The representation of art as a process in cinema is a perpetually vexing situation. I was reminded of this as I was watching Frida the other night, an excellent biopic that makes great use of Frida Kahlo’s paintings as primary visual elements in the structure of the film, somewhat reminiscent of the way Kurosawa used Van Gogh’s paintings in Dreams. Yet at the same time, no one in the movie ever seriously discusses painting – the one point at which the film approaches the question is the one cringe-making moment in the script, Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina) telling Frida Kahlo (Salma Hayek) that “I only paint what I see – you paint what’s in here,” tapping her on the chest.

This in turn recalled the scene in Finding Forrester in which Sean Connery reads the “wonderful” prose of his protégé at the climactic moment & the volume of the musical score rises up to literally drown out the words – this is how we know just how wonderful the prose really is.* From Barfly – think of that title as an adverb – to Naked Lunch, Hollywood has generally done a dreadful job figuring the process of writing. The sanctification of Pablo Neruda in Il Postino is not an improvement, really. Indeed, the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a process that even remotely reminds me of how a poet works is the way in which notebooks are used in some Jean-Luc Godard films from the 1960s.**

The crux of the problem, of course, is that writing is not an inherently “cinematic” activity. Usually it’s solitary and often it’s conducted in utter silence. The writer’s furrowed brow as he/she crosses out a word to insert another is about as “dramatic” as it gets, unless, say, one is involved in something unusual, such as Ginsberg dictating Wichita Vortex Sutra into a tape recorder while tooling around with Orlovsky & Co. in a VW minivan in the American heartland.

In theory, the visual arts should be easier to represent because – hey! – they’re visual. And, in fact, some of the best films about artists have been about painting, such as Basquiat – a film by a painter as well as about one – or Pollock. But, from Dr. Zhivago to The Basketball Diaries, films about poets tend to be about everything but the writing.

There are of course decent documentaries about individual poets, such as the Richard Lerner-Lewis MacAdams production of What Happened to Kerouac? as well as films by poets, from Abigail Child at one end of the spectrum to Paul Auster & Sherman Alexie at the other. At that latter end of the spectrum, at least, any poetic background, post-avant or otherwise, appears to be almost entirely coincidental.

If poetry has become largely “unrepresentable” – or perhaps only “misrepresentable” – from the perspective of at least commercial cinema, it is by no means the only occupation so afflicted. Yet the implications for a practice that has been culturally defined as “significant” & even “romantic” but which can only be indirectly figured cinematically are significant in terms of poetry’s ongoing attempts to create a stable social space for its own activity.

* This in a film with Charles Bernstein as Dr. Simon.

** Godard also pioneered the music-drowns-out-the-dialog technique in Week End, although with a far more Brechtian purpose in mind.