Romantic Circles Blog

On 13 September 2009, the Keats-Shelley Association of America hosted a special advance screening of Jane Campion’s new film Bright Star (previously discussed here), about the love between John Keats and Fanny Brawne, at the New York Public Library. Following the screening was a special panel of reactions to the movie, featuring Stuart Curran (distinguished professor Emeritus of the University of Pennsylvania and president of the KSAA), Christopher Ricks (William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities and Co-Director of the Editorial Institute, Boston University), Timothy Corrigan (professor of English and Director of Cinema Studies, University of Pennsylvania) and Susan Wolfson (Professor of English, Princeton University).

Special thanks are due to to several people who helped to facilitate this screening/panel and its recording: Marsha Manns (Director, Keats-Shelley Association of America), Oleg Dubson (Apparition, the film’s distributor), Doucet Devin Fischer (Co-editor, Shelley and his Circle) Cheryl Raymond (Manager, Programs, Special Events, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts), Mike Diekmann (Manager of Audio Visual Services New York Public Library for the Performing Arts), Sarah Zimmerman (Associate Professor of English, Fordham University), John Bugg (Assistant Professor of English, Fordham University), Zachary Holbrook (Research Associate, Shelley and his Circle), and Elizabeth Denlinger (Curator, Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, New York Public Library).

Romantic Circles Audio is now pleased to make the panel discussion available here as a podcast. The lecture is downloadable by clicking on the speaker icon below, or you can subscribe (free of charge) to the panel as a podcast–and then receive future podcasts from Romantic Circles Audio–manually, by using the RSS button below, or (again free of charge) via the iTunes store using the iTunes button.

Though he does not introduce himself on the recording, Stuart Curran introduces the panel.

click here to listen directly, or right click to download

To manually subscribe, simply follow these steps:

1. Copy the link attached to the RSS button below (Mac users ctrl-click, Windows users right-click).

2. Paste this link into any podcast aggregator–for example, iPodder or Apple’s iTunes player (under: Advanced > Subscribe to podcast).

podcast

Note: Romantic Circles also publishes the Poets on Poets Archive as a free quarterly podcast.

The trailer has come available for Jane Campion’s Bright Star, a new film about the romance between John Keats and Fanny Brawne.

Watch the trailer here.

The film is currently scheduled for theatrical release in the US on September 18th and the UK on November 6th, but there is some talk it may be pushed back in the US for better Academy Award timing. The film had been on critics’ short lists for a Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival in May, but it came up empty handed.

A new stop-motion animation film based on a story by Neil Gaiman offers a slightly more than passing allusion to Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” Directed by Henry Selick (Nightmare Before Christmas), Coraline follows a young girl neglected and ignored by her parents into a parallel world (discovered through a small door in the old mansion into which they’ve recently moved) that contains a set of “other” parents, led by the mother, who have mastered the art of wish-fulfillment. The only difference between the real world and the alternate one: the characters in the latter have buttons sewn over their eyes, marking them as automota of a sort. As the “other mother” begins to ply Coraline with goodies and entertainments, it quickly becomes clear that the former has devious plans for Coraline. And it is not long before the “other mother” gives Coraline an ultimatum: to remain in this happy world, she must abandon her real parents and agree to have buttons sewn over her eyes, like the rest of the characters in the parallel world.

Coraline’s immediate rejection of this proposal unmasks the “other mother” as the sinister, manipulative “Belle Dame” she is. The latter name is given the mother by the ghosts of three children she has previously goaded into her world and subsequently locked away for eternity. A sustained meditation of Keats’ poem this movie is not. But it does contain an interesting take on the poem’s themes of seduction,  economy of exchange (highlighted by the Merci / Mercy pun in the title), the danger of dreams, the abomination of  love, and, most importantly,  the enslavement of the seductress’ victims in a state of perpetual, ghostly death-in-life.  Most conspicuously absent, as might be expected, is the theme of sexual seduction in Keats’ poem; the abomination of love in the movie is of the motherly kind. Absent the sexual politics (that makes possible an empowered reading of the Belle Dame in Keats’ poem), the “other mother” of the movie is thoroughly villainous. What’s more, the dominating visual imagery of the film is that of dolls and puppetry, something Keats poem only addresses by analogy.

For reasons entirely other than its debts to Keats, the film has received mostly favorable reviews, and if that’s not enough, it is projected in stereoscopic 3D! (But not, unfortunately, at this blogger’s theater.)