Film Categories: Poetry

  • Adagio

    Music as sensuous and longing as a fragrance. Phrases that rise and fall slowly at first, then more and more passionately. A love poem. And also a study of the relation between film phrases and musical phrases. As in the music, the film uses only fades and dissolves between statements. Based on Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.”

  • Sappho

    Using the sixth century B.C. lyricist’s poetry, a group of women unwrap the papyrus gauze of the lesbian goddess and bring her to life. Made by Barbara and six students, together at the Women’s Building in Los Angeles.

  • Sons of Captain Poetry

    This “fantasy documentary” tries to blend Canadian poet bp Nichol’s everyday world with the images of characters in his poetry. Sequences include a section on Plunkett, Saskatchewan, where the poet grew up, and scenes of him discussing “concrete poetry.” In the film bp Nichol performs several sound poems. There are also scenes showing his involvement with Coach House Press and Therafields.

  • Villanelle

    Elizabeth Lewis’s “Villanelle” is based on a poem of the same name by Earle Birney, one of Canada’s best-known poets. In a live action segment preceding the animation, Birney introduces the poem, describing the circumstances that led him to write it. He tells of how he spent one summer of the 1960s at Bowen island, north of Vancouver. During the week he was alone. But on the week-ends, friends and students would join him. Only one of those friends, a promising young student named Betty Lamert, was able to join him on his two-mile swims in the icy bay water.…

  • Waterworx (A Clear Day and No Memories)

    The waterworks in the Beaches area of Toronto is the source of an eidetic-like image from early childhood. It was always an enigma to me, and after returning years later to shoot this film, I was still not satisfied it was merely a filtration plant. Its architecture functioned more significantly as some kind of temporal metaphor. Wallace Stevens’ ironic and equally enigmatic poem, “A Clear Day And No Memories,” was sought out to address this phenomenon, and to appear as interruptive graphic for the same reason the editing is interruptive – that is, to both work with the alluring nature…

  • When the Light Grey Man Carries Your Luggage

    Based on the poem of the same name by Joe Rosenblatt (Governor-General Award Winner) and read by the poet in the film. Environmental and electronic sounds, found footage and footage shot for the film combine with the poet’s voice to evoke the eerie landscape of the poem in an original interpretation. The usual poetic questions regarding existence, love, death and bureaucracy are cleverly broached.

  • nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

    ASL is not English: it has a syntax of its own. Remaining true to e.e. cummings’ vision, the poem was transliterated metaphorically into the original syntax of the ASL rather than the SEE (Signed Exact English) to express the poet’s linguistic play in words. The poetic hand movements of the ASL/Art-Sign is to emphasize the dexterous quality of cummings’ perspective, to innovate a different kind of visual interpretation, best suitable for an avant-garde poem. This film, based on e.e. cummings’ poem, presents a penetrating, political-linguistic expression of humanity in a twisting, intertwining multi-choreographed collaboration of the several artists in Art-Sign,…

  • Primiti Too Taa

    The film “Primiti Too Taa” is a playful sound poem, where the text jumps to life through animated typing on paper. Visually the film is a concrete poem in motion: choreography. Aurally the film is a sound poem with a printed text: typography. Constructivist poetry meets literal choreography. Primitive sounds meet their typed representation. The film is based on a 45-minute sound poem “Ur-sonate (Sonata for Primitive Sounds)” by Kurt Schwitters. The film is larva in memory of Kurt Schwitters (Artist Poet 1887-1948), under the influence of Norman McLaren.

  • Kokoro Is for Heart

    This film features a sound composition and performance by poet Gerry Shikatani, and explores the relationships surrounding language, image and sound, set to the backdrop of a gravel pit. “When I got the footage back from the lab, I was disappointed because of the periodic flipping of the image. After screening the footage several times I realised that the malfunctioning camera rendered the filmed-nature, unnatural… and this poses questions: What is nature? What is natural?” – Phil Hoffman

  • Poem from South Africa

    May 4 1997. The first international poetry festival in South Africa. At the seaport of Durban, Natal province, chaired by Breyten Breytenbach, painter/poet/writer. Thirteen poets came from all over the world to meet, speak with, and listen to their South African counterparts. To see for themselves the “New South Africa” with its freshly-found freedom and its deeply-rooted inequalities. Between readings and excursions, discoveries and exchanges, the film weaves a collective visual journal of a land haunted by painful memories and uncertain of promised future. All the while, a reflection on exile, censorship, unfinished struggles and the absolute necessity of poetic…