Victim by Nicole Blackman
A short film shot in Australia and based on a spoken-word poem by the New York-based poet Nicole Blackman. I found a review from 2005 in RealTime Arts Magazine. This was apparently Corrie Jones’ directorial debut. He persuaded Blackman to take an active role in adapting the poem for the film, and it is she doing the voiceover.
Victim was filmed and produced in Perth by a group of relative newcomers, but its local impact was immediate. The first screenings in Perth were controversial, where it was shown with Siddiq Barma’s Osama as part of the 2003 Perth International Arts Festival. With the serial killings of 3 young women in Perth’s northern suburbs still haunting the newspaper headlines, Victim hit a raw nerve. Although the film shows a bound and gagged woman at the mercy of an armed kidnapper, many viewers interpreted the film as being about a woman’s rape, which is not even indirectly implied.
Jones views the film’s real subject as self-empowerment rather than victimisation. His protagonist struggles to the end, and when she realises she may die, she attempts to live the last moments of her life with psychological strength and resolve, rather than annihilating terror. “I wanted to show an inner strength through the detachment of the narration”, Jones explains. “The film is about a woman confronting her fears, dealing with them as they hit her.”
Victim has already won a number of prestigious Australian awards, including an Early Career Award at the 2003 WA Screen Awards, the SBS Eat Carpet award, and Best New Director award at the 2004 St Kilda Film Festival.
Question by May Swenson
http://vimeo.com/31974260
Another video from Dara Elerath at the Art Center Design College in Albuquerque. The full poem includes an additional two stanzas at the end — read it on the Poetry Foundation website.
34 by Patricia Smith
Patricia Smith is both a master poet and a master performer. Would that all poets read this well! The poem is from Blood Dazzler. (Hat-tip: Sherry Chandler.)
Rain by Hone Tuwhare
https://vimeo.com/25072181
This is actually the second time I’ve posted a video for this poem by the great Maori poet, and it might be worth looking at the other one — a fairly straight-forward kinetic text piece — before watching this one, where the text is whispered and fugitive. But this film is superlative in every way, an astonishingly gorgeous piece that must be watched with the volume up and the video expanded to full-screen. According to the notes at Vimeo,
Rain is the first of Maria-Elena films in which she explores our connection with Nature, human-nature and the idea that everything in the universe is interlinked……..Rain was made in 2006 as the final year project of the Graduate diploma in digital animation at Unitec Auckland…. Maria-Elena has just completed her next film Meniscus
Peacock and Fish by Hafez
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUhaF1JI5r8
(English-dubbed excerpt)
This is Tongue of the Hidden, directed by David Alexander Anderson with calligraphy, translation and narration by Jila Peacock and animation by Florian Guibert, assisted by Jerome Dernoncourt. See the film’s webpage for complete credits, stills, storyboard, and more.
The poet Hafez, also known as the Teller of Secrets, used the language of human love and the metaphors of wine and drunkenness to describe his desire for the Divine and intoxication with the mysteries of the Universe. […]
Hand-drawn Farsi (Persian/Iranian) calligraphy is imported into the computer and forms the basis of constructed landscapes, and animals that move within landscapes. Software was Studio Max, Maya, XSI and After Effects.
According to a page on Jila Peacock’s website, “The film was premiered at the National Film Theatre in October 2007 as part of the London Film Festival and as part on Animate TV on C4 in December 2007.” See also the section of her site on her handmade artist’s book Ten Poems From Hafez.
Rush Hour by Thylias Moss
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdoZbbZfnFs
Moss writes,
A video poam that explores the simultaneous and related journeys of workers from two social strata whose need of each other does not include the exchange of essential aspects of identity.
She also uploaded another version, “Rush Hour (too).”
Ode for Ironing (Oda para planchar) by Pablo Neruda
This is a film called Saccharine, directed by Raivan Hall with camera work by Josh Hittleman.
The poem is not from Neruda’s Odas Elementales, but the later Plenos Poderos from 1962. Here’s the Spanish and here’s an English translation by Jodey Bateman. The film uses the translation by Alastair Reid, which carries a less literal title: “In Praise of Ironing.”
As with any popular poet, there are a ton of Neruda videos on YouTube, but most of them are, um, not so good. So it’s a real pleasure to see a professionally made film with a Neruda poem in the soundtrack.
Confused Rain by Nam June Paik
nam june paik’s confused rain (1967) was the chaotic distribution of the letters C-O-N-F-U-S-E on a sheet of paper.
clint enns’ confused rain (2008) is a posthumous collaboration with nam june paik that expands paik’s work into a computer program that produces an animation of the letters C-O-N-F-U-S-E falling like rain drops.
this was written in visual basic.
For more on the Korean-American artist Nam June Paik, see the Wikipedia, which says he was “considered to be the first video artist.” For more on Clint Enns, see his Vimeo page.
Coney Island by Andrew Marotta
Interesting Beat-like, collaborative approach to videopoem-making by poet Andrew Marotta and filmmaker Brandon Knopp, who captured all the material for both the poem and the film in one day, according to Brandon’s note:
Working together on a project created during a day spent at Coney Island. Filmed and written in one outing.
Same Place Different View by Anna Dickie
I’m glad to see This Collection continuing to broker and upload innovative films for its Edinburgh-centered poetry project. Oliver Benton and Stefanie Tan did the camera work and editing respectively, and “thiscollection.org was proud to collaborate with Rocio Jungenfeld to adapt Poet Anna Dickie’s work ‘Same Place Different View’ into a bricolage installation on the shores of Aberlady.”
Anna Dickie is a Scottish artist and poet now blogging at it’sabouttime. You can read the poem at thiscollection.org.
The Men Who Don’t Fit In by Robert Service
Poem by Robert Service, recited by Christopher Herwig, 1-2 lines a day while hiking and rafting across Iceland with Alastair Humphreys from North to South in July 2010.
Mr. Herwig is also the filmmaker here, I think. Some very good editing and of a course a brilliant idea, even if one does get a little tired of looking at him by the end of it. Their journey across Iceland was truly epic, judging from Alastair’s report:
The plan was simple: we were trekking inland from Iceland’s north coast up into the central highlands. We would cross the Hofsjokull ice cap to gain access to the headwaters of Iceland’s longest river. There we would inflate the packrafts we were carrying and attempt to paddle down two separate rivers, eventually reaching the southern coast of Iceland, the ocean, and the end of our expedition.
We were carrying everything we needed. There would be no villages or resupplies on our route. We carried food for 25 days. We had camping equipment, and ropes and crampons for the glacier crossing. There was a fair weight of camera equipment, batteries and solar panel chargers. And we also were carrying all the gear you need for paddling glacial whitewater rivers. The weight of the packs crushed our knees and spine and gouged our shoulders and hips. We feared that we had bitten off more than we could chew.
