~ Animation ~
Poet Nicelle Davis on motion graphics and videopoetry
In a wide-ranging interview with Nancy Chen Long for Poetry Matters, California-based poet Nicelle Davis waxes enthusiastic about the benefits of collaborating with artists, animators and filmmakers:
You’ve also done collaborations with Cheryl [Gross] and others on trailers/motion graphics for your books, including motion graphics for five poems in Becoming Judas, trailers for both Circe and your upcoming book The Circus of You, and a video poem “The First Hour of Being Buried Alive in the Walls of a Half-Built Cathedral.” The idea of video poetry and moving/motion poems is fascinating. What kind of responses have you been getting from those who “watch” your poetry? What has been the most surprising thing for you about making these?
ND: Motion Graphics are great! Great!
As the famous Shakespeare quote goes, The play’s the thing. I couldn’t agree more. The “play” of twenty-first century is the Motion Graphic; these films allow multiple artists to gather and return to their roots—to a place of performance. The Motion Graphics feel like pure art to me; they are so collaborative by nature that no one person is in control; in this way, such projects are as terrifying and exhilarating as live theatre. I feel so grateful to live in a time when artists from across the globe can virtually gather to create a very tangible performance of art, poetry, music, and dance.
The most surprising thing about making these films is how well people work together. Very serious artists are given a space to play, and they do play with diligence. This is a sort of work that adults rarely get to participate in—it approximates how, as children, we created imagined worlds together—it feels like falling in love, but without any of the complications.
I’m also surprise at how far the Motion Graphics travel: they have been shown in film festivals across the globe. My poems go places I’ve only dreamed of. I hope they are leading the way—teaching me how to be a resident of the world.
In Which I Play the Runaway by Rochelle Hurt
https://vimeo.com/101186275
An animation by Christabel Jarrold of a poem by Rochelle Hurt, with voiceover by Caitlin McMillan and sound by Tom Varrall.
Stupid Sandwich by Nathan Anderson
A poem by Nathan Anderson from Best American Poetry 2013, adapted for Motionpoems by Carolyn Figel of MPC with additional animation by Andrew Montague, voiceover by Daniel Silverman, and sound design by Michael Scott.
The Best American Poetry blog has a brief post quoting Anderson about the poem:
This poem started when a few lines (a shadowy echo of what would become the speaker’s voice) surfaced while I was working on another project. As the speaker’s voice developed and the context began to take shape, I became interested in how this particular speaker responds and, more broadly, how all of us respond, when the daily pressures of a life become seemingly unmanageable.
Visit the video’s page on Motionpoems for the text of the poem.
I see from her website that Carolyn Figel has “An ongoing personal project of illustrating delicious sandwiches I find online.” No wonder this poem caught her eye, then.
Był sobie król / Once there was a King by Janina Porazińska
The ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival has just announced the 29 nominees for its 2014 competition, and this is one of them. It’s also a Vimeo Staff Pick — testimony to the high quality of the animation and production. Tytus Majerski’s description reads:
Stop-motion mixed with CG, short film based on a polish lullaby written by Janina Porazińska. Author of original music unknown. Performed by Maria Peszek.
A home made project, which I graduated with at my film school in Poland.
It combines cut out animation and 3d set-ups.
Janina Porazińska (1888-1971) specialized in children’s poetry, fairy tales and other folkloric material. The translation used in the titling is by Magda Bryll.
Mar Belle reviewed the film for the blog No Film School:
Have you ever noticed how parents seem to delight in terrifying their children? Whether it’s old wives tales of wind changes leaving their faces contorted or the devil stealing their souls post-sneeze, there are endless ways for adults to keep children in a perpetual state of fear. However, the cruelest has to be those moments before bed, when they’ll soon to be abandoned to a long, dark night with tales of cannibal witches or bone grinding giants stalking through their heads. Depicting the tragic story of a love triangle between a king, a princess and a page, Tytus Majerski’s atmospheric adaptation of Polish writer Janina Porazińska’s lullaby Once There Was a King, is cut from the same gruesome cloth that keeps nightlight companies in business.
This World (Ten Świat) by Czeslaw Milosz
A brilliant animated poem from Zbigniew Czapla, a Polish screenwriter, director, animator, painter and graphic artist. It was recently featured on Tin House Reels, accompanied by one of their usual engaging write-ups.
Zbigniew Czapla created this week’s Tin House Reels feature, This World—a short based on the poem of the same title by Czeslaw Milosz—at the invitation of the Fundacja Pogranicze, as part of a multimedia exhibition at the Museum of Czeslaw Milosz in Krasnogruda. Czapla calls his project “a catastrophic vision and poetic perspective on human life as a set of secrets, accidents, and misunderstandings.”
[…]
“Poetry is a difficult subject for animation,” Czapla said. “It should at all costs avoid banality, infantile associations, and overwrought pathos. The text and sound work together around themes, as in jazz improvisation. Topics connect, overlap, and move away from each other in a game of associations.”
“Animated experimental film is a way for me to combine my various fascinations. Painting, music, theater and literature are like pieces of a puzzle, which I try to organize in a new way. If the end result for me is mysterious and unknown, that it is worth doing. The expected effects do not interest me. A lot of the work ends up being unsuccessful, but that always comes with artistic risk.”
The Mad Gardener’s Song by Lewis Carroll
This is The Gardener’s Dream, a terrific poetry film by the Moscow-based animator Valeriy Kozhin. It was recently featured in a post by Alison Pezanoski-Browne at Tin House Reels. As Pezanoski-Browne writes,
Kozhin’s film transforms Lewis Carroll’s poem “The Mad Gardener’s Song” into a surrealist adventure that maintains the spirit of the poet’s work and incorporates a wildness that is all Kozhin’s.
The film conveys an abstracted conceit of a logic game. Using paper cut-outs and puppets, porcelain dolls, and minuscule objects, Kozhin draws on images of childhood. Using a color palate rich in natural pigments, his work also feels like more classic animation–a mixture of Marc Davis era Disney and Jan Svankmajer, one of Valeriy’s favorite filmmakers.
“I see a new world with my eyes when I am inside a film,” Kozhin said. “I think that cinema is a young art. We have the great opportunity to make more than we can imagine in animation.”
That imagination, which seems to be equally enamored with the romantic and grotesque, has created an alluring lullaby for those boys and girls who still read under the covers after the lights have been turned off.
Click through for a bio of the filmmaker. Kozhin has also uploaded a version in Russian, Сон Садовника.
Spell Against Impermanence by Kim Addonizio
Cheryl Gross’ inimitable animations accompany Kim Addonizio’s reading.
Черный человек / The Black Man by Sergei Yesenin
Sergei Yesenin‘s poem stunningly translated into film by director Alexander Fedorov (who also contributed the voiceover, soundtrack, and some of the animation), with additional animation by Nikolay Vologdin and videography by Mikhail Kazantsev and Artur Zaynullin. There’s also a version without the English subtitles.
Pigtail by Tadeusz Rózewicz
In honor of the great post-war Polish poet and playwright Tadeusz Rózewicz, who died yesterday at the age of 92, here’s one of his Holocaust poems in a multivocal animation by Dawid Jagusiak (A.K.A. 2wid), who described it on YouTube as:
my final 3rd year Christ Church University animation about holocaust(s), poem: Tadeusz Różewicz, music: Pavol Kajan, voices: Kinga Marchelak, Marta Jagusiak, Lorna Archer
The translation is by Adam Czerniawski, and may be read online at The Legacy Project.
