Question: What is the greatest feature film ever made about a poet? Give the title of the film and the name of the poet who served as its subject.
Answer: The Color of Pomegranates (image, above), 1966, dir. by Georgian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov, about the 18th-century Armenian poet Sayat Nova, who wrote exclusively in the Georgian language. (Paradjanov [1924-1990] employed an extravagantly imagistic and magical style of filmmaking, sometimes compared to Pasolini’s, which went against the official style of “Soviet Realism.” When he was sentenced to five years at hard labor in the gulag during the 1970s, leading filmmakers of France and Spain lent their voices to the worldwide outcry of protest. However, in a 1988 interview with Ron Holloway, Parajanov credited his early release to the Surrealist poet Louis Aragon and Aragon’s wife, Elsa Triolet; the novelist John Updike; and the English actor Herbert Marshall. “Sergei Parajanov Speaks Up,” Kinema: a journal for film and audiovisual media, 1995.)
Question: What is the second greatest feature film ever made about a poet?
Answer: Bright Star, 2009, dir. and written by Jane Campion, about John Keats. (Campion’s screenplay was inspired by Andrew Motion’s 1999 Keats biography.)
from the archive; first posted June 2, 2014