‘Breake off this last lamenting kisse, which sucks two soules and vapors both away.’ Inspired by John Donne’s poem, The Expiration is a beautiful, evocative, depiction of two secret lovers as they accept they must reluctantly part forever. This adaptation embraces the Renaissance concept of la petite mort that ‘to die’ was ‘to orgasm’ and explores the bittersweet moments of a love’s last breath.
That’s the description on the exemplary website for this new film by British director Lotus Hannon, released on the web today in honor of John Donne’s birthday. He’d be 544, which seems incredible to me because in so many ways his work seems so modern. As the greatest of the metaphysical poets, he’s been an indispensable touchstone for metaphor-obsessed 20th and 21st century poets in a way that most of his contemporaries have not. Oddly, however, I haven’t run across very many film or video adaptations of his works online, so let’s hope this one will inspire other poetry filmmakers to try their hand at a John Donne poem.
The Expiration was filmed by BAFTA Breakthrough Brit 2015 Cinematographer Anna Valdez Hanks and has so far been selected for the BFI LOVE season as part of the Cornwall Film Festival and for the StAnza International Poetry Festival in March. The actors are Azzurra Caccetta and Olivier Hubband.
In her director’s statement on the website, Hannon goes into some detail about how she came to make the film and why she chose the shots and setting that she did:
I was introduced to the love poetry of John Donne at high school and suddenly my literature class became a lot more interesting…suddenly his words made ‘one little room an everywhere’. I was able to channel my awakening teenage sexuality into becoming a metaphor sleuth, eagerly stripping away the layers of his work to discover hidden meanings. I found his observations of lovers and loving so beautiful, and The Good Morrow became one of my favourite poems.
John Donne’s honest exploration of life, love, sex, death – la petite mort, fascinates me. When I recently read The Expiration, I was captivated. There is nothing more charged than a ‘…last lamenting kisse,..’ nothing more precious than a love, ‘…which sucks two soules, and vapors both away.’ It was the sobering line “Turn thou ghost that one, and let me turn this,” that instantly brought an image of a couple that can no longer love one another, awkwardly lying close, sharing a bed, knowing they can no longer be connected. An overhead wide shot of a couple turning away from each other, lying back to back became imprinted in my mind,..from this, my ambition to bring it to the screen grew…
Originally I thought we’d shoot in an enclosed environment, inside a bedroom or a beach hut but as my vision for the piece developed, the poem’s earthiness, its grittiness demanded it be located outside. The title and the poem itself made me think of ‘lifeforce,’ or ‘chi’, which literally means breath, air, or gas. And as trees give us the oxygen that we cannot live without, I wanted to set it in the woods.
I wanted to capture the metamorphosis of a couple’s intoxicating sexual euphoria into a clear-headed, post-coital reality: Despite their passionate love, their relationship just cannot be. For me, The Expiration is not about a love that has just fizzled out. There is too much full-blooded passion, anger and too much raw pain. The act of passion creates life itself, and yet this is a love that has to be killed off. This led me to interpret the poem in the way I have. I hope to evoke the emotional effect this poem has on me, and to honour the wonder of loving and the bittersweet joy and pain it can bring.
Be sure to visit the Behind the Scenes page for the full credits list, complete with web links, and a series of snapshots of the filming. The website also includes a good biography of Donne as well as the text of the poem.
An atmospheric video by New York-based artist BriAnna Olson for Warsan Shire‘s widely circulated poem.
I wanted to share something by Sarah Howe today to celebrate her winning the TS Eliot prize with her collection Loop of Jade, “the first debut poetry collection to win the British prize since it was inaugurated in 1993” as the Guardian pointed out. YouTube has a couple of good videos of her reading her work, but the only videopoem is this one by Bridget Smith, produced for National Poetry Day 2015. The renowned physicist Stephen Hawking reads a poem Howe wrote especially for him. He praised the poem on Facebook:
Physicists and poets may differ in discipline, but both seek to communicate the beauty of the world around us. … Sarah Howe brings light to life in her poem “Relativity.”
It sounds as if this video, or one very like it, will be part of an upcoming Bridget Smith exhibition at the Frith Street Gallery in London, The Eye Needs a Horizon:
A high definition video installation shows a beam of light emanating from an unseen projector. The film shows nothing but light and particles of dust, yet it evokes a sense of drama and indeed of immensity using the sparest of means.
This film by Maggie Bailey blends interpretative dance with snippets of a 1961 interview with Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Here’s the description from Vimeo:
An Interview stems from a desire to explore the life of Sylvia Plath. This short film analyzes Plath’s feelings about her relationship with her husband, daily life, and raising her children, through dance and gesture work, paired with excerpts of an interview with Plath and her husband, Ted Hughes. Though she says quite the opposite in this interview, we can infer that she feels a loss of identity and purpose in life, in the midst of caring for a new baby. The year of the interview is 1961, two years prior to Plath’s suicide. Directed & filmed by Maggie Bailey. Edited by Maggie Bailey and Tyler Rubin. Performed by Heather Bybee. Music by Michael Wall. Interview with Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.
A new performance poetry video from director Sabrina Grant and actor and poet Jade Anouka, with original music by Grace Savage.