A 2018 film animated and directed by Afroditi Bitzouni with music and sound design by Kyriakos Charalampides and Giuliano Anzani, featuring the voice of the Greek poet Miltos Sachtouris (1919-2005) and an English translation by Danai Daska in subtitles. Here’s Bitzouni’s description:
Θρήνος (Lament) is a short animated film based on the poem, that was crafted by Miltos Sachtouris and was included in the collection ΣΦΡΑΓΙΔΑ ή Η ΟΓΔΟΗ ΣΕΛΗΝΗ.
This short animated piece aspires to narrate a transition from the present world to a better one. The story line includes incidents that are strongly related to war and lead to the end of the present; recreating a future imaginary world. That way, we emphasize on the diachronic character of the poem.
The visual part is composed of an illustrated sequence inspired by the poem and crafted with textures from books and old images. Words are translated into characters and abstract environments floating into blank or vivid colors, reflecting the poem’s rhythm and creating a storyline. The various materials are connected through motion events that separate the poem in two main sections; the section referring to the present and the one referring to the future.
The sound is composed using recordings of flute, foley and analog synthesizers that were later digitally processed. Through this method we attempt to provide a backbone to the poet’s narration, amplifying the textural motion of the video.
Aiming to combine the existed material with alternative and contemporary mediums, we invite the audience to preserve and experience the poem through multiple senses.
Θρήνος/Lament (click through and scroll down for the text of the poem in Greek and English)
Perhaps the most longstanding case of existing poetry being used as the basis for a game is Hyakunin Isshu Karuta, a competitive Japanese card game in which players match the different parts of poems from the Hyakunin Isshu haiku anthology. The actions of the players here embody the principle of “two worlds in one breath”, which some have argued is central to haiku.
But with the plethora of digital game-making tools now available to poets, as well as the enduring literary penchant for modernising classical texts – see Alice Oswald’s Memorial (2011), or Simon Armitage’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2000) – it’s likely that we’ll begin to see more efforts to convert classical poems into video games.
One example is Dante’s Inferno (2010) by Visceral Games. This third-person adventure re-imagines Dante’s circles of hell as battle arenas, honouring some of the poem’s more memorable imagery, such as “the infernal hurricane that never rests”. Inevitably, though, in the case of violent action games, it’s the narrative arc of the story which is the focus.
On the more experimental end, Gotta Eat the Plums! with William Carlos Williams by Calum Rodger remakes Williams’ poem This Is Just To Say (1934) as a miniature role playing game for the Game Boy. The original poem can be interpreted as concerned with the everyday perversity of human desires, about which we are simultaneously apologetic and boastful (plums, like all juicy fruit, being symbolically linked to forbidden knowledge and sex).
But Rodger adds subtle commentary to this symbolism. He gives the player the option to refrain from eating the plums three times, using up their willpower gauge until they are eventually compelled to consume them.
In a Minute There is Time (2023) by Aster Fialla, meanwhile, is a short text-based game using T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915) as its springboard. It plays specifically on the theme of time, forcing the player down various avenues using a countdown timer. This puts them physically in the position of Prufrock, who is haunted and vexed by the inevitability of death.
Read the rest. Discussing the Rimbaud video, he says:
This attempt uses a flaming tropical jungle, replete with machine guns and exploding barrels, as a metaphysical representation of Rimbaud’s psychological turmoil, with the player battling toward self-understanding. It ran aground, however, due to the difficulty of following the poem alongside the colourful action sequences.
Video game adaptations of poems are not impossible. They do, however, need to leave space for readers to engage with the specific effects of language.
Experimenting further, I found the video game genres which admit the presence of poetry most readily are those which require careful calibration and thoughtful probing from the player. For example, puzzle games, story-rich role playing games, games of exploration and visual novels. Where the two mediums can be integrated, there is great potential for a doubling up of their powers – video games’ ability to draw us into alternative worlds and poetry’s propensity to speak lasting truths.
Book Cover for PoemFilm Edition’s new anthology. Cover image features the painting, “Huapango Torero,” by Ana Segovia.
The book is a multimedia, bilingual collection of poems accompanied by QR codes linking to streaming videopoems. Acclaimed poetry filmmaker Csilla Toldy also contributed her expertise to the project as co-director of Poem Film Editions. Featuring the work of 22 poets and filmmakers, these texts and films are mostly inspired by the painting, “Huapango Torero” by contemporary nonbinary Mexican artist Ana Segovia. The book is the first release from PoemFilm Editions, Tremlett’s new publishing platform dedicated to the art of poetry film. Additionally, a Spanish edition of the book (with additional text) is coming out in November, published by Chamán Ediciones, and will be launched at the upcoming MALDITO Videopoetry Festival in Albacete.
Film still from Meriel Lland, “A Love Spell Cast in Petals/Un hechizo de amor hecho con pétalos,” winner of the Frame to Frames II Ekphrastic Poetry Prize (2023)
Tremlett’s Frame to Frames II call for ekphrastic poetryfilms was part of a curated program for the 2023 FOTOGENIA Film Poetry & Divergent Narratives Festival in Mexico City. It was an invitation for the creation of new videopoems with Segovia’s painting serving as the point of inspiration. The painting, vivid in color and emotional tone, is a response to the gendered politics of machismo and the animal welfare concerns of bullfighting practices. Since FOTOGENIA, the collection of videopoems has been traveling the festival circuit, with selections screening at the 9th Weimar Poetry Filmtage in April 2024 and REELpoetry 2023.
There is also a bilingual documentary (made for REELpoetry 2024) on the making of the Frame to Frames II project with five of the videopoem artists. The doc is available for viewing here: https://vimeo.com/929116208.
What makes this collection so unique, besides the QR code-based format, is its emphasis on the ekphrastic videopoem. According to the Poetry Foundation, ekphrasis translates to “description” in Greek. Ekphrastic poetry embodies the “imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the ‘action’ of a painting or sculpture… the poet may amplify and expand its meaning” (322). The videopoems featured in Frame to Frames : Your Eyes Follow II/Cuadro a Cuadros : Tus Ojos Siguen II (ekphrastic poetry + films/cine + poesía ecfrástica) do just that. Just as Ana Segovia’s painting, “Huapango Torero,” serves as a filmmaker’s portal for new meanings, this anthology is likewise a portal as the reader is encouraged to move seamlessly between the page and streaming online content via QR codes. Not only is this collection truly innovative and collaborative in spirit, taken as a whole, the book reaffirms the contemporary relevance and ever-evolving nature of the ekphrastic as creative incitement and provocation. And while a curated program for a poetry film fest might be ephemeral or inaccessible for those not in attendance, this anthology brings the poetry film festival directly to the reader in a way that hasn’t quite been done before. The Spanish translations by Camilo Bosso also allow for transnational and transcultural dialogues between artists, poets, and filmmakers.
Although this new anthology is a testament to the collaborative spirit that has become the hallmark of the videopoetry community, the project was ultimately spearheaded by poet, filmmaker, and videopoem theorist Sarah Tremlett. Sarah is quite active in the contemporary poetry filmmaking world, known widely for her organization and online platform Liberated Words CIC. Described by Karina Karaeva as a “visual philosopher,” Sarah’s original videopoems have taken top honors at poetry film festivals around the world, and she has also served as jury member and judge for such festivals as REELpoetry and LYRA, among others. She is the author of the seminal study, The Poetics of Poetry Film: Film Poetry, Videopoetry, Lyric Voice, Reflection (2021, Intellect: University of Chicago Press), which includes the voices of over 40 contributors. Described as an encyclopedic and rigorous investigation of the genre, the book is a one-of-a-kind exploration of videopoetry’s formal characteristics framed by the lyric voice. I recently had the opportunity to exchange some thoughts on ekphrastic videopoetry and the new anthology with Sarah, which are excerpted below. Segments of the following interview draw from her scholarship in ThePoetics of Poetry Film as well as her own creative process and years of poetry filmmaking experience.
Collage of film stills from Frame to Frames: Your Eyes Follow II
PK: Do you consider the ekphrastic poetryfilms featured in the new anthology to be adaptations of Segovia’s painting? Or are they something more? Why or why not?
ST: Before focusing specifically on ekphrastic poetry films, in their construction, poetry films can exhibit many types of (often app-based) adaptation: where still photographs become animated or coloured and layered with other photographs; a musical score that is remixed; a poem where the lines are altered to fit the film; a montage of many sources combined to create a single film; a drawing that is layered into another time and place. You could argue poetry film is adaptation. Others take a postmodernist stance arguing that all is intertextual, a continuous flow of material reinventing itself.
Ekphrasis itself can be argued to be happening in many poetry films themselves. Every filmmaker who selects a poem by a poet to develop it in their own way can probably be considered to be committing ‘reverse ekphrasis’, though often not deliberately.
The importance of the relationship between the original artist and their respondee in the ekphrastic work sets it apart from other types of adaptation. The central point is that the second artwork is a reply that implies co-existence of perspectives (however abstracted) and also if reimagining, rather than directly representing, extends the original to create a ‘between’ space with its own characteristics. As I write this, I am reminded of the reverse ekphrastic response a filmmaker might make to a poem by another poet, too. Meriel Lland, filmmaker of the winning Frame to Frames film A Love Spell Cast in Petals, also emphasised how she had thoroughly researched the subject, and she felt she was in dialogue with the artist through her response, and I think this is something that is important to remember.
Film still from, “Self Portrait with a Line from Lorca/Autorretrato con una cita de Lorca,” by Janet Lees (filmmaker), based on a poem by Lois P. Jones & Elena K. Byrne
PK: In The Poetics of Poetry Film, you write, “Quite often the poetry film is realized as it is written: poem, then film, with soundscape design completing the picture; but of course, life is rarely this compartmentalized” (40). How does the ekphrastic encourage the liberation from compartmentalization within the creative process? And what are some of the ways in which the poetryfilms in the new anthology “resist the representational” or embody the “the brilliance of intensional, unique symbols” (5)?
ST: I am not sure that I can definitively answer it does, but here are some thoughts. It was you, Patricia, who noted that you wouldn’t have made your ekphrastic poetry film without this ekphrastic prompt and maybe counter intuitively, that is one way to create liberation from a particular personal approach. Since you are also an auteur poetry filmmaker, standing outside your comfort zone and eliciting something unknown from inside could be really important for you to develop your practice
As mentioned, the ekphrastic poem is somehow (to varying degrees) a ‘co-existence of perspectives’ (Cunningham, 2011). If you are a poet who usually collaborates with the same filmmaker, the terms have altered. The original context, voice and subject matter of the source artist have firstly entered the thought processes of the poet, and secondly cannot help but suggest a different type of dialogue between poet and filmmaker, maybe as if a third voice is present, an inclusion of ‘other’? Ultimately, the source artist has to be taken care of in some way, accorded a position, directly or indirectly; by reference or inference. There is also the aspect of the different types of source that might liberate new approaches and thinking: whilst many worked to paintings, Martin Sercombe with poet Thom Conroy chose an AI artwork and Javier Robledo an Argentinian visual poem. So, yes, actually I do think ekphrasis does liberate the artist from a standard practice into unknown territories.
The festival painting (Huapango Torero by non-binary Mexican artist Ana Segovia) is wholly representational, and was selected by over half the artists in the book. This painting where a boy holds a flower up to a bull, is a call to end animal cruelty, machismo and bullfighting. It revises an original work where boys used to go into bulls’ fields at night to practice bullfighting. The highly political subject of animal cruelty though, on the one hand encouraged the visual depiction of animals – the bull – but on the other, an unwillingness to show the gory details, the actual killing, the bloodshed. Filmmakers chose different ways to negotiate this.
Film still from “Sensurious/Sensoriales” by Ian Gibbins (poet/filmmaker) featuring drawings by Judy Morris
In It Ain’t Wot it Seems, Penny Florence adapted direct images from Segovia’s painting that became layered with each other, alongside the bilingual, moving text of the visual poem (also a visual poem on the page).
The winning film, A Love Spell Cast in Petals, by Meriel Lland was many layered and directly representational, including images of bulls, a carving of a bull, and a powerful poem that confronts the subject with depth and emotional strength; a call for change – an end to cruelty to animals.
Janet Lees found the painting too complex to work to, and so based her film on the extraordinary poem ‘Self Portrait with a Line from Lorca’ by Elena K. Byrne and Lois P. Jones which was based on the painting Huapango Torero. Whilst she included some images of toreadors, the main subject matter was a Mexican dancer in slow motion, which the poets viewed as a feminist parallel in rhythm to the toreador’s movements with his cape. This revisioning can be seen as a filmic intensional undoing of the performative machismo of death and killing through celebratory joy and the feminine.
Film still from “Huapango Torero” by Beate Gördes
In Huapango Torero, Jack Cochran and Pamela Falkenberg created an ekphrastic animation of Segovia’s work… as they say “in an intertextual way.” Ideas flow and reinvent each other, a poem is influenced by another poem, and a song, or Ana Segovia’s paintings reappear in different locations and guises in the narrative.
In A New History, your film, Patricia, is about ending cruel stereotypes and a new beginning towards animal-human relationships. You talk to the boy in the painting; and the really meaningful and beautiful line ‘as the hoof takes the hand to show us all another way’ ending with ‘not every dance must end in death … a new history awakens.’ Here the painting is visible in your poem but not in the film at all. It is a reverse ekphrastic transfer via text alone.
Beate Gördes based her images directly on the bull but there was no verbal poem at all.
In Crystal Flower Carlos Ramirez Kobra from Mexico made a film that included images of bulls but associated the poem with the death of his mother and her village home.
Film still from “Night is Paper/La noche es papel,” by Martin Sercombe (filmmaker, poet) and Thom Conroy (poet)
Alejandro Thornton from Argentina focused on the title Huapango Torero and filmed a dancer’s bare feet stamping out the Huapango dance, whilst the words Resist / Exist appear in coloured smoke, but no bull in sight.
My own performative poetry film includes a mime artist who is both man and bull at one and the same time, to show how little difference there is between us, and how if you taunt a man he will react just the same as a bull. The mime artist was made up with a curly moustache (echoing bull’s horns) and accompanied by silhouettes of the shapes they made in performing, which appear bull-like. The poem is an Italian sonnet in two halves; in the first the man is full of his own importance, and in the second half this is dissolved by the arrival of a fly. The Spanish voiceover and the music tell the narrative very clearly, of the fate of the bull, but we don’t actually see one at all.
Film still from “Bull/Toro” by Sarah Tremlett
Finn Harvor was inspired by Huapango Torero but only in terms of an association between the hot summers in both Mexico and Korea. His film focused on the South Korean landscape and the sun, without referencing the narrative in the painting at all.
Of the artists who chose their own artwork, some were directly representational as in Colm Scully’s Interior Group Portrait of the Penrose Family which was exactly that, and the poem affords a deeper look into their lives through touching on actual events; or Tova Beck Friedman’s The Fall of Lilith painted by the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Collier, where Beck-Friedman examines with a feminist critique a deeply patriarchal approach to narrative
Ian Gibbins responded to Judy Morris’ illustrations of plants, where, after each Latin name of a plant a stream of consciousness description erupts that expands across numerous associations, and I feel is truly intensional.
Csilla Toldy’s poem ‘This Yard’ was a response to another poet and their poem, as she says in a double ekphrastic process.
PK: You have asserted that “Poetry film-making is largely attuned to and in a philosophical dialogue with the world” (323) and can “create radical change for humanity and the planet” (322). How does this new anthology contribute to that philosophical dialogue or create change?
ST: In general, since the rise of digital media and the Internet, the chance for different voices to speak out has emerged, through genres such as poetry film. And these voices have only grown, year by year. Unfortunately for the planet, the environment has become a central issue, and the poetry film community worldwide is voicing its distress. For me, organizing poetry film events and or publishing books means I can share these voices, and particularly encourage a diverse lens.
Collage of film stills from Frame to Frames: Your Eyes Follow II
PK: What were some of the unique challenges or revelations that arose during the completion of this first publication from PoemFilm Imprints?
ST: I knew that asking artists to create work that tries to offer ideas for political change would be difficult, especially coming from left field, but I feel that the responses were extraordinary, brave and memorable. The question is – how to create an artwork that speaks to us both politically but also creatively, reflectively and aesthetically without making us turn away, or reject the work for other reasons, too. Every artist in this collection achieved that very difficult double act, and I applaud everyone who took part.
I have worked in publishing on and off for many years, so I knew what I had to do in terms of production, editing, proofreading, paper selection etc. etc., and I have been curating poetry film screenings since 2012, so in general not many areas were a surprise. However, I specifically wanted it to be bilingual, to include Spanish readers, and to show the comparative musicality – euphonious or sonic patterning – rhythm, syntax etc. between the two languages. I am learning Spanish, and I had worked with translator Camilo Bosso before, and through him I discovered a lot about the language and honing the exact translations in the process. This was time-consuming but has been richly rewarding!
Maybe the biggest revelation is that although I kept thinking it was taking too long to produce, since I had announced it in December in Mexico, the fact that it only took six months, for a 116-page, bilingual anthology with links to films was amazing. If you look at academic publishers and their long schedules I feel really pleased about that.
Csilla Toldy, my co-director also has been very helpful and given great publishing advice and a second pair of eyes, which are really needed at the start of a company.
In terms of the aims of Poem Film editions, it was also essential to source an environmentally aware printer, (for the book and even bookmark); it is important to me that the books follow through in my eco credentials, and environmental beliefs.
Film still from “Crystal Flower/Flor de cristal” by Carlos Ramírez Kobra
What has also been wonderful is the reception it has had, both from contributors and readers. It is especially gratifying to hear praise first hand, as I travel around on my tour presenting the book: so far FOTOGENIA (Mexico city), REELpoetry (Houston online), Weimar (Germany), and Leeds Trinity ekphrastic symposium (UK). However, I really would like more of the contributors to come along, although many aren’t in the UK. The next one is at Bristol Literary Film Festival on October 27th.
PK: Is there anything else you’d like to share about ekphrastic videopoetry, your own creative process, or any other comments or contributions by filmmakers featured in the book?
ST: In terms of my own practice, I personally have worked with ekphrastic poetry films before, as in Villanelle for Elizabeth not Ophelia (based on the painting Ophelia by Dante Gabriel Rossetti) which takes a feminist stance against the position of the model and abuse of power, and there are others that are upcoming. My latest film Flight which is from the commissioned poetry (with images) collection The Unexhibited, due later this year, includes some fragments of my early Neo-Expressionist paintings, alongside those of the Cornish painter Peter Lanyon. The film centres on drone footage of the coast of Cornwall, and this is also a reference to Lanyon who in his later years flew a glider and made glider paintings (actually dying from a gliding accident). It also includes a reference to an ekphrastic poem I wrote ‘The (Last) Green Mile’ (based on one of his other works) in Transitional anthology by the Otter Gallery workshops, Chichester University, 2017.
Film still from “After Huapango Torero/Según el caudro Huapango Torero” by Finn Harvor
I would finally like to add something of the reality of the working process of Bull, my own poetry film response to Huapango Torero which gives an insight into a dramatic, scripted (though without dialogue) performative poetry film. I conceived the narrative and concept (and lighting), which was interpreted by my daughter Hatti aka XaiLA who is a performance and makeup/ special effects artist in LA. My other daughter Georgie directed onsite, with a script (sent by WhatsApp) by myself. Hatti has never taken on this role before, and together they interpreted what I wanted and then some, as there was the added factor of a subtle, strangely dark humour brought to the performance. It was also determined by the clothes and makeup and the small space to film in (a small studio apartment), which in some ways also added to the sense of being trapped, whilst feeling like an experimental, cabaret-style venue. I found the Spanish band Lapso Producciones whose evocative, bitter-sweet cabaret-style music fitted both parts of the Italian sonnet structure and the Spanish voiceover artist Helena Amado brought a subtle sense of delightful irony to the narrative to complete the picture. I think this film shows how each person, each creative practitioner contributed an important part of the final result.
Film still from “Huapango Torero” by Jack Cochran and Pamela Falkenberg
All the contributors have been wonderful, and supportive and view it as a unique and timely project that they are proud to be part of, so I can’t really ask for more than that. It was a leap of faith, a leap in the dark and I really had no idea that it would achieve what it has, when I think back to last summer when I began requesting films. At that stage a book hadn’t even been thought of. Looking back, I think it was the quality of the films and the poetry that inspired me to expand the concept from a prize and screening to an intermedial project. I have been told it is a first in the field and if so, I am extremely happy!
As Janet Lees mentioned in the video documentary on Frame to Frames, in poetry films the poem often passes you by, but here you can stop and pause and go back to the poems and read them in either language at your leisure. So, there is not only the comparison between the painting and films but also the comparison between the poems on the page in English and Spanish and also the poems as they appear in the films.
What I would like to say is that this project is also very different in that the ‘book’ is more than simply a book. It is a central hub with bilingual poems and explanatory synopses, and the poetry films are extensions of that, if you like, via QR link. It affords a different type of (varying chronologies) audience experience for the reader/viewer.
PK: Do you plan on organizing additional ekphrastic videopoem series in the future?
ST: You ask about more Frame to Frames events. Readers of Moving Poems can always submit ekphrastic poetry films to me. I will build a collection and it could serve for the next edition which will be down the line.
For press, further details regarding readings and screenings, or if you wish to submit ekphrastic poetry films for future events see poemfilmeditions@gmail.com.
the last singing descendants of a burning world the first heirs of a new
So often, the poems most effective at making a political statement are not overtly political at all. Here’s a 2019 animation by Suzie Hanna, an Emerita Professor of Animation at Norwich University of the Arts whose “current personal focus in research and practice is poetry animation made in collaboration,” according to her website. I found a good micro-review on the Palestine Cinema website:
How can we witness a world in which the moon and the drone hang in the same sky? What can the evolution of dinosaur into bird tell us about human survival? In “water for canaries”, award-winning Toronto poet Doyali Islam contemplates an Associated Press photograph taken during a ceasefire within the July 2014 bombing of Beit Hanoun. Islam’s poem acts as solemn witness but also achieves a moment of lift-off in which Palestinians reveal their extraordinary courage, resilience, and mercy. UK animator Suzie Hanna has collaborated to create a short poetry film using hand-cut stencils and paint to emphasize the chaotic atmosphere and to celebrate the fragility of life amid destruction. doyali-islam.com & suziehanna.com
The poem “water for canaries” is from Doyali Islam’s 2019 poetry book, heft, published by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada.
Here’s the link to heft. Doyali Islam’s website seems to be offline, but here’s a good bio. “Water for Canaries” wasn’t the only poem from heft to get adapted into a poetry film; “Letter” had three different adaptations for the online Visible Poetry Project in 2019, including one by Moving Poems’ own Jane Glennie: see here. And we’ve shared a number of Suzie Hanna’s animations over the years.
This month, American writer and poetry film artist Matt Mullins released a new author-made video poem on his Vimeo channel, titled “scrambled transmission #3.” It’s the most recent work from Mullins, who took second place at this year’s Filmetry 24: The Poetics of Cinema with his film, “Janet Leigh is Afraid of Jazz,” which is based on a poem by Marsha de la O and was previously profiled by Moving Poems.
“scrambled transmission #3” leads with an interesting soundscape, one which reflects the poem’s title, by way of a fuzzy, mechanical, radio-out-of-tune loop. It pairs well with the black and white found footage. The film’s opening image highlights a compelling fusion of insect and machine, and its following frames continue riffing on this same visual theme, which often make use of repetition. This piece also uses intertitles, so between the footage and its filter and the text on screen, “scrambled transmission #3” makes direct connections with the silent film era.
Film Still: “scrambled transmission #3”
The poem itself, voice-overed by Mullins, evokes something of Hunter S. Thompson in its themes and tone: a third-person narrative in fragments highlighting mundane acts of violence and estrangement on a “typical atypical day,” mind-altering substances, memory, and American underground art subculture. Overall, the links between the insect world and the human psyche are made quite clear through the poem’s intertitles, voice-over, and found footage. I also thought that the delivery of the poem, particularly its cadence and sense of addled urgency, vaguely recalled the Beat Poets.
As for the filmmaker himself, Mullins’ description of his latest poetry film is refreshingly simple, as he writes: “Some things, one hopes, are self-explanatory.”