Frieda - I am so sorry

Listening to - Four Organs - Steve Reich

Don't listen to this if, like one person at the premier, you are the sort who will bang the stage with a shoe if you do not like something. If you are listening to a CD then probably all you will have to bash will be something of yours. Four Organs is the same chord played over and over against a maraca rhythm, just lengthened each cycle. I think it is wonderful.

My DVD copy of Sylvia arrived yesterday so after restraining my self enough to watch Terry Jones' wonderful programme about Medieval Lives, I dived straight in. Well I have to say that it spookily matched the images in my head. Even more spookily, there is an early scene where Ted and his mates are reciting poetry or plays at high speed. One does "Henry King" but Hughes' piece is Prince Hal's soliloquy from Henry IV Part 1 so Henry King and King Henry bookend the scene. What is spookier is that the soliloquy is the one long piece of Shakespeare that I have memorised after being forced to by my English teacher in about 1980. It was only Saturday that I quoted it for reasons I cannot remember.

I suppose I ought to make an effort and do a longer review. have to say that the film messed up real life quite badly for the sake of flow, though it may have benefited from being a bit longer and fleshing things out. Some aspects of Plath's character were glossed over - she used to re-use old papers so I suspect she would not have screwed up paper to throw away. In some ways though and contradicting what I have just said, maybe the film did not need to be made. People who know Plath's life would not really gain anything other than entertainment involving the object of their hero-worship and lay viewers might well be bored unless they like beautifully composed shots.

Over all I was not disappointed but I could not feel anything other than that the film was an accurate visual representation of what happened even if the characters were flattened. Contrary to what I thought, there was quite a bit of Plath's poetry in the film (none of Hughes' though) but it was often in the form of audio equivalents of the spinning newspaper to indicate time spent composing and even then I think some of it seemed made-up. Maybe I just do not remember enough of her poetry. As one reviewer said, what can a film about poets actually do other than show the hard life that inspires them? Well, neither Hughes nor Plath had a really hard life physically but Plath was bound in the cycle of her own emotional problems anyway. In a way I could say that this is a film about how the other half lives, the emotional, literary people whose outlook on life and love differ from us mere mortals though looking at the tabloids these days maybe I am the peculiarity. See this film and it will not be a wasted ticket but as you probably know, the end is what we expect. I am not sure whether they resisted temptation by not extending the film into the posthumous life or whether they stuck to the brief of the original title of the film - Ted and Sylvia - which leaves me with an image of a Venn Diagram of the lives of the two poets with the film being the intersection, which is what it was. Sylvia on its own suggests that the film should have started in the thirties and finished where it did.

I wrote a long poem after the film finished. The house was quiet as my wife had not managed to stay the distance. It felt quite unworldly like the house was all that the universe consisted of at that time, or maybe like the Tardis spinning in space, the atmosphere of so many of Plath's poems. I know this sounds like real self-indulgent, self-reference and maybe you are right but have a look at the poems inspired by Sylvia Plath page here. My poem is better than most of these. There is also discussion of the film on the same site.