The past decade has seen biopics of Sylvia Plath, Dylan Thomas and now John Keats (pictured above), but film's reliance on poetry goes beyond simply retelling poets' life stories, says The Guardian.
From the piece...
Although cinema may not outwardly seem to have any debt to poetry, in the films' skeletons – their screenplays – we can see a similar paring down of language, an immediacy of and reliance on the image. American author David Benioff's adaptation of his novel The 25th Hour, written while he was teaching English in high school, points us in this direction. The screenplay, which went on to form the basis of Spike Lee's film, shows the same set of instincts at work. The script opens as a black dog sleeps on the shoulder of the highway, and is studded with similarly pleasing, pared-down descriptions.
This is not an exact parallel – screenplays are useable, disposable, largely unseen documents, aiming for immediacy, written to be interpreted, not remembered – but at heart their goal is to have the same effect on the director as poets seek to have on their readership: the ignition and direction of the imagination.
The "Bright Star" trailer (the new film about Keats):
No comments:
Post a Comment