T.S.Eliot was known to occasionally visit the cinema with either his close friend Mary Trevelyan or Valerie Eliot. Mary records them going to see the Marx Brother’s A Night at the Opera (An irrepressible Groucho Marx was now corresponding by letter with the dour Tom); a Luigi Zampa film called Angelina, starring Anna Magnani, through which Eliot fell asleep and later told Mary “I thought Zampa was the name of an obscure opera.” Also in 1949 Mary arranged for them to attend the premiere of Carol Reed’s The Third Man but Eliot missed it for he had to leave London for a lecture tour. That was a pity.
Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 Throne of Blood, adapted from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, has for sixty seven years been cited as T.S.Eliot’s favourite film. Again and again Eliot is reputed, presumed, reported or supposed to have said this in an interview. But where and when? I can’t find a source for his claim. Eliot lived in London not far from the Southbank NFT and The Academy Cinema in Oxford Street: both indubitably screening the films of Kurosawa.
If Eliot really saw Throne of Blood then I’m sure he would have been excited. Although much of Shakespeare’s dialogue is omitted, intense visual metaphors of fear, power, revenge and guilt explode on screen. And particularly so in the scene where a distraught Lady Macbeth attempts to wash off the blood she still imagines to be on her hands. Lady Macbeth (Lady Asaji in the film) is played by Isuzu Yamada whose Noh mask-like face proves to be so haunting. Her terror at smelling the spilt blood feeds into Eliot’s criticism where sensations and atmosphere inevitably accompany and motivate characters in a poem, play or novel (Eliot wrote about Shakespeare’s Hamlet and also spoke of Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene as an example of his theory of the objective correlative in art.)
The young Eliot wrote enthusiastically about the music hall which he preferred to the serious new theatre on offer. When older he occasionally mentioned the theatre (most disparagingly concerning the film version of his play Murder in the Cathedral of which he said “the film is not a good medium for poetry.”) If he meant that cinema has a hard time with poetic verse drama then I would probably agree. Interestingly verse dramas performed in London’s West End of the fifties saw full houses. Not just for Eliot’s plays but Christopher Fry’s. And Fry went on to script films that although they aren’t verse dramas, have a quasi poetry. Forgetting the TV movies of his plays, now rightly or wrongly forgotten, Fry scripted two Hollywood biblical epics, Barabbas (Blank verse very well) and The Bible…in the Beginning (Well not so well). As for Eliot’s plays there was a BBC TV version of The Family Reunion but the recording was then wiped. After this, Eliot’s final play, it’s hard to imagine him taking up scriptwriting
The Waste Land was published in 1922. In 1925 The London Film Society was founded. Under a special club licence they were able to screen Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925). Many writers, artists and intellectuals attended the screenings. Yet there’s no record of Eliot being there. The critic Michael Wood has said that The Waste Land is “modern montage par excellence.” It that’s correct then the fragmented disunity / unity of this modernist poem has much in common with the editing of the Odessa steps sequence of Potemkin and the savage climax of Eisenstein’s earlier film Strike ( 1925). I think Eliot must have been aware of 20’s Russian cinema but never let on. It was maybe that cinema, as modernism was a force concurrent with modernist poetry but only infrequently to be taken seriously and, as a tasteful commercial entertainment, snobbishly looked down upon.
Automatism is a word that Eliot and D.H.Lawrence recoiled from. Mechanical reproduction of art was not for them. Eliot could view an artist like Chaplin as a genius performing in films (viewed with his suspicion or antipathy) to possess a performance rhythm set apart from the rhythm of film editing and I assume, for Eliot, superior to the medium. His real figures of mythic stature were musical hall artists like Marie Lloyd. For Eliot Lloyd’s spontaneity and ability to ad lib for a working class audience was a more visceral experience than a film comedy that’s sealed in the can. Of Laurel and Hardy Eliot he did not find them to be “comedians for national life.” The brilliance of their routines had been pre-recorded. And therefore lacked the immediacy and authenticity of comedy in the here and now. To that I would say no. The greatest physical screen comedians (Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy or Jacques Tati) rarely improvise on screen but construct a comic universe. Though all that rigour and artistic control also creates the illusion of occurring easefully in the moment.
I wonder what Eliot would have thought of Laurel and Hardy if he’d attended one of their theatre shows when they toured the UK in the early fifties? Would that have made them proper comedians for national life or would hyper-fussy Eliot have regarded that as only a stage record of the duo’s tried and tested movie routines? My own brother told me he saw and loved their stage act in Liverpool. It slipped my mind to ask him how much they improvised for their adoring audience.
Given Eliot’s prominence as the leading modernist poet then you might have assumed he’d be attracted to early experimental cinema (Hans Arp, Rene Clair’s Entr’acte, Jean Epstein or Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou) and that he’d adopt similar cinematic devices. Certainly the fragmentation of the epic The Waste Land collage was innovatory and yet was it, before its time, more a prescient radio play than a cinematic experiment akin to the film avant-gardists? Last year (2022) Radio 3 produced The Waste Land in the manner of a radio play with actors, sound effects and music. It fitted very comfortably inside this other medium: resonating as powerfully as Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall (though that was written as a specific play for radio and is still regarded as a landmark drama).
Eliot saw some early silent westerns and enjoyed them. Probably The Great Train Robbery (1903). Afterwards he was playing round with a scenario called Effie the Waif in which he included technical film terms. Eliot was attracted to playful, mainstream popular cinema. No avant gardism here. But before writing The Waste Land Eliot read a book by the surrealist French director Jean Epstein. He found it very interesting. Did it influence his writing? There are contradictions round Eliot’s seemingly indifferent and very passing engagement with film.
“He do the police in many voices” was once the first title over “The Burial of the Dead” opening for Eliot’s great modernist poem. That suggests ventriloquism for The Waste Land more than imagism. Yet cinematic impressions, with an edgy soundtrack, of Eliot’s own invention or borrowed from other classic texts, working class pub chatter and classical music are in the poem. In 2021 Four Quartets was done on stage as a one man show by Ralph Fiennes. He attempted to dramatize the verse and it was mainly successful. But can you really make a version, re-imagined as an authentic film, of The Waste Land or should you resist the idea of an immersive cinematic event? Maybe going for Eliot’s possible preference – commercial cinema over art house: old Possum’s ruins shorn across a huge IMAX screen in 3D with a Hans Zimmer soundscape battering on? Not for me. I’m happier to remain at home with my copy of Eliot’s collected poems and mentally zoom into his haunting language, producing and directing it all in my head.
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