Posts By Dave Bonta
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.
dear padmarajan by Nitin Nath
Nitin Nath is the poet and performer in this musical short directed by Sumesh Lal with music rearranged and produced by Govind Menon. Like yesterday’s video, this poetry film was released as a trailer for a feature-length movie. But there’s an additional connection with the world of film here: the poem is a tribute to the great Malayalam director P. Padmarajan.
India’s first spoken word musical, ‘dear padmarajan’ is a prologue to the independent English feature film ‘Humans of Someone’, slated for release this March 2016.
‘Humans of Someone’ tells the story of a man who gets obsessed with a filmmaker whose films become inextricably entwined with his own life. WATCH THIS exclusive introduction to warm up to the neighbourhood of the film.
The prologue is our heart-sized ode to the dramatic genius of P. Padmarajan, one of the greatest storytellers we’ve ever known.
To support the film, follow facebook.com/humansofsomeone
Click through to YouTube for the unusually complete credits, which include a list of the Padmarajan films mentioned plus other references in the poem.
Not the Stars by John Dofflemyer
This videopoem is a teaser for a forthcoming feature-length poetry documentary, The West, by filmmaker, composer and video artist H. Paul Moon (Zen Violence Films). According to the Vimeo description, it
Features poem “Not the Stars” written and recited by John Dofflemyer. Music composed and performed by Josh Coffey, with Jacob Siener. Additional camera by Bradley Winegar and Shang Ik Moon.
For more on John Dofflemyer, check out the wonderful poetry and ranching blog that he maintains with his photographer wife Robbin: drycrikjournal.
Here’s how the website for The West describes the full-length film:
This is an in-progress feature documentary about Western folklife, cowboy poets, and the American frontier. Pushing boundaries of documentary style, the film complements spoken poetry with artfully devised tableaus and landscapes that visualize the narrative themes of the poems, evincing stories of hardship and perseverance in today’s ranch culture. Surrounding this, interviews with folklorists, musicians, ranchers, and the cowboy poets themselves create an educational and historical context for this exploration, forming insightful ruminations on the West: not just a place or a moment in history, but a state of mind. Among all that seriousness, the cowboy’s lighter side will manifest in live performances and profiles from famous Western musicians like Don Edwards and Ian Tyson, and comedic monologues from legends in Western folklore like Baxter Black.
Before the current post-production stage of development, things kicked off in late 2012, when renowned historian and author Michael Wallis sat for an interview to give his insights on the West, laying a foundation for the West as “not just a place, but a state of mind.” Principal photography began around the annual occasion of the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering at Elko, Nevada in January 2013, and continued at the 2014 Gathering. Icons of this culture, like Temple Grandin, Wallace McRae, Joel Nelson, John Dofflemyer, Baxter Black, Paul Zarzyski, Henry Real Bird, Amy Hale Auker, Don Edwards, The Quebe Sisters Band, Dave Stamey, Gail Steiger and many more are now in-the-can, with more footage to come. Release is planned for sometime in 2017.
In the meantime, a module from the feature-length documentary, of Joel Nelson’s reading of his poem “Equus Caballus” combined with footage from the ranch of John Dofflemyer, has been an Official Selection in the 2014 Visible Verse Film Festival at the Cinemateque in Vancouver, Canada, and in the 2015 Trail Dance Film Festival at the Chisholm Trail Heritage Center in Duncan, Oklahoma.
It sounds as if it will be an engaging and entertaining film. Moon told me in an email that he’s “heading now into concentrated post-production editing after wrapping most of the principal photography.” Visit the website to read bios of all the people involved in the production, follow news about the project, sign up for the email newsletter, and more.
Advice Dyslexic by Lisa Vihos (3)
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Last year, I shared two videos made with Lisa Vihos‘ poem “Advice Dyslexic”: one by Dale Wisely and one by Marc Neys AKA Swoon. Now Marie Craven and Nigel Wells have given us two more. Craven explained on Facebook that she and Wells had challenged each other to each make a short video out of the poem over the long holiday weekend, and both decided to use Nic S.’s voice recording in their videos.
Both of the videos take a fairly literal, illustrative approach to the text, but for once, this seems to work, I think because the poem is so playful. The videos simply build upon that playfulness, keeping things light and fast-moving.
