Most studies of adaptation consider the relationship between fiction and film, whether that means a novel or a short story. However, this tendency presumes that the ideal analogue for cinema is fiction rather than some other medium. Filmmakers have long been interested in all kinds of stories from a number of different mediums, and have adapted many different kinds of works for the screen. This week, as we examine Robert Wise’s 1950 boxing film The Set-Up, we consider how film might more closely resemble poetry.
FILM AS POETRY
Unlike fiction, poetry tends not to have a narrative requirement. Most works of fiction will contain characters, a story, a setting, and other generic markers that indicate its status as a literary narrative. Poetry is much more free and open to interpretation; poets have long experimented with structure, with form, with metaphor, with meter and rhyme, and above all, with language itself. More than anything else, poetry is about feeling—the emotions it can capture through language.
It is telling, however, that when we describe the most beautiful passages of written poetry, we tend to use a crucial word: images. This reliance on the comparative use of images created by words in poetry and images as images in cinema illustrates the ways in which the two mediums might be considered in relationship to one another. French critic and filmmaker Eric Rohmer, one of the founding members of the influential French New Wave movement that began in the late 1950s, argues that cinematic images are the logical end point of what poetry was trying to achieve: “By exempting us from the need to name things, the cinema makes any form of literary metaphor useless. The beauty of a wave caught in color on the wide screen makes all stylistic artifice more than ever superfluous. The greatest goal of poetry was to render the movement which painting was by its essence incapable of expressing. But when the sea, just as it is, can be delivered at will in cans of film to the deepest countryside or dusty towns, there is nothing more to be said. I want to take the point further, however, to show that the power of metaphor, whose secret has been lost by poetry, is now a kind of prerogative of the cinema and that this is the main reason why the newest of the arts is the sole legitimate refuge of poetry.”
As Rohmer sees it, poetic moments in cinema come about when filmmakers use images to express metaphor. Rather than describe a subject through linguistic comparison, as poets do, Rohmer argues that films can simply present their metaphors visually. Filmmakers might do this within individual shots, using the content of the frames to generate complex meaning. Cinematic images are capable of rendering metaphors of great beauty and great violence. On the left, a shot from the opening of The Leopard (1963, Dir. Luchino Visconti), who uses the shot of the broken statue to foreshadow the decline of the Sicilian aristocracy that will be the subject of his three-hour epic. On the right, the climax of Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (1981), as foley sound artist Jack Terry (John Travolta) cradles Sally (Nancy Allen), who he was unable to save from being murdered, while fireworks from a local celebration shoot into the sky behind him; the image is richly ironic, a dramatic celebration of freedom and life contrasting with his agony at the loss of the woman he loves.
Each of these images reveal how effectively filmmakers use the content of their frames to express meaning through poetic metaphor. However, many critics would argue that cinema’s real poetry comes not from single images, but through the chain of meaning established across images through editing and montage. Russian critic Yury Tynyanov argues that montage’s essential place in cinema means that it is inextricably linked to poetry: “In cinema, images do not ‘unfold’ in a sequential order, nor is their development progressive. They alternate. That is the principle of montage. They alternate in the same way that one metrical unit replaces another on a precise frontier in verse. The cinema makes ‘jumps’ from image to image as poetry does from line to line. Strange though it may seem, if we are to establish an analogy between cinema and the verbal arts, the only legitimate one would be not between cinema and prose but between cinema and poetry.” In Tynyanov’s estimation, filmmakers’ use of editing joins ideas through disparate images, creating poetic meaning out of their juxtaposition. A number of Russian theorists and filmmakers, Sergei Eisenstein chief among them, spent their careers advocating for the principles of montage as the most important method by which cinema could express meaning.
Legendary editor and sound designer Walter Murch offers useful insights into the process of editing, and in his description of its effect on the audience, articulates something of its poetic qualities: “The paradox of cinema is that it is most effective when it seems to fuse two contradictory elements—the general and the personal—into a kind of mass intimacy. The work itself is unchanging, aimed at an audience of millions, and yet—when it works—a film seems to speak to each member of the audience in a powerfully personal way.” This is the power of metaphor in poetry, as well—the specificity of a personal experience described by an author becomes generally representative of other people’s experiences through the relatability of the image.
Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a kind of fairy tale, as its title indicates; it is a deeply personal film that draws upon Tarantino’s fondness for the Los Angeles of his youth, and he looks back on it in an effort to capture its beauty through images. In the clip at right, he uses editing to maximize the emotional effect of the film in one of its most effective sequences.
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There is no narrative information being conveyed in this sequence. The camera isolates a sign, and waits for it to light up, watching as day turns into night. It is pure cinematic poetry, a reflection of Tarantino’s wonder at the beauty of the place he calls home. The Rolling Stones provide the soundtrack: “Baby, baby, baby, you’re out of time.” Tarantino’s use of the song laments a time gone by that has been recreated for the film, which is set in 1969, but is impossible to really get back—this period is long gone.
Viewing cinema as poetry requires thinking less about narrative and more about style. Poetry is as much about form as it is about content: the rhyme, the meter, the number of lines, and other qualities matter a great deal. In the commentary at right on the opening of Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959), I examine how film might be used to create poetic effect.
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The poetry of Hiroshima Mon Amour’s opening sequence demonstrates how filmmakers might rely on its conventions. Resnais repeats images: his lovers locked in an embrace, with special emphasis on their hands. His shots of the warped and scarred hands and bodies of the bomb’s victims serve as a point of contrast. His camera is frequently in motion, simulating the effect of flowing lines of verse. His editing is associative rather than narrative; he places images in relationship to one another without inherent connection. He forces the connection through juxtaposition. It is a lyrical sequence of intense feeling that resembles the effect of poetry in motion.
If we are to consider cinema as poetry, we need to think about its numerous disparate elements of style, which may be combined to create an effect that goes beyond narrative. Resnais’s free associating with images and occasional synchronization with the voice over offers a possible template, but its poetic approach is at the extreme stylistic end. Filmmakers interested in cinema as poetry often don’t push their style quite so far. However, they find small moments of poetry amidst their narratives.
THe SET-uP: A Cinematic Poem
The Set-Up (1950, Dir. Robert Wise) is based on a poem of the same name by Joseph Moncure March about an African-American boxer who is asked to take a dive, first published in 1928. The film changes the race of the central boxer, who is played in the film by Robert Ryan; this is just one of its many adaptations and deviations from the original text. However, we won’t be considering its fidelity (or lack thereof), but instead, thinking about how the film functions poetically.
The Set-Up is a 72-minute cinematic poem. Director Robert Wise, who cut his teeth in Hollywood as an editor, strips away many of the fight-film conventions that his contemporaries used quite liberally. There is no training montage, no meteoric rise and fall, no climactic bout between the fighter and his hated rival. Set in the cruelly named Paradise City, a backwater town populated by crooks and human detritus, its streets lined with garbage blowing in the wind, the film opens with a long shot of the street, the camera drifting past a clock on a post that reads 9:05. When the film concludes 70 minutes later, the camera floats back and the clock reenters the frame, reading 10:15. Wise uses clocks as a visual motif throughout the movie, but its real-time narrative device can almost slip by unnoticed. The story is brisk, unencumbered by the genre’s tendency to elevate its characters into heroes. This is one round of its boxer’s ongoing struggle. In this hour-and-change fight, he risks his pride, his body, his soul, his marriage, his future, and his life. Like many boxing films, The Set-Up makes its ring a metaphor for life itself; unlike other films in its genre, Wise’s film uses the part to stand in for the whole. In Wise’s hands, the round becomes the match and the moment becomes the lifetime.
Wise’s camera captures an entire world made up of desperate people, each grabbing at a piece of an elusive American Dream. The boxing arena at the center of Paradise City is its beating heart, but it’s badly clogged with arterial plaque. With such a brief running time, each character beat carries more weight; every moment the camera witnesses communicates an entire existence. People line the street, sizing each other up. That one looks like a sucker. Here’s a crook on the make. There goes a pickpocket. The air is thick with the hustles of a thousand hustlers. The carnival music and ka-ching of arcade games fill the space with noise, and flashing lights blink out the hope that one of these wasted deadbeats will win big. But the music and the ka-ching and the lights, they’re all lies. It’s a city-sized game of three-card monte, the queen always under the card you didn’t flip over. It ain’t no place for an honest boxer like Stoker, paradoxically trapped in cities like these, America’s undercard. The boxer is driven by the sense that he’ll make it big one day, fight in Madison Square Garden, and take the championship belt from a worthy opponent in a fair bout, besting his rival mentally, emotionally, and physically. But in order to get there, he has to fight his way out of this crooked maze of blind alleys and dead ends, guarded at every turn by wastrels looking to get one over on him. And all the while, he gets older. The clock ticks louder. Time slips away faster. The images below get at some of Wise’s poetic approach to the film’s visuals.
On the street outside the arena, Wise finds little moments of poetry to encapsulate the film’s themes. In a traveling long take that introduces a few key supporting characters who will fill out the fight’s audience, Wise emphasizes the immediacy of time, which is running out for just about everyone in Paradise City. A craggy, older man selling newspapers, his voice hoarse and husky, is displaced by a handsome teenager who can belt. A small crowd is suddenly interested in buying papers from the young man, while the washed-up fella looks on, his expression betraying the defeat he feels. A few other denizens of Paradise City gather around the poster advertising the night’s lineup, one of them amazed that Stoker, who he remembers from when he was a kid, is still fighting. Paradise City is a place where the promise of the American Dream still lingers, but its light is growing dimmer all the time. Inside the city’s arcade, Dreamland, a few dreamers dump money into a claw machine, only to watch the item slip through the claws and tumble back into the mess of unattainable trinkets below. These people cling to the faintest hope that they’ll win something, because that’s their ticket out. But if they were going to earn their living, it would have happened by now. If the American Dream was ever within reach, then surely, they would have grabbed onto it by this point. There’s no longer any possibility of “when,” so they pin their uncertain futures on “if.” They gamble. Nearly everyone in the arena has money on one of the fights, each of these desperate people trading nickels around, nobody really gaining, nobody really losing. The people here are out of time.
In this brutal arena where favor is won and lost moment-to-moment, the fickle crowd boos the ring announcer when he refers to them as “Ladies and gentlemen.” They have come to see punishment, and they react violently when fights end before their prescribed four rounds. They repeatedly chant “Let them fight!” when the referee tries to stop the action out of concern for an injured fighter. Wise’s camera refuses to look away from the violence of the ring, but stares unblinkingly at the savagery of the crowd, too. These are people consumed by the present moment, brought to roaring life by the brutality of the ring. For three minutes at a time, they forget their own troubles and watch another punished for his failures. Time is finite. Each of us is granted only so much, and it must be spent wisely. The boxer, for whom time is everything, feels this pull of the clock more acutely. Like a car depreciating in value the moment it is driven off the lot, the boxer’s body will eventually betray him. After getting knocked down, Wise gives Stoker a rare first-person point of view shot, his eyes coming into focus on a billboard in the arena that reads, “Over 35?” His clock is ticking. His opponent is younger, faster, stronger. Stoker will be displaced by time, but between the mocking advertisement and the anonymous shouts from the crowd calling him “old man” and asking “where’s your wheelchair?” everything conspires to make that inevitable decline personal. It’s Stoker’s fault for allowing time to do its work.
In the commentary at right, I discuss some of Robert Wise’s techniques during the extended fight sequence, the centerpiece of many boxing films. All boxing films portray their fight scenes differently, so it is worth paying attention to Wise’s specific approach in more detail. This analysis gets at some of how Wise applies his poetic approach in practice.
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The film’s final sequence plays out in a darkened, empty arena, as Stoker races to escape before Little Boy and his goons catch up with him. Even in his moment of triumph, the clock begins ticking again. When the thugs eventually find him in the alley and smash his right hand with a brick, ending his career, it is the final judgment of the clock. Even though Stoker momentarily found a way to regain control over time in the ring, outside the boxing arena, it catches up with him. From the hotel room window, Julie sees Stoker stagger into the street, his hand folded into his suit jacket. She runs to him and holds him, calling to the gathered onlookers to send for an ambulance. He’s delirious, and she comforts him. He says, “I won, Julie. I won.” Julie, knowing that his career is over, nods, and through tears says “We both won.” The lingering, drifting camera shot that closes the film, the clock on the right side of the frame tipping the real-time structure, plays out without a triumphant final score. There is no great victory here. There is no flourish. Though Julie believes they’ve won, the emptiness of this final moment, the clock dominating the frame, calls that into question. Yes, she has her husband back, and he’ll no longer be able to fight. But what else will he do? What kind of work will a washed-up fighter be able to get? What does a man do when the only thing he’s ever done is taken away from him?
Though The Set-Up has a narrative, Wise often takes a poetic approach to the film through his visuals. Its brief running time and source material emphasizes the connection. Though Wise has made some fundamental changes to the original poem that the film is based on, his poetic approach offers insight into how filmmakers might see their medium through other perspectives beyond literary fiction.