My blog
on film & poetry last Wednesday provoked a lot of thoughtful email. Murat
Nemet-Nejat picks up the Godard thread:
Dear
Ron,
Your connecting
writing with Godard in the cinema is very acute. Godard analyzes (more than
visually describes) the nature of writing, writing process itself in some of
his movies. The movie which particularly comes to my mind is Les
Carabiniers. It starts, I think, with quotes from The Communist Manifesto and is interspersed throughout with letters
from the soldiers to their wives, all embodying a dialectics of war. The end of
the movie reverses the process into a series of postcards from all over the
world, the "fruits" of war as image.
More
than any other director, I think, Godard deals with the relationship between
words (language) and image, creating a synthesis – the movie essay. Though part
of this fusion is Brechtian, it goes beyond that; creates a poetry of the word
(as detached text)/the eye. What one experiences in Godard is a visual writing
process.
As a
poet I am very interested in this Godardian process, from the reversed angle:
how to make poetry cinematic (something you believe poetry is not). My poem,
"Steps," which will appear in the next issue of Mirage, focuses very much on this impossibility. Green Integers
published three weeks ago my long essay, The
Peripheral Space of Photography*, which also struggles with the same
issues.
In
the movie Frida Frida Kahlo comes out,
in my opinion, as a bad painter**, exactly for the reason you suggested. In one
place it focuses on one of her paintings where two bodies are joined by a heart
or arteries or something like that, pointing to her painting "what is in
the heart." The movie lives for me when it creates its own images, maybe
as parallel images, for example, Frida burning in her bed or the amazing streetcar
accident sequence.
My
best,
Murat
* The book is Green Integer
no. 76, but is not yet listed on the web site. An official announcement should
be made this week.
** I don’t think that Murat
is suggesting that Kahlo is a bad painter, only that the film presents her as
one –consistent with my own earlier theme of misrepresentation. But, before I
am flooded with email on this point, I want to be clear that I think Kahlo is one of the dozen or so
great masters of the 20th century. As was her husband, the painter
who has probably had the greatest impact on my own poetry.
