Note to Self: Must Watch These Films with Links to Poetry…
Anaemic Cinema
A spiral design spins dizzily. It’s replaced by a spinning disk. These two continue in perfect alternation until the end: a spiral design, a disk. Each disk is labelled and can be read as it rotates. The messages, in French, feature puns and whimsical rhymes and alliteration. The final message comments on the spiral motif itself. Directed by Marcel Duchamp.
At Land
Film by May Deren – “remarkable fractured narrative connected by story fragments that have a perfect dreamlike logic”.
Bells of Atlantis
This dream-journey features Anais Nin reading an extract from her novella House of Incest.
Darwish
A film-poem:’a Sufi road movie’.
Diary
A film-poem by Peter Todd, ‘layers of emotions that shape the most ordinary of lives’.
First Hymn to the Night Novalis
A film-poem by Stan Brakhage, ‘hand painted…interwoven with words’.
Hugh MacDiarmid
A film poem about the poet, Hugh McDiamid.
Kokoro is for Heart
Features poet Gerry Shikatani. The irregular, yet rhythmic sound of the cameras inner working echoes Gerry’s phrasing, and re-phrasing.
L’Etoile de Mer
Film poem by Man Ray inspired by Robert Desnos: ‘Desnos brought me a script-like poem…inspired by a starfish he kept in a jar by his bed’.
Looking for Langston
Film-poem about Langston Hughes.
Manhatta
A film-poem – ‘the first genuine avant garde film produced in the United States’.
Meshes of the Afternoon
Another Maya Deren – the ‘trance film’ – ‘a web of dream events that in the final scene appear to spill over in reality’.
Pan Tadeusz
Andrzej Wajda’s film of ‘Pan Tadeusz’ – a big hit in Poland in 1999, regarded as the national poem.
Perceval
Narrated by madrigal singers.
Roma
Impressionistic portrait of Rome.
The Sentimental Bloke
A silent film using an Australian poem by C.J. Dennis.
The Sweet Hereafter
Features Robert Browning’s ‘Pied Piper’.
Words for Battle
A film-poem: dir. by Humphrey Jennings – ‘he composes exactly like a poet’.
Yes
Sally Potter film for which she wrote the poem-script.
12 Feb 2007 12:54
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Aris
Cinema Paradiso: Very nice movie! You have a very beautiful blog too!Bravo! :-)
15 Feb 2007, 21:06
Yes, a good movie! Thanks Aris! Glad that you like it.
16 Feb 2007, 20:07
David Morley
Dear Zoe
These look very interesting and I would like to get hold of all or some of them for the Writers Room. Could you annotate – even minimally – some of the less obvious titles to elucidate the poetry connection?
18 Feb 2007, 16:50
Ok have written a few notes. Hope this helps. Some of them might be quite hard to get hold of.
19 Feb 2007, 16:48
Also I want to add Sayat Nova also known as The Colour of Pomegranates which tells the life of the poet and has Armenian poetry in it apparently.
26 Feb 2007, 17:20
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