carol Novack
Another poem by Carol Novack adapted for film by Jean Detheux. (I shared Destination back in March.) Here’s Detheux’s description on Vimeo:
Just weeks before she died in December 2011, Carol Novack sent me “Refuge,” a prose poem she hoped I could create a movie with/for/to.
We had already done two movies together, “Civil War” (vimeo.com/26869484) and “Destination” (vimeo.com/26782140), and I also did the cover and over a dozen illustrations for her book “Giraffes in Hiding” (tinyurl.com/d93v9lv).
“Refuge” was a challenge, the first two movies were done with the voice of Carol reciting her own work, she of course was no longer alive to record her text. That’s when Donald Meyer, the composer who created the sound track of “Destination,” agreed to help. He enlisted Victoria Johnson who provided the voice, and he began working with the recording, mixing, arranging, to finally give me the audio that became the base for the images.
I am not sure this is the “final” (video) version (hence “sketch 1”), but given December 29 is the anniversary of Carol’s death, I wanted to publish it as a celebration of her memory.
I hope she found her town, her refuge.
The Fearful by Sylvia Plath
This is Deceit by Ilhan Alyanak, who describes it on Vimeo as “pretty images for [a] sad poem about lies”. No credits are supplied, but I’m guessing that the recitation is by Alyanak herself, a “D.C based teen with a good camera and an appreciation for pretty things, people and places”. I think though that the images here go well beyond the merely pretty—it’s a striking interpretation of Plath’s poem.
