Poetry At The National Film & Television School

Each year the (UK) National Film & Television School asks their Year One Group (Documentary Direction; Cinematography; Location Sound; and Editing) to combine strands, and produce a short film based on a line of poetry.

The tutors for the course are directors Asher Tlalim and Dick Fontaine. Fontaine has directed documentaries with, and about, The Beatles, Norman Mailer, and many of the great American Jazz legends. The visiting Tutors are writer Jane Corbett and cinematographer Sean Bobbit.

They also invite two guest poets each year to kick-start the intensive 5-week project as part of a workshop panel, to read their poems, and discuss the creative conflict between image and word. This year, I was invited to join English poet Julia Casterton.

We read some of our poetry, and had an intense, free-wheeling debate on violence and experience, where to place the camera when filming in a war zone, cinema of the Holocaust, the relative merits of Tarantino, and the dialectical nature of documentaries, which Julia suggested might be one part tragedy, one part accident. We all agreed the unearned sensational image was worst, and the best was the one which seemed indirect, felicitious.

My poem on Charlotte Rampling, from Rue du Regard (DC Books, 2004) went over well.

http://www.nftsfilm-tv.ac.uk/

Comments

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....

Poetry vs. Literature

Poetry is, of course, a part of literature. But, increasingly, over the 20th century, it has become marginalised - and, famously, has less of an audience than "before". I think that, when one considers the sort of criticism levelled against Seamus Heaney and "mainstream poetry", by poet-critics like Jeffrey Side , one ought to see the wider context for poetry in the "Anglo-Saxon" world. This phrase was used by one of the UK's leading literary cultural figures, in a private conversation recently, when they spoke eloquently about the supremacy of "Anglo-Saxon novels" and their impressive command of narrative. My heart sank as I listened, for what became clear to me, in a flash, is that nothing has changed since Victorian England (for some in the literary establishment). Britain (now allied to America) and the English language with its marvellous fiction machine, still rule the waves. I personally find this an uncomfortable position - but when ...

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and Silence of the Lambs . I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

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