Where film, poetry meet

I have a lifelong love affair with film. Even before I met my husband, who is a filmmaker, I loved movies. As a child, I didn't put much thought into the connection between poetry and film; I just knew that both activities brought me great joy. The first time I considered the similarities between the two art forms was when I saw the Ingmar Bergman film "Wild Strawberries" by chance on PBS. I was a teenager, and I had never heard of Bergman, but there was something about the way he sustained imagery that felt like reading a poem. I was mesmerized, and the sensation was palpable.

Years later, my husband had a film at the Sundance Film Festival, and I was fortunate to see a documentary premiering there called "Waldo Salt: A Screenwriter's Journey." A central premise of the movie is that a screenwriter should study poetry in order to learn how to write a good script. Since Salt was an Academy Award-winning screenwriter, his theories and opinions mattered a great deal and influenced a generation of young filmmakers. You may not know his name, but you have probably seen some of the films he wrote. "Coming Home," "Serpico" and "Midnight Cowboy" are some of the best known. He was nominated for the Oscar for all three screenplays and won it for two of them.

In the documentary, Salt described the importance of using poetic devices when writing a screenplay. Poetry's attention to detail and its capacity to use an object as a symbol for something larger was emphasized.

Salt explained how he thought like a poet in order to demonstrate how down and out the Dustin Hoffman character was in the film "Midnight Cowboy" by having the camera slowly show the inside of Hoffman's apartment without using sound. Hoffman's character lived in poverty in New York City, and as the camera slowly circled the squalid room, you felt grimy just watching it. Everything was covered in dirt, and it seemed that each object was literally taken from a garbage can and placed in the room. It is so effective that I swear you could smell the place. The viewer's senses were heightened by Salt's approach.

Since then, I have seen films in which poems are recited, films whose titles come from a line in a poem and animated films based on poems.

The relationship between film and poetry is reciprocal, and there are virtually thousands of poems written about movies in every language imaginable. I could fill pages of this newspaper with individual titles.

Instead, I will choose one poem that is a classic: "Chaplinesque" by Hart Crane. This poem embodies the essence of a Charlie Chaplin film, in much the same way that Bergman's film captured the essence of a poem. "Chaplinesque" takes a Chaplin film, which is filled with humor, and discovers the tenderness that lies beneath the laughter. Ultimately, we experience the full range of human emotions at work in this poem. It is, so very much, like watching a great movie.

"Chaplinesque"

By Hart Crane

We will make our meek adjustments,

Contented with such random consolations

As the wind deposits

In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find

A famished kitten on the step, and know

Recesses for it from the fury of the street,

Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk

Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb

That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,

Facing the dull squint with what innocence

And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies

More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;

Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.

We can evade you, and all else but the heart:

What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen

The moon in lonely alleys make

A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,

And through all sound of gaiety and quest

Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

Marjory Wentworth is South Carolina's poet laureate.