This essay first appeared as an article in the spring 2010 edition of Wavelength, the journal (now sadly defunct) of Poetry-next-the-Sea. I'm glad to say that the festival is still extant, and grows from strength to strength. I make no pretence to comprehensiveness here - the subject is huge, untidy, and difficult to define -  the references are simply to films, television films, and presentations that I have personally seen over the years and that are in some ways of interest or pertinent to this discussion.

In the postscript I've made some recommendations of more films that may enhance study in this area. I haven't seen any of these (yet), but would welcome the inclusion of any comments from those who have, or concerning others that inevitably will have escaped my attention.

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Poetry and the screen:

a personal survey

“As soon as Keats appeared with his quill, I knew it was bad ... I couldn’t stop staring at his hair as he wilted around, playing an actor from RADA. He seemed about as tortured as a man who had missed a bus.”

Tanya Gold, reviewing Jane Campion’s 2009 biopic of John Keats, Bright Star, in The Guardian, perhaps voices the view of many poetry lovers: that the screen can offer us only an inadequate insight into what Robert Graves terms “the weight [of] an infinite mass of imponderables”¹ that are necessary to the workings of the poetic imagination. Whilst we are mostly happy to accept the spectacle of other artists toiling over canvas, marble, or keyboard (as in numerous Hollywood biopics, such as Lust for Life, The Agony and the Ecstasy, etc), the pen-poised, blanksheeted poet almost invariably comes across as a feverish and fey creative slacker. Despite the weighty sanction of Andrew Motion, whose biography of Keats provided Campion with her main source material, and his participation in its publicity round, Bright Star becomes for Gold “an act of war of one cultural medium on another.”²

Nevertheless, the worlds of poetry and film have frequently, often fruitfully, crossed each other’s orbits since the early years of the twentieth century. Federico García Lorca began incorporating film aesthetics and techniques into his verse from the early-1920s, partly under the influence of fellow students Buñuel and Dalí, employing editing and cross-cutting techniques in the assembly of the startling imagery of his earliest books - processes which were akin to those of the cinema pioneers. Surrealists such as Breton and Eluard took much the same approach in France.

Indeed, it was from Europe that the earliest cinema auteurs emerged. Perhaps not incidentally, these figures were often poets. Jean Cocteau’s so-called Orphic Trilogy – Le Sang d’Un Poete (1931) , Orphée (1949) , and Le Testament d’Orphée (1959) – are the work of an extraordinary, visionary polymath, and whilst the nominal “poets” of his films are perhaps more accurately symbolic of an idealised, universal artistic sensibility, Cocteau used the language of film to explore a central poetic concern, the nature of immortality, and evolved from it an original myth tangential to those of the classical world, but vital to the post-war era which provided his context. His simple yet still startling, special effects evoke the timelessness of the Orpheus tale, whilst the backdrop of actual wartime ruins employed in Le Testament lend a convincing concreteness and contemporary edge to the telling. The work of poet/film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini is also worth mention in this respect. His luminous Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew) (1964), presents its realist Christ in cinema verité terms that have barely been approached by any religious movie before or since.

English poetry took to the screen in a different vehicle. The GPO Film Unit’s fondly remembered Night Mail (1936) utilised a specially commissioned piece by W.H. Auden in its closing section, in which the speeding rhythms of the verse mimic the train wheels, crescendoing to an almost breathless pace in the final verses. Night Mail can be seen today as a pioneer of the “film poem”, in which visual nuance amplifies the spoken word, and becomes an integral part of its text.

Foremost amongst British poets working in this genre in the last thirty years is Tony Harrison. Harrison’s film of V, which appeared in 1987 (two years after its first print publication), remains one of the most vital critiques of Thatcher’s Britain, and by penetrating deeply, forced itself into the cultural and political currency of its time. It gained enormous media attention and notoriety, and perhaps more significantly, was the subject of parliamentary debate, due to its alleged obscenity. Simon Armitage’s notes on urban decay, featuring a Rochdale housing estate, Xanadu (1992), was no less incisive, whilst his 2006 Out Of The Blue plugged its audience directly into the looped, televisual nightmare that, for many of us, framed our perspective of 9/11. A superbly intense performance by Rufus Sewell as a fictional office worker in the WTC, caught in the midst of the unfolding drama, is alternated with verse accompanying images that have seared themselves into the global consciousness, thus directly incorporating aspects of the audience’s experience.

The documentary eye has also been focussed on poetry events. Peter Whitehead’s Wholly Communion (1965) captured a galvanising moment in the birth of the British “counter-culture”, the Royal Albert Hall poetry reading known as the International Poetry Incarnation, which itself spawned many later sixties “happenings”. Despite the input of Beat heroes such as Ginsberg, Corso, and Ferlinghetti, Whitehead’s film is perhaps chiefly remembered today for Adrian Mitchell’s passionate performance of his savage anti-Vietnam war piece “To Whom It May Concern”, as well as the disturbing sight of a clearly distraught Harry Fainlight, being heckled as he read.

Box-office hits have played a significant part in the public exposure to poetry. A poignant recitation of Auden’s “Funeral Blues” beautifully marked a shift of mood in the hit comedy Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) and sparked a publishing phenomenon which saw anthologies of repackaged and film tie-in classics rise to the top of bestseller lists, - the same year’s Il Postino did much the same for Pablo Neruda’s passionate love poems. This was an extraordinary high watermark for the popular consumption of poetry, which lasted until the late-1990s. The trend sporadically continues: Vintage Classics have marketed a tie-in volume of the complete Keats to capitalise on the Bright Star audience.

Biographical films on poets have inevitably varied in their impact. The filmed version of Hugh Whitemore’s play Stevie (1978), successfully evoked the humdrum external existence of Stevie Smith, and thus managed to throw her eccentric verse into sharp relief as an escape from suburban normality.

Christine Jeffs’ Sylvia (2003), however, wasted an opportunity to shed light on one of the most symbiotic creative relationships in twentieth-century literature, and opted instead to perpetuate a popular and misleading two-dimensional feminist myth: Gwyneth Paltrow’s Plath showed us plenty of the poet’s vulnerable character and mental fragility, but almost nothing of her wit, humour, and fierce intelligence, whilst Ted Hughes was presented as little better than a Northern love-rat, albeit a charming and talented one.

The 1980s and 90s saw a different set of values being applied to the treatment of poets’ lives. Now we were regaled with studies of extreme personality and behaviour, in which the Romantic notion of the poet as-rebel-and-outsider became the dominant focus. Surely the apogee of this approach was Ken Russell’s hysterical Gothic (1986), in which the celebrated Swiss house-party that gave birth to both the Frankenstein and Dracula myths is presented as an endless round of supernaturally-flavoured climaxes: Byron, Shelley, and his wife Mary cavort like manic rock stars in an MTV video, and don’t get much writing done. Russell’s characteristically stylish, but lurid hand had already touched the Lake poets in two television dramas, Clouds of Glory (1976 & 78), which cast a suitably druggy haze across the lives of Coleridge and the Wordsworths. Russell dreams up an all-too-obvious incestuous relationship between William and Dorothy, and has both poets taking mental, as well as physical “trips” in a rowing boat. The rock aesthetic similarly fuels Pandaemonium (2000), by former music-video director Julien Temple. The Lyrical Ballads-era Wordsworth and Coleridge are presented as virtually the Lennon and McCartney of their time, (guess who’s who). It even presents a  “greatest hits mentality”, according to one reviewer³, cramming in many lines of over-familiar verse to produce a kind of poetry juke-box.

One of the most successful attempts to penetrate an individual poetic “consciousness” in recent years has been Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There (2007). Whether one accepts or not the notion that Bob Dylan is a major twentieth-century poet – Andrew Motion and Christopher Ricks certainly think he is – Haynes makes a remarkable stab at illuminating a mythopoeic aspect of the creative imagination, which arguably constitutes a fundamental part of the poetic mind-set as well. By adopting Dylan’s notorious mythologizing of his own life-story as his starting point, Haynes has presented a multi-faceted portrait of a multi-faceted artist which succeeds in producing the ring of truthful biography. Thus, through the device of using different actors, we are given Bob as latter-day Rimbaud, Bob the lover, Bob the born-again Christian, Bob the spirit of Woody Guthrie-style protest, and Bob the guardian of Old Western archetypes. In weaving these disparate strands we are brought closer to the consciousness, the poet behind the man.

Haynes’ film acknowledges that the outward details of an artist’s life are of less use in penetrating that artist’s oeuvre than exploring the timbre of their imagination. In the final analysis, the true work of the poet will always remain ineffable, mental and imaginative. The poet will invisibly weigh Graves’ “mass of imponderables” while performing Keats’s "priest-like task”, rather than picturesquely “wandering around Italy in a big shirt, trying to get laid.”⁴

¹  Robert Graves, Poetic Craft and Principle, Cassell, 1967, p.138

²  The Guardian, Nov 10th 2009

³  Andrew Anthony in The Guardian, Sept 16th 2001

⁴  Richard Curtis and Ben Elton, Blackadder the Third, Ep. 2, BBC 1987

 

                                                                                                David Redfield, Sept. 2009

POSTSCRIPT - Apr. 2017

A handful of other films about poetry & poets

Tom & Viv (1994, Brian Gilbert) on T.S. Eliot

Total Eclipse (1995, Agnieszka Holland) on Rimbaud and Verlaine

Little Ashes (2008, Paul Morrison) on Federico García Lorca

The Edge of Love (2008, John Maybury) on Dylan Thomas

Howl (2010, Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman) on Allen Ginsberg and the Beat Generation

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Despite the disparaging remarks made above concerning Bright Star, there is really very little to actively dislike about this film. It's entertaining, decorous, with a decent grasp of its period and mores, and the ever-excellent Ben Whishaw gives a good performance as Keats - one of my own literary heroes. Coincidentally, he also portrays the Rimbaudian-persona of Dylan in I'm Not There. (Whishaw could probably make an impression in any Nick Drake biopic being worked up - unless age defeats him - as to my eyes he's currently the perfect spit of the singer/songwriter!)

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I've not even attempted to dip my toe into the material now being generated through the "micro-screen". The proliferation of technology - mobile and otherwise - means that the potential for creating, and delivering a marriage of words and images to the largest (as well as to the most elite) potential audiences is inexhaustible. As communication becomes thoroughly democratized in the digital age, poetry could well have the world - literally - in its hands, and vice versa; it certainly doesn't stop with YouTube. Performance poetry, poetry slams (especially the excellent SLAMbassadors events) are hugely well-served by, and represented through technological "capture", and are instantly consumable. Unfortunately this is an area in which - apart from a few honourable exceptions (such as Kate Tempest, Luke Wright, and the older guard of Attila the Stockbroker, John Cooper Clarke, etc.) I am lamentably unfamiliar. That particular history will be written by someone more qualified than I ...