Posts By Dave Bonta
Here by Philip Larkin
Last week’s Larkin centenary surfaced this fine poetry film from 2010, directed by Dave Lee with voiceover by Sir Tom Courtney. David Stubbins was the cinematographer, Andrew Olsson the editor and Louise Bennett the composer. The YouTube description:
‘Here’ is a contemporary cinematic interpretation of Philip Larkin’s poem of the same name, which depicts a journey east “from rich industrial shadows” through an initially bleak but increasingly fecund rural landscape and on to a large and bustling town, whose inhabitants (and their lives) are brought into sharp focus in uncompromising but affectionately honest terms before the journey continues eastwards beyond the town, to where “Ends the land suddenly” in an ethereal and unattainable “unfenced existence”.
The film has been nominated for awards at:
RTS Awards 2010
Holmfirth Film Festival 2010
Hull Short Film Festival 2010
Cambridge Strawberry Shorts 2011
Call for work: REELpoetry/HoustonTX 2023
REELpoetry/HoustonTX 2023 is accepting submissions on FilmFreeway.
POETRY combined with film and video propels “REELpoetry/HoustonTX” 2023, an international, curated, hybrid poetry film festival taking place online and in person FEBRUARY 24-26, 2023 We explore this genre with poets, videograpers and filmmakers working solo or collaboratively, on a cell phone or in a studio, with new or remixed or previously created work. We’re inviting open submissions, and also featuring screenings from invited guest curators, deaf poetry, films about poets or a particular poem, as well as Q&A with poets, videographers and filmmakers, networking, live readings, panel discussions, and more.
This year’s poetry film/ video festival is not themed. Everyone is invited to submit their best work, created in the past or the present, up to a maximum of 6 minutes. Prizes will be awarded in two categories: poetry film/ videos under 4 minutes and poetry film/ video 4 to 6 minutes. See Guidelines for additional details.
REELpoetry/HoustonTX is a project of Public Poetry (publicpoetry.net).
Public Poetry director Fran Sanders elaborated in an email:
In 2023, in addition to juried open submissions, programs by curators/presenters, trio talks on craft and a panel discussion, we will be significantly expanding our offerings for the deaf and hard of hearing, with ASL poets and poetry and English/ASL interpreters so it is accessible to everyone. We have an outstanding all-deaf committee doing the programming, including Peter Cook, Sabina England, Crom Saunders among others.
Given the way the world is, I don’t feel comfortable asking people to travel to Houston if they live any distance away, so the 2023 Festival will be largely online. However, there will be multiple opportunities for interaction on Zoom in real time each day of the festival. For local audiences here will be some in-person events that feature Houston and Texas makers. Everything will be streamed to accommodate international time zones.
Huge kudos to the organizers for taking accessibility so seriously, and best of luck to everyone who enters. Visit FilmFreeway for complete rules and guidelines.
The More Loving One by W. H. Auden
Auden’s poem animated by Taiwanese filmmaker Liang-Hsin Huang for The Universe in Verse, “A project by Maria Popova in partnership with On Being“. Here’s Popova’s post introducing the new video. A snippet:
In what may be the single most poignant one-word alteration in the history of our species, [Auden] changed the final line of the penultimate stanza to reflect his war-annealed recognition that entropy dominates all. The original version read: “We must love one another or die” — an impassioned plea for compassion as a moral imperative, the withholding of which assures the destruction of life. But the plea had gone unanswered and eighty million lives had gone unsaved. Auden came to feel that his reach for poetic truth had been rendered “a damned lie,” later lamenting that however our ideals and idealisms may play out, “we must die anyway.”
A decade of disquiet after the end of the war, he changed the line to read: “We must love one another and die.”
The reading is by Janna Levin, and Garth Stevenson composed the music.
Աշնանացան / Autumn Sowing by Anahit Hayrapetyan
Let me turn into a song and spread in your wilderness
Let me turn into a ray of sun and by diffused in your light
Let me turn into a seed and sprout in your fields…
Moving Poems’ first film from Armenia is part videopoem, part documentary of an installation. Poet Anahit Hayrapetyan‘s lines are first shown on screen then incorporated line by line as white flags planted in a scarified landscape of furrowed fields and eroded pastureland, making a powerful statement about how land is claimed and occupied. Only in the final words is the poem’s political agenda revealed: “beloved Artsakh.”
Both installation and film are credited to Maïda Chavak and Naïri Khatchadourian, with Narek Harutyunyan as cinematographer, typography by Sargis Antonian and editing by Nina Khachatryan. The music was composed by Miqayel Voskanyan with Rafik Avagyan on blul (a type of flute). Together, they call themselves the AHA Collective. Autumn Sowing is the third part of a triptych called Hanging Garden, and is probably best seen in that context, as part of an exhibition including “objects of memory, traces of an act of emergency, historical sources of a heritage site with a status left hanging.”
[T]here is an urge to reinvent how mankind inhabits territory and heritage and what new forms can be taken by one’s sense of belonging to one’s land and language. The third space showcases such a short film and an educational program for all to practice the art of typography through wooden stamps, to write by hand to inscribe a permanent imprint.
What Day, from “West: A Translation” by Paisley Rekdal
Salt Lake City-based filmmaker Jennilyn Merten collaborated with Utah’s former poet laureate, Paisely Rekdal, on an online video installation for Rekdal’s cycle of poems West: A Translation,
a linked collection of poems that respond to a Chinese elegy carved into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station where Chinese migrants to the United States were detained. “West” translates this elegy character by character through the lens of Chinese and other transcontinental railroad workers’ histories, and through the railroad’s cultural impact on America.
West connects the completion of the transcontinental railroad with another significant American historical event: the Chinese Exclusion Act, which passed thirteen years after the first transcontinental’s completion.
This is What Day, which was also featured at Terrain.org. It’s the one that works best as a stand-alone film, in my opinion. Rekdal also has a 20-minute video on YouTube of her reading from the collection.
West: A Translation is slated for publication in book form by Copper Canyon Press in May 2023.
Gran mosaico / Large mosaic by Juan Manuel González Zapatero
A brand new videopoem by Dutch artist Pat van Boeckel, who was in northern Spain for an installation with Karin van der Molen at EspacioArteVACA. For this videopoem, he used footage from the installation and collaborated with Spanish poet Juan Manuel González Zapatero. The text resonates with the theme of the installation; here’s what Google Translate makes of the opening paragraphs from Pat and Karin’s joint artist statement:
Can two plus two add up to five? Are there mysterious tools at our fingertips to help us change the course of the world? Can walls tell us stories?
The Dutch couple of artists formed by Karin van der Molen and Patrick van Boeckel try to liberate history and the future from its linear course with their exhibition project at EspacioArteVACA. The vernacular stables of the once self-sufficient mountain mansion located in Viniegra de Abajo invite you to create a poetic dialogue with the history of the place.
Documentary filmmaker and video artist Patrick van Boeckel breathes new life into everyday objects with subtle video interventions. Faces emerging from soapy waters or disappearing behind veils of mourning. A horse that seems to snort behind the blurry bars of his trough. Slaughter pieces that seem to rock on the sea. A wedding dress hangs in the old municipal laundry; the bride’s gloves still dripping onto the water. What will happen to him for the rest of his life? These small installations do not configure a closed history. They are simple ingredients of an amalgam with possible meanings that each visitor must compose.
There’s also a version without English subtitles. The music is by Erland Cooper.
Lac du Saint Sacrament by Marilyn McCabe
Some delicious-looking wintry images in this collaboration between videopoet Marilyn McCabe and photographer Dan Scott. It was featured last February in Atticus Review, with this artist statement:
Photographer Dan Scott and poet Marilyn McCabe are old friends who share an obsession with beautiful Lake George (once known as Lac du Saint Sacrament) in upstate New York, their old stomping ground. With this collaboration, they built on each other’s visions and creative exploration. For more on Dan’s art: https://www.danscott-photography.com/ For more on Marilyn’s poetry and video: MarilynOnaRoll.wordpress.com
Morning Walk by Joyce Sutphen
A new film from Motionpoems—the first in a couple of years—underwritten by the Center for the Art of Medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School. My elderly mother takes a morning walk every day, so Joyce Sutphen‘s poem really resonated—especially as embodied by the actor here, Debra Magid. Zack Grant directs.
The text on the front page of Motionpoems suggests that while the nonprofit organization has shut down, we can expect more occasional films like this one:
Motionpoems Inc., was a 12-year initiative known for turning contemporary poems into short films, while also producing educational programs, public installations, and events. Founded by filmmaker Angella Kassube and poet Todd Boss in 2008, and officially dissolved in 2020 after having made 150+ shorts, today Motionpoems is a project of Todd Boss Originals.
The Life Breath Songs: toward a nature poem, written by the people of Scotland
In her first project as Makar (Scotland’s national poet), Kathleen Jamie invited Scots to submit lines for a trio of crowd-sourced film-poems with a clear rewilding theme, to coincide with the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow. As filmmaker Alastair Cook explains on the project’s page at Filmpoem:
The Life Breath Songs (Òrain Beò-analach) is a three film cycle from the #PeoplesPoem project supported by the Scottish Government and driven by the Makar, Kathleen Jamie –
The Life Breath Song
The Shivering River
Are We Listening?Commissioned by the Scottish Poetry Library from Alastair Cook, the triptych is called “The Life Breath Songs – toward a nature poem, written by the people of Scotland”, and is curated and arranged by Scotland’s Makar Kathleen Jamie and read by Eilidh Cormack. The cycle was directed and edited by Alastair with sound by Luca Nasciuti and cinematography by James William Norton.
For the texts of the poems, go to the Scottish Poetry Library. From the same source, here’s a good bio of Kathleen Jamie.
