Books into films

Last term I joined a film club in my home town. The club is run by a retired professor of film history who wanted to share her knowledge and promote discussion about films. We meet at the local Neighbourhood Centre and make a small donation to the Centre. Our leader provides us with copies of the films so that we can watch them at home before we meet to discuss them. The films come from a man with a very large film library who copies the film for us onto CDs, purely for purposes of study. It's like a book club but with films, led by a person with special knowledge. It's a wonderful example of sharing and free access to knowledge.

So far we have looked at three films that have their origins in novels or stories. The Servant, a 1963 film directed by Joseph Losey, and starring Dirk Bogarde, was based on a story of the same name by the British writer, Robin Maugham. Babette's Feast (1987) came from a story by the Danish-born Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), and the Hitchcock film, Rebecca, is based on the novel of the same name by Daphne du Maurier.

I read Rebecca prior to watching the film and that reading shaped my response to the film. I disliked the book intensely, was appalled especially by the treatment of female characters - clueless, nameless, female narrator; evil nymphomanic dead Rebecca; vampirish evil Mrs. Danvers etc. I could not see how such a lineup of hideous female characters and their vacuous male counterparts could possibly translate into a good film. While the film redeemed the book in many ways because of its sumptuous mise-en-scene in some sections, such as the encounters between Mrs. Danvers and the young Mrs. de Winter in Rebecca's hallowed bedroom, (with lesbian undertones), or Hitchcock's beautiful framing in many instances, it could not enhance or negate the reactionary sexual politics which tainted the whole conception of both film and book for me.

Each of the participants in the group reacted to the film, and some also to the book, in very different ways from enthralling to cliched, melodramatic, entertaining and disappointing. All these various reactions led to an interesting discussion, especially about whether one can judge the sexual politics of a previous era (Rebecca was made in Hollywood in 1941), and whether the film ought to be seen as a well-made melodrama. No conclusions were reached, but the threads of this discussion and others are bound to be taken up again as the group looks at other films and develops enough common language and experience to be able to cross-reference ideas.

Bright Star John Keats

Many friends have been to see Bright Star, the film about John Keats directed by Jane Campion. I wrote a poem about it:

Dressing for Keats

Emerging from my rock of penury
with nothing
and with no-one to inhibit me
I dressed as a poet
and took the train to see
a film about John Keats,
dressing for his memory.

On the silver screen
the storytelling mistress
flung out her mat of mystery
embroidered with flowery stitches
fabrics lifting
to petal faces
in beds of blossom.

She played his songs
in voices soft like pastel palates
words of vigorous youth that note the ghostly spectre
then hit on trees and birdsong rising from the land.
These words lift hearts with every beat
they bid us fly upon the music sweet.



What did Keats think about the purpose of poetry?

His idea of ‘Negative Capability’ now appears under the heading ‘Theory’ in relation to Keats and his poetry (see, for instance, the Wikipedia entry on Keats).

The phrase appears in a letter Keats wrote to his brothers, George and Thomas, in December 1817. He discusses a number of experiences in the letter before he comes to the phrase, and it is as if he is following a thread that leads him closer and closer towards a definition of what he values in life and in art.

He has been to see a painting called Death on the Pale Horse which he considers a ‘wonderful’ picture, especially if the painter’s age is considered ( I assume the painter, West, was young). But the painting does not satisfy him:
'…there is nothing to be intense upon, no women one feels mad to kiss, no face swelling into reality. The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth. Examine ‘King Lear’,and you will find this exemplified throughout: but in this picture we have unpleasantness without any momentous depth of speculation excited, in which to bury its repulsiveness.'

Keats goes on to relate another experience, this time it is a social one when he dined with a group of men, some of whom he was meeting for the first time. This experience also gave him food for thought about what he really valued:
'They only served to convince me how superior humour is to wit, in respect to enjoyment. These men say things which make one start, without making one feel; they are all alike; their manners are alike; they all know fashionables; they have all a mannerism in their very eating and drinking, in their mere handling a decanter. They talked of Kean and his low company. ‘Would I were with that company instead of yours,’ said I to myself!'

These thoughts begin to coalesce as he brings the letter to a close and moves towards that phrase which is now counted as part of Keats’s theory:
'Several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.'

The Letters of John Keats, Vols 1 & 2, are available from the Book Camel.