The question points to the mediocre plots of almost every instance of cinema throughout its history. Here we must be snobs for a moment: Hollywood is all trash, a capitalist farce. Even the groundlings in the 3B for Big Beard Bard willy shakesbeard were closer to esthetes than the platonic dream-bound in darkened theatres and their hypnotic 'well-made plays'. Most of 3B's plots were 'well-made plays', especially Hamlet, yet its action is all in blank verse. Snobs in Shakesbeard's time looked down on him, but history turned them over to ridicule before his genius. But the point is apt: the crudity in the bard's poetics turned mysteriously into gold.

The tragic genre has had two mysterious flowerings, both in terms of the 'eonic series': Athenian Greece, and seventeenth-century: England/France. Shakespeare and Racine, especially

George Steiner in his classic Death of Tragedy discusses this classic question. And also the multiple compulsive efforts to produce 'tragedies' in the wake of Shakespeare and their strange failure. The problem is that the genre requires poetic dramas and while that is not so impossible in French it has defeated English poets, although Wordsworth in his Prelude, which is not a tragic genre, produces some fascinating blank verse.

Part of the problem is that people have forgotten how to write blank verse although with a bit of practice it can be produced as you speak like the hexameters and other multiple verse forms of the Greeks in their epics. But to the problem of simple versification comes the mystery of such a crude peotic form  creating high poetry: Shakesbeard solved that also. Steiner struggles with the problem but it can be confused with other issues: a student of the eonic effect sees that the problem is a macrohistorical puzzle of the strange generation of literatures in the evolution macroevolution of civilization, a statement that would seem incomprehensible or plain false in most thinkers. Again the question of poetry suffers from aesthetic confusion over verse types and the result is the archaic highfalutin junk poetry of too many...snobs. But we see the way past the snob problem in the emergence of great literatures. Shaespeare speaks in 'crude' beauty without snob effects in a common language of crats and groundlings in the theatres of the times. But it is blank verse all the way. There is a mystery to poetry in the way in invokes an unseen dimension that the brain can detect but which our sciences of linguistics can't yet explain.

Let's put  our post today into blank verse:

The mediocre plots of cinema

next to the prose of unversed dialogue

begs forth verse tragical as ancient Greece...  three minutes, done, very low quality but blank verse, sort of: iambic pentameters, very close to yet distinct from ordinary speech.

 

Cinema deserves better than our momentary snobbery but the fact remains that a great tragedy in blank verse is entirely possible.

and Steiner struggled with that too). There is no reason whatever that a cinema could not be done in blank verse, but if you look at the examples, most fail or disregard the meter. One exception, almost bizarre is the Hamlet of Mel Gibson, which is quite good.  Much of the highfallutin attempts are too arty.

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Source: Is Cinema Dead Again? - CounterPunch.org