Posts By Dave Bonta
Melancholia by Jacob Balde
A videopoem with a decidedly neo-classical feel by German filmmaker Patrick Müller, who sets it up in the Vimeo description as follows:
MELANCHOLIA (Melancholie/Melancholy) A short silent film by Patrick Müller after the poem by German Latinist Jacob Balde (1604–1668). This film was entirely shot in Ingolstadt, Germany, where Balde was a professor of rhetoric from 1635. He was widely known as the “German Horaz”.
(Horaz = Horace.) The attention and care Müller brought to the project even extended to the credits, where he had the filming details translated into Latin — a nice touch. For more on Balde, see the Catholic Encyclopedia.
Lisp of Cloud by Leila Wilson
The Motionpoem for December is by David P. Hanson. The text is from Leila Wilson’s new collection The Hundred Grasses. The Motionpoems email newsletter quotes her reaction to the film:
I’m really pleased with the results of David’s piece—in terms of its quality of production and fullness of vision—and I’m honored that he examined and expanded my poem with such attentiveness to detail. The film captures the speaker’s dependence on her surroundings to make sense of her sensual experience, and it offers surprising visual nuance.
The unfurling of color and movement that the amaryllis provides feels necessary. Though in many ways the amaryllis serves to represent the lyrical speaker driving the poem, it feels like a surreal presence, which I quite like. I’m also really interested in the quivering soundtrack. It expresses the omnipresence of the snow and seems to hold the melt within it. Kellie Fitzgerald’s lush reading captures a longing that’s definitely present in the poem, and she gives it a force that makes me blush!
4th Sadho Poetry Film Fest will be held Dec. 11-12 in New Delhi
Asia’s premiere poetry film festival is set for next Wednesday and Thursday, running from 6:30-8:30 each evening.
We showcase films, that broadly fall into following categories:
- Poetry films – based on or inspired by a poem. Most of the films in the festival are of this genre
- Poetic films – films that are highly poetic in their cinematic construction. We include some of the finest of this vast and varied genre in our festival.
- Poetry Discourse – films that engage in a debate about the image, the word and life.
- Film on poets
I was interested to learn that the name Sadho is derived from the poetry of Kabir:
Sadho is a voluntary organization that aims at taking great ‘poetry to people’ from all walks of life, through the innovative use of arts, media and social action.
Sadho is based on the conviction that poetry should not remain confined to books and literary circles. It should reach out to all sensitive people who have an interest in other arts and issues. Towards this end, Sadho tries to create new ways of sharing, promoting and enjoying poetry.
Initiated in 2007, Sadho has set-up Asia’s first poetry films festival, has introduced sign-language poetry films to India, organised workshops on poetry, painting and cinema and created art based on poetry, including poetry souvenirs and wallpapers. IT also tries to encourage poetry among children by publishing their poems on the website and offers special screenings of poetry-films for children.
Sadho soon plans adding a new vertical to its activities – poetry albums. These would include recordings featuring some of the prominent poets from various languages.
Sadho functions as a not-for profit charitable trust supported mostly by the donations of volunteers and well-wishers. Its trustees and core team members are unpaid volunteers, and include people from various fields like literature, cinema, music, art, media and education.
Sadho, which literally means ‘O sage’, is the familiar addressee in the poetry of the great Indian saint poet Kabir. For us ‘Sadho’ is a call to all those with poetic hearts!
(Hat-tip: @ZebraFestival on Twitter)
Call for submissions: 7th biannual ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin
I’m a little late in sharing this announcement, but the 2014 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival is open for submissions:
For the seventh time, the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival is calling for entries to find the best poetry film. Entries may be short films made on the basis of poems. The total value of the prizes in the competition is € 13,000. From among the films submitted, a Programme Committee will nominate the films to be entered for the Competition and select the films for the various sections of the festival programme. The winners will be chose by an international jury.
The Festival is also inviting entries of films based on this year’s »Festival poem«, Love in the Age of the EU by Björn Kuhligk. The directors of the three best films will be invited to Berlin to meet the poet and have the opportunity to present and discuss their films. You can find the poem with a sound recording and various translations here.
Closing date for entries for all the competitions is 25 April 2014
See the complete call for entries [PDF].
The Crowning of Jesters by David Tomaloff
This appeared when Moving Poems was on hiatus this past summer, but I got to see it on the big screen at the Filmpoem Festival in August, where it was shown as an example of filmmaker-poet collaboration where the images preceded and inspired the poetic text. It’s part of a growing body of collaborations between Swoon (Marc Neys) and the American poet David Tomaloff (see his Moving Poems archive page for more). Neys blogged some rather extensive process notes in the form of a conversation with Tomaloff:
[Swoon]: Images will come from this video: http://archive.org/details/Mommartz_3_Glaser_1968
I’m doing a re-edit of that archive material and Maybe I want to add excerpts from ‘Das Kapital’ by Marx as titles. One thing missing: a poem that reflects greed, money – power, crisis, banks, the whole bubble of money driven economics that led to the different crises we had,…
Nothing literally…hints, atmosphere… Are you up for it? Let me know what you think…”
– TIME –[David]: “…As for the new prompt, I can definitely give it a shot. I’ll see if I can conjure up a draft within the next couple of days. Is that ok?”
– TIME –S: “Yes, sure. Take your time…I’m happy you want to go for it…”
– TIME –D: “So, this is a draft. It’s a little more upfront than some of the other stuff I’ve written for you, I think. That said, it’s still pretty surreal. I want to still tweak it a bit, read it aloud a few times, etc”
– TIME –S: “Yes! Yes. Fantastic title. Love the quotes.
Good imaging. The last line ‘Currency is a plot of land to which the wingless birds have marched us—on which we are sold the means to dig ourselves a more efficient kind of grave’ is spot on…
So yes, you’re definitely on to something. Tweak as you like and see fit.”
Giacometti’s Pears by Donna Vorreyer
I couldn’t resist making a video for one of Donna Vorreyer‘s poems at The Poetry Storehouse myself. “Giacometti’s Pears” was originally published in Weave magazine. I blogged about my process a bit at Via Negativa last week.
Two Elizabeth Bishop filmpoems and the art of Heather Haley
The latest installments from our two favorite monthly columnists don’t disappoint. In his “Swoon’s View” column at Awkword Paper Cut, Marc Neys considers “Two Cinematic Approaches to the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop”: “First Death in Nova Scotia” by John Scott, and “Where are the Dolls” by Cassandra Nicolaou.
The editing is thoughtful and draws the viewer inside the story (I love the jump cuts between the introvert close-ups of the woman and the loud and intimidating girls). Nicolaou did an amazing job in translating the poem to this day and age with respect and love for the original words, accenting the power of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry. And when it’s over, I want to see it again.
And in her “Third Form” column at Connotation Press, Erica Goss mixes interview with analysis for an in-depth portrait of Heather Haley, organizer of the long-running Visible Verse Festival in Vancouver and a talented filmmaker in her own right.
Heather Haley’s videos take risks. They deal with domestic violence, eating disorders, prostitution, and other serious issues that affect society. “I don’t set out to deliver a message. I don’t like being preached at and I don’t want to preach. My work comes from my experience, but it’s also universal. I don’t theorize,” Heather told me. “There’s not enough time for that.”
The Royal Oak by Benedict Newbery
An award-winning watercolor animation by Sandra Salter, with additional animation by Meg Bisineer, for a poem by Benedict Newbery (read here by Tony Fish). For additional credits, see Vimeo, which includes this description:
A local pub, despite it’s refit continues to be a bolt-hole, refuge and home to its regulars. An animated poetry film.
Channel 4 commissioned Sandra Salter and Benedict Newbery to make a film for its first Random Acts Season. The film was broadcast on Channel 4 in October 2012. The animation is based on the poem The Royal Oak which was published in Magma, and this film sees a further evolution of Newbery and Salter’s poetry film style using watercolour and transitions.
The Royal Oak won the Best Animation Audience Choice Award at the Purbeck Shorts competition at the Purbeck Film Festival held on 18 October 2013. It was described by the Festival as ‘a beautifully observed, watercolour, animated poem.’
The film was also exhibited in the 2013 Ludlow Open Rural Contemporary Art Showcase, and chosen as the opening film for the Filmpoem Festival in Dunbar, Scotland, in August 2013.
