~ Nationality: U.K. ~
Quiet Sounds by Lucy English
The second collaboration between Marie Craven and Lucy English for The Book of Hours. Marie recently blogged some process notes:
‘Quiet Sounds’ is my second video collaboration with the marvelous UK poet and performer, Lucy English. Both have been made as part of her great, multi-artist project, ‘The Book of Hours‘. The earlier video, ‘The Last Days‘, started with images. This one started with the poem and sound. The soundscape is comprised entirely of Lucy’s voice and small noises in the environment. I wanted the ‘bed’ of the soundscape to be quietly musical and constructed it from a collection of sounds recorded by various artists, and found on Creative Commons licences at Freesound. The central element is the metronomic sound of a clock ticking. I edited Lucy’s voice in loose rhythm with the clock, elongating the pace of her reading and leaving spaces for the various other sounds to have their ‘solo’ moments: a pheasant and a wood pigeon, a sheep, a cow, an old fridge, air traffic. I carefully built up the soundtrack piece by piece until I had a complete first draft. Then I looked for images that might add further to the audiovisual experience of the poem. The poem describes a moment of solitude, a hush when a woman becomes aware of the little sounds in her environment. It is implied she is inside a domestic space at the time. In my net wanderings, I found a marvelous series of interior shots by Carol Blyberg (aka Smilla4 on Flickr), also available on a Creative Commons licence. I worked with the images using zooms and slow dissolves that changed in rhythm with Lucy’s voice. For such an apparently simple piece, it was time-intensive to make, especially in the refining process that saw both sound and image go through many drafts. I gave a lot of attention to subtle details, in a meditative way. Maureen Doallas has since featured ‘Quiet Sounds’ on her wonderful blog, Writing Without Paper.
See Vimeo for the text of the poem, as well as links to all the soundtrack sources.
Vaccine by Christy Ducker
I can’t say enough good things about this animated film by the ever-inventive Kate Sweeney. It works equally well as a poetry film or as a lyrical promo for vaccination; the transition from prose narration (by Dr. Mohamed Osman) to poetry half-way through is natural and powerful, and the poem by Christy Ducker is extraordinarily good. Here’s the description:
An animated film highlighting the research and fieldwork into finding a cure for Leishmaniasis, a chronic disease affecting millions of people in areas such as Sudan and Syria. The film was made as part of a collaboration between poet Christy Ducker and artist Kate Sweeney and scientists working at York University at The Centre for Chronic Disease.
Working in collaboration allows access to an other’s research, in this case, the work of scientists who are actively working to find a cure, and to study the causes and exacerbations of the Leishmaniasis disease. Dr Mohamed Osman sent me photographs he had taken when in Sudan of the people he was working with, trialing a vaccine for the disease. I was able to interview him, talk to him about my interests in stories and how we tell stories to frame experiences and use his response and his photographs in the initial part of the film. The second part of the film is an animated response to Christy’s poem that explores metaphorical links between medical vaccinations and the grieving process. Where the loose style of the first part of the film reflects the nature of conversation, the more structured animation in the second part reflects poetry’s structured, considered language.
Endellion — excerpts from a poem by Emma McGordon
Filmmaker Rhiannon Tate collaborated on this film with spoken word poet Emma McGordon and composer David John Roche. Endellion was “produced as part of Endelienta‘s Artists in Residence 2017, held in St Endellion, North Cornwall,” according to the Vimeo description.
Hat-tip: the Poetry Film Live group on Facebook.
A Scientist’s Advice on Healing by Christy Ducker
The winner for Best Animation at Rabbit Heart Poetry Festival 2017, where it was also a finalist for Best Overall Production. Filmmaker Kate Sweeney notes in her c.v. that the 2016 film is a “2.05 min hand-drawn animation. In collaboration with poet Christy Ducker and Centre for Chronic Diseases, York. Funded by Wellcome Trust.” It’s one of at least two films that came from that collaboration, as well as a pamphlet of photography and poetry called Messenger.
Drawing on the science of immunology, Messenger explores how we wound and how we heal. Whether the focus is a tiny molecule or a global problem, Christy Ducker’s succinct poems offer ‘hope and a warning’. Illustrated throughout by Kate Sweeney’s striking photographs, Messenger shuttles between science and art to suggest alternative ways of looking at recovery.
For more on Ducker, see her website.
The Desktop Metaphor by Caleb Parkin
The Desktop Metaphor is a film by Helmie Stil of Caleb Parkin’s second placed poem in the National Poetry Competition 2016, commissioned by Alastair Cook of Filmpoem in partnership with the Poetry Society.
Dutch filmmaker Helmie Stil is also the organizer of Filmpoem Festival 2017 at the Depot in Lewes on October 28, which will include a screening of all ten of the films made for the 2016 winners of the UK Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition.
Caleb Parkin is a “poet, performer, artist, facilitator and educator, based in Bristol.” His poem on the page takes an interesting diptych-like form as the words echo back and forth from one line to the next.
Mining Poems or Odes by Robert Fullerton
Working-class voices are all too rare in poetry, so I’m delighted to be able to share this profound and lyrical documentary by Callum Rice in which Glaswegian poet Robert Fullerton reflects on how his approach to writing was shaped by his experiences as a welder. It was featured three years ago in Aeon (which I clearly don’t read faithfully enough) in partnership with the Scottish Documentary Institute, which produced it. Thanks to a Facebook friend, Luis Andrade, for alerting me to the post:
The Scottish poet Robert Fullerton is a former shipyard welder who was an apprentice when he found his love of books thanks to his mentor. Drawing inspiration from the sparks that he imagines as ‘wee thoughts, or wee possibilities, or wee ideas’, Fullerton began crafting poems while working at the shipyard, finding his dark, solitary days provided the ‘perfect thinking laboratory’ for mining words. Like its subject, Mining Poems or Odes finds beauty in language and in the docks of Glasgow, combining Fullerton’s thoughts on mining and lyrical readings of his poetry with scenes from the Govan shipyard’s distinctly working-class milieu. This celebrated short documentary by the Scottish filmmaker Callum Rice played at the Sundance Film Festival in 2016 and won a BAFTA Scotland award for best short in 2015.
See the film’s page on the Scottish Documentary Institute website for a complete list of awards and screenings (which don’t include any poetry film festivals, sadly). Mining Poems or Odes was Callum Rice’s first film, as a newly minted graduate of the Glasgow School of Art.
I love how Fullerton identifies mining as a root metaphor for artistic discovery. There’s no ignoring—nor should we want to ignore—the nitty-gritty, industrial or post-industrial reality underpinning our civilization. After several days’ wrestling with the nitty-gritty of modern web-hosting technology as I moved Moving Poems and Moving Poems Magazine to a new host with SSL, this was just the film I needed to watch.
Surge by George Szirtes
We are disasters
on the edge of our own shores,
dreaming and woken.Nothing permanent
about us. If sea can break
so can shore and cliff.
I was delighted to run across this on Vimeo the other day: director Colin Ramsay‘s film for a poem by one of my favorite British poets, George Szirtes. I remembered seeing him post about the filming on Facebook back in August:
Today we film three poems dealing with flood from Mapping the Delta. The poems will be recorded here at lunchtime then we head out to Happisburgh to ascend lighthouses and church towers and possibly to drop dramatically into the sea at an opportune moment of erosion. Where is my Tennysonian cloak when it is needed?
Szirtes also shared the producer’s series of photos from the shoot. Here’s the Vimeo description:
Surge – based on a poem by George Szirtes from his 2016 poetry book Mapping the Delta. Shot on location in Happisburgh, Norfolk, England.
Directed & edited by Colin Ramsay
Produced by James Murray-White
Camera by James Uren
Music – Lost Frontier by Kevin MacleodShot on an Ursa 4K mini using Samyang 24mm & 50mm prime lenses, graded in Premiere.
