Time’s Up by Holly Corfield Carr
https://vimeo.com/104014704
Bristol-based writer and artist Holly Corfield Carr made this brief but effective videopoem in 2014 as a promo for a live event called MINE, which she describes on Vimeo as
A poetic excavation of second-best diamonds
MINE journeys into the extraordinary underworld of an 18th-century grotto, a cave blistered with crystals and coral collected from slavers’ ports, to tell a story of dolour and dolerite amongst the city’s dealt dirt.
An audience of six descend with writer Holly Corfield Carr to play cards, trade voices and dig up a murder mystery, a disastrous meeting, a comedy, a spiralling inferno.
MINE was part of a 9-day arts festival held in September, 2014 for the Bristol Biennial. As for the videopoem, Carr writes:
To transfer some time back to you, I’ve piled it all up into a rushed sort of stalagmite. There’s about two million years here. So we’re even.
Peyton Place: A Haiku Soap Opera by David Trinidad
Writer and filmmaker John Bresland, the former video editor for TriQuarterly, made this videopoem for David Trinidad’s haiku collection using clips from the soap opera that prompted the haiku. It appeared in the November 2015 issue of Blackbird, accompanied by a commentary by Gregory Donovan which is essential reading if, like me, you’re too young to remember Peyton Place, “the very first American prime-time soap opera.” It was, he says, “one of the first televised programs in the U.S. to deal frankly with sexual themes, which revealed the hypocrisy and masked immorality beneath the misleadingly peaceful façade of small-town American life.”
In David Trinidad’s Peyton Place: A Haiku Soap Opera (Turtle Point Press, 2013) he has whipped up a haiku concoction to respond, with an energy both antic and erotic, to each of the over 500 episodes of the complete run of the television program. Reading this series of poems, carefully constructed within the confines of a taut form yet unleashing a sardonic and often laugh-generating appreciation of the oddities of a now-dated television drama, one is struck by an experience on the page that brings the television series back into the mind’s eye with a pointed mix of humor, pathos, and social critique.
Meanwhile, the imaginative adaptation by John Bresland, collected, edited and enhanced into an equally layered, genre-challenging video essay, employs actual clips from the television program with the texts of Trinidad’s poems superimposed and narrated. Bresland builds upon Trinidad’s frank exploration of the many dimensions of “the male gaze” and further examines the looking generated not only by the camera’s eye, but also by our own changed vision of a set of cultural moments and icons that time and history have inescapably altered. Bresland’s video piece provides its own unique experience that arises from the atmosphere generated by Trinidad’s book while also plunging us into an even more pointed sense of the absurdities and strange possibilities of realization available in the now transformed and reconstituted images of what was once, and is now again, Peyton Place.
Shop by Lucy English
The latest addition to UK poet (and Liberated Words festival co-creator) Lucy English’s Book of Hours project comes from the U.S. artist (and Moving Poems Magazine columnist) Cheryl Gross. Her usual “Dr. Seuss on crack” approach to animation makes a great fit for the poem’s wry take on motherhood, I thought.
Incidentally, I believe that the call for filmmakers to contribute to the project is still open, if anyone’s interested.
The Hero is Light by Matt Mullins
Usually, the American poet and electronic literature expert Matt Mullins makes his own poetry films, but for this one he teamed up with Spanish director Eduardo Yagüe, providing only the poem, voice and music. The poem is dedicated to the Soviet artist Eva Levina Rozengolts (1898-1975), a drawing of whose appears in the credits. According to the Museum of Russian Art website,
Eva Levina-Rozengolts was one of the few Soviet artists who managed to creatively transform and express the trauma of Stalinist repression in a striking visual language.
Trained in the celebrated VkHuTeMas, the hotbed of early Soviet avant-garde, Eva Rozengolts worked as a textile designer and later a copyist at the Soviet Artists’ Union production studios. She was arrested in 1949 and sentenced to ten years of exile in the depth of Siberia where she lived in a settlement on the Yenisei river, in the Krasnoyarsk region. She was assigned to work as a woodcutter, wall painter, and later medical assistant. After returning from exile, she regained her creativity, undeterred by age and failing health. In fact, it was after her return from Siberia, that her talent came into its own. Unknown to the broad public, her work stirred the attention of the new generation of unofficial artists that emerged after Stalin’s death. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Eva Levina-Rozengolts became recognized as one of the outstanding figures of the ‘lost’ artistic generation of the Stalin era.
Yagüe shot the film in Stockholm with actress Carolina Rosa.
Light by Ed Madden
This short video by Allen Wheeler in support of Ed Madden’s poetry collection Ark has two things I love: time-lapse photography and a single, continuous shot from one position. The flooded field in the shot is presumably even more full of light than the field referenced in the text, but given the nature of photography, it’s hard to see how anything less would have worked. The piano music by Kai Engel was found on the Free Music Archive, according to the credits.
A Painting by Sarah Howe
Hong Kong-born British poet Sarah Howe’s poem is brought to the screen by Amabel Stokes, credited with screenplay, directing and editing. The camerawork is by Raquel Orendain Shrestha and music by The Cinematic Orchestra. Howe shared the video in a public Facebook post, writing:
I was really touched when, out of the blue, an English student called Amabel Stokes emailed me to say she’d made a film out of my poem, ‘A Painting’. Amabel is Eurasian too, and I confess at the spot in the film when she moves the paintbrushes like chopsticks, I spontaneously burst into tears. Maybe it was just the Stephen Hawking-film music working on my heartstrings(!), but I’m really, really impressed at what the kids can do these days.
“You live…” by Anaïs Nin (diary excerpt)
A video by Lisa Seidenberg with text on screen from The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume 1. Though the text wasn’t a poem in its original context, its poetic quality taken out of that context and its juxtaposition with lyrical images and a dark ambient score make this more of a videopoem than anything else, I’d say. The Vimeo description reads:
A quote from the writing of Anais Nin, known best for her erotic memoirs is interpreted through dream-like expressionistic images and tantalising original score by composer Karl Warner. Filmed in Antibes, France.
For more of Seidenberg’s work, see her Vimeo channel.
Crow (three poems) by Ted Hughes
Ted Hughes reads “The Door,” “Crow’s Vanity,” and “Crow Hears Fate Knock on the Door”—three poems from his 1970 tour de force Crow—in this stunning animation produced and directed by Yoav Segal. The other animators were Alasdair Beckett King, Nandita Jain, and Aindri Chakraborty; Leafcutter John was the composer and Holly Waddington the art director. See Vimeo for the full credits, which include this note: “The material started life as part of the Handspring UK theatrical production ‘CROW’.” Segal has uploaded a theatre clip from that production, which is interesting for comparison’s sake:
(Hat-tip: Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival page on Facebook.)
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot (2)
The music and rhythmic recitation from Mikey Georgeson is integral to the success of this interpretation of Eliot’s classic poem by London-based filmmaker and animator Martin Pickles. His Vimeo description:
Poem by T.S. Eliot (1915)
Voice and Music by Mikey Georgeson (2015)
Produced by David M. Allen
Encouraged by Simon IndelicateFilm by Martin Pickles (2015)
The Man: Pat Reid
The Woman: Leslie Cummins
Edited from Super 8 film shot in Soho, Piccadilly and Belgravia in 1999
Film stock: 200 ASA Kodak Security Film created by Alan Doyle
Telecine by Lux
The description at a separate upload by PoetryFilm on Vimeo adds some details:
The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock was premiered at PoetryFilm Paradox at The Groucho Club on 13 December 2015, a venue in the heart of Soho where, as it happens, the work was filmed.
The poem recording was made to celebrate the 100th anniversary of T.S. Eliot’s 1915 poem. In the accompanying film, a man and a woman fail to meet, despite their paths crossing on the neon streets of Soho. The special Super 8 stock (200 ASA Kodak Security Film) was negative rather than positive, and it is this that lends the film a beige ambiance, reflecting Eliot’s “yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes.”
This is the second time I’ve shared a video of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” on Moving Poems; the first was this animation by Everett Wilson back in 2009. But that was just a selection from the text, and used the poet’s own reading, which even at 4:02 minutes dragged, to my ear, because of Eliot’s tiresome “poet voice,” which now sounds so dated.
Hypochondriac by Chris Tusa
Filmmaker Alex Zakon superimposed Flash animation on live action film for this video interpretation of a poem by New Orleans writer Chris Tusa.
