Notes from Noise by Jan Lauwereyns
Swoon used public-domain footage from the U.S. Navy’s MSTS Arctic operations (1955-1957) to accompany an English-language text by the multilingual Belgian writer and scientist Jan Lauwereyns. He first constructed a soundscape, then found footage to match, but in a departure from his usual modus operandi, decided not to include the poem in the soundtrack:
Reading or recording the poem was no option…
It wouldn’t work. I needed to see the words ‘floating’ slowly, using the pace of the music and the images.
Giving them time to interact with the sounds and the images.
How Well It Burns by Brian Johnstone
Alastair Cook writes,
How Well It Burns is the third in a series of seven Filmpoems commissioned by Alastair Cook in collaboration with Absent Voices, a group focused on the celebration of the vast and semi-derelict Greenock Sugar Sheds.
How Well It Burns is by poet Brian Johnstone, erstwhile Director of StAnza, the Scottish Poetry Festival and a widely published poet; the other poets in the series are John Glenday, Vicki Feaver, Sheree Mack, Jane McKie, Gérard Rudolf and Jennifer Lynn Williams.
The series of seven will be performed live at the Scottish Poetry Library at an event on 6th December 2012; more information and tickets here.
For more on Brian Johnstone, see his page at the Scottish Poetry Library.
A fora (Outside) by Albert Balasch
Moving Poems’ first piece by a Catalan poet is one of the competition films in the upcoming 6th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival, nominated in the category “Best Debut.” The collaborative process by which it came into being sounds fascinating—part accident, part ekphrasis:
A fora(Outside), is a text by the poet Albert Balasch. A few years ago, Balasch began a series of collaborations with the painter Tià Zanoguera. It was from this collaboration that the idea of adapting the text to comic form arose. Zanoguera then created a long series of paintings and drawings that gave birth to the project. In the end, the project did not come to fruition, but the filmmaker and editor Marc Capdevila thought about the possibility of animating the pages and paintings that had been produced. And in this way they constructed a short-film combining poetry, painting and 2D animation.
The challenge in doing the project was to bring the paintings to life and create a stimulating rather than a narrative universe. How can a painting be brought to life? How can you give life to an individual line or to that essence of a picture that cannot be reproduced? And how can you go beyond a literal illustration of the text?
Zanoguera and Capdevila took photographs of the painting and worked on them with animation software. Then Balasch reduced the text to a script in search of ellipsis.
The result of all this process is a short-film that aims to maintain the texture of the original paintings, the expressivity of the brush strokes and the vitality of the range of colours.
In short, the result is A fora(Outside), a brief journey.
There’s also a version on Vimeo without the subtitles.
Spring 82 by T. Carmi
A film by Avi Dabach with acrobatics and choreography by Reenat Caidar and sound design by Gai Sherf.
Bring Me My Sky-Canoe by Al Rempel
Al Rempel’s description on YouTube is so thorough, I’m just going to reproduce it in its entirety, minus the text of the poem (click through to read).
The Sky Canoe is a collaboration between four artists: Phil Morrison, Al Rempel, Steph St Laurent, and Jeremy Stewart. Phil is a sculptor who works mainly in concrete & metal, and often incorporates text into his work. Al is a poet and teacher; his first book is understories. The poem in this piece is from This Isn’t the Apocalypse We Hoped For, which is forthcoming with Caitlin Press in spring, 2013. Please visit http://alrempel.com for more info. Steph is a filmmaker as well as an actor. His site is http://www.videonexus.ca. Jeremy is a musician and a poet; his first book of poetry is called (flood basement and he can be found at http://www.jeremystewartmusic.bandcamp.com
The Sky Canoe has been accepted into the Visible Verse festival, 2012! Details can be found here: http://www.cinematheque.bc.ca/visible-verse-festival-2012
The festival’s coming up on October 13 — that’s this coming Saturday! So if you live anywhere in the Pacific Northwest, be sure not to miss it.
A Woman by Jillian Brall
Jillian Brall is responsible for the still images of street art as well as the text and reading in this experimental video by VIV G. It’s interesting to contrast this with the way Pablo Lópes Jordán used graffiti in “I-poem 6.”
