Lights, camera, action!

A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine,

Y cladd in mightie armes and siluer shielde,

Wherein old dints of deepe wounds did remaine,

The cruell markes of many’ a bloudy fielde;

Yet armes till that time did he neuer wield:

His angry steede did chide his foming bitt,

As much disdayning to the curbe to yield:

Full iolly knight he seemd, and faire did sitt,

As one for knightly giusts and fierce encounters fitt.

Our scene begins with an establishing shot, from a distance, the knight riding across the open plain, shot on location in—Ireland? Virginia? Death Valley? We may have to wait for the credits, but already we are engrossed in the story. The camera pans slowly, following him, then cuts to a medium shot, framing the full figure of the knight, his arms and his shield. Then a close-up, the light raking across the bright metal of the shield to show the beating it has taken; another closeup, now his jaw, his beaver raised—you can see the firm set of it, but it is surprisingly smooth; and yet another close-up, a so-called matching shot, that hairless chin replaced with the foaming mouth of his horse, grinding its bit. Then the camera pulls back again, out of these disquieting details, to a tracking shot from the front, receding as the knight advances and keeping him steady in the frame—he is moving forward, toward the camera, with what looks like purpose again.

John Hollander, eminent Spenserian and a critical polymath, liked to say that the technical vocabulary of one domain in the arts makes itself available to the others as metaphor. There are no shots in The Faerie Queene, and no cameras. But the poem elaborately choreographs the visual and acoustic attention of the reader (to borrow, now, a metaphor from dance), and one way of paying attention to that choreography is to reconstruct a stanza as a succession of cinematic perspectives—shots, defined by their distance, their movement, their angle; by how they frame their subject, and for how long, and what they do next. All of these directorial choices require interpretation of the text, obliging us readers to consider the shifting positions we are asked to adopt. The camera must choose one, willy-nilly. We need not, and that is one important difference. (There are discursive passages that seem to take a view from nowhere—or perhaps they are voiceover? And if so, what plays on the screen as the narrator talks?) But if we accept that cinematic necessity, not only perspectival but positional, as our own, what will we see about the poem that we haven’t seen before?

My little exercise in storyboarding the first stanza of canto i has a lot to say about the implied distance of the narration. No early modern reader had available the repertoire of transitions that together make for Hollywood continuity editing—but Hollywood continuity editing itself mimics and stylizes the way that overt and covert attention move around a space. (Overt attention: the pointed gaze; covert attention: our mental selection of scales and foci of interest, potentially different from the point of focus, and including mental images.) Getting close up, in this stanza, makes for skepticism. The details don’t match the big picture. My camera shoots the shield and the horse—but the sequence can also convey a word like “yet,” not by picturing it (that would be a trick), but by a particular relation between shots, a disjunction in the grammar of the editing, a difference in distances. The reader-director has to be constantly thinking about the ratio of attention between parts and wholes and the distance and the vantage from which they are seen. What problems could be more native to poetry?

There are infinite thought experiments to perform. Imagine Quentin Tarantino getting the camera into the middle of the fight between Red Cross and Sans Joy, so close that the bodies can’t be told apart. Imagine Ingmar Bergman taking in, at a placid, desaturated distance, one of the melees where Talus wreaks havoc on an indifferent crowd of petitioners or Amazons or whomever. Imagine being lost with Ismail Merchant and James Ivory in the rich texture of Busyrane’s tapestries, the camera languorously following that coy thread of gold. And the narrator’s penchant for appalling self-contradictions: is that Robert McNamara sitting for an interview with Errol Morris? Or even with Agnes Varda? (That, I would truly like to see.) There is fun in conjuring these adaptations, but the critical interest comes when the camera can serve as a kind of attentional prosthetic, adopting (or dictating) the reader’s position as it does the viewer’s. I haven’t made a movie, even an imaginary one, of Milton or Shakespeare. But I am going to wager that Spenser’s camera is tellingly jumpier than theirs—that his hybrid of romance narrative and allegorical pictorialism makes for an especially uneasy, sometimes almost montaged relationship between symbolic details and the wholes they supposedly constitute; between the establishing shots (say, Holiness), the close-ups (the dents in the shield), and those middle shots of the integral body of the hero-knight, ever-vulnerable to the next cut, be it piercingly near scrutiny or explosion by vast context.

Are you convinced yet, reader, viewer, that Spenser is the most cinematic of our early modern poets? So many Shakespeare films, and none of The Faerie Queene?—surely the convenience of having written plays is a poor excuse. If you are not yet ready to grant Spenser his DGA (Directors Guild of America) card, read on—you have several chances here to convert. The question of what our sage and serious epic romancer could ever have to do with the silver screen activated the imaginations of our contributors in a multiplex of different ways. There are some enlightening juxtapositions of auteur and poet, Gordon Teskey on Fellini the ambivalent allegorist, and Kat Addis casting Buster Keaton as the Knight of Justice. Joe Moshenska finds The Faerie Queene less cinematic than televisual, in its structural affinities with the long-form series The Wire and The Sopranos. Yulia Rhyzik meditates on the allegorical affordances of the genre of anime, and Jim Ellis goes to early cinema to understand the ways in which Spenser’s poetry makes its pictures move. And finally, not a film of The Faerie Queene, not yet—but from Dan Moss and his collaborators, Claire Krüeger and Spencer Kenney, a movie of Muiopotmos, represented here by a mesmerizing trailer, playing at the Spenser Review for the first time ever and anywhere. Get your popcorn, Spenserians. The show is about to start.