A brief note on Paterson. A film by Jim Jarmusch and an (epic?) poem by William Carlos Williams.
A 9-minute read
Cinema and literature (poetry). Prologue.
From its very beginnings, cinema has flirted with literature. If on one side, with the Lumières, the vein of cinema/reality was taking shape, the documentary in all its forms and variants, on the other, with the genius of Georges Méliès, the debt to literature was contracted from the very outset.
Great novels have been adapted for the screen and have rarely resulted in great works; far more frequent is the case of minor literary works that met with success and are remembered for having given rise to masterpieces of cinema.
We will not draw up a tedious list; let us note only that fiction cinema at once takes on as its own the grammar and syntax of literature, translated of course into images, temporal sequences and techniques of shooting and editing, which little by little evolve until they make of it a universally recognisable language.
Speaking of literature, it comes fairly naturally to think of prose, and yet poetry too has had a role, and not a negligible one, in the film industry. As early as 1911 there appeared L’Inferno by Francesco Bertolini and Adolfo Padovan, in which perhaps the first special effects in the history of cinema were tried out. It is still silent cinema, and we read Dante’s lines only in brief fragments in the intertitles, intertitles that for the most part tell us, in prose, what is happening on the screen. The true attempt to make cinema/poetry, with a relative autonomy from literature, comes with Dada and Surrealism, between the 1920s and 1930s: a season of experiments, risks and provocations that would mark a turning point in all the arts and leave traces which, as far as cinema is concerned, would still be discernible in the avant-gardes of the late century.
But poetry, in mainstream cinema, almost always enters, so to speak, in a role that is if not exactly incidental then at least marginal. To give an example: the revolutionary power of poetry in a hugely successful film such as Dead Poets Society (1989) is marginal, important though it is, compared with the account of the relationships that come to form within a boarding school, and that in fact constitute the essence of the narrative. Another example is Il giovane favoloso, by Mario Martone, with a superb Elio Germano in the role of Giacomo Leopardi. The poetry is there, but it lies entirely in the protagonist’s head. It is a careful biographical reconstruction of a poet’s life in which, quite rightly, for that matter, very little or nothing is risked in the attempt to convey how and why the poet wrote the poetry we still read.
These are only two examples among the many that could be given, but we will spare ourselves the lists, which are easily found online.
Jim Jarmusch
A literature graduate of Columbia University, Jarmusch has enjoyed success ever since his debut film, Stranger than Paradise (1984), which won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes along with many other prizes and honours. Soon becoming an icon of independent cinema, Jarmusch’s filmography is marked by a body of work that, for all the diversity of its subjects and settings, concentrates essentially on a marginal humanity. Vampires, drifters, ascetics: they are very different from one another, yet all connected by a search for meaning. And the ways of that search may be as far apart as can be, from the ascetic path of Bushido (the ethical code of the Samurai) followed by the hitman of Ghost Dog, to the initiatory journey of the accountant William Blake in Dead Man; from the seemingly senseless wanderings of the protagonist of Broken Flowers to the jailbreak of the three good-for-nothings in Down by Law. Technically, Jarmusch’s cinema, made of long takes and static images, concedes little to mere diversion; rich in symbolic allusions, many of them drawn directly, and ironically, from literature (from the aforementioned accountant William Blake to the vampire Christopher Marlowe, plainly the most striking, though the more hidden and camouflaged ones are past counting), it is also a cinema of totemic actors who appear again and again, sometimes in brief cameos but often in leading roles. John Lurie, Tom Waits, Johnny Depp, Tilda Swinton, Bill Murray, and so on.
In 2016 came Paterson, to date Jarmusch’s penultimate film, followed only by The Dead Don’t Die (2019). The story, laid out day by day, recounts a week in the life of a couple. A wholly ordinary pair of young newlyweds: he a bus driver, she a housewife, perhaps a little eccentric and with a certain creative flair. There is also a dog, Marvin, who for almost the whole film is merely a dog like any other, but who towards the end will play a crucial part, one we will not give away, except to say that it will be thanks to him, or rather because of him, that we are handed the most lapidary definition of poetry I can remember.
A quiet routine, marked here and there by slight departures, small departures that, in appearance at least, bear little or no weight on their daily round. He gets up early in the morning, has breakfast, goes out and heads to work. His name is Paterson, and he drives the bus through the streets of Paterson (New Jersey). He comes home from work, she tells him what she has done during the day, they have dinner, then he goes out to walk the dog and stop at the bar for a beer. A few words with the barman; in the neighbourhood everyone knows everyone and there is never much to say, because how’s life? Same as ever, how are you? Same as ever, and little else. Laconic exchanges in a provincial town, an urban landscape just like that of so many small American towns, that is, fairly monotonous and dreary. Jarmusch does nothing to make it interesting to us: no framing, no camera technique, no tricks. The film could almost be filed as a kind of documentary on provincial life in the United States in the twenty-first century, were it not that the news (Jarmusch’s film, though, does not!) reports to us almost daily the shootings, often with many innocent victims, that take place in precisely these seemingly quiet American towns.
The one anomaly in this story, on the whole rather ordinary, is a small detail: Paterson, the bus driver, is a poet. A poet rather reluctant to publish his verse, but who, as a memento, keeps in his lunchbox, together with a photograph of his wife, a picture of Dante Alighieri.
What makes him a poet, Jarmusch seems to tell us, is his attention, his capacity to look and to see, to hear and to listen, to people and to things, to the world around him, with heart and mind ready to take in everything, even the trillions of molecules his body displaces as it moves, along with the trillions of molecules that, a little further off, lie at rest. The film tries to show us, and to my mind it succeeds, how in Paterson the impulse (preferable to inspiration, a term too marked by a spiritualising and lofty tradition) to write poetry is born.
How a box of matches, described phrase after phrase in its meagre simplicity, can turn into a small love poem. It is a poetry born of little things, of the everyday of relations between people, of knowing how to look and to listen.
A few shots of Paterson’s study show us his bookshelf where, among other books, we can glimpse William Carlos Williams’s Paterson and a collection of poems by Wallace Stevens. What at first sight may seem one visual insert among others is in reality, I believe, the true heart of the film. If you like, to use an often abused expression, the message Jarmusch means to send us.
W.C. Williams (Rutherford, 1883-1963), paediatrician and poet, a prolific author of both poetry and prose, practised all his life the profession of medicine and the craft of poetry, as Alfredo Rizzardi puts it, Rizzardi being the editor of the first, and only, and at present, I believe, unobtainable version, since never reprinted, of Williams’s masterpiece. Paterson, published in five books between 1946 and 1958, is the epos of twentieth-century America, and comes after Leaves of Grass, the epos of the nineteenth, Walt Whitman’s masterpiece. If Whitman’s work, much loved, moreover, by Williams, turns entirely, and seems to want to make the whole universe turn, around the poet’s overflowing vitality, in Paterson the poet’s attention is focused on a small city, on the women and men who people it, on their everyday joys and miseries, those of a time in which the so-called American dream has already lived through more than a few bitter awakenings. In Paterson we can catch echoes of the Spoon River Anthology, a Spoon River that widens to embrace an entire city; in a language where lyrical fragments, newspaper clippings and snatches of correspondence follow one upon another, the poet manages to bring out all that is universal in every place and in every being, for those who know how to look and to see, to listen and to hear with open mind and heart.
These repeated dyads, deliberately repeated, to signify that they are by no means synonymous, are another element, an invitation, essential to understanding the film and, above all, to understanding and appreciating poetry, at least this kind of poetry.
A friend and companion of the great poets of the twentieth century (Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, H.D. Hilda Doolittle, Wallace Stevens, and many others), a friend of painters and musicians, Williams served his poetic apprenticeship by passing through, and digesting, all the currents of the twentieth-century avant-garde, until he found his own style, the right form for the content of his poetic craft, thanks to his profession as a doctor, which brought him daily into contact with the material reality of people’s lives. No room for lucubrations, for mental convolutions, for self-pity, the solitude of the poet enthroned upon the heights of the spirit. And it is in a poem by Williams that we find the clearest and most resolute expression of his poetics; the line reads thus:
“Say it, no ideas but in things.”
Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson is, in essence, I believe, a fine viaticum for coming to understand, if not Poetry itself, then at least a good part of the poetry of the twentieth century.
Giorgio Pangaro, an editor of Studi Umbri, curates with Luigi Cimmino the “Corpo a corpo” series of texts on literature and cinema for Rubbettino Editore.