~ 2022 ~
Recusio Redacted by Jacqueline Saphra
Recusio Redacted is a film by Helen Dewbery, from a poem by Jacqueline Saphra. The poem appears in the collection Dad, Remember You Are Dead, published by Nine Arches Press.
Helen will be familiar to followers of Moving Poems from her earlier films previously shared here. Aside from being a marvelous film-maker, she is co-editor with Chaucer Cameron of the online journal Poetry Film Live.
Jacqueline Saphra is a playwright as well as a poet. Her writing has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize, among other honours. She lives in London and teaches at The Poetry School.
My Father’s Bones by Zoe Paterson Macinnes
An author-made poetry film by Zoe Paterson Macinnes,
a visual artist and filmmaker from the Isle of Lewis. Zoe’s work is a result of her island heritage. She combines personal observations of land and sea with voice, memory and music from the islands to explore themes of identity and belonging. Her documentary short, Cianalas, which investigates the identity of young musicians in Lewis, was awarded Best Documentary Short by Desert Rock Film and Music Festival, and Best Student Film by Culture and Diversity Film Festival.
The music is by Lauren MacColl—the traditional fiddle tune “MacGregor of Roro’s Lament“—setting the mood for a bittersweet, meditative film which I liked well enough when I first watched it two months ago, but found incredibly moving the second time through. I suppose it helps than I can connect to it in two ways, from having visited other islands in the Hebrides, and from my own deep connection to the place where I grew up (including knowing exactly where I’ll be buried, as the poem says).
Video is such a great medium for poems of place! And despite being a professional filmmaker, Macinnes kept things simple with text on screen and slow-moving shots that aren’t redundant with the text and give the viewer’s mind permission to roam—paradoxically, a state more amenable to active engagement. It moves at a walker’s pace. I like that.
We Are The War by T&DA
A fascinating experiment in AI-generated videopoetry from an artists’ collective in Sydney, written and directed by Tyrone Estephan.
We Are The War | CLIP-Guided Storytelling & Speech Synthesis
At T&DA we have explored leveraging the latest technologies to create ‘We Are The War’, an animated graphic novella poem, where both the images and narration were generated through visual and audio synthesis.
Created using prompts inspired by children’s book illustrations and the lines of our poem, images were generated using Midjourney. The narrator was generated through speech synthesis software that only needed 15 minute sample of talking.
To add parallax and depth to the scenes we used neural Z depth extraction.
Using these tools we tell the story of children’s metaversal shenanigans as realities of recent years bleed into their locked down lives. We can think of this technology almost as if it’s a 10 year old expressing itself, which felt like the perfect means to convey the sentiments of the poem.
Tyrone Estephan – Written & Directed
Sean Simon – Visuals & Post
Josh Kell – Online Editor
Bloomsday Film Festival, 11-16 June 2022
There is much to see in the programme for this year’s Bloomsday Festival in Dublin, Ireland and online, including experimental and poetry short film selections. The organisers say:
“Ireland’s most literary film festival is back for its third year, and a very special one indeed as 2022 is the centenarian celebration of the publication of Ulysses (1922). The film festival was set up to be a celebration of cinema, literature, and artistic innovation, inspired by the long reaching arm of Ireland’s patriarch of modernism, James Joyce. The festival is run in partnership with the Bloomsday Festival & the James Joyce Centre. The festival will run between the 11th – 16th June, online and with live screenings in Dublin at the historic James Joyce Centre, the IFI, and the Sugar Club.”
Find out more on the website http://www.bloomsdayfestival.ie/filmfestival
The Opposites Game by Brendan Constantine (2)
A classroom erupts into a war of words as students grapple with a seemingly simple prompt: what is the opposite of a gun?
This animation of Brendan Constantine‘s poem by Anna Samo and Lisa LaBracio went viral, with more than 24,700 views on Vimeo and 364,814 views
on YouTube. It probably helps that it was a Vimeo staff pick. But it’s also
part of TED-Ed’s series, “There’s a Poem for That,” which features animated interpretations of poems both old and new that give language to some of life’s biggest feelings.
See the Vimeo description for the full credits and list of honors.
We previously shared Mike Gioia’s film adaptation of the same poem. I’m not sure which I prefer; both have their strengths.
Mist by Alice Oswald
This beautiful video of Alice Oswald‘s Mist is by Aodhagán O’Flaherty, a film-maker previously unknown to me. The poet is very well known, especially in UK, but the film is one of those random discoveries that sometimes happens when wandering the web.
I found in my searches that Aodhagán O’Flaherty is Irish-born, now Berlin-based. I found no other videos from him, and so it seems all the more surprising that this one has such an assured and affecting way with images, editing, rhythm, sound and narration. Of course, it helps as well that the poem is so wonderful. It can be read on the page here.
Because Goddess is Never Enough by Rosie Garland
Because Goddess is Never Enough draws its inspiration from the life of Austrian-born dancer, choreographer, actor and painter, Tilly Losch (1903-1975). The film is a collaboration between film-maker Jane Glennie and writer/performer Rosie Garland, both award-winning artists in the UK. The subject is the representation of women artists in history, especially the ways their stories have been footnoted in relation to famous men. One of the film’s lines about Tilly’s place in history: “blink and you’ll miss her”.
From the web page for the film:
Tilly Losch was an Austrian dancer who worked with prominent, and cutting-edge, choreographers and artists in the UK and the US, from the West End to Hollywood. She was also a choreographer in her own right, who later turned to painting.
Through moving images and poetry Glennie and Garland investigate the elusive and fragmentary nature of Tilly’s life, evoking the spirit of the 1920s–40s when she was at the peak of her fame.
The film is about self-worth, the authentic self, and the credibility of creative women – Losch was someone who was at times exploited yet determined to maintain a path of her own making despite the obstacles that were very much present in her era… highlighting how far women have come in 90 years, and yet how far they still have to go to get recognition and true independence.
Jane Glennie’s film-making most often involves rapid animation of still images, creating a highly dynamic sense of cinematic motion. At ten minutes duration, this is her most ambitious film to date, involving thousands of her own photographs, meticulously layered with contrasting rhythms that underscore voice and text.
Rosie Garland’s expressive narration of her own poem is highly effective. Her voice alternates with that of Alison Glennie, equally as effective in the first-person sections that evoke Tilly speaking for herself. The overall soundtrack is mainly just the two voices accompanied by textural sound effects. This minimal approach proves an excellent stylistic choice.
All the different elements of the film combine organically and assuredly, suggesting a great collaboration between the artists involved. Because Goddess is Never Enough is a unique evocation of one woman’s creative life and by extension the lives of so many creative women throughout time.
Tattoo by Wallace Stevens
Belgian composer and artist Marc Neys (A.K.A. Swoon) is back making videopoems after a lengthy hiatus, with a new website for all his output. For a sense of just how prolific he used to be, and how central his lyrical, idiosyncratic approach to filmmaking has been to the development of contemporary poetry film, this recent adaptation of a Wallace Stevens poem appears to be the 159th video of his we’ve shared at Moving Poems. Here are the credits:
film, voice & music: Marc Neys
Footage: Jan Eerala
translation: Peter Nijmeijer
Ramblings by Gabriel Rosenstock
Irish poet Gabriel Rosenstock has been collaborating with filmmakers for years, often on adaptations of his Gaelic haiku. This film finds him working with Kashmiri artist Masood Hussain on a brief anthology of four free-verse videopoems, “The Poet as Untouchable,” “Broken Bangle,” “The Dismantling of the Taj Mahal” and “White Flags.”
Ramblings is a suite of short video-poems by bilingual poet Gabriel Rosenstock (Ireland), an Indophile who has been dazzled by his contact with the literary and spiritual legacy of India, her people and landscapes, but is not blind to the darker side of India, such as the caste system, Hindutva, the violence and injustices, and so on. In previous short films with his artistic collaborator, artist and auteur Masood Hussain with whom he created the book Walk with Gandhi, he has focussed on the shabby treatment of dissident poet Varavara Rao. Ramblings ends with an anarchist poem which contains a key to universal peace.
Call for work: Filmetry – a Festival of Poetry and Film
Now entering its 4th year, FILMETRY is a festival in Michigan, USA. The organisers are inviting filmmakers to create a film of their choice from a collection of 32 poems on the theme of ‘Home’ from Michigan State University Short Edition Press into a film of five minutes or less. The poems to choose from (and full rules and details) are available via their website https://filmetry.org/
Submissions of films are open between 21st May and 27th August for the festival happening on 30th September. Submissions can be made via FilmFreeway.
Poetry film event: Translating / City in Belfast, N.I. on 18th June 2022
Belfast Book Festival in Northern Ireland opens on 10th June and runs until 19th June 2022. Delighted to say that they are including a feature-length curation of poetry films ‘Translating / City’ on 18th June.
The programme says:
“Join us for a feature-length curation of filmpoems – and film and video excerpts – that foreground poetry. Join poet Kathleen McCracken (previous winner of Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing) for a screening which will teases out processes that shape these novel verbal-visual collaborations with a particular focus on two thematic nodes of this year’s festival: translation, and the inherent sociality of our cities. Curation by Natasha Cuddington and Shannon Kuta Kelly.”
Event webpage: https://belfastbookfestival.com/whats-on/filmpoem-translating–city–
