A fictionalised documentary about the great Japanese poet Bashô (1644–1694), the spiritual father of haiku poetry. A monk, portraying the poet, journeys through Japan, following Bashô's journal and writing many of his haikus. A ruminant, poetic, Zen Buddhist observation of nature – a return to the lost paradise of unspoilt nature.
Rival poets Reginald Bunthorne (a 'fleshy poet') and Archibald Grosvenor (an 'idyllic poet') vie for the affections of the lovely milkmaid Patience. A 1995 Opera Australia performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's classic operetta, recorded at the Sydney Opera House.
Eugene Devlin, a once famous, now reclusive poet, searches through his past, looking for redemption and peace.
How the inventor of the detective story became his own greatest mystery.
Based on the autobiographical book "Ya -sam" (I-myself) by Vladimir Mayakovsky the leading Russian Futurist poet of the beginning of the 20th century. He was born in 1893, into a Russian Cossack family in the Transcaucasian kingdom of Georgia, then part of Russian Empire. There he spent his childhood and boyhood attending a grammar school in Kutaisi. Mayakovsky moved to Moscow at the age of 14, after his father's death. He became a poet, an artist, an actor, a writer/director and public speaker.
Docudrama that recounts the astonishing life story of a forgotten genius, English poet Alexander Pope, who lived from 1688 to 1744.
Live performance, Bayerische Staatsoper, 2011. The Tales of Hoffmann (French: LES CONTES D'HOFFMANN) is an opéra fantastique by Jacques Offenbach that combines three short stories by E.T.A. Hoffmann into a haunting whole: a melancholy poet reflects on three women he loved and lost in the past: a mechanical performing doll, a Venetian courtesan, and the consumptive daughter of a celebrated composer. One of the questions this opera poses for any director is how to link the 'tales' of Hoffmann's three lost loves together and knit them satisfactorily into the Prologue and Epilogue. In this production, Richard Jones solves the puzzle by turning it into an autobiographical journey which ends with a grand meet-up of all the characters Hoffmann has encountered: for once, Hoffmann is not presented as a rollicking kind of drunken story-spinner, but rather a sad-eyed, sobered-up depressive, who reaches for the bottle only because his disastrous love life has gone wrong yet again.
Biopic about legendary Turkmen philosopher and poet, Makhtoumkuli, who was also known as Fragi.
A husband, a wife and another woman. Only three are in the frame.
Docudrama about American poet Hart Crane, who committed suicide in April 1932 at the age of 32 by jumping off the steamship SS Orizaba.
A tv play about the Swedish poet Gustaf Fröding. Flashbacks from his life in a mental hospital.
Polish rebel Rafal Wojaczek writes poetry and lives life on the edge before his suicide in 1971.
Assumpta Serna stars as the brilliant and beautiful poet Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz in this magnificent portrayal of 17th Century Mexico. In order to pursue her love of writing, Juana enters the convent and gains international renown. When the Inquisition comes, the local Vicereine becomes Juana's protectress and erotic muse, and soon begins a thrilling romance of startling passion and intensity.
This American Experience tells Whitman's life story, from his working-class childhood in Long Island, to his years as a newspaper reporter in Brooklyn when he struggled to support his impoverished family, then to his reckless pursuit of the attention and affection he craved for his work, to his death in 1892.
King Louis XI masquerades as a commoner in Paris, seeking out the treachery he is sure lurks in his kingdom. At a local tavern, he overhears the brash poet François Villon extolling why he would be a better king. Annoyed yet intrigued, the King bestows on Villon the title of Grand Constable. Soon Villon begins work and falls for a lovely lady-in-waiting, but then must flee execution when the King turns on him.
Ralph Ellison was an African-American writer and essayist, who's only novel Invisible Man (1953) gained a wide critical success. Ellison's ambitious journey from a childhood of hardship and poverty to celebrated African American writer is chronicled in this inspiring program through exclusive interviews and personal recollection.
The love affair between poet Percy Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin resulted in the creation of an immortal novel, “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.”
An influential Serbian poet decides to leave Nazi-occupied Belgrade and join partisans in the country. A young resistance activist, however, is not so thrilled with the idea because the old and womanizing intellectual doesn't fit in with his strict moralistic standards.
Considered one of the finest late Naruses and a model of film biography, A Wanderer’s Notebook features remarkable performances by Hideko Takamine – Phillip Lopate calls it “probably her greatest performance” – and Kinuyo Tanaka as mother and daughter living from hand to mouth in Twenties Tokyo. Based on the life and career of Fumiko Hayashi, the novelist whose work Naruse adapted to the screen several times, A Wanderer’s Notebook traces her bitter struggle for literary recognition in the first half of the twentieth century – her affairs with feckless men, the jobs she took to survive (peddler, waitress, bar maid), and her arduous, often humiliating attempts to get published in a male-dominated culture.
Somerset Maugham introduces four of his tales in this anthology film: "The Facts of Life," "The Alien Corn," "The Kite," and "The Colonel's Lady."