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The Blasphemer’s Banquet. Poem-film, words Tony Harrison, director Peter Symes.

Tony Harrison: Prometheus. London: Faber, £8.99.

     Film techniques grew out of poetic techniques, as Eisenstein’s brilliant writings show, and there’s certainly “a cinema of prose and a cinema of poetry”, even when the language is prose. A case could be made for cinema as the art form of our time, as the novel was of the nineteenth century. It’s certainly the popular theatre. Theoretically there’s a place for the language of poetry too. Tony Harrison sees a rhythmic parallel in the 24 frames per second and the metrical beat of a verse line and feels the two can be plaited.

     The comparatively light-of-touch Tony Harrison who also wrote some rather tender poems about his parents seems to have been lost somewhere. The Aldeburgh audience for his thundering The Blasphemer’s Banquet was uncomfortably polite to him at question time, but perhaps, like me, they couldn’t boil down the text’s muddle of blurred distinctions, pseudo-history and reductive propaganda into a question.

     The film has a respectable justification, an attack on the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, but Harrison becomes his own Khomenei, growling out a fundamentalist atheist sermon from a personal minaret. His prophet of wine-drinking atheism is Omar Khayyam – not the mystic revered as a religious teacher by fifty million Sutis – but Fitzgerald’s Victorian misconstruction. Every schoolboy knows that in Sufism “wine” is a symbol of the ecstasy of divine love, and as Graves wrote:

By an outrageous freak of fortune this blameless Moslem celebrant of mystical love has come to be elected patron saint of fifty million hearty boozers throughout the Christian west.

Voltaire, Byron and Shelley are enlisted as prophets of Harrison’s atheism, though Voltaire was a deist and in his charitable behaviour more Christian than the Christians. Voltaire’s writings did however encourage the bloodstained atheistic French revolution. Harrison overlooks that Byron was a sort of crypto-Christian, somewhat shocked by Shelley’s atheism, nor that Shelley’s “atheism” was merely a snook cocked at orthodox hypocrisy, as any reader of Shelley’s great mystical poems such as Adonais and Prometheus Unbound knows.

     Of course the history of religion is disgraceful, like the rest of our history. Human beings can corrupt anything, even the teachings of Jesus, into an excuse for torture and murder. But the trouble is Harrison’s thrown the saviour out with the bath water. He can see no distinction between Archbishop Runcie and the Ayatollah Khomenei, and he conveniently skips over Alexander, Caesar, Robespierre, Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler and all the other gifted and brilliant criminal atheists. The main point is: one doesn’t come to film or poetry to be lectured at. Both film and poetry do of course deal with religion and politics but not in a mess of imprecision and propaganda.

     So what about the script of his “powerful and eloquent” first feature-length film, Prometheus, along with the notes on its generation?

     Somewhat to my surprise after this, I found nothing to complain about in the twenty-odd pages of the introduction. The reports on Shelley, Byron, industrialism, the holocaust, the burning of books in fascist regimes seemed fair and well-judged. His point is that the fire of Prometheus that brought freedom from a tyrannical “Zeus” has been converted by man into the fires of the concentration-camp oven, and the bomb. He now sees in the film screen’s light in darkness a new kind of fire for creative purposes:

The other factor that led me to the cinema is the way the size of the cinema screen can give heroic stature to the most humble of faces, and this became an essential requirement in a film where the most unlikely wheezing ex-miner is slowly made to represent Prometheus himself.

     The film is an elegy for the closing of the last coal pit in Yorkshire. The libretto sets a coal-mining family against a backdrop of pits, slag heaps, a brass band, a defiant smoker’s cough, and the gods Hermes, Prometheus, Kratos (Force), Bia (Violence). The verse goes like this:

     A typical scene is the old coal miner with a smoker’s cough (Prometheus) sitting in a now-derelict cinema and Hermes magically forbidding him to smoke on a black-and-white non-screen. The old man comments:

No, when fags were finally forbidden
in this rat-infested and flea-ridden
bug’utch, bugger it, I thought,
I’ll bloody smoke and not get caught.
I smoked, got caught, and allus chucked
out on mi lug’ole. Films were fucked...
Who smokes now? Them were the days
when women smoked in negligées...

The old man then rises into the pose of Prometheus, fist raised with a burning fag in defiance: “Smokers of the world unite!” Hermes explains to a popcorn-eating audience who Aeschylus is.

     The libretto never rises to the drama of the strike newsreels and promotes no such sympathy or empathy. Dresden and a chorus of burnt ghosts are brought in, and so is Auschwitz, but they seem embarrassingly reduced to clichés, self-evident misuses of fire. After visits to Eastern Europe, with socialism dead, and profit and free trade replacing it, holocausts of cattle signal the coming climax. At the end the cinema’s on fire, the old miner Prometheus is dead, and Hermes and Zeus’s impersonations of Prometheus are triumphant.

     I haven’t been able to see the film itself, and so perhaps the cinematography brings transforming values in. But the plotless, storyless libretto, with its “puke and piss” and reiterated banalities (the characters noticing they’re bursting into rhyme), suggests there’s no place for doggerel in the cinema. Eisenstein transformed the techniques of Paradise Lost and the ballads into visual terms, camera-imagery, montage and cutting, and surely they’re better that way. If we look for poetry in the cinema, as we fervently do, we’re more likely to find it in prose films like Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Trois Couleurs Bleu.