Artikel
Bas Kwakman on the poetry in everything
Film and poetry
17 februari 2014
Dust on the Steppes
When a film is described as poetic many film lovers will picture slow, dark, and incomprehensible, art-house films, with endless shots of dust on the steppes, shimmering grass and bizarre, ungraspable, shots. When one sees a thing of beauty without understanding it the word ‘poetic’ often comes up. In one way that’s understandable. The poet TS Eliot once justly wrote that “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood”. Many a film director managed to translate that statement to their own field. Ingmar Bergman, for example. Luis Buñuel or David Lynch.
With a ‘poetic film’ I don’t mean a film that takes poetry as its subject, like Dead Poets Society by Peter Weir, or Poetry by Lee Chang-dong. These films employ poetry exactly in order to grasp the incomprehensible. The teacher who tries to provide some content to a bunch of teenagers’ transition into adulthood through poetry, or the grandmother trying to place the incomprehensible experiences of her life, like her grandson who raped and killed a girl, by taking a poetry course.
Andrej Tarkovski
The poetic film is a film that approaches the subject as one would approach it in the world of poetry. Not with linear, logical, causal, plot, but in a non-linear, associative, visually and linguistically focussed construction. One of the greatest masters in this field is the Russian director Andrej Tarkovski. His films, like The Mirror, Nostalgia, or Stalker, are the result of an almost abstract and random order. This poetic montage demonstrates more of humanity’s reality than a linear montage, according to Tarkovski. If you want to show how thoughts come into being and develop, you need shapes that differ from the more rational constructions.
Andrej was raised on poetry, his father Arseni Tarkovski was an important and much-loved poet in Russia. The director included a number of his father’s poems in his autobiographical book Sculpting in Time:
I picked an age whose stature measured mine.
We headed south, made dust swirl on the steppe.
Tall weeds were rank;
[translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair]
Even more than the influence of his father, his resistance to the strict demands and rules at the film academy, his love for geniuses like Chaplin and Bergman, and his reaction to the ‘wrong choices’ of predecessors such as Eisenstein, it was his love of poetry that formed the basis of a unique and strong film oeuvre. The conviction that poetry, and its special, emphatic, and associative relation to reality, gave him the worldview he needed for his films.
“Poetic logic”, as he put it in Sculpting in Time, “in my eyes best answers the possibilities of cinema as the most familiar art form, precisely because poetry is closer to reality. Our thoughts and feelings are made of incomplete, spontaneously arising, associative images. In the somewhat more restrained, ‘realistically’ filmed works, such an associative image is lacking, created artificiality instead of authentically.”
Mirror
The misconception that this results in films without an audience was contradicted early in his career. A good example of this is a letter sent by a young worker to Tarkovski, which she wrote shortly after seeing his film The Mirror.
“I went to a movie four times last week. I didn’t go to the cinema just to watch, but, at least for a few hours, to really live. And to be among real artists and real people. Everything that tortures me and that I miss, that makes me melancholy, that excites me, that smothers me, that disgusts me and that makes me warm and cheery, everything that really makes me alive, and that lets me die – all that I saw in your film as in a mirror. For the first time a film became reality for me.”
What Tarkovski shows in his films is that poetry is not merely an independent art form. Poetry can be combined with all forms of art as a unique ‘method’ to closely approach reality. Theatre, music, literature, dance, and visual arts can approach reality more closely by embracing poetry than in works composed with only the methods embedded in their own art form, like linearity, logic, rhythm, ratio, and the tendency towards providing answers.
In this way there is poetry in the music of Morton Feldman, in the artworks of Patrick van de Caeckenbergh, in the plays by Jon Fosse, and in Alain Patel’s choreography, to name but a few. One might think that these are relatively unknown names, but that is also linear, limited, thought. Poetry will give them eternal relevance.
Bas Kwakman is the director of Poetry International in Rotterdam, organiser of the annual Poetry International Festival, Poetry Day, the Dutch Poet Laureate, the VSB-poetry prize, and this website. Kwakman trained as an artist and regularly publishes about poetry, sculpture, and the relationship between them. A collection of stories and drawings about Mongolia, which Kwakman co-wrote with Flemish artist and poet Lies van Gasse, will be published in May 2014.
This article was originally a guest blog in Dutch on the website Indebioscoop.
Film reel image © Fer Gregory on Shutterstock.
I watch a film almost every night. Most I forget about within the week. Often I notice halfway through that I’ve already seen it once –or sometimes even twice – before. I use these films to relax. For an hour and a half they manage to entertain me and allow me to empty my head. These are usually films with a clearly linear plot and a largely predictable outcome, in which a lot happens and few questions are asked.
There are also films I watch less often. Films I’ll never forget. Films that stick in my mind for months or even years, which keep resurfacing in my mind and change in meaning at every recollection. These films are less linear, are unfamiliar with predictability, raise lots of questions and leave most of those unanswered. With these films my head gets filled up. They’re films that are often described by critics as poetic. They’re films with an eternal relevance.Dust on the Steppes
When a film is described as poetic many film lovers will picture slow, dark, and incomprehensible, art-house films, with endless shots of dust on the steppes, shimmering grass and bizarre, ungraspable, shots. When one sees a thing of beauty without understanding it the word ‘poetic’ often comes up. In one way that’s understandable. The poet TS Eliot once justly wrote that “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood”. Many a film director managed to translate that statement to their own field. Ingmar Bergman, for example. Luis Buñuel or David Lynch.
With a ‘poetic film’ I don’t mean a film that takes poetry as its subject, like Dead Poets Society by Peter Weir, or Poetry by Lee Chang-dong. These films employ poetry exactly in order to grasp the incomprehensible. The teacher who tries to provide some content to a bunch of teenagers’ transition into adulthood through poetry, or the grandmother trying to place the incomprehensible experiences of her life, like her grandson who raped and killed a girl, by taking a poetry course.
Andrej Tarkovski
The poetic film is a film that approaches the subject as one would approach it in the world of poetry. Not with linear, logical, causal, plot, but in a non-linear, associative, visually and linguistically focussed construction. One of the greatest masters in this field is the Russian director Andrej Tarkovski. His films, like The Mirror, Nostalgia, or Stalker, are the result of an almost abstract and random order. This poetic montage demonstrates more of humanity’s reality than a linear montage, according to Tarkovski. If you want to show how thoughts come into being and develop, you need shapes that differ from the more rational constructions.
Andrej was raised on poetry, his father Arseni Tarkovski was an important and much-loved poet in Russia. The director included a number of his father’s poems in his autobiographical book Sculpting in Time:
I picked an age whose stature measured mine.
We headed south, made dust swirl on the steppe.
Tall weeds were rank;
[translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair]
Even more than the influence of his father, his resistance to the strict demands and rules at the film academy, his love for geniuses like Chaplin and Bergman, and his reaction to the ‘wrong choices’ of predecessors such as Eisenstein, it was his love of poetry that formed the basis of a unique and strong film oeuvre. The conviction that poetry, and its special, emphatic, and associative relation to reality, gave him the worldview he needed for his films.
“Poetic logic”, as he put it in Sculpting in Time, “in my eyes best answers the possibilities of cinema as the most familiar art form, precisely because poetry is closer to reality. Our thoughts and feelings are made of incomplete, spontaneously arising, associative images. In the somewhat more restrained, ‘realistically’ filmed works, such an associative image is lacking, created artificiality instead of authentically.”
Mirror
The misconception that this results in films without an audience was contradicted early in his career. A good example of this is a letter sent by a young worker to Tarkovski, which she wrote shortly after seeing his film The Mirror.
“I went to a movie four times last week. I didn’t go to the cinema just to watch, but, at least for a few hours, to really live. And to be among real artists and real people. Everything that tortures me and that I miss, that makes me melancholy, that excites me, that smothers me, that disgusts me and that makes me warm and cheery, everything that really makes me alive, and that lets me die – all that I saw in your film as in a mirror. For the first time a film became reality for me.”
What Tarkovski shows in his films is that poetry is not merely an independent art form. Poetry can be combined with all forms of art as a unique ‘method’ to closely approach reality. Theatre, music, literature, dance, and visual arts can approach reality more closely by embracing poetry than in works composed with only the methods embedded in their own art form, like linearity, logic, rhythm, ratio, and the tendency towards providing answers.
In this way there is poetry in the music of Morton Feldman, in the artworks of Patrick van de Caeckenbergh, in the plays by Jon Fosse, and in Alain Patel’s choreography, to name but a few. One might think that these are relatively unknown names, but that is also linear, limited, thought. Poetry will give them eternal relevance.
Bas Kwakman is the director of Poetry International in Rotterdam, organiser of the annual Poetry International Festival, Poetry Day, the Dutch Poet Laureate, the VSB-poetry prize, and this website. Kwakman trained as an artist and regularly publishes about poetry, sculpture, and the relationship between them. A collection of stories and drawings about Mongolia, which Kwakman co-wrote with Flemish artist and poet Lies van Gasse, will be published in May 2014.
This article was originally a guest blog in Dutch on the website Indebioscoop.
Film reel image © Fer Gregory on Shutterstock.
© Bas Kwakman
Vertaler: Sanna McGregor
Bron: Indebioscoop.com
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