Reflections on a Lost Cinema

Before I studied poetry, I spent two years studying film; not at a prestigious film school, but at a small college in Liverpool, called South Mersey College. Those were the best two years of my life.

At the college, we watched classic Hollywood films by directors like Howard Hawks, John Ford, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and William Wyler, alongside European avant-garde films by Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Sergei Eisenstein and Andrei Tarkovsky. We studied American Direct Cinema through the films of Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker and Albert and David Maysles. And also the experimental filmmaking pioneered by Len Lye and Stan Brakhage, as well as the underground cinema of Andy Warhol and Kenneth Anger. After each screening, we analysed the films’ themes, visual style, editing and historical context.

We also studied movements such as German Expressionism, Film Noir, Italian Neorealism, the French New Wave, Soviet Montage, Constructivist cinema, Surrealism, British Social Realism and New Hollywood. Our reading list included Rudolf Arnheim’s Film as Art, Sergei Eisenstein’s Film Form and The Film Sense and André Bazin’s What Is Cinema?

I was fascinated by the vibrant use of colour in 1940s and ’50s films. Bright, saturated hues made every frame look like a living painting. Music was equally as important to me, producing maybe eighty percent of a film’s emotional impact. At that time, one of my musical muses was Aaron Copland. I had only recently discovered his works, such as Fanfare for the Common Man and the score he composed for the film The Red Pony. Both pieces were life-affirming, and they became a personal soundtrack to my daydreams of the sorts of films I wanted to make. In my mind, I created film sequences, rising and falling with the flow of the music.

Had I known then how cinema would evolve, I might have been less optimistic. The digital revolution has changed everything. Traditional film stock (16 mm, 35 mm, 70 mm) has largely disappeared. Cameras have become lighter, and handheld naturalism dominates the look of films, with available light replacing carefully designed chiaroscuro lighting schemes. And long takes have largely replaced montage. Digital detail is sharper, but it lacks the depth and texture of film. The deliberate use of light, shadow and colour (the visual poetry that once defined films) has given way to bland, uniform imagery. Music, too, has shifted towards ambient textures rather than emotional scores.

Maybe this will change, and film will return as a tactile, expressive medium once digital technology matures. But for now, many contemporary films have no magic. Yet when I hear a Copland score, I can still glimpse the wonder that first drew me to film.

Old 'Carrier of the Seed' ebook review

I Just found this very old review of my 'Carrier of the Seed' ebook. I never knew it existed.

Quote from it:

"Those skeptical about the e-book format would do well to peruse it; it is proof positive that e-books are, in fact, both real and legitimate. This is a single long poem; 63 pages long, and its formal characteristics are unique: it features a single column composed of spare, terse lines, going straight down the page. This gives the poem a sleek, lean look, as is customary with Side. Reading the poem is like riding on a high-velocity train; it doesn't get sluggish, and there are no breaks in the continuity of the sustained, brisk rhythm. There is an obvious connection with some aspects of Language Poetry; the primary difference between, say, Barrett Watten's Progress and Carrier is that Carrier does actually tell a story, albeit elliptically. This is a story of love lost: memory associations, forms of consciousness which accrue to it."

https://adamfieled.blogspot.com/2007/12/jeffrey-side-carrier-of-seed.html

‘Death, Taxes and Poetry, or, Poetry is My Disability’ by Joritz-Nakagawa—guest blogger

Unable to bear it any longer, I start splintering . . .

I write this in big letters, my eyesight is fading . . .

When my father in law died I wrote a poem the second line of which was "No one will notice Milton's light has dimmed" and which ended ". . . and none of this is actually visible from the lighthouse."

This poem was published under the title The Lighthouse, in New American Writing, a print journal I am very fond of, although I read mostly online now, and also appears with no title in my 2013 poetry collection titled FLUX.

Of course I was referring to John Milton's famous sonnet ‘When I Consider How My Light is Spent’ also known as ‘On His Blindness’ and ‘Sonnet XIX,’ a poem I taught several times in an undergrad course in comparative poetry here in Japan.

After that, my mother in law died, my sister in law died (in October 2025), and my husband has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. My own parents have died, two siblings died of cancer when they are the age I am now, friends died, friends of friends and relatives of friends died, etc. et al.

I survived advanced cancer but it was a kind of devil's bargain: you can live, or you can choose palliative chemo, but your body and new life will be (almost?) unrecognizable in many important ways. But not in this way: poetry is still my disability.

I have written somewhat extensively about death as well as my multiple chronic illnesses and other disabilities and those of others.

When at one of my lowest points, before my third surgery for cancer, I was so frightened of death and further disability that I read Emily Dickinson's poems aloud to myself every night from my bed. Any poem of hers that mentioned psychic pain would do. And there is a great many of such poems by Dickinson, so there was much to choose from! I didn't even have to repeat myself, as I often do!

I am not saying however that disability is bad or necessarily frightening. I don't think that at all, and I was already disabled anyhow before I got cancer. I just became much more so—more disabled I mean. I was afraid of suffering, which is not the same thing as disability, or death, and the unknown, and perhaps a feeling of my own powerlessness in this situation. Please let's not confuse these!

I was net surfing recently and found somebody much younger than myself referring to a group of young persons who are "dark" (their word, not mine!) and inevitably drawn to Plath! I was very surprised to hear this remark! First, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that young people know who Plath is! Although always interested in Plath due to her thematic range, theatricality, power, mastery of verse and stylistic achievements, I didn't really feel the depth of that kind of darkness that appears in some of her late poems until later in life when due to extensive bereavement I felt I was living in it. Or as a Christian friend said to me recently, maybe this life on earth is hell, and heaven is what we get when we die?

But we (= I) also know, if only from opera, that love makes a heaven out of life if only temporarily; love is fragile and can turn to hate or disinterest or disappointment, etc. with relative ease. Can it bounce back with relative ease?

The happiest elegy (actually a so-called "self-elegy" which is why it is more cheerful!) I know is Christina Rossetti's ‘Remember,’ another poem I have taught to undergrads; the saddest is ‘Ending with a Line From Lear’ by Marvin Bell, which I have not. At times of intense suffering (e.g. physical pain, or, bereavement or depression) I have often repeated to myself his line: "I will never be better again" oftentimes followed by the final line, the repetition of the word "never." I was wrong about that, but it helped me to say it, anyway. There's also song lyrics by the band Everclear which begin "I hate waking up, it means I have to die again tonight…" another set of words I have repeated in my head upon waking up during my worst moments in life. As well as the beginning and ending of William Carlos Williams' poem ‘The Widow's Lament in Springtime;’ interestingly, the lyrics to Everclear's ‘Fire Maple Song’ contains a line similar to one in Williams' poem. These poems and songs soothe me somehow during difficult times, although they do much more than that.

Yet life changes, we change, things change.

But poetry is still my disability.

As a person with fibromyalgia, one of the Plath lines I most identify with, from her incredible poem ‘Tulips’ published when I was two years old, is: "The tulips are too red in the first place they hurt me."

I was raised by Plath. No, I don't mean I was raised on Plath or knew her personally. I mean Plath's generation was my mother's generation and they both raised me, if not revived me. A fiction writer friend who also likes poetry once said: "All women can relate to Plath." She meant all women of our generation. Because we were raised by Plath.

When I say "blue bladder" I don't mean the color blue. I mean my bladder is sad. Because it was removed from my body seven years ago.

When I say "There are baroque places inside me" I am quoting someone else.

Poetry is my disability.

NOTES:

“There are baroque places inside me” comes from the poem ‘The Believable Weather of His Baroque Face on a Wall’ by Raymond Farr in the journal Upstairs at Duroc, ed. Barbara Beck, issue 17, 2020, Paris.

A monograph by the author about Plath and other female poets under the title Dying Swans is available online via Argotist Ebooks.