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Breakages
There is a short film of Garbo, somewhere in the reels and rushes of preserved monochrome that no-one knows about, somewhere in the last cabinet that Doctor Caligari would ever look in, right at the back, seared in black and white, in which, unawares, she throws her shoulders into laughter, the sky goes dark and all the glasses on the drinks table shatter to pieces. I know this because I have seen the remake as you look across at me when I say that you could be a big-screen idol, postmodern Ninotchka, and you laugh with a laugh that could put broken glass back together, if you wanted to, that is; I wish I'd never met you. John Stammers |
I would also add Frank O'Hara's wonderful "Ave Maria" - the first poem of his I ever read, & I loved him from that moment - but it has too many indents. Mothers of America, let your children go to the movies... Maybe I'll do it anyway, later.
Who has others? (Stammers has a couple, of course.) KEB PS - I've written a couple, too, I think the movies is a good subject. |
On a related note, I tried to think of movies based on poems (excluding verse dramas and movies about poets like "Stevie" and "Sylvia" and that Janet Jackson masterpiece "Poetic Justice") and I could only immediately come up with these:
--Poe's "The Raven" with Vincent Price --Homer's "Troy" (well, that's admittedly a stretch, but still... I can't remember if anyone has made a film based on "The Odyssey") --Pasolini's version of some of Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales" --Pasolini's version of some of Boccachio's "The Decameron" --Kipling's "Gunga Din" with Cary Grant and a cast of thousands --Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade" with Errol Flynn and Olivia DeHavilland (I'm pretty sure someone made a movie of "The Lady of Shallot" as well) --Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha" (it's fairly recent; I'm sure there must be other "Longfellow movies"--Paul Revere seems a natural) Epics and narrative poetry, of course--films tend to "need" a plot. Hard to imagine a movie based on anything l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e-"y" or postmodern or heavily lyrical. As far as poems about the movies, well yes, O'Hara of course , but I somehow remember taking out an anthology of "movie poems" from the NYPL a few years ago. Can't remember the title but maybe it will come to me. What would be interesting to look at is how the poems changed with the advent of more "naturalistic" acting styles such as The Method. Do the poems become more "naturalistic," less camp (the O'Hara poems about the movies tend to have a strong camp/kitsch tone)? Or do the poems exhibit a kind of reaction formation, becoming more reliant on artifice as the movies they use for source material became more naturalistic? Just wondering. I did a little series of "Movie Monster" poems a few years ago that were fun to write. It is a rich topic to mine for source material. Oh, there is a very good villanelle by Mary Jo Salter that I liked, but can't remember the details (you know, like the title). Perhaps someone might be able to site it. |
A poem is sometimes pivotal to a movie, even if the movie isn't about the poem. Watching "In Her Shoes," on a transatlantic flight (watchable enough under the circumstances), I was surprised that a transformative scene for Cameron Diaz's character hinges on her reading a poem--Bishop's "One Art". A Cummings poem also makes a cameo.
It is very interesting ways in which movies are represented or dealt with in poems. I'll be back with some examples... |
Well sure, there are plenty of movies where poetry is used within a movie for a pivotal scene--think of "Funeral Blues" in Four Weddings and a Funeral or pretty much all of Dead Poets' Society to name just two of the more well-known examples. I was just thinking how hard it must be to make an entire movie out of a single poem, and then was surprised I could think of seven right off the bat. And I'm sure there are quite a few more.
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KEB,
“A poem is sometimes pivotal to a movie, even if the movie isn't about the poem.” --A. E. Stallings I had never thought of D. H. Lawrence as a poet before I saw the movie titled, “G. I. Jane” in which Self-pity I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself. was pivotal, in showing that the drill instructor was cultured. |
The Prisoner of Zenda
At the end a "The Prisoner of Zenda," The King being out of danger, Stewart Granger (As Rudolph Rassendyll) Must swallow a bitter pill By renouncing his co-star, Deborah Kerr. It would be poor behavia In him and in Princess Flavia Were they to put their own Concerns before those of the Throne. Deborah Kerr must wed The King instead. Rassendyll turns to go. Must it be so? Why can't they have their cake And eat it, for heaven's sake? Please let them have it both ways, The audience prays. And yet it is hard to quarrel With a plot so moral. One redeeming factor, However, is that the actor Who plays the once-dissolute King (Who has learned through suffering Not to drink or be mean To his future Queen), Far from being a stranger, Is also Steward Granger. (Richard Wilbur) |
Just following up on Tom's posting: according to Dana Gioia's essay on Longfellow, "Evangeline became a movie three times - the last in 1929 starring Dolores del Rio Evangeline, who sang two songs to celebrate Longfellow's arrival in talkies. 'The Village Blacksmith' became a film at least eight times, if one counts cartoons and parodies, including John Ford's 1922 adaptation, which updated the protagonist into an auto mechanic."
By the way, Boccaccio's Decameron is in prose. It was Keats (among others) who turned its stories into poetry. |
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Robert Meyer [This message has been edited by Robert Meyer (edited March 21, 2006).] |
There are probably many instances of movies with titles pulled from poems but one I think worth mentioning is the movie "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," in which the protagonists, after breaking up, try to have their memories of each other erased to begin with a "fresh slate." Alexander Pope is mentioned in the movie along with I believe this part of his poem "Eloise to Abelard"
How happy is the blameless Vestal’s lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot: Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d The character played by Jim Carrey then spends most of the movie trying to stop the memories from being erased. [This message has been edited by Mario Pita (edited March 21, 2006).] |
Hmm, I'd forgotten The Decameron was prose--it's been at least twenty years since I last read it!
OK--so make that six movies based on poems... |
My first contact with Dylan Thomas was Rodney Dangerfield's reading of "Do Not Go Gentle," in the movie Back to School; I think it had something to do with his attempts to sleep with an English prof. Needless, I now remember the poem much more easily than the movie.
In Apocalypse Now there was that reporter who kept reciting Prufrock, & then Kurtz himself quoted from the Hollow Men, the epigraph to which is, "Mistah Kurtz, he dead." An interesting little intertextual game, I thought. I also saw a Steven Spielberg film about a robot boy that used a poem from Yeats ("The Faery Child"?), but I can't remember the name of the film. I don't think it was very good. Chris |
Chris and Robert -
The primary literary antecedent for Apocalypse Now was not a poem, but a poetic novel - Conrad's Heart of Darkness - with the Marlon Brando character a stand-in for Kurtz. [This message has been edited by Michael Cantor (edited March 21, 2006).] |
Stretching the subject a bit again, but there was the 1994 film on Eliot's first marriage, Tom and Viv, in which Willem Dafoe abso-fucking-lutely nails Eliot's speaking voice. He must have listened to every recording the man ever made. (If you want to admire an actor, watch Dafoe in that film and Platoon back-to-back.) And I bet there were a slew of films on poets.
[This message has been edited by Michael Cantor (edited March 21, 2006).] |
Perhaps apropos, perhaps not, see the following link:
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2000/02/14pound.html This is, of course, satire. Quincy |
For movies on poems, all the Shakespeare films; the films on Lorca like Blood Wedding; El Cid; and Claudel's Partage de Midi was made into a tv film I've never seen. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral.
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Wot, no Frank O'Hara??
Margaret. |
This is a favorite subject of mine; I have written a series of poems about films and film stars and plan to write more. Because I am so interested in the subject, I find it odd that I don't find more poems about film.
It's now quite the trend to include poems in films. One of my favorites from way back, though, is the use of Whitman's "The Untold Want" in Now Voyager. |
I just found a link over on the Accomplished Members forum to this wonderful poem, Noir , by Alicia Stallings. It seems pertinent here.
Gregory p.s. Thanks to Paul Lake and Thomas Newton. |
Hart Crane's, Chaplinesque, though not exactly about movies has got to be the finest evocation of movie derived imagery in poetry so far as I'm concerned.
I've experimented with movie iconography myself a few years ago writing a sonnet sequence taking Hopper's Nighthawks as a starting point and developing a series of film noir derived scenes from it. Never got finished - one day maybe.... http://p197.ezboard.com/fthesonnetbo...icID=114.topic Alan |
The Browning Version - of which a film was made some time ago with Ian Holm in what I suppose is the lead role. Poetry barely features in the film, but the title refers to a book of poetry, so... I think it was made again more recently but I couldn't really go and watch it, after having seen Holm.
Under Milk Wood. I'm sure I saw a film version of this once. If my memory serves me at all well it was not good. Neither would I expect it to be, as it's such a piss-poor idea to make a film out of a sound-play. Then again, I wonder if that isn't true for any attempt to make film from poetry. p |
If you scroll down the first page of the Court Green thread:
http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtm...ML/000447.html you'll find Marion Shore's "Where Are the Film Divas of Yesteryear?" which was selected for this spring's issue of Court Green. |
If you buy the Powow Anthology (plug!) you can read my poem Japanese for Beginners: Ronin, in which the leading man is a stock character in Kurosawa swordplay films.
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Originally posted by A. E. Stallings:
"I was surprised that a transformative scene for Cameron Diaz's character hinges on her reading a poem--Bishop's "One Art". A Cummings poem also makes a cameo." Friday night, at the Concord Poetry Center, Donald Hall was grousing about Diaz including some Jane Kenyon, but not attributing it. Diaz didn't write the script. Bob |
Tino Villanueva wrote a booklength poem, "Scene from the Movie GIANT," which won an American Book Award. Curbstone Press.
Bob |
According to the Coen Brothers, O Brother Where Art Thou? is based on The Odyssey.
Chris, the not-so-good movie you're thinking of is A.I. --CS |
I wrote a poem inspired by the great Russian actor, Innokenty Smoktunovsky.
Obscure? Ah well ;) Janet |
Wonderful topic!
Dana Gioa's Cruising with the Beach Boys The penultimate stanza: Some nights I drove down to the beach to park And walk along the railings of the pier. The water down below was cold and dark, The waves monotonous against the shore. The darkness and the mist, the midnight sea The flickering lights reflected from the city- A perfect setting for a boy like me, The Cecil B. DeMille of my self-pity. In "The Petrified Forest" poetic soul Leslie Howard reads Villon to a naive, romantic Bette Davis. I believe there was a movie based on "The Divine Comedy"(!) Also, "The Canterbury Tales (very sexed-up, if I'm not mistaken). Does anyone know who wrote/sang the song that went "The movies are a mother to me"? In high school my nights were spent watching old movies on TV (which explains my grades)... Anyway movies--old and new-- are a great source of inspiration for me (so is television, I must admit!). [Check out my poem "The Movie" now appearing on a second-run thread on DE. (I'm offering a prize for anyone who guesses what movie it is.)] Movie Buff in Massachusetts |
The Middle English epic poem "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" was made into a movie called <u>Sword of the Valiant</u> (with Sean Connery as the Green Knight). The medieval Greman epic by Gottfried von Strassburg "Tristan" was made into the movie <u>Lovespell</u> (with Richard Burton as King Mark), and that movie has the two Isoldes like the poem and not the one Isolde of Wagner's opera. The new Tristan movie, while interesting in and of itself (especially its politics), has a lot more inconsistencies with both Wagner and Gottfried to be considered a movie based on a poem.
Robert Meyer [This message has been edited by Robert Meyer (edited March 29, 2006).] |
Robert,
I'm interested that you mentioned the latest Tristan movie, which does leave out many elements of the traditional version-- the potion, the dragon, all the magic elements, as well as the two Isoldes as you mention (actually there were three, if you count her mom!) But my feeling about the recent movie is that by placing it in a realistic, historical setting (well, more or less) and simplifying and de-mythologizing it, they’ve distilled the essence of the legend, making the love story shine out all the more brightly against the stark, realistic background. So in that sense I would say it is true to Gottfried's version. But speaking of poetry, the one bizarre element of this movie was Isolde's reading Donne’s “The Good Morrow”! What were they thinking? And yet, the poem was still somehow quite moving, although it did strain one’s suspension of disbelief a wee bit--the one minor flaw in this (underrated by critics) heartbreakingly beautiful film. Marion |
Marion,
I loved the movie, but was always thinking about how modern the story was: the Irish vs English seemed a lot like Serb vs Croat. Robert ps: the other movie in the past 12 months that I liked was "Walk The Line" (but is the Dylan that Johnny Cash sang poetry? that's another topic!) |
About Terence Rattigan's "The Browning Version" (which I think is the great teacher-play of all time), the first movie version starred Michael Redgrave, and later it was made for TV starring John Gielgud in one of his best performances. Of course the real poet in the play is Aeschylus; the "Browning version" is of "Agamemnon."
And speaking of T.S. Eliot, why hasn't a movie been made of "Cats" - or have I missed it? |
Gail, there's a video of "Cats" that was shown on the Vegas PBS station a few years ago. "Murder In The Cathedral" was made into a film in 1952 (if you have seen the Eliot episode of <u>Voices & Visions</u>, they showed a couple of scenes from it, lasting about a minute or two). There is a web site, www.imdb.com , that lists it with some data, like: date, Director (Hoellering), writing (TSE & Hoellering), the cast (John Groser as Becket, etc including TSE as 4th tempter and Leo McKern [who died a few years ago, and was famous as <u>Rumpole of the Bailey</u>; he also was a monk in <u>Ladyhawk</u>, one of the No. 2's in <u>The Prisoner</u>, and Herod the Great in <u>The Nativity</u>] as 3rd knight), and a runtime of 140 mins. I've always wanted a copy of the film version of <u>Murder In The Cathedral</u> (either tape or disk), but it has never been available.
It had a book from it with pictures, the screenplay (it was slightly different the play, adding a Henry II character), and a preface written by Eliot. THE FILM OF MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL by TS Eliot and George Hoellering (Faber & Faber, 1952) "....The... most obvious difference [between stage & film]... was that the cinema... is much more realistic than the stage. ...In watching a stage performance, the member of the audience is in direct contact with the actor, is always conscious that he is looking at a stage and listening to an actor play a part. In looking at a film, we are much more passive; as audience, we contribute less. We are seized with the illusion that we are observing the actual event, or at least a series of photographs of the actual event; and nothing must be allowed to break this illusion. ... "....The speeches of the Four Knights [in "Murder in the Cathedral"], which in the play are addressed directly to the audience, had to be completely revised. ...This also is a consequence of the realism of film: the Stilbruch -as such an abrupt change is aptly called in German- would be intolerable. ...For one thing, the camera must never stand still. An audience can give their attention to four men actually speaking to them; but to look at the picture of the same four men for that length of time would be an intolerable strain. ... "In looking at a film we are always under the direction of the eye. It is part of the problem of the producer, to decide to what point on the screen, at every moment, the eyes of the audience are to be directed. You are, in fact, looking at the picture, though you do not realise it, through the eyes of the producer. What you see is what he makes the camera see. The fact that the audience's vision is directed by the producer of the film has special consequences for a verse play. It is important, first, that what you see should never distract your attention from what you hear. ...Several visual effects, magnificent in themselves, were sacrificed because ...the audience in watching them would cease to attend to the words. Second, the fact that the illustration of the words by the scene is, so much more positively than on the stage, an interpretation of the meaning of the words, points to the conclusion that only a producer who understands poetry, and has taken a good deal of trouble to grasp the value of every line, is competent to deal with such a play at all. ..." TS Eliot, 1952 [This message has been edited by Robert Meyer (edited April 10, 2006).] |
" Chris and Robert -
The primary literary antecedent for Apocalypse Now was not a poem, but a poetic novel - Conrad's Heart of Darkness - with the Marlon Brando character a stand-in for Kurtz." I know this. My point was that the poem read by Brando has its epigraph taken from the novel on which the movie is based. So Brando's Kurtz -- he was named Kurtz, wasn't he? -- was reading from a poem in which he was named in the epigraph. Clay, A.I., yes, thank you. To justify my making this post, I will now type out a poem about movies. The Invisible Man We are kids with orange Jujubes stuck to our chins and licorice sticks snaking out of our jeans pockets, and we see him, or rather don't see him, when the bandages uncoil from his face and lo, there's nothing between the hat and suit. It is wonderful, this pure nothing, but we begin to be troubled by the paradoxes of non-existence (Can he pee? If he itches, can he scratch? If he eats Milk Duds, do they disappear?). Sure, standing around in the girls' lockerroom unobserved or floating erasers in math class, who could resist, but the enigma of sheer absence, the loss of the body, of who we are, continues to grind against us even into the Roy Rogers western that follows. The pungent Vista Vision embodiments of good and evil--this clear-eyed young man with watermelon voice and high principles, the fat, unshaven dipshits with no respect for old ladies or hard-working Baptist farmers--none of this feels quite solid anymore. Granted, it's the world as the world appears, but provisional somehow, a shadow, a ghost, dragging behind every rustled cow or runaway stagecoach, and though afterwards the cloud of insubstantiality lifts and fades as we stroll out grimacing into the hard sunlight, there is that slight tremble of deja-vu years later in Philosophy 412 as Professor Caws mumbles on about essence and existence, being and nothingness, and Happy Trails to You echoes from the far end of the hall. ...........................................In The Invisible Man sometimes we could see the thread or thin wire that lifted the gun from the thief's hand, and at the Hearst mansion only days ago a sign explained that the orchestra of Leonard Slye entertained the zillionaire and his Hollywood friends on spring evenings caressed by ocean breezes and the scent of gardenias. you can almost see them swaying to Mood Indigo or Cherokee, champagne glasses in hand: Chaplin, Gable, Marion Davies, Herman Mankiewicz, and cruising large as the Titanic, William Randolph Hearst, Citizen Kane himself. Leonard Slye sees this, too, along with the Roman statuary and rare medieval tapestries, and thinks someday, someday, and becomes invisible so that he can appear later as Roy Rogers and make movies in Victorville, California, where Mankiewicz and Orson Welles will write the story of an enormous man who misplaced his childhood and tried to call it back on his death-bed. O Leonard Slye, lifting Roy's six-gun from its holster, O Hearst, dreaming of Rosebud and raping the castles of Europe, O America, with your dreams of money and power, small boys sit before your movie screens invisible to themselves, waiting for the next episode, in which they stumble blind into daylight and the body of the world. B.H. Fairchild |
I'm such a lightweight. Seeing Rodney Dangerfield recite Do Not Go Gentle would probably disturb my sleep for a very long time. You're a brave man, Chris.
Blake's tyger weaves very nicely throughout a meaty little film called "The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys". Good one to see, with Jodie Foster as pretty frightening peg-legged nun. So there are poems on movies, movies on poems, and then there are poems that are cinematic, and cinema that's poetic. Speaking of the latter, some months ago saw a marvelous little film called "you me and everyone we know" and was so taken by some of the music I made myself sit through all the closing credits. Discovered some of the lyrics had come from a Richard Wilbur poem/hymn. And how cool is that... |
In "Must Love Dogs" the character played by Christopher Plummer recites "Brown Penny" by W.B. Yeats.
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