The title poem of Don Paterson's new collection Rain opens with the confession that "I love all films that start with rain: / rain, braiding a windowpane / or darkening a hung-out dress / or streaming down her upturned face". In so doing, Paterson underlines a relationship with cinema which many poets writing today would acknowledge.
At first glance it seems the relationship is largely one way – that modern cinema is less enamoured with poetry than with poets' life stories. The past decade has seen films about Sylvia Plath, Dylan Thomas, Wordsworth, Coleridge and now, with the release of Bright Star, John Keats. Il Postino saw Philippe Noiret play Pablo Neruda, a man whose life was so full of cinematic opportunity he could feature again in several films, whether cast in his incarnation as a benevolent South American Schindler orchestrating the transport of refugees to Chile during the Spanish civil war, or fleeing his lover in Burma after he awoke to see her, through the mosquito net, circling his bed with a kitchen knife. The life of the poet – the perceived freedoms and hardships – provides an intensifying prism through which to view the historical moment.
These films then have a knock-on effect as publishers respond to a (fleeting) increase in public interest. In November, Penguin publishes So Bright, So Delicate, the poems and letters of John Keats. A collection of Auden poems was brought out shortly after Four Weddings and a Funeral, with the film's leading man on the cover. (Auden's Funeral Blues, brought to mainstream attention by the film, was a poem which had originally been written as a parody for a verse-play).
Although cinema may not outwardly seem to have any debt to poetry, in the films' skeletons – their screenplays – we can see a similar paring down of language, an immediacy of and reliance on the image. American author David Benioff's adaptation of his novel The 25th Hour, written while he was teaching English in high school, points us in this direction. The screenplay, which went on to form the basis of Spike Lee's film, shows the same set of instincts at work. The script opens as a black dog sleeps on the shoulder of the highway, and is studded with similarly pleasing, pared-down descriptions.
This is not an exact parallel – screenplays are useable, disposable, largely unseen documents, aiming for immediacy, written to be interpreted, not remembered – but at heart their goal is to have the same effect on the director as poets seek to have on their readership: the ignition and direction of the imagination.
Take the opening of Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal, itself a type of establishing shot, albeit one written in terza rima. "Close and slow, summer is ending in Hampshire, / Ebbing away down ramps of shaven lawn where close-clipped yew / Insulates the lives of retired generals and admirals / And the spyglasses hung in the hall and the prayer-books ready in the pew." MacNeice embeds us in his world before we begin our journey through the poem.
Filmmakers and critics often use poetry and poetics to describe difficult aspects of metaphor, abstraction and non-linear narrative, whereas poets, arguably, borrow more from mainstream cinema in the way we choose to deploy and develop images or stories (though the corollary of this, as some have argued, is that cinematic narratives are influenced at their core by classical poetry).
That's not to suggest all screenplays are poetic or all screenwriters are aspiring poets or vice versa – though the Forward prize winner and screenwriter Nick Drake proves both are possible – but rather that poetry has a function in the wider world beyond simply being a term co-opted by the avant garde, or as fodder for the residual myth of the poet's life story. That at the heart of one of the newest of art forms, there is an often unacknowledged reliance on one of the oldest.
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