| DAS KINO DER POESIE 37
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ESSAYS
Whitman on Film.
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alt Whitman might be the best known poet in print, not to mention in film and television through the years. In 2019, we’re celebrating his 200th birthday, reconciling his legacy across two centuries of American history, and his influence on media beyond the printed word. From silent movies of the early 20th century, to episodic dramas
Manhatta (1921) But really, it starts with the masterpiece called “Manhatta” in 1921. It’s the kind of film that I love the most, called “city symphonies,” and this one arrived even before the seminal German and Russian archetypes, leading up to our time with modern American examples like “Koyaanisqatsi.” Living somewhere
on television today, I’m focusing here on the poet showing up in cinema and television – and since the lines are blurred by now, I’m just calling this “Whitman on Film.”
between narrative and documentary cinema, and before the arrival of sound and much else, “Manhatta” uses intertitles to excerpt Whitman’s famous New York poems: “A Broadway Pageant,” “Mannahatta,” and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”
Born May 31, 1819, Walt Whitman came of age surrounded with new technology and American enterprise, something he celebrated with joy, taking full advantage as a writer. His lifetime magnum opus “Leaves of Grass” started out as a true “song of himself,” self-published and launched with rave reviews that he wrote anonymously about himself! Sometimes-professor James Franco once wrote an article suggesting that Whitman was the original Kanye West. And there’s no doubting that Walt would have just loved the Internet, if he had it. But photography was the newest thing in his time, and so we have lots of pictures of the bearded poet, and also the Civil War that most dramatically defined his era. Movies weren’t invented yet, so we can’t see him that way – but we can hear his actual voice in a wax cylinder recording that was probably captured personally by Thomas Edison in 1890. When I made my own trilogy of Whitman poetry films, I started out with that recording of his voice in “America” – and it’s a curious bit of trivia that Daniel Day-Lewis studied the recording to estimate a New Yorker’s accent mid-19th century. But it wasn’t until the 20th century, after Whitman’s death in 1892, that cinema came of age – the ultimate medium of sight, sound and word. Much of that birth was ugly, consummated in D. W. Griffith’s 1915 “Birth of a Nation” that reflected back on the Civil War of Whitman’s time, filled with Lost Cause racism that actually inspired protests from day one. Ever the provocateur, Griffith followed that up casting himself as a sort of victim with “Intolerance” one year later, and the first thing seen is a direct allusion to the Whitman poem, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” So technically, that’s the first big example of Whitman on Film.
Street Scene (1931) It was just six years later in 1927 that the first sound film arrived, “The Jazz Singer,” and by 1931, we get Whitman in spoken word. “Street Scene” was an adaptation of a Pulitzer Prize-winning play that dug into the urban and cultural dramas of immigrant New York, using the transcendent longing found in Whitman’s poem “Passage to India.” Sail forth—steer for the deep waters only, / Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me, / For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go, / And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all. Now Voyager (1942) And then in 1942, still in sea-faring metaphor, Bette Davis reads from “The Untold Want” in “Now Voyager.” The untold want by life and land ne‘er granted, / Now voyager sail thou forth to seek and find. It’s almost as if Whitman is giving these not-fully-actualized characters, permission to become whole. Goodbye, My Fancy (1951) But even Whitman’s transcendent qualities could manage to kindle an old romance, adding a bit of melancholy to Joan Crawford’s performance in the 1951 film “Goodbye, My Fancy” that’s named directly after Whitman’s poem. Good-bye my Fancy! / Farewell dear mate, dear love! / I‘m going away, I know not where, / Or to what fortune, or whether I may ever see you again, / So Good-bye my Fancy.
essays
A video essay at the poet's bicentennial
