T S Eliot on television
Oct. 17th, 2022 10:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
callmemadamThe Waste Land was first published in 1922, so to mark the centenary, there’s a flurry of programmes about Eliot. Last week, BBC 2 showed a programme devoted entirely to The Waste Land. It wasn’t bad. The most surprising thing about it for me was to find how much of the poem I knew, although I haven’t read it that often.
Yesterday evening, on BBC 4, there was a repeat of a programme I’ve seen before: A N Wilson talking about Eliot’s life and work. He was trying to square the great poet (he considers The Waste Land the greatest poem of the twentieth century) with Eliot’s ‘abhorrent’ views. He failed in this attempt and confessed himself ‘baffled’. It’s good. Both these programmes used Eliot’s own recordings of his poems; an eerie voice from the past.
This was followed by possibly the most challenging and exhausting one-hour film I’ve ever seen. Apparently, when lockdown began, Ralph Fiennes set himself the task of learning The Four Quartets. Phew! He turned his recitation into a one-man stage performance and then this film (directed by his sister). To hold an audience with poetry for an hour non-stop and never a dull moment is an amazing achievement. (Weakly, I did get the occasional mental flash of Fiennes with no nose.) It must surely become compulsory viewing for anyone unlucky enough to be studying the poems. I say unlucky not because the poetry is bad (far from it) but because you could spend a lifetime studying the Quartets and still not get to the bottom of them. Luckily for me, I can accept mysteries. I felt tired afterwards so Fiennes must have been prostrated. When does he get a knighthood?
Yesterday evening, on BBC 4, there was a repeat of a programme I’ve seen before: A N Wilson talking about Eliot’s life and work. He was trying to square the great poet (he considers The Waste Land the greatest poem of the twentieth century) with Eliot’s ‘abhorrent’ views. He failed in this attempt and confessed himself ‘baffled’. It’s good. Both these programmes used Eliot’s own recordings of his poems; an eerie voice from the past.
This was followed by possibly the most challenging and exhausting one-hour film I’ve ever seen. Apparently, when lockdown began, Ralph Fiennes set himself the task of learning The Four Quartets. Phew! He turned his recitation into a one-man stage performance and then this film (directed by his sister). To hold an audience with poetry for an hour non-stop and never a dull moment is an amazing achievement. (Weakly, I did get the occasional mental flash of Fiennes with no nose.) It must surely become compulsory viewing for anyone unlucky enough to be studying the poems. I say unlucky not because the poetry is bad (far from it) but because you could spend a lifetime studying the Quartets and still not get to the bottom of them. Luckily for me, I can accept mysteries. I felt tired afterwards so Fiennes must have been prostrated. When does he get a knighthood?
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Date: 2022-10-17 01:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-17 01:26 pm (UTC)