If not for lockdown, our acclaimed film ‘Lift Me Up I Am Dying would never have happened, it would have been a live tribute to John Keats, performed, on the bicentenary of his death in front of an invited audience, in the historic rooms at John Murray, at no 50 Albemarle Street. When everything got cancelled cultural solutions to the pandemic became a badge of honour especially for freelance creatives. In this case it would not do to have this quiet revelutionary locked in the dark, reduced to an inaudible whisper. Here there were parallels, Keats’ life had been brought to a sudden end by TB two hundred before, in Rome. He had died in penury hardly able to breathe and far from his loved ones. We needed him more than he us. This was a poet who believed in the healing power of poetry. He had given up practicing medicine because he believed poetry was the only balm for the deep-down part of the human soul.
All poets worth their salt and I’m sure filmmakers too, understand that finding parity with your discipline, especially if it’s new to you, centres around overcoming obstacles, and we were rich in obstacles. So it was for pragmatic purposes, I became a filmmaker. Whichever way I looked at the puzzle there was no choice but to step into a discipline I had no experience of.
The imagination lies in the lighted rooms of impossible ideas. The possibility of film came into my imagination like a 500-watt bulb. One can make art make sense, even on dark evenings, with only an iphone and email and an audience locked in other houses. We were living in a technological boon and if we could find a way to make a film we could deliver his healing perspective to more people, like hot soup. The whole world needed comfort. Quote here. And I had some pretty experienced people in the frame. Their cameras and iphones would be able to transport the lens to that imagined room on the Spanish steps where he died. They found ways to draw Keats’ impulse into their voices and faces. The poems blossomed from their mouths as they filmed themselves, leant against bedroom walls and walked through empty graveyards –Even the title roared out his lasting message to the human spirit. As a team of 8 (cast and crew), over that month, we all learned about film from this impossible angle, we learned that with a great poet for inspiration a film could be as much a poem as a collection of verses on a page. We used each frame as if it were one verse or fragment of correspondence leading to another. The actors lit a candles in Antwerp and candles in Putney, the iphone and editing app turning them to a single flame. We kept close to our intention, and directed from afar, never straying from the poems, using tricks along the way and subtracting all the ‘bells and whistles’ of filmaking. Even without funds we found it could be as fresh and vital as the pen and ink that must have pulled Keats’ lines along under the tree where he heard the nightingale. This was virtual reality of the highest order. On the very night he had died two hundred years before, our lighted candle wove its way in high winds of a February night into the homes and onto the screens of 4000 viewers as if it had been a volume of his poetry, newly wrapped, the ink just dried. With Keats as our nightingale we had completed and screened the film in a month on no budget, even though we were miles apart from each other. The film medium gave us different access to the same poems. We listened to his song, each one of us, using the power of the language, our iphones and emails like the canopy of branches stretching out over our heads. With film we could light the candle at 8pm and snuff it out at 8.30, we could turn the screens dark at the moment of his death. The immediacy of the actor’s private performances had unearthed a single location two centuries ago. What timeless forms film and poetry are. What a joy to bring them together. Time is a great traveller. As Keats knew, until he was too ill to lift a book, no discipline is beyond a human heart who is willing to see what they can do. ‘How many rules can you break?’ The poets whispered to me. ‘Look how little money is needed!’ Why not make films. With the right steer we kicked off the dust of our preconceptions, of our establishments. We brought a lighted fragment of his unforgettable story into the hearts of those at home.