In Praise of My Brother, the Painter by Michelle Bitting

Another film directed by Michelle Bitting for one of her own poems, with editing by Phil Abrams. Great use of found material, I thought, suggesting quite a bit more than the text itself says about the narrator’s brother.

Prison Hounds by Cynthia Cox

A new video for an old poem by Cynthia Cox, using found footage from the Prelinger Archives. Cynthia writes,

The footage is from an excruciatingly bad ‘scary’ film I found in the Prelinger Archives written by John Parker called “Daughter of Horror.” The howling hounds I downloaded from iTunes and ran through the iPhone VoiceChanger app, because on its own the howling sounded too low and kinda dopey. Honestly, there is a prison right behind my neighborhood, and when they run the dogs there’s a much higher, keening sort of sound that I couldn’t get VoiceChanger to duplicate, so I went with an effect called “Haunting.” Then I recorded my voice with VoiceChanger as well, using an echo effect mostly to try and disguise the pops I made on “prison” and “quiet” (didn’t really work, but I timed everything else about the reading out so well I chose not to re-record. I’m far from a perfectionist.)

Everything Simple Becomes Complex by Howie Good

http://vimeo.com/29124206

Another Swoon film for a poem by Howie Good — his seventh to date. The description at Vimeo characterizes this as “an edited, layered compilation of ‘simple’ camera-errors, to fit the jagged music and the title of the poem itself.”

Schubertiana by Tomas Tranströmer

This is A Galaxy Over There — a lavishly produced film by British director Martin Earle, illustrating excerpts from Tranströmer’s poem “Schubertiana,” as translated by Jöns Mellgren and narrated by Graham Sharpe in a kind of bedtime-stories voice. Though much of it is rather too literal for my taste, it’s hard to find fault with such beautiful filmmaking. The flying household objects in the first part seem in keeping with the spirit of Tranströmer’s “miracle speech,” and I love the scene where the landscape turns into a bed quilt. It’s also hard to see how they could’ve used anything other than a Schubert string quartet for the soundtrack!

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by William Carlos Williams

http://www.vimeo.com/28799428

Making a videopoem for a poem that was written in response to a painting is always a challenge. Nic S. used footage of a California forest fire from 1914 in what strikes me as a fairly successful pairing.

In other Nic S.-related news, she has just launched a new venture that should be of interest to anyone making poetry videos — Pizzicati of Hosanna: dead poets’ poems read by Nic S. in English & other languages. According to a note in the sidebar, “These recordings may be used for any type of creative non-commercial project. No need to ask permission.” Poets recorded so far include Stevens, Baudelaire, Quasimodo and Neruda, all in the original languages.

one moment passes by Robert Lax

German animator Susanne Wiegner made this film with audio from the late poet, who “did nothing to court publicity or expand his literary career or reputation,” according to the Wikipedia. A man after my own heart!

Where Sins Are More Sinful by Heather Haley

Canadian poet, musician and filmmaker Heather Haley‘s poem (from her first spoken-word album, Surfing Season) gets the Swoon treatment. Marc blogged about it (in Dutch) here and here:

The ideas for these images came fairly quickly. For “sins,” I had the associative thought, “wash in innocence.” So I went searching for “shower” images and found one by Erica Scourti.

Then I made a “rushing” background by processing images from recordings I made ​​half a year ago from a boat, plus a bunch of Ghent pictures of the most diverse things, faces, and symbols.

Kurt Heintz interviewed Heather about Surfing Season after it was released in 2004. Start here.

Commands by Dana Heise

http://vimeo.com/17160224

In the description at Vimeo, multimedia artist and poet Dana Heise writes,

Commands is a performance video and sound poem that addresses desire and the boundaries of consensual relationships.

Icicles by Todd Boss

A motionpoem created by Michael Guncheon and Ben O’Brien.

And speaking of Motionpoems, if you can get to Minneapolis on October 25, they’re planning to screen a whole new season’s worth of films, which will include poems by Jane Hirshfield, Mark Strand, Richard Wilbur and others — a dozen in all, produced to accompany the Best American Poetry 2011 anthology From Scribner. See their website for details.

Sonnet 65 by William Shakespeare

A timeless meditation on time gets the film noir treatment. Moving Poems’ latest production uses footage from two films in the public domain at the Prelinger Archives and a Creative Commons-licenced William Byrd piece by Vicente Parrilla and company.

Trees by Michelle Bitting

The most recent of four “poem films” uploaded to Vimeo so far by Los Angeles poet Michelle Bitting. She succeeds where most filmmakers would fail in a fairly literal match of film image to poem, remaining just allusive enough to hold the viewer’s interest. (Also, as a tree lover, I admit the subject matter holds a special attraction for me.)

I found out about Bitting’s project thanks to a blog post by Robert Peake, “The Film-Poem.”

Large Red Man Reading by Wallace Stevens

http://www.vimeo.com/28855678

This has to be one of my favorite found footage-poem match-ups ever. It’s one of Nic S.’s first solo efforts at videopoem-making (though she doesn’t appear to have blogged it). Here’s the text of the poem.