Film Categories: Poetry

  • Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The

    Using the cut-out style of animation, I tried to marry the classic engravings of Gustave Dore to the classic poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge through a classic narrator: Orson Welles. It’s a long opium dream of the old Mariner (Welles) who wantonly killed the albatross and suffered the pains of the damned for it. (LJ) Original narration by Orson Welles; made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. “The film, far from being a mere visual accompaniment to the poem, has an integrity of its own. Throughout the film, serpents, butterflies and other creatures from Jordan’s…

  • PoeTix

    PoeTix is radical and mundane Three word poems Edited into perversion and delirium Verbal refrigerator poetry Following Aristotle’s dramatic structure Creating a heap for really cheap

  • Her 13th Incarnation

    Told through a montage of personal photographs and video images, backed with dynamic, cutting-edge prose/poetics, “Her 13th Incarnation” is one Black, queer woman’s exploration of gender, sexuality, and the infinite fluidity of identity and desire.

  • Term, The

    A lovely and spare animated film illustrating the poem, “The Term,” by William Carlos Williams. The film is an homage to the work of Williams and to the school of Imagist Poetry, which he founded and best exemplifies. The filmmaker chose this particular poem because of the power of the imagery, the constant metamorphosis, the musicality of the words and the gentle humanistic quality of the message. All these things lend themselves well to film: particularly to the style of animation she has developed. The animation is hand-drawn pencil on paper, fully animated twelve drawings per second. The drawings illustrate…

  • breath

    A beautiful cameraless film based on the text and structure of a haiku, “breath” explores the interplay between sound, image and written word. The soundtrack is created by an optical light reading of three haikus and one short poem, all written by ninth-century Japanese poetesses. The film’s structure is based on the five-seven-five syllabic composition of a typical haiku.

  • Ode to a Sparrow

    “Ode to a Sparrow” is a profile of Canadian poet Peter Van Toorn. Van Toorn’s book “Mountain Tea” was nominated for a Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 1984. The film celebrates Van Toorn’s poetic insight and language, and captures the concentration and labour of Mountain Tea’s creation. “Ode to a Sparrow” includes readings from Van Toorn, conversations with some of his friends, and lyrical visuals to accompany a reading of Van Toorn’s essay about the importance of the title of a poem, “Handy Handles.” “Mountain Tea” was unavailable for many years, but was reissued by Signal Editions in 2004.…

  • Sea Horses and Flying Fish

    A one-minute animation treat that celebrates the art of sound poetry as Christian Bök recites words from Hugo Ball, one of the leading pioneers of phonetic poetry.

  • Almost Forgot My Bones

    A lyrical video-poem which depicts the transformation of an African-Canadian woman’s identity as she goes in search of her roots. In order to find herself she must travel past skin into bone – to the root, the secret inside identity. Almost forgot my bones In this home without no mirrors Almost forgot my bones In this home without no mirrors Of myself, my skin, my kin, my hidden Of myself, my skin, my kin, my hidden

  • Paradise Lost

    A poetic assembly of 1950s’ and 1960s’ Soviet film print fragments and graphic text that elicits a romantic tale of an individual’s fall from grace.

  • Oramics: Atlantis Anew

    ‘Oramics: Atlantis Anew’ is conceived of as an artist’s film in homage to Daphne Oram, the pioneer of British Electronic Music and co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic workshop in 1958. The film features a close-up encounter with her unique invention, the Oramics Machine, housed at the Science Museum in London.
Oram used drawn sound principles to compose ‘handwrought’electronic music, and yet the visual nature of her work remains largely unseen and unsung. The film brings this obsolete technological fantasy briefly to back to life, enabling the visualisation of the drawn sound material, re-interpreting and translating it into new filmic sequences. The…