Paul Casey and Colm Scully, organisers and judges of the Ó Bhéal Winter Warmer poetry festival and poetry film competition in Cork (Ireland), have collaborated on their top ten films that feature classic poems from a wide range of writers. Their range of selections begin with Lewis Carroll with Jabberwocky written in 1871 in England, and conclude with Pablo Neruda, in 20th century Chile, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature 100 years later in 1971.
Jabberwocky
Lewis Carroll
Filmmaker: Sjaak Rood
When it comes to marching
Bertholt Brecht
Filmmaker: Andrea Malpede
The Peace of Wild Things
Wendell Berry
Filmmakers: Charlotte Ager & Katy Wang
Hope is the thing with feathers
Emily Dickinson
Filmmaker: Dave Bonta
Ozymandias
Percy Bysshe-Shelley
Filmmaker: Alvaro Lamarche Toloza
Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower
Rainer Maria Rilke
Filmmaker: Matt Huynh & Mila Nery
Lightenings viii
Seamus Heaney
Filmmaker: Eoghan Kidney
Innisfree
W B Yeats
Filmmaker: Don Carey
Toads Revisited
Philip Larkin
An excerpt from a BBC programme (Monitor, 1964, UK) with John Betjeman interviewing Philip Larkin.
Tonight I can Write
Pablo Neruda
Filmmaker: Lorena Col
A poem accompanied by a visual story, blue jay is written and directed by Anthony Matos in Maine, USA. He describes the film as “a story about three strangers trying to overcome different forms of grief and loneliness.”
From his bio at FilmFreeway:
My love for film grew from my love of poetry and the Walt Whitman and Mary Oliver collections I read in high school. I lived through these poets and craved to be able to appreciate life and the moment around me as they did.
Poetry films are most often very short and small-scale in production. By contrast, Blue Jay is over 12 minutes and involved a substantial cast and crew. In these ways it more closely resembles a well-produced narrative short.
The combination of poem and story is an interesting approach, and I find this touching film well worth the time in watching.
New Zealand poetry filmmaker Charles Olsen just wrote to let us know about this fabulous-sounding new festival, scheduled for November 2-3, 2023 in Wellington. Here’s the press release:
Submissions are now open for the Aotearoa Poetry Film Festival 2023
The Aotearoa Poetry Film Festival is an event entirely devoted to the celebration and showcase of poetry film in New Zealand. Poetry film or video poetry is a fast-growing art form that combines poetry, moving images, sound and music. We would like to invite film-makers and poets of any age and backgrounds to participate in the first edition of the Festival which will take place in November 2023 in Wellington. In particular, we encourage the submission of innovative and eclectic takes on poetry film as a distinct media form.
The Festival will feature a poetry film competition, workshops, seminars, poetry readings and retrospectives and it will offer the opportunity to showcase the diversity of poetry film produced both in Aotearoa New Zealand and overseas. The 2023 Aotearoa Poetry Film Festival is organised in collaboration with Victoria University of Wellington.
Submissions open: 1 February 2023
Submission deadline: 15 August 2023
Event: 2-3 November 2023
Website: https://www.aotearoapff.com/
FilmFreeway Page: https://filmfreeway.com/AotearoaPoetryFilmFestival-1
For more info please contact: aotearoapff@gmail.com
I hesitated on how to title this list. As I thought about films I liked and that inspired me, I realised that I didn’t want to title this ‘typographic films’ because it suggests that the emphasis in all my choices is all about the typography. Sometimes in poetry film it is. The lettering, whether fonts, or by hand, can take centre stage for an entire piece. Or it can take centre stage for significant parts of a film, whether that is significant in total time or significant in moment. But for me, I am excited by the use of typography not the dominance of typography in a genre which is diverse and engaging through the variations of all the elements at a filmmaker’s disposal: sound, image, lettering, music, etc.
I was originally trained as a typographic designer, predominantly for print and books. A classic essay by Beatrice Warde (The Crystal Goblet, or printing should be invisible, 1932) describes the role of typography as a crystal-clear transparent goblet — a means to let the content (the red wine) shine through. A useful thought for the design of many books. Warde is arguing for a typography that supports and facilitates the text in a beautiful way. Though of course typography isn’t invisible and the visual choices are there on the page. Matthew Butterick has debunked the crystal goblet as a metaphor.
Butterick argues that the goblet is:
An appealing metaphor, but totally inapt. … [T]ypography is the visual component of the written word. But the converse is also true: without typography, a text has no visual characteristics. A goblet can be invisible because the wine is not. But text is already invisible, so typography cannot be. Rather than wine in a goblet, a more apt parallel might be helium in a balloon: the balloon gives shape and visibility to something that otherwise cannot be seen.
Typography can be the visual component of the written word in poetry film, but in a time-based media, the word can be manifest in many more ways, alongside, blended with, or instead of visually. The poetry can have many characteristics that are ‘visual’ because they are part of a film, though they may not be typographic. Poetry can be represented through image alone, moving footage, through audible language, sound effects, music and so on. Come back to typography and the lettering itself is affected by the timing and/or animation of text in addition to the 2-d factors such as layout, size, colour and font selection.
The typographic ‘balloon’ can be functional and practical — adding subtitles in the same or another language, and somewhat separate or external to the film. Or the ‘balloon’ can be part of the aesthetic choices and integral to the whole impact of the film. In this selection of ten films, my choices have come out of thinking about the aesthetic impact of the typography and the allure that it adds to the film as a whole.
In no particular order … ten typographically alluring films.
CRUSH
Film-maker/poet: Janet Lees
UK
I could have picked any one of a number of Janet Lees’ films. Her photography is very strong, and her typography is chosen with finesse to go with her images. Quiet, fine-weight fonts give quiet impact without being problematic with legibility, while the positioning and animation is beautifully done. Classic and understated.
SEX & VIOLENCE #4: WHAT’S INSIDE A GIRL?
Film-maker/poet: Kristy Bowen
USA
Typewriter fonts can be horribly overused in unhelpful ways. Typewriter has an obvious aesthetic appeal, a bit grungy, and with lots of retro-vibes. Like the beleaguered Comic Sans, their use can leave you thinking: ‘Yes, but why?’ or worse: ‘Oh no! Really? Out of everything you chose this?’ However, in this film by Kristy Bowen I think it is a great choice. Simple, great layout and timing, and as Dave Bonta said in his review: creepy.
THERE’S A CERTAIN SLANT OF LIGHT
Film-maker: Susan McCann
USA
Poet: Emily Dickinson
I watched this at Ó Bhéal’s Winter Warmer event (November 2022). This is a virtuoso play with cut-out lettering. I think the craft of making this lettering, and the skill in filming it, is just gorgeous. I’ll leave you to discover what it looks like…
PROFILE
Film-maker/poet: R.W. Perkins
USA
A complete change of pace and style for this ‘oldie but a goodie’ (as Joe Wicks has said about a classic workout exercise). And like a high energy Joe Wicks starting some squats, I am still as excited and delighted by the energy of this film as when I first watched it some years ago.
I just love the interplay between the voice and the text on screen, and the text on screen that is not part of the voiced poem.
It is so good that I want to be very picky about the typographic detail. For example, the ‘rivers of white’ (or in this case black) that are left in the setting of the Jack Kerouac quote. Going back to the crystal goblet metaphor – this is very much a clunky and chipped cheap tumbler here. It is not wrong as such, more than likely it is just what came out when the setting is clicked on ‘justify’. But it highlights the pitfalls of using that particular feature of computer text-setting all too clearly. Fine-tuning the typography with subtle and ‘invisible’ tweaks to this would make me even more happy to watch it.
IMAGININGS
Film-maker: Anja Hiddinga
Netherlands
In Imaginings six young, deaf signed-word artists present raps in sign language. At first glance the type in this film is functional – it is subtitling for those who don’t know sign language to enjoy the film and understand what the people are saying. But I include this film here because the functional has been done so well that it becomes part of the aesthetic energy and appeal of the film. The film was screened at Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin in 2022 where I was very happy to have the opportunity to watch it twice. I wanted to talk about it here because the subtitling is so brilliantly done. The positioning of the subtitles mean that you can focus on the hands and expression of the sign language. It would have been so easy to leave the subtitles down at the bottom of the page and the face and hands of the performers would have become secondary. But it is the subtlety of movement of the type that is genius. It makes me wonder if the movement was hard to animate, and it certainly makes the text slightly less legible at times, but it keeps the text so tightly tied to the energy and passion of the performers that, without a doubt, it adds to the allure of this film.
I can only find the trailer viewable online, but I think there is enough to see what I’m trying to describe.
The effort and style with which the subtitles have been provided for me (as a non-signer) makes me more determined that we should be making more effort with subtitles in return for the deaf community. And that is the very least that the performers are hoping for in their imaginings for the future.
THE FERROVORES
Film-maker/poet: Ian Gibbins
Australia
I’m generally not a fan of landscape footage in which there is blowing wind, the waving of a blade of grass, the tremble of a spider’s web, or a shaft of light. It is an almost immediate turn-off because it is often the bearer of a slow, ponderous film that just isn’t my cup of tea. But in this film by Ian Gibbins, the treatment of the typography turns this around for me. It has some pace and doom about the lettering that is compelling, and juxtaposes well with the footage. The coding text and the text of the poem work well together and add to the interest and feel of the film. More about the subject of the film in Dave Bonta’s review.
ODE ALL’ANSIA / ODE TO ANXIETY
Film-maker/poet: Milena Tipaldo
Italy
This animation has a great handling of modernist typography, very much in the mode of Jan Tschichold and his manifesto Die Neue Typografie (The New Typography), first published in 1928. A fantastic example of how inspiration can be taken from printed graphic design and manipulated in a film. It is tricky to read in English because one wants to follow the delicious animation and design of the primary Italian text, but not a bad typographic solution to a duo-lingual film.
PLASTICPOEMS
Film-makers: Fiona Tinwei Lam, Nhat Truong
Poem: Fiona Tinwei Lam
Canada
Spirals always have allure for me in whatever medium … ancient stone carving, graphic design, clothes or furniture. So I was always going to be drawn to this film. The spiral animation of swirling plastic makes a very effective concrete poem. The film is described as two concrete poems, and there is a distinct shift from the spiral to a floating sea of broken apart plastic. The typography of the spiral is great. The font choice feels like a ubiquitous, dull text font – as such, it is perfect to depict the plastic problem. But it also feels just a bit different to a default, so perhaps it is very carefully chosen. What makes the typography great is the tacky choice of colours and font outlining. It feels like horrible plastic that is swirling in water. And those fine serifs? … They are going to break off and be micro-plastics all too soon.
However, I wanted the second poem to be the breaking apart of the first one and follow on the story. It is that conceptually. But typographically I’m confused and disappointed. The colour is lost but maybe that is fading and degradation over the inordinate time it takes the plastic to break-up? Perhaps the colour should have been tints? The main problem for me though, is that the case changes. What was all capitals has become lower case. The one thing hard plastic isn’t likely to do is to morph into a whole other shape. If the second poem is a whole other thing, then why put them as a pair?
NEW ARCTIC
Film-maker/poet: Allain Daigle
USA
This is a very powerful film, in the strength of the film footage and in the subject matter. But the typography supports it all the way. I think the font choice is excellent, and the positioning of the text relates to the images is superb. The poem is in the text only, not the audio, and this film is exemplary for this approach.
SEED
Film-maker: David C. Montgomery
Poet: Asim Khan
UK
This film is extremely simple typographically – four letters in the four corners of the screen. But the simplicity has been beautifully done and as the letters change and the words they spell change, the film becomes a frenetic but alluring race for the brain to keep up. I’m not sure what the message of this film might be but I’m compelled to keep watching to try to decide.
Ecopoetry Films & Subjectivity is the title of a group discussion to be given by Ian Gibbins (Australia), Mary McDonald (Canada) and Sarah Tremlett (UK), as part of this year’s REELpoetry, a festival for videopoetry in Houston, USA.
These highly esteemed artists and thinkers will be discussing approaches to making poetry films in relation to the theme of ecopoetry and subjectivity. The full discussion will be streamed at REELpoetry on Sunday 26 February at 6:30-7:15pm (Houston time). The full festival program and more information is here.
The trailer:
It’s that time again!
In 2023, the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival is inviting entries for the International Poetry Film Competition! Eligible for entry are short films, based on poems of no more than 15 minutes duration, produced in or after 2022. All languages are allowed. The competition winners will be awarded prize money. A program committee will select films for the International Competition and for all other festival programs. The winning films will be chosen by a jury composed of representatives from the worlds of poetry, film, and media.
Closing date for entries: 1 June 2023 (postmark date)
If you have any questions, please contact: zebra@haus-fuer-poesie.org
For submission, please use the FilmFreeway portal: ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival – FilmFreeway
Visit FilmFreeway also for the full guidelines.
One month ago, we invited submissions
for a screening of haibun poetry films at the biennial Haiku North America conference, to be held in Cincinnati, Ohio from June 28-July 2, 2023. Moving Poems is an official co-sponsor, and we’ll be the ones selecting the films. Winning films will be screened at the conference and published at Moving Poems.
We required filmmakers to use one of our provided texts, among other quite specific guidelines on FilmFreeway… which have been completely ignored by hundreds of filmmakers from around the world, much to my chagrin. I may have something to say about FilmFreeway’s appalling spam submissions problem later, but today I’d like to emphasize the bright side: So far we’ve gotten two strong submissions that follow the guidelines, and I’m grateful to both filmmakers. We just need a few more. Check out these haibun (password: haibun) and tell me there aren’t a ton of great potential films here! The deadline is March 15.
A most rewarding part of sharing videos at Moving Poems is finding a film-maker or poet who has never been published on our site. Sound of the footsteps of water spoke to me while searching the #poetryfilm tag at Vimeo.
The beautiful and mystical poem from 1964 is by Iranian writer and artist Sohrab Sepehri (1928-1980).
Well-versed in Buddhism, mysticism, and Western traditions, he blended the Eastern concepts with Western techniques, thereby creating a kind of poetry unprecedented in the history of Persian literature. (Wikipedia)
The English translation in the film’s subtitles can be read on the page in the Vimeo summary. It is a selection from a much longer poem. A different translation in entirety is here.
This delicate film and its subtle music are by French media artist Carine Iriarte, and gently voiced in Farsi by Mossi Hashemi.
Carine Iriarte has also made a companion video to this one, a part two, from another section of Sohrab Sepehri’s poem.