There’s a scene in Jane Campion’s “Bright Star” that I use very often when discussing art and our relationship with it. In teaching poetry to a student, John Keats stops his class to give some valuable information:
A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving into a lake is not immediately to swim to shore; it’s to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought.
The four sentences are an expert riff on the idea of negative capability, which Keats coined, but it’s an even greater window into the way film can or should be considered as a medium. Literature, even Keats own poetry, depends on foregrounding language in a way that cannot be avoided but film – decisively, ultimately – depends on more. It depends on letting the images wash over us and allowing ourselves to be moved by their sensations. “Blade Runner,” the 1982 film directed by Ridley Scott, took that to the limit, so that the enduring cultural obsession with whether or not its protagonist Deckard is a replicant is almost incidental. That film is about images, about feelings, about mood and less about plot and text.
