Ginevra

Based on a poem by Percy Shelley, this film depicts the aftermath of a murder. But for Ginevra, death is merely transformation.

Credits:

Director: Tess Martin
Producer: Max Rothman
Composer & Sound Designer: Jeremy Lloyd-Styles
Narrator: Alexana Ryer

Backstory:

This short film is based on a poem called ‘The Dirge’ by Percy Shelley (not to be confused with another Shelley poem called A Dirge). Max Rothman at Monticello Park Productions brought this project to animation filmmaker Tess Martin. Upon further research Tess discovered that The Dirge is actually part of a longer, unfinished poem called Ginevra (read the full poem here).

In the book The Poems of Shelley: Volume Four 1820-1821 by Michael Rossington, Jack Donovan and Kelvin Everest, the authors speculate that the poem might have been inspired by a supposedly true story contained in a book that his wife Mary was reading at the time. The story is that of Ginevra degli Almieri, a Renaissance-era urban legend about a woman who was thought dead of a plague that swept the city of Florence in the year 1400, and was put in a vault to be buried the next day. But she then awakens and is mistaken for a ghost by both her husband and her parents. Unfortunately, Percy Shelley himself died an untimely death in 1822, and was not able to finish this poem. His wife Mary published just the last segment under the title ‘The Dirge’, as well as the rest of the unfinished poem under the title ‘Ginevra’, in 1824 after Percy’s death.

The animated film incorporates inspiration from the Ginevra backstory, as well as direct inspiration from the poem itself. It is created using primarily cream-colored paper cut-outs on a multi-plane animation stand, with lots of lights and colored filters.