A Quiet Passion [DVD] [2017]

Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Maya Angelou, Sara Teasdale, Emily Dickinson. These were the only American women poets I could name just now off the top of my head, which means either my education or American culture is deficient (the former is). But it does show how seemingly rare the two go together in consciousness, or in the consciousness of some — women and poetry. Which is a nonsense when one thinks about it because women are more sensitive than men, or at least better at expressing their sensitivity. Girls are encouraged early on to embrace their feelings, whereas boys are taught to suppress theirs. Women don’t fear their feelings as men do, which makes them stronger than men in some ways. No man knows the pain and struggle of childbirth, for instance. Women are the ones who bring life into the world.Emily Dickinson (1830-86) was both sensitive and expressive. Religion weighed heavily on her, affecting her conscience and conduct, her struggle to reconcile the spiritual with the sensuous constant. Her poetry is made intense by this struggle, the soul stripped bare:The heart asks for pleasure first,And then, excuse for pain;And then, those little anodynesThat deaden suffering;And then, to go to sleep;And then, if it should beThe will of the InquisitorThe liberty to dieShe was born in the small college town of Amherst in central Massachusetts. Her father Edward was a prominent lawyer and her older brother Austin would become one as well. Her mother, also named Emily, was bright and sensitive, much like daughter Emily, but both prone to depression. During one of her mother’s frequent crying episodes she says to Emily:“Life has passed by as if in a dream. As if I’ve never been part of it.”Emily feels that her own tendency toward over-dramatisation comes from her mother. The breath of fresh air in the household is Lavinia (usually endearingly called Vinnie) who’s lively and positive. Vinnie’s love for Emily is unconditional. She recognises her sister’s honesty, goodness and purity of soul. She’s always there for her emotionally. She looks up to Emily even as Emily looks down on herself, a fate many perfectionists suffer from.Into the household eventually comes Susan Gilbert, the wife of Austin, and thereafter their baby boy. Actually, they live in the house next door, but the doors to each domicile are always open, so they come and go as if they live in both places.Early on we see the rigours young Emily, aged perhaps 14 or 15, faces in the Puritan world of her small-town upbringing. Her teacher at Mount Holyoke, a private religious seminary for girls, is Miss Lyon, a woman made rigid by the fierce tenets that form the backbone of the Bible. During an assembly of the girls she calls upon them to stand aside: those who have found God should move to their right; those who are still seeking God and salvation should move to their left. In the end one girl stands alone facing Miss Lyon. It is Emily. She moves neither right nor left because she’s confused. Scripture is unclear to her. She cannot decipher God’s messages. They are too ambivalent, too subject to conflicting interpretations. This answer is no good and Miss Lyon becomes angry. It isn’t for Emily to decipher. It’s for her to accept. God knows all and He isn’t to be questioned. But Emily does so anyway, assessing his wisdom, saying it’s her soul, not his, to which she must attend. No, says the teacher. He made your soul so it’s his, not yours. Doubt registers on Emily’s face as she hears these words — a doubt that cannot abide being lied to.Although she died of congested heart failure and kidney disease, it seems certain she suffered from epilepsy as well. Her convulsions are shown graphically in the film, her body shaking, her head thrashing violently against the pillow. In the days leading up to death her family were forced to hold her down, her painful screams muffled only by chloroform given by a doctor, an antidote that knocked her out. “I felt a funeral in my brain,” she writes in one poem. “I dropped down, and down.” Describing her brain in another poetic passage, she writes:Floods have slit the hillsAnd scooped a turnpike for themselvesShe knew something was wrong with her brain.Epilepsy ran in the extended family. Her cousin Zebina was a lifelong invalid. Her nephew Ned (son of her brother Austin) also had attacks.Another sign of epilepsy is clumsiness due to impaired motor skills. Emily was clumsy. She was known to drop crockery and there’s a scene in the film where she shatters a plate (though this is done deliberately to prove a point to her father), smashing it against the table. Inwardly she raged against her limitations and those of life: her perceived lack of beauty, her awkward social skills, her stubbornness, the social and professional inequality she faced as a woman in a man’s world, the sense that whatever poetic talent she had was undervalued and unrecognised by persons who should have been able to see its worth. She fretted, worried and doubted. At times she despaired and wept. There was love in her life, paternal and filial, but she longed for intimate, passionate love as well, though she hardly knew what it was, inexperienced as she was. Furthermore, would she even have had the confidence to accept it if it had appeared?One wonders. She was a loner in spirit, so soulmates were rare. One man she does seem to have loved was married already. He was Reverend Wadsworth, local vicar in Amherst. His sermons were dreamy and angelic, Paradise in them a celestial palace-in-waiting for all those who were good and obedient on Earth. Today the sermons read like maudlin fluff, but the imagery in them captivated those who heard them at the time. What could be finer and greater than a celestial palace in the sky, a place where happiness reigned eternally?Nothing came of Emily’s infatuation with the vicar of course. His marriage vows were sacred, vows God himself must have heard when they were uttered. The reverend cavorted with no mistresses, and Emily herself hardly matched the image of what a mistress should be, coquetry and sexual innuendo not part of her charm. In fact, such behaviour appalled her, the face she presented to the world always prim and proper.But in fantasy she had what she called her Looming Man, the dark stranger of dream who would tear her away her from all her suffering, sweeping her up in his passionate arms. Exactly how he would do this was uncertain. His identity, too, was shrouded in mists. Half corporeal, half spiritual, he was the one to save her from the heavy pull of earthly existence, as if gravity had become too much for her to bear. It made her slow, sluggish, fatigued. Like Proust, she was a bookish homebody, the Amherst family home her fortress from the wicked world beyond. Some say she suffered from agoraphobia. I doubt it. She loved the outdoors, the family garden and nature. She wasn’t cooped up in a hen house because of the natural world. It was people who made her shy and socially awkward. She didn’t like most of them, not trusting their motives, their self-interest a masquerade for charity, their sense of community a vehicle for self-advancement. Piety repelled her too if worn to mask insincerity and selfishness. The soul’s integrity is what she clung to. In a world of temptation and falsity what else could be trusted? So she guarded hers as if her life depended on it because in essence it did. It’s where the poetry comes from — her depth of soul:“Poems are my solace for the eternity that surrounds us all.”Her honesty was rapturous, ecstatic, ethereal, but also painful and depressing. The poems contain elements of both — rapture and pain, a duality she dealt with throughout her life:For each ecstatic instantWe must an anguish payIn keen and quivering ratioTo the ecstasyApart from Vinnie, her beloved younger sister, there were two other women Emily’s age whom she confided in. One was Susan, her sister-in-law, the other Vryling Buffum, a good friend of hers.Late one night in the Dickinson house Susan comes downstairs. Emily is in the parlour writing by oil lamplight. It’s probably 3:00 or 4:00 a.m, well before dawn, Emily’s favourite time of day for writing, up before the birds when all is silent save for the ticking of the family clock.Susan sits down near Emily and they quietly converse.Susan: You have your poetry.Emily: But you have a life. I have a routine.S: Does writing give you solace?E: For those of us who have minor lives, and one deprived of a particular kind of love, we know best how to starve. We deceive ourselves, and then others. It is the worst kind of lie.S: But in matters of the soul you are rigorous.E: Rigour is no substitute for happiness.Another conversation she has — this one with Vryling — is equally illuminating:Emily: For the lost soul there will be no tomorrow.Vryling: For the lost soul, the body is quite enough. Will you marry?E: I only want my family. It is not perfect. It is not Paradise. But it is far better than anything I could know. Or want.There is a cosmic and lonely dimension to the life and poetry of Emily Dickinson. We come from the cosmos, the chemicals in our bodies forged in the stars. But the universe is silent, indifferent to our fate. A poem fragment of Emily’s says the same:No colour in the rainbowPerceives when you are goneNature carries on as if you never were:We never know we goWhere we are goingWe jest and shut the doorFate following behind bolts itAnd we accost no moreToward the end she felt death coming for her, or stopping for her as she put it in verse. One fragment from a love poem to life survives:Goodbye to the life I used to liveAnd the world I used to knowAnd kiss the hills for me, just onceNow I am ready to goDeath came on 15 May 1886. A few days later her body was placed in a carriage and taken to the family plot in the churchyard cemetery, her parents lying patiently for her there:Because I could not stop for DeathHe kindly stopped for meThe carriage held but just ourselvesAnd immortalityYes, immortality. She achieved it in this life, not in the imagined world beyond.

Terence Davies has pulled off a spectacular success in this biopic of Emily Dickinson.He shows why his reputation goes before him in terms of being a craftsman of pure film. He has filmed novels before(House of Mirth,Deep Blue Sea and Sunset Song),but he identifies with ED(Cynthia Nixon) as the unappreciated artist, whose fame is posthumous, as Peter Watkins did with the Edward Munch film. He films Dickinson’s development from her younger self when at a seminary, where the young student ladies are asked to stand in 3 different queues: 1) belief in Christ and salavation,2) belief in salvation, 3) have no hope of salvation.. She chooses the last and is severely reprimanded. Later she shows a similar rebellion when at home a pastor comes to pray with the family, and she refuses to kneel to God. Davies identifies with this.The early part of the film is the sunny-side up part, with young ladies of wit mocking the status quo and societal conventions, like knocking the patriarchy, religion, society dances. This is done through Emily, Vinnie(Jennifer Ehle), her sister, and Miss Buffam, all friends, who hang around together. There is a quality of banter and Wildean witticism, as in Stillman’s Love and Friendship. Emily is down to earth, and likes a good laugh. Emily befriends males, who aid her desire to get published ,who are connected to publishing. She has limited success and manages to only get 7 poems published anonymously. A woman’s writing faces a harder task than a man’s in being accepted, and has to conform often in sentiment and syntax. Emily flouts both in going for the big subjects, God, eternity, death and subjects of nature. The technique Davies uses in interiors is to pan around the room, taking in all the faces, the interiors are lit by lantern. The effect is remarkable, a chiaroscuro of the subtler darker colours. The camera weaves around corners and into other rooms. There is a beautifully done effects shot where Emily and family members are seen to age to their later years.Emily’s brother Austin marries Susan Gilbert and she becomes accepted by the sisters as another sister, who shares in Emily’s concerns. Susan is to play a major role as a confidante, and receiver of 270 of Emily’s poems and letters that declare a lover’s feelings. They are really so close in spirit. Davies doesn’t much explore her relations with men, or an affair she is reputed to have had with a married man. The sisters share a love of the Brontes, George Eliot, Mrs Gaskell. They are like the Brontes. Keith Carradine as the father gives a great and funny performance. Jennifer Ehle is such a good performer as the sister. Catherine Bailey killed it as the swift, sophisticated,witty Miss Buffam. Cynthia Nixon’s Emily is a brilliant and powerful portrait of frustration, rebellion, self-loathing, happiness among her family, and suffering from her later disease.Davies shows us little of Emily’s inner life, apart from her abrasive differences of opinion with her sister Vinnie or her father, both whom she loved; her brother Austin also close and falls out with Emily over his affair with another man’s wife., Mabel Todd. ED had similar feelings for a married man, the Pastor Wadsworth, but they were unconsummated. He admired her poetry, but he moved away. Emily also registers gradually the loss of her mother, father, and niece, and her own withdrawal into her own room, and refusal to come downstairs, when she had visitors, whom she’s often rude to. She sets such high standards of integrity, she often punishes herself. She also suffers from Bright’s Disease, for which there is no known cure. Davies has her poems read out over the soundtrack, which is effective in adumbrating the mystery of the self, she made so much of. The climax of the film is when Emily sits in her room at night awaiting the “looming man” visitor she had of a mystery presence which came to her up the dark stairs, a cross between an ideal man, muse and godhead of her poetry; all the time Davies has this Elizabethan love poetry sung to Elizabethan music. A truly beautiful moment. Her legendary reputation starts when she dresses in white for the remainder of her life as a kind of bride of eternity.She becomes more immobilised with back ache and the shakes and her sisters and brother tend to her lovingly in her dying moments. Her family seem more than aware of the great soul parting. Davies’s film is like an arrow shot into the future loaded with posthumous fame. The film is full equally of light and shade and breathes.

Watchable

……renowned American Poet. Not acknowledged fame wise during her life time. Her story starts in her very strict girls/young ladies school where she boards. She instinctively resists the regimens of the school, shying away from the training of “young ladies” in what she perceives as rigid. The Christian Faith is used by the school regime by ways of threats and eternal punishments. (Not at all the loving God the Father, sin being emphasised and authorised for severe living.Emily is seen as rebellious.Her family arrive, she is pleased to see them, and they tell her she is being taken away from the school and going home.This is the start of her life at home.Emily refuses to attend Church, until one Sunday she attends, and finds a kindred spirit in the Parson, who enjoys poetry as Emily does.One day, when the Parson and his wife visit for afternoon tea, Emily strolls in the garden with the Parson, she shows him some of her poetry, he commends it.Emily achieves one or two publications in local newspapers/magazines.The Parson becomes a focus for Emily, which her sister tells her is inappropriate.Emily has a strict moral code, lives by it.Her own brother is discovered by Emily in unacceptable circumstances with a family friend’s wife.Emily is mortified and angry, defending her sister-in-law, a loving wife who tells Emily “she does her duty”.An excellent production. Educational. Thought provoking. Prompts more research into the poetry and writings of Emily Dickinson, who is deemed as a very important writer and poet.

I had one for me and one as a gift. We both just loved it. Thank you, merci. Nycole Veilleux

Magnifique édition digibook contenant le livre avec ses 40 poèmes traduits en Anglais et en français, ainsi que des informations sur sa vie.Ce digibook contient également le DVD réalisé par Terence Davies avec l'excellente actrice Cynthia Nixon, Grand Prix d'Interprétation dont lefilm a obtenu 3 Prix et 15 Nominations en 2017. Enfin, j'ajoute que les images du DVD sont en Cinémascope couleur et d'excellente facture.

Enorme Déception que ce Film sur Emily Dickinson; Bref, un film loupé à part la lumière et le son, j'en conviens... Emily Dickinson méritait beaucoup mieux que ce mièvre film pourtant récompensé, je ne sais encore pourquoi; La scène de l'agonie et la mort de Dickinson en vient tellement dérangeante, déconcertante, désolante, et mauvaise, que cela nous laisse pantois et navré face à tant d'Indélicatesse et d'Impudeur Cinématographique.Ayant lu, la Biographie de Emily Dickinson en Français (réalisée par l'Excellente F.Delphy), ainsi que sa Correspondance Complète et Poésies Complètes, je préfère rester sur cela et vite oublier ce navrant et si désolant hommage...

I loved the movie but was disappointed with the narrow viewing band. Do all music box productions have this narrow band?

le livres avec poesies est trés interessant , mais hier soir quand j'ai essayé de voir le film le lecteur me dit ''pas de disque'', qu'est ce que vous pouvez faire ?, j'attends votre réponse le plus rapidement possible. merci