Ekphrasis
in
Reverse: The Use and Abuse of Poetry in Popular Films.
Bent
Sørensen, Aalborg
University, Denmark
This
paper discusses the uses and abuses of poetry in two
recent, popular American and British films. Poetry travels from the
field of
high culture and is recuperated from obscurity by being quoted in these
feel-good
dramas. However, along the transtextual path something is also lost,
and rather
than simple quotation, what happens to the poems in question is
something
beyond the list of relations suggested in the call for papers:
“quotation,
allusion, plagiarism, pastiche, parody, counterfeit[ing]…”
In 4
Weddings and a Funeral (1993) we all share a common
tear at the death of one of the minor characters, especially when his
male
lover recites a W.H. Auden poem at his funeral. Poetry is thus used to
heighten
emotional expression and character empathy, but is only present in this
one
interlude in what remains a quintessential low culture product, a
romantic
comedy.
In
contrast a thoroughly melodramatic film such as Dead Poets
Society
(1989) uses Walt Whitman throughout as a poetic beacon, whose poems and
life
are suggested as a model for the young protagonists to follow in their
quest
for individuality and Bildung. In this
film poetry functions as a metaphor for pedagogy and guided
self-expression.
Despite the contrasts between how poetry is represented
in the two movies, both can be regarded as instances of ekphrasis
in reverse. In these films the presence of poems as high
culture manifestations is further used to signify queerness, which in
the
English case is safely bracketed via its status as the one funeral
among four
weddings, and which in the American film is only suggested as a deeply
buried
subtext (a homosocial rather than homoerotic bonding). Why is poetry
queer and
Scottish, or mad and Indian when used as reverse ekphrastic interludes
in
popular films such as these?
[Paper]
[Slides]