~ Alice Lyons ~

Alice Lyons: Ten Films to Look at When You Want to Think About Poetry and Film

I’m always looking for poetry films that mobilise what Hollis Frampton called ‘the counter-machine to the machine of language’, i.e., the visual. Frampton has been my guide to understanding how poetic language might be translated to cinema. I’ve written a forthcoming book on the subject called Perpetual Speech: Hollis Frampton’s Gloria! as Lyric Poem. So Gloria! has got to be in my list. It’s at the end.

Subterranean Homesick Blues (song by Bob Dylan)
D.A. Pennebaker, from the documentary Dont Look Back, 1967

 

The Grass is Greener (poem by Ivor Cutler)
Orla Mc Hardy, 2001

 

Anna Blume (poem by Kurt Schwitters)
Vessela Dantcheva (main animator Ebele Okoye), 2010

 

Höpöhöpö Böks
Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, 2010

 

The Grammar Tables: The Great and The Dead (poem by Pat Boran)
Helen Horgan, 2013

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJd_jOw4x1o

 

American Haikus (poetry by Jack Kerouac)
Orla Mc Hardy, 2006

http://vimeo.com/10469119

 

Zorns Lemma
Hollis Frampton, 1970

 

Walden
Jonas Mekas, 1969

(see longer selection on UbuWeb)

 

Зеркало/The Mirror (poems by Arseny Tarkovsky)
Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975

https://vimeo.com/44315068

 

Gloria!
Hollis Frampton, 1979