This common light is at the heart of the experience of Greek tragedy, as I have written in my introduction to my play The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus (see this volume, pp. 201–22). Why, you might ask, should I – who have often claimed that we cannot understand the essence of ancient tragedy unless we remember that the common light united audience and performer, and have refused all offers to have my theatrical presentations filmed – use the cinema for my Prometheus?
In fact, many years ago, I had wanted to stage the original play of Aeschylus in Yorkshire, as one of what have been called my ‘kamikaze’ performances, on a Caucasus of coal slack on some colliery spoil heap close to a power station. It became a cinema venture because of a feeling I had that my poetic reveries in front of our living-room coal fire and my earliest experiences of films were connected. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, a German historian of the industrialisation of light in the nineteenth century, articulates a parallel that I had always felt – between gazing into fire where our poetry began and looking at images in the cinema, which needs the surrounding darkness:
In light-based media, light does not simply illuminate existing scenes, it creates them. The world of the diorama and the cinema is an illusory dream world that light opens up to the viewer … He can lose himself in it in the same way that he can submerge himself in contemplating the campfire or a candle. In this respect the film is closer to the fire than the theatre. An open-air performance in bright daylight is quite feasible, while a campfire in the light of day is as senseless, even invisible, as a film projected in daylight. The power of artificial light to create its own reality only reveals itself in darkness. In the dark, light is life.
The connection between my obsession with fire and my obsession with movies led me to make a film about fire and poetry. The other factor which led me to the cinema is the way the size of the cinema screen can give heroic stature to the most humble of faces, and this became an essential requirement in a film where the most unlikely wheezing ex-miner is slowly made to represent Prometheus himself. Men projected onto large screens could become Titans or gods.
In 1978, I worked at the Metropolitan Opera in New York with John Dexter, doing a new English libretto for Smetana’s opera Prodaná Nevěsta (The Bartered Bride). The designer was the great Czech scenographer Josef Svoboda, with whom I spent time in Prague as I was researching my scenario in Bohemia. He gave me a book on his work by Jarka Burian, The Scenography of Josef Svoboda (Wesleyan University Press, 1971). I had lived and worked in Prague in the 1960s and had seen many of his truly innovative designs in the theatres there and his thrilling combinations of film and stage at the Laterna Magika, so I was very glad to have a book which documented these productions and gave me detailed information on those I hadn’t seen. One in particular stayed in my mind: the Staatsoper Munich production by Everding of Carl Orff’s opera Prometheus, in 1968. Svoboda tried to solve the problem of a man portraying a Titan by using simultaneous video to literally project the singing Prometheus onto the rock where he was bound so that the tenor sang from between his own projected Titan’s eyes. Svoboda described his ingenious solution thus:
… The main device was the use of live television to project an enlarged image of Prometheus’ face onto the very surface of the rock to which he was nailed, in other words, we saw Prometheus ‘in’ the image of his face, thereby providing tremendous emphasis to his torment. We used the technique at special moments only, for maximum impact. The ending, during which I used dozens of low-voltage units, had its own special effectiveness. I had the entire frame of the proscenium lined with low-voltage units aimed at the rock and Prometheus. During the ending of the opera, the intensity of these units was gradually increased at the same time that the rock was gradually being withdrawn. The intensity of the special lights increased to a painful, blinding glare in which the TV image faded and the rock began to function as a mirror. The audience was blinded for nearly a full minute, in the meantime the whole setting – the rock and the stairs – disappeared, leaving only a blank space. Prometheus was consumed in the fire of light.
VII
What remained to do was to put the poetry I had nurtured in the flames of the family hearth into the cinema. I happen to believe that film and poetry have a great deal in common. One of the first things I learned from the ten film poems I have made was that poetry could enter the inner world of people in documentary situations. Auden, probably the first poet to write verse specifically for a screen documentary, Night Mail (1936), is reported to have said in a lecture on ‘Poetry and Film’: ‘Poetry can also be used to express the thoughts of characters, in rather the same way as Eugene O’Neill introduces “the interior voice” in Strange Interlude.’
I disagree wholeheartedly with Auden’s opinion that ‘the generally accepted metrical forms cannot be used in films, owing to the difficulty of cutting the film exactly according to the beat without distorting the visual content’. In my own film poems I have used the quatrain of Gray’s Elegy and the quatrain of Fitzgerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, as well as octosyllabic couplets. Auden’s remark, of course, only applies to the kind of task Auden was set – that is, to compose verse to an already edited picture, as a film composer usually produces his score. Although I sometimes work in this way, when the editor has come up with an exciting sequence, I usually begin drafting even before the editor has done his first rough assembly. In fact, when I wasn’t on the shoot itself (and after my first collaboration with the BBC director Peter Symes, I always was present and sometimes composing on the spot) I would see all the rushes and begin sketching lines and sequences.
The person who wrote notes on Auden’s lecture observes that ‘Mr Auden even found it necessary to time his spoken verse with a stop-watch in order to fit it exactly to the shot on which it commented’. Auden was working before the video machine made it possible to have frame-accurate time codes and easily replayed sequences. And perhaps the new digital editing has made it possible to experiment much more with the relations between poetry and film. Whereas manual editing on the Steenbeck gives a run-up, albeit in fast forward, to the sequence being worked on, and therefore a quick reprise of the wider context, digital editing with its speed can allow you to try many different variations in much shorter time. It also allows the editor to call up clusters of related imagery from any part of the logged and telecined rushes. This can be the visual equivalent of laterally garnered clusters of poetic imagery, and my deep-rooted way of letting disparate images grow together has been fed by the Avid or Lightworks editing programmes.
Auden clearly wanted to learn more about the technicalities of film-making in the 1930s and to explore the possibilities of what he could do, not after the film was edited, but before and even during the shooting. He was to have been co-director on Grierson’s planned sequel to Night Mail, to be called Air Mail to Australia. The endeavour was abandoned, but it shows that Auden was keen to extend his relationship with film. In 1935, Auden served as production manager and assistant director on another GPO Film Unit production, Calendar of the Year, in which he also played a small role as Father Christmas! Auden clearly saw the possibilities of film and poetry, and seems to have been willing to apprentice himself to all the processes, with a view to doing what I, in fact, have ended up doing in my own film poems – being there as a constant presence during the shoot with a very sympathetic colleague like Peter Symes, and then, following the logic of the organic process developed during our collaborations, directing the films myself.
Another great figure in British cinema, the documentary film-maker Humphrey Jennings, was also a poet both on the page and in his cinematic practice, and the perception of the affinity could also be found at the same time in the Soviet Union. Sergei Eisenstein began work on Alexander Nevsky in 1937, the year of my birth. When he began his shooting script he was inspired by Milton’s Paradise Lost. Thus, ‘Milton’s imagery of the Battle of Heaven became the battle on the ice in Alexander Nevsky,’ writes Marie Seton, Eisenstein’s bi
ographer. He broke lines of Milton down into scenes ‘to illustrate how cinematic construction could be found in poetry [my italics]’.
Pier Paolo Pasolini was a poet before he was a film director. Even towards the end of his career a film like Teorema (1968) began life in the form of a verse tragedy, and Pasolini used his own verse, as Eisenstein used Milton’s, as a template for cinematic construction. Victor Erice, the Spanish director of The Spirit of the Beehive and The Quince Tree Sun, said, in an interview in the Guardian on 1 April 1993:
As Pasolini used to say, there is the cinema of prose and the cinema of poetry, and I try for the latter kind … Nowadays, prose is triumphant. We are very frightened of poetry. Hollywood deals with prose and it is as powerful in Spain as everywhere else. I can’t compete with it, still less beat it. All I would say is that there is another cinema and surely it should be allowed to exist.
There were earlier attempts before Pasolini to distinguish the cinema of prose from the cinema of poetry, and probably the first was by the Russian Victor Shklovsky, whose ‘Poetry and Prose in the Cinema’ was published in 1927. Maya Turovskaya, in her study of Tarkovsky, quotes Shklovsky’s distinction:
There is a cinema of prose and a cinema of poetry, two different genres; they differ not in their rhythm – or rather not only in their rhythm – but in the fact that in the cinema of poetry elements of form prevail over elements of meaning and it is they, rather than the meaning, which determine the composition.
She then goes on to ask a very important question: ‘Why is it that at some moments in history the cinema feels the need for a poetic treatment of its raw material?’ She answers her question by saying that this need ‘is particularly sharply felt during periods of historical change, when our “normal”, accepted notions and perceptions become inadequate in the face of changing realities, and new perceptions have to be developed’. And in these changing realities the often forgotten captive champion, Prometheus, tends to be remembered. Of course, she includes the films of Tarkovsky as ‘poetic’, and though Tarkovsky himself grew irritated with the label, he admires and quotes his father’s poetry in his films and in his ‘Reflections on Cinema’, Sculpting in Time, and himself applies the adjective to the cinema of Kurosawa. Tarkovsky, who confesses that his favourite art form is the three-line Japanese haiku, writes: ‘I find poetic links, the logic of poetry in cinema, extraordinarily pleasing.’ And among those he designates as creating ‘great spiritual treasures and that special beauty which is subject only to poetry’ he includes not only poets in the literary sense – Pushkin, Mandelstam and Pasternak – but also film-makers: Chaplin, the Russian Dovzhenko and the Japanese director Mizoguchi.
Pasolini also includes Chaplin and Mizoguchi, along with Bergman, as producers of ‘great cinematic poems’, but goes on to say that their films were not constructed according to the laws of what he calls ‘the language of the cinema of poetry’: ‘This means that these films were not poetry, but narratives. Classic cinema was and is narrative, its language is that of prose. Its poetry is an inner poetry, as, for example, in the narratives of Chekhov or Melville.’ For Pasolini the cinema of poetry means, among other things, making the spectator aware of the camera’s presence, and ‘a primarily formalist world-view of the author’. He speaks (in an article which, considering it is by a poet, is surprisingly bogged down with semiotic jargon) of an emergent ‘prosody’.
Though much of this thinking comes from directors who are either poets themselves or have a close affinity with poetry, they are usually referring to a kind of cinema in which, as Pasolini defines it, we are aware of the camera and its movement and what he calls a ‘free indirect subjective’. We are not talking about the actual use of verse, though again Tarkovsky uses his father’s poetry to wonderful effect in Mirror. Nor are they talking about films which are cinematic versions of theatre – Shakespeare, say, or Rostand’s Cyrano with Gérard Depardieu. My own Prometheus brings my experience of film verse and theatre verse together.
There is an underlying connection between verse, metrical poetry and film which my colleague Peter Symes draws attention to in his introduction to a volume of my film poems, The Shadow of Hiroshima (Faber, 1995). The twenty-four (or twenty-five) frames per second have what can be called a prosodic motion. In my first experiences of the cutting room of Jess Palmer at the BBC in 1981, I realised that my own rhythmic preoccupations had a parallel in what I now think of as the scansions of edited sequences. It is not merely the twenty-four frames per second, nor the metrical beats in a verse line, but how they succeed one another and build into gratifications or disappointments of expectation. Tarkovsky expresses a similar view: ‘Feeling the rhythmicity of a shot is rather like feeling a truthful word in literature.’ In poetry, of course, the truthful word is also the right metrical word, the word with its truth and its sound placed on the most telling grid of the metric. The cinematic construction in poetry that Eisenstein found in Milton is paralleled by the poetic construction of cinema. And, I have always thought, the two prosodies can be plaited, metrical beat and cinematic scansion.
VIII
At the very end of the film, when there is a kind of Götterdämmerung caused by the Old Man’s flung cigarette, intended to destroy Hermes, the golden statue of Prometheus is consumed ‘in his own concoction, bloody flames’. We see real red and yellow flames consuming the black-and-white projected flames on the Palace Cinema screen, as the whole collected cast of statues melt and scream like humans in a conflagration. We only had one chance to film it, and although the charred limbs fell apart and tumbled down the rocks in a quarry belonging to Titan Cement, Elefsina, nonetheless what remained was the chained but still defiantly clenched fist of the champion of mankind, burned off at the shoulder. And what remained of the silver statue of Hermes was a fist still grasping his caduceus, the symbol of his office. No détente!
There are times in all art when you accept what you are given, and this was one. However, as I often do, when everyone else had left for England I went back and looked round the quarry. At the foot of the towering rock was the charred head of Prometheus, matted blackened fibreglass still with the Titan’s features, looking uncannily like the photograph of the Iraqi soldier burned in his truck on the road to Basra during the Gulf War, about whom I had written my poem ‘A Cold Coming’. What was remarkable about this incinerated head was that in its eyes it retained the gold leaf it had been painstakingly gilded with. So that for all its having passed through holocaust it retained its golden visions. The vision seen by the golden eyes in the carbonised profile isn’t diminished. They take their sheen and glitter from ‘the fire of light’, from the future, from the flicker of the screen whenever their journey is projected and witnessed by new eyes. As I held the head I remembered that wonderful poem of Yannis Ritsos on the Bulgarian poet Geo Milev (1895–1925), who had a glass eye, and when he was arrested and burned alive by the police, all that was left of him in the crematorium was the blue glass eye:
His eye is being kept in the Museum of Revolution
like a seeing stone of the struggle. I saw his eye.
In his pupil there was the full story of the Revolution,
blue scenes of blood-stained years,
blue scenes with red flags
with dead who carry in their raised hands a blue day.
His eye never closes,
this eye keeps vigil over Sofia.
This eye is a blue star in all the nights.
This eye sees and illuminates and judges.
Whoever looks at this eye wins back his eyes.
Whoever looks at this eye sees the world.
(trans. Ninetta Makrinikola)
Poetry rises out of its own ashes and continues its ancient dream in front of fire. Not only the animated flame but also smoking ash and cinders with their bits of bone, rings, a blue glass eye, the golden pupils of the first champion of mankind, strike the aboriginal poetic spark. Whoever looks into the golden eyes of Prometheus set in the cremated so
ckets sees the early hope of the world and knows its late despair.
[Terme di Caracalla, Rome
Delphi, Greece]
The Tears and the Trumpets
* * *
2000
D. W. Blandford, in what he admits is a ‘red-nosed’ epilogue to his essay on the Virgil Society in Pentekontaetia, wonders if the Society ‘should … perhaps go for “street cred” and appeal to YOOF. We could revamp the Society as the Virgil Fan Club, issue lapel badges with the motto AMO MARONEM’, etc.
I have to confess to wondering if asking me to be your president was part of the same fantasy, as I have, even in my sixties and long past my YOOF, been recently styled in the press as the ‘Liam Gallagher of modern poetry’.
This tabloid branding presumably was for the outcries in 1987 surrounding my poem v. At the same time as I was being branded as a yob from the gas works I was also president of the Classical Association. Because of the huge controversy the Independent published the whole poem on its news pages. On the very day that it appeared I was trying to decipher the Res Gestae of Augustus on a temple wall in Ankara, Turkey, where I’d been invited to give a reading of my poetry.
v. is a poem which has the central place in the collection of my poetry published in Italian translation by Einaudi in 1996. Since its publication I’ve had many invitations to Italy to read my poems: Rome, Venice, Bologna, Torino, Genoa, Milan and Napoli, where I returned the year before last. My first visit to Napoli was in 1987, to make one of my film poems for the BBC called Mimmo Perrella non è piu, about the burial customs of the modern Neapolitans, showing how bodies are exhumed after a year in the volcanic soil of Naples and deposited in marble lockers in the vast Cemetery of Poggioreale. Each year the remains of the dried, disintegrating corpse are taken out, spoken to gently, dusted with DDT, given new cerements and put back again. I’m not suggesting that this rifresco, as the Neapolitans call it, is analogous to the ritual of this Presidential Address, but the theory behind the rifresco is that the more attention you give to the remains of a loved one, the more favours the ‘refreshed’ spirit will give back; the more disintegrated the leathery remains of skull or pelvis, the more tender the devotion. I believe you could say that the more deconstructed the Aeneid, the more potent and precious the fractured residues. And I have gone in search of Virgil’s literal remains, as well as his remains in a literary sense. Each time I’ve been to Napoli I’ve made my pilgrimage to Mergellina and the Parco Virgiliano. After paying homage to Virgil, and Leopardi next to him, I would eat in the Piazza Sannazaro, where the descendants of the fisherman protagonists of the Piscatory Eclogues, inspired by Virgil’s, of the square’s eponymous poet still land baby octopuses deliciously dished up at Pasqualino’s near the supposed tomba di Virgilio in Mergellina.
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 22