Sunday, August 01, 2021

IMAGINE THIS: A 14th Century Anonymous Poem Takes On A New Life

WHOA! The power of one poem... it was required reading in high school but never brought-to-life like this > Dev Patel stars as Gawain—nephew to King Arthur and an aspiring knight—in The Green Knight, filmmaker David Lowery's mesmerizing adaptation of the 14th-century anonymous poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Dev Patel stars as Gawain—nephew to King Arthur and an aspiring knight—in <em>The Green Knight</em>, filmmaker David Lowery's mesmerizing adaptation of the 14th-century anonymous poem, <em>Sir Gawain and the Green Knight</em>.

A QUESTION OF HONOR

Review: The Green Knight weaves a compelling coming-of-age fantasy quest

David Lowery's atmospheric film is as richly textured and layered as the original poem.

Jennifer Ouellette - 7/31/2021, 10:55 AM

"The tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, immortalized in a 14th-century anonymous poem, is among the most popular of the Arthurian legends, second only to the quest for the Holy Grail. Yet I would argue that it has never been successfully adapted to film—until now. Director David Lowery's new film, The Green Knight, takes some necessary liberties with the source material. But he also artfully weaves in elements and symbols from that source material to create a darkly brooding fantasy quest that is just as richly textured and layered as the medieval poem on which it is based.

(Major spoilers for the 14th-century medieval poem below; some additional spoilers for the film are below the gallery.)

Let's lay out the basics of the original poem before discussing the clever ways in which Lowery (A Ghost Story, Pete's Dragon) has reimagined it.

As I've written previously, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight falls into the chivalric romance genre, relating a well-known story from Arthurian legend in distinctively alliterative verse. (Alliteration was all the rage at the time. I highly recommend J.R.R. Tolkien's translation from 1925 or Simon Armitage's 2008 translation, recently revised.)

On New Year's Day, King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table gather at Camelot to feast and exchange gifts. A mysterious Green Knight disrupts the festivities and proposes a different kind of exchange: any one of the knights may strike him with one blow with his axe; in return, the Green Knight will come back in a year to return the blow. Sir Gawain, the youngest of the knights and nephew to Arthur, accepts the challenge and beheads the Green Knight. Everyone is shocked when the Green Knight picks up his severed head. He says Gawain must meet him at the Green Chapel one year hence to receive a similar blow, per their bargain. . .

One can definitely see elements from all those sources in The Green Knight, but the tapestry Lowery has woven out of so many disparate threads is every inch an original vision. There are no quick cuts or frenetic action sequences. Lowery takes the time to let the story unfold at a leisurely pace, drawing the viewer into the Arthurian world he has created, as seen through the eyes of young Gawain. At times, the film takes on a hallucinatory quality. Just as the 14th-century poem continues to fascinate us some 700 years later, this strange, powerfully evocative film will have you mulling over everything you've just seen, pondering various interpretations, long after you've left the theater.

The Green Knight is now playing in theaters. We strongly recommend only watching movies in theaters if you have been fully vaccinated.

Filmmaker David Lowery on the "shared DNA" between The Green Knight, Willow, The Dark Crystal, Marie Antoinette, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and Bram Stoker's Dracula.

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Michael Pollan, Author of "This Is Your Mind on Plants" | Amanpour & Company Interview and a review

Nice to have one more book --- first a write-up/review from The Guardian + a streaming video from Amanpour & Company

This Is Your Mind on Plants by Michael Pollan review – the trip of a lifetime

Tim Adams

the Guardian

This fascinating insight into our relationship with mind-altering plants weaves personal experimentation with cultural history

Michael Pollan has written for many years, brilliantly, about our relationship with food and farming, in particular for the New York Times. In 2018, in what seemed like a midlife departure, he published a book on “the new science of psychedelics”, which was a personal report on renewed scientific interest in experiments with LSD and Ayahuasca, after decades of taboo. Pollan saw no change of direction in that project, however; he insisted to me at the time that it was simply a natural evolution of his “abiding interest in how we interact with other plant and animal species and how they get ahead in nature by gratifying our desires”. The desire to change consciousness was a fundamental element of that relationship, he suggested. This book, which concerns our species’ symbiotic entanglements with three other potent plant-derived substances – opium, caffeine and mescaline – is a further development of a lifelong inquiry, which began, he writes, when he took up gardening as a teenager and attempted to grow cannabis.

His essays on perhaps the three most dramatically efficacious medicinal compounds proceed in a similar way, weaving personal experimentation with each of the “drugs” into informed histories of the ways in which they have taken such a hold of different human cultures. At the root of each case study is a pair of questions: the first asks why, as a species, we have gone to extraordinary lengths to propagate and disseminate these consciousness-changing molecules, and the second is why they are subject to paranoia and regulation in differing degrees. . ." READ MORE >

Tim Adams

the Guardian