http://vimeo.com/67852968
A Vimeo find. The description reads:
Poem by Joshua Stewart.
Video by Fraser Jones.
Scenic views by The United States of America.
http://vimeo.com/37075020
David Wharton directed this film for a poem by UK performance poet Tony Walsh, A.K.A. Longfella. Videopoetry critic Erica Goss writes,
Actor James Foster delivers an emotional punch you won’t forget: This is one of the few video poems I’ve seen that features the talents of a professional actor, and the results are striking. Foster tells the story of the devastation of divorce with his facial expressions and body language, increasing the tension with repetitions of the word, “Sometimes:” “When I’m eating it cold from a tin in the kitchen / and sometimes, when I’ve stood in a line to collect my prescription.” Watching him break apart is at once humbling and terrifying.
http://vimeo.com/67875626
This is Basho by Babak Gray, starring Yoshi Oida and Dai Tabuchi, with haiga-style illustrations by Graham High (who also, believe it or not, built the animatronics for Aliens). It’s actually one of the first things I ever posted to this site, but the original upload was taken down, so I unpublished the post. Let’s hope the film stays online this time.
The English translation of the travelogue and haiku included in the film is mostly from Sam Hamill. Here’s the description at Vimeo (minus the credits):
The legacy of Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), famous Japanese poet, is his elevation of haiku to the realm of high poetry. This film, an adaptation of Basho’s ‘Travelogue of Weather-Beaten Bones’, reveals a glimpse into an account of one of Basho’s journeys in the company of confidante and disciple, Chiri.
An interview with director, Babak Gray is available here.
My favorite quote from that interview:
It’s the lightness and ease with which [Basho] treated a subject which we would imagine could only be treated by recourse to tragedy, or something altogether darker and heavier than the language of haiku. That’s what I find so striking—and ultimately so brave. It produces an effect which is at once beautiful, noble and serene. At times more than that, the effect seems deliberately, teasingly ironic, or provocative at least, something like a koan.
That’s the effect I wanted to reproduce in this film.
But do read the whole interview. Fascinating stuff.
Nozarashi Kikô, also translated as Record of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton, was published in 1684, the first of four haibun travelogues Basho wrote (the most famous being Oku no Hosomichi — The Narrow Road to the Far North). As the Wikipedia puts it,
Traveling in medieval Japan was immensely dangerous, and at first Bashô expected to simply die in the middle of nowhere or be killed by bandits. As the trip progressed, his mood improved and he became comfortable on the road. He met many friends and grew to enjoy the changing scenery and the seasons. His poems took on a less introspective and more striking tone as he observed the world around him. […] The trip took him from Edo to Mount Fuji, Ueno, and Kyoto.
Swoon‘s latest videopoem is a testimony to the way the web can break down differences of geography and language. He writes,
If there’s one thing I really like about the internet, it got to be the possibility and speed in how we can ‘meet’ and collaborate with people everywhere.
Throught the fiber I ‘met’ Jaromír Typlt.
At a certain point we started to write about poetry and videopoems and the possibility of working together.
On his website there were English translations of some of his poems.
We decided on one of them …
The translator is David Vichnar, and the poem is dedicated to the late poet and translator Ludvík Kundera. See Swoon’s blog post for the complete text in Czech and English, as well as the rest of his process notes.
Nilson Muniz performs a work by the young Portuguese poet Ruth Ministro. Alexandre Braga directs.
Just a reminder that July 1 is a little over three weeks away. And given how quickly time tends to fly in the summer, anyone who intends to submit work for screening at the first Filmpoem Festival shouldn’t delay! Here are the guidelines [PDF]. Also, it’s not to late to make or change your vacation plans. The Filmpoem Festival will take place on August 2-4 at Dunbar Town House, Dunbar, Scotland.
(Three other poetry film festival deadlines are coming up at the end of July/beginning of August, and one on September 15, so chronic procrastinators can take heart. See the list of deadlines I posted here the other week.)
Rob Lycett made this beautiful film for a poem by the young British poet Gaia Holmes, whose work has attracted a number of filmmakers and animators in recent years. This is one of six films featured in the latest Third Form column on videopoetry at Connotation Press, a review of The Body Electric film festival. Erica Goss writes:
With an eerie precision, the mash-up of flickering images captures the awkwardness of strangers fingering other strangers’ used things. This video poem shows how public access film footage, reimagined and reassembled, can create a compelling story.
For her June “Third Form” column at Connotation Press, Erica Goss reports on the first Body Electric Poetry Film Festival. I’m continually frustrated by the paucity of reviews of poetry film festivals, so I was especially glad to get Erica’s impressions of this one (and of the city of Fort Collins, Colorado, which I’ve never visited). One thing I didn’t realize was that the festival organizer, R.W. Perkins, played a crucial role in keeping open the venue in which it was held:
A town that values culture should have an independent theater, but the Lyric Cinema was in danger of closing is doors last year. They needed a digital projector, which costs approximately $150,000, a steep price for a small business. Enter Kickstarter, with a high-energy video by R.W. Perkins. The Lyric raised the money for its projector, remaining a favorite place for movies and off-beat events (like The Body Electric).
I was also cheered to hear how well attended the festival was. Perkins obviously really knows how design and promote a popular event, even if it includes the dreaded word “poetry” in its description.
The thirty-four video poems that appeared in The Body Electric ranged from sensitive, emotional stories such as “Writer’s Block,” “The Barking Horse,” and “Husniyah” to edgy, animated videos (“Anna Blume”) to the tragically comic (“Portugal.”) Some featured exquisite, hand-made drawings (“Afterlight,” “Becoming Judas.”) I cannot emphasize enough how much these beautifully crafted videos benefit from seeing them on the big screen; for example, details of Cheryl Gross’s drawings for “Becoming Judas,” done in archival ball-point pen, are simply not visible on a tiny computer screen, and the complex layering of text, still images, photographs and rapid film clips of “The Mantis Shrimp” gain strength and power when viewed in the theater.
Read the rest of Erica’s review, which also includes examples of six of her favorite films from the festival.
Congratulations to Mark Neys, A.K.A. Swoon, for winning the sixth edition of “La parola immaginata,” the poetry-film contest associated with the Trevigliopoesia Festival in Italy, with his film Drift. It features a poem by the Irish poet Paul Perry, “For two NATO soldiers who drowned in an attempt to recover supplies from a river in the province of Badghis, Western Afghanistan, November, 2009.” As regular followers of this site know, Swoon’s videopoetry is a particular favorite around here, though honestly, all nine of the finalist films seemed deserving to me. (Thank god I wasn’t one of the judges!) With 65 films in the Moving Poems archive — and I don’t even post everything he uploads to Vimeo — Swoon is without a doubt one of the most productive filmmakers in the poetry-film world. Given that, it’s impressive that his films are also of such high quality, as the jury at Trevigliopoesia recognized.
The folks at Motionpoems, the Minnesota-based arts organization responsible for so many stunning poetry films in the last several years, are hiring a producer.
Motionpoems is seeking an ambitious, self-starting Producer to bring artist relations, project coordination, and production skills to a 12-month project, July 2013-June 2014. The Producer will manage production of a dozen new Motionpoems shorts and organize a public screening and online distribution of the films.
Click through for the full description.