Creating a film poem with stylistic analysis: A pedagogical approach

Abstract

A film poem is a cinematic artwork that takes a written, often canonical, poem as its stimulus. Many are imaginative and arresting performances of poems, going far beyond the likely intentions of the poet into something completely new. However, with this genre, the poem’s stylistic detail is largely irrelevant to its visual realisation. I highlight how this limitation can be addressed by bringing film poems into stylistics teaching and assessment. After providing background on the film poem genre, I model an assignment where students draw on their cinematic literacy to dramatise a poem imaginatively. As with other film poems, the student creates a series of cinematic images and connects them to the poem’s lines, activating new meanings in them. In contrast with the traditional construction of film poems, the procedure involves another stage – the student also connects the images they have created to the poem’s stylistic detail. In turn, as I show, this extra connection helps drive the film’s narrative, adding to the creativity of the film. This staged procedure is different from established (pedagogical) stylistic practice where interpretation and stylistic analysis of a poem are simultaneous, with the stylistic analysis providing support for the burgeoning interpretation. To model this student assignment, I produce a film script of Philip Larkin’s poem, ‘Wants’. The script depicts the activities of a serial killer; some readers may find the script graphic.