Correspondence No. 1: “A Postcard from the Volcano,” a poem by Wallace Stevens // Homo Sapiens, a film directed by Nikolaus Geyrhalter
This series will look at the correspondences between one work of art and another – specifically, how common themes and ideas are manifested in works of different genres. Poem vs. film, song vs. novel, painting vs. symphony, film vs. short story: these are the sort of pairings I’m going to consider. “Compare and contrast” is a good exercise even after you get out of high school; the experience of one work can be enriched by exposure to the other.
Our first Correspondence deals with the things people leave behind – and when I say people, I mean whole groups of people: cities, nations, civilizations, maybe the entire genus Homo itself. Lots of stuff is left – but is there anyone around to see it? The term “ruin porn” has been applied to a trend in photography and video that dwells on the decay and dilapidation of the built environment. Today’s two works can be seen as differing manifestations of this idea: one of them in words, with a humanistic focus; the other in images, with a material one.
Wallace Stevens’ poem “A Postcard from the Volcano” (written in the 1930s, long before anyone was using the term “ruin porn”) is a message to the future from a person or people, representatives of some dying or already destroyed society. We don’t know how this civilization met its end, although the volcano reference, which brings Pompeii to mind, gives us a clue. The first lines are: “Children picking up our bones / Will never know that these were once / As quick as foxes on the hill.” Nor will the children know “that with our bones / We left much more, left what still is / The look of things, left what we felt / At what we saw.”
From this opening rumination on human bones, the poem’s focus moves to a piece of architecture, namely a mansion. “The spring clouds blow / Above the shuttered mansion-house, … We knew for long the mansion’s look / And what we said of it became / A part of what it is.”
All is not lost, as there will be people in the future to continue the work of civilization. Yet their comprehension of what is left behind will be fragmentary: those children introduced at the beginning “will speak our speech and never know” the life of the destroyed world – they will have only the material remains, as represented by “a dirty house in a gutted world.”
The counterpart to Stevens’ poem is the 2016 documentary Homo Sapiens, directed by Nikolaus Geyrhalter. The supreme irony of Homo Sapiens is its title: there is not a single human being to be seen anywhere in the film (not even a corpse). Rather, it is concerned exclusively with the material remains that the human species leaves behind – Stevens’ “the look of things.” I found the documentary in my local library’s foreign language section, which is another, inadvertent irony: you never hear a single word spoken, in any language, over the entire course of the film.
Every shot in Homo Sapiens shows a decaying structure, constructed by members of the title species, then abandoned. In his brief poem, Stevens has room for a single mansion to make his point, but Geyrhalter’s film shows us one metaphorical “mansion-house” after another. We see an abandoned and dilapidated auditorium, bicycles lined up in racks and being pelted by rain, massive deserted seaside buildings (apartments? hotels?), a McDonald’s peeking out from a decaying street, a boat lying on its side in the overgrown grass, medical equipment rotting away in an empty hospital…and on and on, for 94 minutes. There is no narration on the soundtrack to enlighten us, and the camera never moves, remaining fixed on each shot, then moving to the next. One of Geyrhalter’s locations was the Fukushima exclusion zone in Japan – the site of a nuclear disaster, a sort of technological updating of Stevens’ volcano.
Although humans are absent, animals make their presence known, through various chirps and buzzes, while the weather adds its own sonic contribution, with rain and wind hammering at the ruins. At the end, we return to the circular, UFO-like Buzludzha Monument on a mountain in Bulgaria, where the film started – reminiscent of Stevens’ “dirty house in a gutted world” – and then the fog blots it all out with its cold white blanket.
Stevens’ postcard is about the end of a civilization, but the melancholia is tempered somewhat by the realization that the future will still be populated; at least the messenger assumes that someone will be around to read the message. By contrast, Homo Sapiens suggests the end of all civilization, and possibly all human life on earth. A human voice speaks to us in the postcard, while the film offers us only decaying physical remains.
You can read my own literary exercise in ruin porn here.