amy king is putting together a remarkable list of poetry and film. as i was reading her list i was making my own notes about poetry and film too. but rather than make such a list myself, i have done just that in the past, i thought of one film in particular that i believe does an interesting job of integrating a poet, a line of poetry and the film itself.

i found songs from the second floor a couple years ago on the shelf of the local blockbuster. not familiar with the director roy andersson's work and the premise as it read on the back video sleeve, a film about millenial fears at the end of 1999 siphoned thru the lens of a comic romero, certainly grabbed me by the collar and demanded that i watch it.

andersson i later learned spent many years working in swedish tv. you wouldn't know that from the cool surrealism of the movie. it would seem stockholm is frozen in a perpetual traffic jam. the markets are doing poorly so the traders, market analysts, corporate ceo's, ad infinitum have have taken to the streets and become flagellants in order to appease the gods of finance.

these flagellants, which echo the danse macabre in bergman's the seventh seal, are a near constant presence in the background. there is also street violence of the sort which is racially motivated, callous employers who fire a luckless soul who must return to his home and face his wife which underscores the deep fears of facing an unknown and unstable future that is at hand. there is also an old tired magician who performs before a group of slack voyeurs and really, by accident, saws a person in half.

yet, the film is inspired by a line of verse by cesar vallejo, BLESSED BE THE ONE WHO SITS DOWN, which again is a bit of refrain thru out the running time of the film. in all the odd, violent background of financial unease and social unrest the film is about a family, 2 brothers, the wife of the brother who is a poet and in a mental ward, and the brothers' distraught parents. the father keeps yelling to anyone who will listen about his poet son, 'he went crazy from writing poetry'!

but not much happens during the length of the film. it's been a couple of years since i've watched the movie and my memory of it is reduced to scenes rather than the whole. perhaps that is not only from my shitty memory, but also is a result of andersson's grammar of filmmaking. the camera barely moved as andersson perpetuated the frozen economy and the social stasis, symbolized by the traffic jam, and those who do harm to themselves by attemping to appease a figment of their superstition, is on the surface very funny, as surrealism sometimes can be. but the overall effect is one of extreme ennui. i could've used one of romero's zombies to liven things up as i watched misadventure after misadventure.

still, the photography is accomplished bordering on lush. andersson has a message to tell and yet perhaps that message was lost as we turned the millenium and started upon the 21st century. the poetry is locked up in the mind of the poet son and in that line by vallejo as andersson's camera is simply content to sit still among the ruins. watching andersson's movie i was struck by his need to telaport the viewer into some transcendent plane and not getting much lift. and yet, i remember the movie and am still haunted by some of its images and by the very presence of a line of poetry in the film, from vallejo, an early favorite of mine. that was, i guess, all the lift i could muster.