"Somebody get Aristotle in here for a rewrite"

As it happens, I am teaching bits of Aristotle's Poetics to my AP Literature class. A lot of it seems so elementary and self-evident, and yet apparently it isn't. For instance, Aristotle writes that a play is an imitation of an action. Not a person, not an idea, an action. Yet major expensive films omit that on a regular basis.

Take The Conspirator (2011), about the sham military trial and summary hanging of Mary Surratt, accused of being part of the Lincoln assassination conspiracy by virtue of being Southern, being related to one of the conspirators and of living among angry wounded people (Americans) desperately in need of scapegoats. Ignoring the prologue, which shows the various parts of the conspiracy in motion, at the outset of the story, Mary Surratt is going to be tried before a kangaroo court and be hanged. Not only do those facts never change, but the purported protagonist, Surratt's appointed lawyer never manages to change them. The second hour of the film runs out of narrative gas so badly that it repeats the same scene three or four times. Stanton tells Aiken nothing can be done. Seward tells Aiken nothing can be done. The other lawyers tell Aiken nothing can be done. Round and round the wheels spin, throwing up mud and going nowhere.

And then there is Dean Spanley (2008), which I will, exercising the utmost self-restraint, not describe as a shaggy-dog story, but which also would earn Aristotle's scorn. It also happens that I am teaching a creative writing course (yes, my teaching life is quite wonderful at the moment), and I am trying to hammer into the students the importance of making a timely promise to the reader (or audience) as to where the story is going to go. The classic rule in film is that by ten minutes in, you have to clue the audience in as to what the film is going to be about, what the objective is, what the conflict will be.

Dean Spanley lets an hour go by before it settles down and decides what story it wants to tell. It does have quite a touching and remarkable payoff, but not one worth that arid first hour. At least 45 minutes of the movie are engaged in pure misdirection, whether or not intentional it is hard to say. But it makes it hard to invest in the emotional stakes the film is really interested in. Once again, filmmakers have attempted to cram one hour's worth of story into two slam-bang hours of middle-aged men sipping liqueurs.

People, these are not just rules for their own sakes. Breaking the rules of screenplay structure has consequences! You're playing with fire! Or in the case of Dean Spanley, some rather tepid and dingy bathwater.
On more purely cinematic territory, why was everything in the past blurry, grainy and distorted in color? Was the air that different back when? This penchant, as displayed in The Conspirator for arty visual treatment to suggest earlier eras (it's even worse with future noir films) started, to my recollection, with The Godfather, which stood for the proposition that everything in the past used to be more yellow. That was bad, but it at least had to be planned in advance so that filters could be put on lenses. Now directors can decide in post-production that the whole world is topsy-turvy colorwise, which raises the question as to whether future cinematographers will need any competence at all, given that images can be reframed, objects added or removed and color timing completely reconfigured at will.

And are there no American actors other than Paul Giamatti (who seems particularly contemporary to me) who can portray people who lived long ago? Look at the picture at the top of this blog, and there is an Englishman facing off with a Scot, pretending to be 1865 Americans. I think SAG needs to step in here. (At least they got John Cullum, as authentic a Virginian as you can find anywhere, to play a Southerner.)

I think the English can share their objection, given that in Dean Spanley, English people are portrayed by Ozzies and Kiwis in a quite indiscriminate way. What next? Carmen sung by a soprano? Or a bass?

April is National Poetry Month...

...so celebrate by seeing Howl (2010) -- but NOT IN YOUR CLASSROOM. The movie, like the poem is most definitely NSFS or W, but it is the best film I've ever seen to enter into a poem and inhabit it. Frankly, I can't think of another that even tries.

This clip, which is from YouTube, and therefore IS safe for work (though probably blocked at school), is nicely representative of the film. It begins with James Franco as Ginsberg talking first about himself, and then about his creative process, admitting that the sense and meaning of a given verse is not readily apparent even to him at first, that the meanings and patterns emerge as the poem develops, or after it is finished, or maybe not even after that. Those are clearly for the audience, not for the artist, who, at his best, is in direct contact with his subconscious.

Then the clip moves to one of the wonderful animated segments which form a contrapuntal interpretation of the poem. As you see, they do not directly illustrate the words, but run in parallel with them, and frequently illuminate them. For me, the animation lends a cohesion that is difficult to find in the poem at first hearing. Some might argue that they are limiting, but it is not necessary to watch this animation to enjoy the poem "Howl." You can walk always walk away from the film and pick up a book and read the poem. Meanwhile this film is out there to entice skittish filmgoers into the strange and familiar universe of "Howl."



For the sake of the general audience, the film takes the form of a courtroom drama, based on a criminal charge of obscenity lodged against the poem. the filmmakers have promised that all the dialogue in the film is documented. In the court, they are taken from transcripts; otherwise they are taken from letters, memoirs and interviews. The conservative Republican judge evidently had no real difficulty in dismissing the charges, especially since the prosecutor seemed to want to turn the proceedings into a hearing on the literary merits of the poem, i.e., it should be banned because it is dirty AND bad.

But the movie is not meant to be biographical or even purely documentary in nature. Its principal thrust seems to be to convey the energy and excitement of "Howl" as a work. It is a bit like those symphonies that are based on a novel, or a painting of a mThe yth, or a song about a painting. It is art celebrating art, but that does not make it derivative, except in the most literal since. The film Howl might not be as original as its source poem, but it is an independent, original piece of art, and for me anyway, got me engaged about modern free verse poetry all over again.

It reminded me somewhat of Seraphine (2009), another story of an artist, this one a naive, outsider artist in France in the early 20th century, whose visions seemed to arrive directly from another planet without the artist's intercession.

The artist was an uneducated scrubwoman who, without any apparent outside stimulus or encouragement, began scrounging natural materials to make paint from and flat surfaces to paint on, to record the complex and baroque visions she had based on visual motifs taken from the natural world. She painted plants and flowers yes, but plants and flowers with an Escher-like paradoxically unnatural naturalness never seen in the real world. She ascribed the visions to the guiding hand of her guardian angel. She was discovered by a painter-collector-dealer, had a brief vogue, yet continued working and developing regardless of the size or prestige of her audience. She was as happy painting for her friends and neighbors as for the international art cognescenti.

In this clip, Seraphine reveals some of her larger, more complex canvases to trusted friends. At this point the film starts to climb inside her work, as though despairing of ever getting insider her head. (Please forgive the ad up front, the clip is worth it. And do yourself a favor and expand the video to the full screen.)



This film is far more of a character portrait than Howl, which is perverse, given that Seraphine is far less articulate and far more unfathomable than Allen Ginsberg. But like Howl, the net result of the film is a view of the world as if from inside the art. It's worth the trip.