ABSTRACT
Tony Harrison is preoccupied in his work with the representation of suffering. He argues that the poet’s “unflinching gaze” – the continuous observation of reality – must be maintained, even in the face of atrocities. The question which looms over any work of art which encompasses extremes of suffering is the im/possibility of representation: in other words, the need to find a form for what appears indescribable, or beyond representation. Harrison’s own poetry probes boundaries and analyzes liminal experiences – doubting the power of language, and yet never abandoning it as a tool of resistance.
Harrison has created some of his most powerful works in the form of film-poems, which focus the viewer’s gaze on the “human being in all its corporeality”. This chapter examines the way that the film-poem, as an intermedial form, creates a multi-layering of voices and perspectives and engages the viewer on different levels.
Harrison’s “The Gaze of the Gorgon” (1992) is a film-poem concerned with war, death, and the reification of the human body. It uses a montage form in the struggle to confront “a mass contemporary audience” with a “radical theatre of atrocity”. In one sequence, “the Trojan War, Nazis, neo-Nazis, Hitler, Wilhelm II and Second World War concentration camps are conjoined” in dizzying succession. The film is also full of ekphrastic gestures: its fragmented composition includes various representations of paintings, sculptures, architecture, press cuttings and documentary photography. One ekphrastic image is set against another, creating the mirroring, self-reflexive effect of a mise en abyme. The “recycling” of art works and images from different periods only emphasizes the endless and absurd return of the horrors of war. The result is to turn the viewer into a witness who has to share in the poet’s struggle: to continue to face the “Gorgon” in their own time.
