#Movie scene paterson waterfall movie

I went there for a little day trip, and I went to the Passaic Falls, sat right where Adam Driver-Paterson in our film-sits, and I walked around the industrial buildings. I went to check out this place where this poet lived. No poets ever did it for the money.Īfter my first visit to Paterson 25 years ago or so, I started making vague notes toward this film. You’ve got to have another job to do this stuff. Frank O’Hara was a curator of the Museum of Modern Art, Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive-when he won some kind of award, one of his colleagues said, “Wait a minute, Wally writes poetry? I had no idea.” One of our greatest poets ever in America! And this is true of many writers-Robert Walser was a bureaucrat, like Kafka. He delivered over 2,000 children in his lifetime. So it was like, “Wow, I could make a film about a man named Paterson in Paterson, and he’s a working-class guy who’s a poet.” Now, William Carlos Williams was not working-class, but he had a job, he was a pediatrician, and he wrote poetry on the side. And yet, it was a big inspiration for the film Paterson because the beginning of the poem is using the metaphor of Paterson, the city, being a man, and he even describes the formation of the rocks that form the waterfall as a reclining figure. It’s a bit too abstract, or maybe a bit too philosophical for me somehow. And of course he wrote the long, more abstract, book-length poem Paterson, which frankly, I don’t understand a lot of. William Carlos Williams is really important in that lineage. “I have eaten the plums you were saving for breakfast.” It’s the precedent for what Frank O’Hara was proposing poetry to be. William Carlos Williams is kind of the avatar, on one level-the godfather of “Personism.” We used a very obvious one of his poems in the film, “This Is Just to Say,” which literally was a little note left on a table. And then Wallace Stevens, leading to, of course, the New York School. And I discovered Walt Whitman, Hart Crane. I’ve always loved poets since I was a teenager, because I discovered Baudelaire and the French symbolists, and of course Rimbaud a little later, and then-I discovered all this in translation-Rilke.

So I understand Jonas’s observation of a certain form of films being freed of prosaic restraints. Prose can do something like that, but it’s not the same way. Poetry, even how it’s placed on a page, even if you go back to Apollinaire- Calligrammes-who played a lot with the way the way things are on the page so that the spaces become equally important… That’s very abstract.

Because it’s a film, and I know what Jonas means because poetry is allowed to be abstract where prose is not in the same way. And as far as Paterson, somebody said it’s like a poem in the form of cinema, but I think it’s more like cinema in a poetic form. I’ve shown a few over the years to David Shapiro. Write a love note to someone you love, or write a little poetic letter to someone you know.” So that’s been really inspiring to me and I’ve tried to make films that are not shouting out from the mountaintop to all of the world, but more like little letters out to someone I care for. Frank O’Hara wrote this very beautiful manifesto called “Personism” in which he says: “Don’t write poetry to the world. Because their poems are funny, their poems are personal. Some of their poetry is concurrent with the Beats, whom I love in a different way, but to me, the New York School, those are my godfathers.Īnd also for film too, in a way. That’s Frank O’Hara, of course, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Ron Padgett, David Shapiro, Kenneth Koch, incredible poet, Joe Ceravolo, Frank Lima. The New York School particularly was really, and remains, very close to my heart. And Ron Padgett and David edited an anthology of New York poets in 1975 that was kind of the bible of this school of poetry. I came to New York and I studied at Columbia with Kenneth Koch and with David Shapiro, figureheads of what we call the New York School. Narrative cinema is prose.” So I was curious about you and your relationship to poetry and film. Jonas has that line, something like, “Avant-garde film is poetry. Was the book important for you in some way?ĭid you read Jonas when he was writing in the Village Voice? I’m asking it in relation to poetry.

#Movie scene paterson waterfall movie

You gave a cover quote for the reissue of Jonas Mekas’s book, Movie Journal.