Gustave Courbet, “Portrait of Charles Baudelaire” (1848-9). Wikimedia Commons.

How does one picture or dramatize the writing of poetry? Is the labor of poetry—the abstract, nebulous, and invisible activity that occurs somewhere between the body and the page—an action or emotion which can be captured in pictorial or cinematic form? Two recent films, one on the life of Emily Dickinson, and the second concerning an historical moment in the life of Pablo Neruda, seem to propose different solutions to the enigma of how to represent such seemingly unrepresentable states. While the first film, Terence Davies’s A Quiet Passion (2016), ambitiously attempts to condense the entirety of Dickinson’s writing life into just over two hours, the second, Pablo Larraín’s Neruda (2016), more modestly reimagines the incidents leading up to its titular subject’s political exile from Chile in 1948. Are there two more different, yet universally famous, poets than Dickinson and Neruda? Dickinson, the poet of ellipsis, subtext, sparsity, and concision, enframes vast metaphysical and existential questions in the minor moment, while Neruda, the poet of accretion, velocity, gluttony, and the epic gesture, explodes all the world’s vegetable histories into a monumentalized, lascivious verse form.

In Larraín’s film, Neruda’s reputation as the author of the celebrated Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair) (1924) precedes him, and the film establishes early on Neruda’s role as public figure: he is a senator, diplomat, and “the world’s most famous Communist.” Neruda nurtures international attention and attracts crowds wherever he goes—we frequently see admirers ask him to repeat famous lines from his poems, as people do of actors who starred in their favorite films. Neruda’s celebrity outweighs him. Dickinson, by contrast, lived in relative obscurity, published almost nothing in her lifetime, remained aloof from political engagement, and would have bristled at the idea of a crowd. Her audience was with “Eternity,” and her readers awaited her somewhere in a vast futurity that seemed destined for a wide range of interpretations and the inevitable biopic. If Neruda’s legacy and international globe-trotting guaranteed him an overexposure during his lifetime, Dickinson’s biography endured multiple omissions and recessions due to her formal radicality as a poet and the injustice of not being taken seriously in the same patriarchal culture that would allow Neruda to travel so liberally.

As directed by Davies, A Quiet Passion exemplifies this contrast between the public celebrity and the solitary figure from the very opening of the film. We see a group of young women facing, in a counter-shot, a stern-looking instructor who glares at them, a Christian cross authoritatively placed on the wall behind her. The scene is clearly meant to be Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, where Dickinson matriculated. The instructor divides the students into those who “wish to come to God and be saved,” and those who only “hope to be saved,” and after two sets of students take sides, we are left with only one student, the solitary Emily Dickinson (played by Emma Bell), who defiantly chooses neither side and answers back to the instructor’s remonstrations: “I wish I could feel as others do, but it is not possible.” The instructor answers, “You are alone in your rebellion,” and it is this statement which the film seems intent on establishing as the general theme of Dickinson’s life, a “quiet passion” that luxuriates in solitude and rejects the kind of fame that poets such as Neruda courted. It is no surprise, then, that among the poems featured in the film, Dickinson’s “I’m nobody!” is heard in voice-over in another scene:

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell your name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

Choosing neither side, and contradicting the strictures of the evangelical authority, Dickinson chooses to follow her own lights. In one of Davies’s most striking shots in the film, we find Dickinson, left alone now, gazing out a window as sunlight streams around her. I read this shot as an allegorization of the invisible labor of poetry, the necessary and silent rituals of contemplation that feed into the fabric of lyric thought. She gazes out, motionless and almost distractedly, but she is also, we imagine, “working” inside her head, within the careful abacus of her mind. We hear in voice-over the lines of “For each extatic instant”:


For each extatic instant
We must an anguish pay
In keen and quivering ratio
To the extasy –

For each beloved hour
Sharp pittances of Years –
Bitter contested farthings –
And Coffers heaped with tears!

As we gaze at her in the act of gazing out, the “work” of poetry erupts in a voice-over by Cynthia Nixon, who plays the older Dickinson for most of the film. The shot seems to punctuate the two ends of Dickinson’s maturity. As a young woman, Dickinson is presented as favoring a primarily indoor life in which she routinely gazes outward and ponders complex, enigmatic thoughts that only become visible to everyone else in the hundreds of poems and poetic fragments that she would write down on multiple surfaces: stationery paper, parcel paper, letterheads, fascicles, the pieces, bits, and scraps of paper that Dickinson wrote on, collected, and extended into her correspondence. Much later in the film, we again find Dickinson, now significantly older and on what will be her death-bed, gazing out a window in a kind of “anguish” that, following through on the poem’s own tenets, she now pays “In keen and quivering ratio / To the extasy” she had felt as a young woman many years before.

Still from Neruda, dir. Pablo Larrain (2016).

Whereas Davies opens up with scenes from Dickinson’s cherished solitude and her rejection of conventional society and its doxa, Pablo Larraín opens Neruda by emphasizing the Chilean poet’s courtship of the crowd and his evident pleasure in his own celebrity. Neruda (played with mischievous aplomb by Luis Gnecco) is berated by opposition party senators who whistle at his Communist Party allegiance and call into question Neruda’s double life as the politician “Ricardo Reyes” (Neruda’s birth name) and as the published poet “Pablo Neruda” (the pen name Neruda would legalize later in his life): Which name is he? Is he a Communist spy, a mole in the house of government?

Interestingly, Larraín and screenwriter Guillermo Calderόn focus much of the film’s narrative on the problem of identity and the impossibility of solitude in the throes of public celebrity. If Dickinson chooses a solitude that rewards her with mystic and resonant silences, Neruda attempts to fabricate some sense of personal integrity in the eye of a political vortex that threatens to consume him. Neruda constructs personae with various costumes, fake beards, and aliases, and Larraín suggests that it was as much for Neruda’s safety (as he avoids detection for political reasons) as it was for his own pleasure. The film plays on this theme of multiple Nerudas: the actor, the Communist agitator, the witty diplomat, the philandering husband, and the poet who is still asked, many years later, to recite his greatest hits (“Tonight I may write the saddest lines…”), even as he was engaged in writing the magnum opus that would mark the high point of his career, Canto General (1950). In another scene, we find Neruda performing for a crowd of friends and admirers during a bohemian house party, and he recites his most famous poem while cosplaying in the garb of Lawrence of Arabia. The allusion is appropriate: soon to be forced into exile, Neruda is as much a foreigner in his own country as he is a poet dressed up in the costume of diplomat-cum-adventurer.

The plot of Neruda involves the poet’s “grand escape” from the clutches of a vainglorious and fashionably dressed pursuer, Oscar Peluchonneau (Gael Garcia Bernal), a police detective tasked by the Chilean President, Gabriel Gonzalez Videla (Alfredo Castro, in a rare minor role), to capture and imprison Neruda, whose popularity and recent allegiance to the Communist Party threatens to upset the conservative government’s political influence. While Neruda, with the help of Communist party members, plots his clandestine escape from Chile to Argentina, Peluchonneau traces his every step, only to fall one step behind the poet who leaves clues and calling cards for the bumbling detective. But, as we find out eventually, Peluchonneau is fated to live out Zeno’s paradox and never reach his quarry: the detective is a figment of Neruda’s imagination, an invention straight out of an Unamuno novel or a Pirandello play. In the film’s meta-fictional third-act, Peluchonneau learns from Neruda’s wife, Delia del Carril (Mercedes Morán), that Neruda has dreamt up and scripted Peluchonneau’s character. Everything from his frequent voice-overs to his ostentatious behavior and dress code is an invention of Neruda’s own making—a private diversion that results from Neruda’s rabid reading of romans policiers, as a way of intensifying and spicing up the stakes of the poet’s impending exile.

The reveal is not so clever as it seems, but part of Larraín and Calderόn’s point is that Neruda may have been partly insensitive or class-blind to the realities of the danger that circumvented him, possibly even to the realities of actual poverty and the suffering of those who were captured, tortured, and imprisoned. In a conversation with a politician, Neruda unfeelingly suggests, “You think the way to defeat communism is to push us into exile, to throw us into jail. Let me give you some advice. The solution is to kill us all. Kill us. And your problem will be solved”—a statement that would become all too true during the purges that followed the Chilean military coup on September 11, 1973. (Larraín’s trilogy of films beginning with Tony Manero [2008] and ending with No [2012] deals explicitly with the painful and bloody legacy of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile.) Later, when Neruda asks in total disbelief, “Who will kill me?” Larraín and Calderόn seem to ironize the statement, perhaps in some dim recognition of rumors that Neruda’s death had been an assassination staged only two weeks after the coup.

In this regard, the dreaming up of a police detective who Neruda outwits at every turn seems particularly uncomprehending of the realities of other communists in Chile less fortunate than the grandstanding poet. We glimpse some aspects of Neruda’s self-importance during small moments in the film. He rages impetuously when a Communist Party attaché tasked to keep him safe and undetected questions where the poet has wandered off to. In another scene, a drunk reveler at an underground party approaches Neruda, at first in admiration, only later to question Neruda’s comprehension of what the working class actually experience in their everyday situation. Here the poet is briefly presented as the feckless and self-involved poseur, who writes of the working class and yet doesn’t seem to participate in its struggles other than through the labor of poetry. In a sense, poetry itself is being interrogated: What is Neruda’s value to the Communist Party, or to the people of Chile? As a poet of the working class, what labor does Neruda’s lyrical language actually enact or put forth, if it isn’t policy or legislation or the language of collective bargaining? The film’s conclusion puts forth the thesis we already know and expect: The poet speaks for the people in that the people—their lives, their fears, their struggles, their loves—are already the material of his poetry. In Neruda’s case, the poet as public figure fulfills his end of the bargain by speaking in and for the people.

Which brings us back to the question: How do Larraín and Davies, respectively, portray the work of poetry? In Larraín’s film, we see Neruda actually write and compose poetry in two small cut-scenes, but often we find Neruda wandering around, disguised, clandestine, a flaneur aimlessly searching around for his thoughts to roam free. Larraín often depicts Neruda writing with Peluchonneau’s voice-over carefully describing the inner thoughts that disclose the labor of poetry-writing. All of the lyrical bits are given to Peluchonneau, who praises the object of his pursuit, but here and there are snippets of Neruda testing out a few phrases or lines in his mellifluous “poetic” voice. (There’s even a scene in which Neruda is rehearsing the lines of a speech he’s about to give, and del Carril encourages him to adopt the affected poetic voice in place of his more formal diplomat’s voice.) Peluchonneau’s voice-over informs us Neruda must have specific conditions for him to produce his lines. Here, the labor of poetry is presented as a theatrical event, “four walls and roof,” and the camera frame in which we can trace his thought process becomes a function of the poetry itself. In seeing Neruda type or write out his thoughts, sometimes reading aloud a line or two, the ordinariness of poetry’s labor is what comes across. As public or as private figure, the poet writes lines in the way one washes dishes, smokes a cigarette, or breathes in the air at Machu Picchu. Neruda’s ordinariness prompts him to take up fake identities and disguises, but it also prompts him to write poems, long ones, short ones, odes to socks, tuna fish, or to Juan, the carpenter, miner, and fisherman “whose bones litter all places.”

In A Quiet Passion, on the other hand, Davies offers about four different scenes of Dickinson writing—or sewing a fascicle together—and he frames his medium shots with a view toward opening up Dickinson’s writing process to both the spectator and an off-screen interrupter who is revealed in a counter-shot, usually Dickinson’s father, her sister Vinnie, or her brother Austin poking into her study room. The framing is intended to invite us into the labor of her writing, and yet, similar to the shot of a young Dickinson gazing outside, her thought process remains occluded to us.

Nonetheless, we hear Dickinson’s poems—the stuff of the writing we glimpse in parts—in multiple voice-overs by Cynthia Nixon, and her readings capably bring us to consider the bits and pieces of Dickinson’s accumulated material as a seamless play of poetic thought that links the events of the film together. In one notable sequence, we witness Dickinson write the lines to “If you were coming in the Fall,” then gaze at the words on the page with a loving enthusiasm, and then stand up to gaze out the window again. This chain of actions seems to link the scripting of the poems to the primary moment the film opened with, in which Dickinson refutes the Christian rigidity of her schooling and its false certainty for the communal solitude of sunlight, the vista of an open window, and a steady and cautious agnosticism. Dickinson answers to no one but to her own labor.

Still from A Quiet Passion, dir. Terrence Davies (2016)

It may be this fairly rote portrayal of Dickinson’s labor as an epiphany-dependent activity which too readily lyricizes poetry-writing into romantic scribbling and window-gazing, that Johanna Drucker mocks as constituting a portrayal of how “poetry is fatal, especially to unmarried women.” Drucker reads the film’s argument as one in which “interiority is clearly a form of pathology,” and this critical point holds when considering how reduced the particulars of Dickinson’s life are, oriented around a few deaths in the family that seem to accelerate her own death: the death of her father, after which she begins to wear white in mourning, and the death of her mother, after which she is diagnosed with Bright’s disease and eventually succumbs to the histrionics of a movie death. The before and after of Dickinson’s life—the blithe and happy party-going of a young brilliant woman in Amherst society, and the grim and convulsion-racked “interiority” of an unmarried woman who loses her friends, her taste for society, and her parents—seem to position her life as a series of cruel exchanges for the “quiet passion” of poetry-writing. Of all the poems heard and cited in the film, the first one we hear in the film (“For each beloved hour / Sharp pittances of Years”) calculates the film’s controlling thesis for the remnant of Dickinson’s life, and it is one that no doubt leaves much of Dickinson’s joys and miseries open to endless interpretation (or biopics). But as Virginia Jackson has argued, the “hermeneutic legacy of Dickinson’s posthumous publication is also first of all a ‘sorting out’” of the spaces, silences, marginalia, and extensions that tend to make of Dickinson’s figure either a palimpsest for specific types of “lyric reading” or a blank slate for completely experimental interpretations.

Poetry remains figurally unrepresentable in pictures or on film, but these films seem to arrive at the same conclusion for poets who are strikingly, even vastly, different: The relative “publicness” or obscurity of a poet offers no solution to the enframing of poetic labor, since the invisible labor of poetry, especially in the genre of the biopic, too often relies on voice-overs and scenes of actual writing to register transparently what it is a poet does when they are “poetizing.” It’s true: biopics aren’t usually greenlit if they don’t already have a built-in audience in mind, and thus they depend on the figure of the poet as a person of interest who is meant to be pictured as a person apart from the words, that is, as a compelling biographic cipher deserving visualization. Neruda is cast as a socially-conscious but self-involved flaneur who responds to and acts in accordance with public desire, and Dickinson (to use Drucker’s words) is reduced to an “embittered spinster” who rejects publicity in favor of hermetic solitude; and yet these thematic conclusions don’t seem to transmit the quality of the poems themselves nor the quality of the aesthetic impact the directors bring to the table.

For one thing, neither film seems to represent the signature qualities of the best work of its respective director (both Larraín and Davies are celebrated international auteurs with a long body of critically-acclaimed work), and this may be due in part to a fundamental misunderstanding regarding how to “cinematize” poetry. The brilliance of Larraín’s other films (especially Tony Manero [2008]), or of Davies’ masterworks (especially The Long Day Closes [1993]) are lost somehow in the translation of poetry to the screen. There is a notable lack of conviction in the transmission. Is it the medium-specific anxiety over how to represent poetry? Put more harshly, Neruda and A Quiet Passion pale in comparison to the directors’ other works: the former comes across as surprisingly middling and minor considering Larraín’s Chilean roots and deep awareness of Neruda’s significance, while the latter film feels profoundly stilted and artificial, a glitzier version of a Masterpiece Theatre episode in which the acting, excepting Nixon’s, is dull to the point of suggesting an affect bordering the animatronic. (Or maybe New Englanders in the 1870s just talked that way?) What’s missing, I’d argue, is a formal awareness of the particularities of the medium of poetry, and it is one that transcends, or can’t be restricted to, what can be gathered from the historical data concerning the presumed personality of the poet. Visualization of acts of writing may not be enough, and this is because the invisible labor of poetry isn’t of the kind that can be easily communicated in histrionic death-scenes or in the sight of a poet furiously clacking away at a typewriter or dipping a plume to ink and paper. In other words, the film itself must be the poem, and neither A Quiet Passion nor Neruda manage to convey the intensity of the poetry of their subjects because there is, as is customary with most biopics, far too much attention lavished on the mythos and figurality of the authors themselves.

I want to conclude with a brief look at a few scenes from a different kind of biopic—one which doesn’t concern the life of a poet but that of Johann Sebastian Bach—Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet’s The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968). As the title suggests, the film centers on Bach’s wife, Anna Magdalena, and her journals (a narrative device fabricated by Straub-Huillet) track and describe the composition and performance of Bach’s works. The minimalist film was radical for its time, and continues to be: instead of focusing on biographical details or dramatic episodes in Bach’s life, the film is comprised of long takes of on-set performances of Bach’s works. The only narrative guidance we are afforded are a series of voice-overs by Anna Magdalena (played by classical pianist Christiane Lang), who describes the composition we hear, the setting for its first performances, and the circumstances surrounding the composition. What comes forward isn’t the persona, but the work—Bach hardly matters because the work, which we hear in performance after performance, sums up the totality of what Bach represents, of who he was and what he accomplished. The film is less bio and more pic—the labor of making is introduced here as a spectacle of bodies and instruments harmonizing in a carefully unfolding instant. We see the notes on the page, we see the hands play in real time, and somehow this tells us more about Bach and his milieu than a conventional biopic would.

One scene comes to mind. Thirty minutes into the film, we enter a compressed master shot of a double chorus and orchestra playing the first movement of Bach’s oratorio St. Matthew Passion. The tightness of the composition suggests historical accuracy: the players are compressed to the left of the shot, in what looks like the narrow raised section of the choir, the orchestra cascading across the chancel like a garland of voices and instruments strung along the ridge of a massive yet concealed organ. The setting is presumably at the original site of the work’s first performance in 1727, Thomaskirche in Leipzig, and the “actors” are all trained Baroque musicians donning wigs and period costume, in what is staged as a cinematic reenactment of the historical settings for the composition. Bach himself is hardly the center of attention, and Anna Magdalena, like many of the characters in the film, is only a conduit for the music. In the compressed shot described here, Bach lies in the background to the right of the shot, hardly visible in the eye of an unmoving yet resonant vortex. What we do see of him are his arms rhythmically waving up and down as he conducts an assemblage of faintly swaying bodies that communicate their passion into voices and instruments that are themselves focused and stationary bodies that communicate remoter abstract frequencies.

Still from The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, dir. Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet (1968).

The scene is remarkable because it makes the critical point regarding the cinematic treatment of the lives of artists: Bach’s life was almost entirely a succession of works, and the film restricts itself, with nearly monomaniacal yet phlegmatic devotion, to long takes of master shots of performances (recorded in mono, on set) by actual musicians dressed up according to the standards of Bach’s time, playing Bach’s music. The distantiation from the subject of choice, Johann Sebastian Bach, is increased through this double distance. Played by the eminent Dutch pianist, Gustav Leonhardt, Bach is never given a voice other than through his wife and his works: he himself, as narratological object and cultural icon, hardly ever speaks or becomes a figure of dialogic exchange. Bach is merely a point of contact, a focal point around which musical situations, genres of performance, congregate, rehearse, and perform. The music precedes and buttresses him—he is hardly there, except in the costumes, instruments, and sounds that Straub-Huillet carefully craft, assemble, and direct.

Depicting the life of a musician has a singular advantage: play the music, only play the music, and you get the gist of the work. Instantaneous reproduction, instantaneous understanding. Bach’s soul is the music itself, it only has to be played to arrive at the centrality of a life dedicated to its medium. Straub-Huillet’s film, remarkable on its own, forgoes the usual trappings of biopics and invests itself in the pure phenomenon of a medium speaking in and for itself. That is, the labor that went into Bach’s compositions is almost totally retained in the mere recording and replaying, the performance of the works. Seen from this angle, one can understand why, in the words of Walter Pater, “all art aspires to the condition of music”—the instantaneity is a step closer to thought, as Hegel once noted. Translated to the cinema screen, the medium of sound allows for an immediate and encompassing kinship with the complex contingencies of Bach’s time, with little difficulty or obstacle. And it is perhaps this secret in the life of music that posits a solution to the enigma of poetry’s unrepresentability in pictures or on the screen.

October, 2018