Poetry
see all genres ›Though not exactly the popular medium it was in, say, the 19th century, verse has inspired plenty of celluloid art in the 20th century and onward. From adaptations of famous epic narrative poems to shorts musing upon modernist wordsmiths.
Watch Poetry Films
Genres / Adaptation / Literary / Poetry
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Night Tide
A sailor on shore leave becomes fascinated by a woman who poses as a mermaid in an oceanfront carnival. As their relationship blossoms, Johnny (Dennis Hopper) realizes that Mora (Linda Lawson) is more than a sideshow illusionist. She seems to be a descendent of the mythical sirens of the sea, and...Watch Movie
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Keita: The Heritage of the Griot
KEITA introduces Americans, young and old, to one of the most important works of African oral literature, "The Sundjata Epic." The film frames its dramatization of this legend within the story of a contemporary young African's initiation into the history of his family. When a...Watch Movie
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Tiger's Claw
Akbar’s angry. But it is not the iron bars of his cage that has rattled him. It is the manhandling his fair-haired trainer is getting from some new guy. Tiger love goes both ways in this late Harry Piel film set in the circus, with the blonde and perky Friedl Hardt refusing to put Akbar down even...Watch Movie
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Kimono
This half hour "ambient narrative" was made for the German TV series EROTIC TALES. Inspired by some of the more sensual readings in a collection of classical Japanese poetry, the film follows a young bride abandoned at a desolate roadside and her dream-like descent into the depths of the forest....Watch Movie
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Manhatta
Photographic artists Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler are the cinematographers of this visualization of Walt Whitman's poetry about New York City. Like many of the avant-garde works of the time, the film prefers to look at cities as abstractions of line, form and movement. A vignette of the Staten...Watch Movie
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Beauty in Trouble
BEAUTY IN TROUBLE explores a young woman’s romantic dilemma: torn between a primal connection and the need to provide for her children, she loves two men. Set against the back drop of the recent floods in Prague, BEAUTY IN TROUBLE is full of unexpected twists, humor and...Watch Movie
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This Unnameable Little Broom
This piece was originally conceived as a pilot for a series which never materialized due to lack of funding. Alternative title: LITTLE SONGS OF THE CHIEF OFFICER OF HUNAR LOUSE (BEING A LARGELY DISGUISED REDUCTION OF THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH) “in which Gilgamesh sends a...Watch Movie
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What Memphis Needs
Contrasting the black and white cultures of Memphis, Tennessee, WHAT MEMPHIS NEEDS is based on a poem written in the Free People's Poetry Workshop of the internationally renowned "prison poet" Etheridge Knight. From ponies running through the Memphis cottonwoods to a girl...Watch Movie
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The Face on the Barroom Floor
Charles Chaplin here parodies the ballad form poem "The Face Upon the Floor" by Hugo Antoine d'Arcy. A once prosperous painter who, having lost his beloved Madeleine (Cecile Arnold) to another man, becomes destitute in despair and is reduced to drawing her "face on the barroom...Watch Movie
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Enoch Arden
"Here on this beach a hundred years ago, three children of three houses: Annie Lee, the prettiest little damsel in the port, and Philip Ray the miller's only son, and Enoch Arden, a rough sailor's lad made orphan by a winter shipwreck, play'd among the waste and lumber of the shore, hard coils of...Watch Movie
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The Cry of the Children
THE CRY OF THE CHILDREN is the most famous and best documented of all Thanhouser films. In its day it was recognized as one of the most important expressions of the pre-World War One reform movement, in particular child labor. Perhaps because the uncompromising content drew...Watch Movie
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The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
"I wanted to depict the complete [Samuel Taylor Coleridge] poem via [Gustave] Doré illustrations, yet infuse with dream-irrelevancies that would carry the film at least one step out of the realm of the merely filmic illustrations of a poem. I tried to infiltrate the world of...Watch Movie
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The Angelic Conversation
Derek Jarman's lyrical celebration of gay love set within the context of a series of William Shakespeare’s sonnets. Ethereal Super-8 images slowed to a magical, meditative pace follow the love affair between two men as Dame Judi Dench provides a soothing presence with her...Watch Movie
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The Frozen North
A parody of the Western melodramas of William S. Hart, THE FROZEN NORTH was filmed partly on location near Truckee, California, and the intertitles drew from Robert Service's "The Shooting of Dan McGrew." Charles Chaplin later used Truckee for his masterpiece THE GOLD RUSH and...Watch Movie
