Interesting points, Doug. We watched it last night, as we were out at a John
Lucas reading (who mentioned that he was having to miss the programme -
someone offered to video it for him) and although I liked the film's
disobedience to 'the rules' it gave an unfortunate overall impression of
being about a very callow towards the slightly better off end of the social
spectrum man whom life has treated with kid gloves having an inflated crisis
of .... of what? ... ego perhaps?
I'm still glad the BBC did it though, but it really needed something sharper
to bite through the complacencies of status.
best
On 8 October 2010 18:01, Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> on poetry into film(TV):
>
> A poem that proves to be a bit of a mouthful
>
> No question that the BBC's decision to dramatise Christopher Reid's poem
> "The Song of Lunch" is admirable. It flies in the teeth of demographic
> caution and trusts that an audience will be patient with a drama that obeys
> few of the rules of TV narrative. Though it unfolds in something very close
> to real time it moves slowly, and it doesn't offer the kind of neat
> resolutions that TV audiences have grown accustomed to. And as a two-hander
> it allows for real attention to the performances of Alan Rickman and Emma
> Thompson. So it is a good thing for TV. Whether it's a good thing for
> Christopher Reid's poem I'm less sure. The thing is that real images are
> generally poorer than poetic ones, and since the verse has essentially been
> used as a shooting-script there are a lot of occasions when description and
> things overlap. "The lift yawns emptily", writes Reid at one point. And we
> see a lift yawning emptily. Except, of course, that what we see is just a
> lift and the banal familiarity of the sight tends to block out the unfixable
> amalgam of feeling and function that Reid achieved. The picture takes a
> two-tone line and flattens it into a kind of literalism. Where it still
> works, significantly, is where no literal depiction of the words would be
> conceivable. "For a moment he halts, mouth full of pause/ Which he can
> either spit out or swallow", writes Reid, about a moment of mental
> hesitation. You can't show that on a screen, so it adds to the picture
> rather than simply subtitling it, as does Reid's fine description of his
> character's retreat to the restaurant toilet, where he inhales "the jabbing
> kidney reek that proclaims all men brothers". Again, impossible to film and
> impossible to reduce to a mere stage direction.
>
>
>
> I have to agree, even if I dont know the poet or his work. Almost every
> attempt at filming a poem Ive seen has been so ham-handed in its literalism
> as to be inadvertent comic kitsch.
>
> Doug
>
> Douglas Barbour
> [log in to unmask]
>
> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/ <http://www.ualberta.ca/%7Edbarbour/>
>
> Latest books:
> Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
> http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
> Wednesdays'
>
> http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10.html
>
> There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the
> opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the
> community.
>
> Oscar Wilde
>
--
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