A Funeral And A Poet

Films are often thought of as belonging to the dramatic genre, like theatre, with an emphasis on dialogue and the resulting confrontation of characters leading to a final catharsis. However, the medium of film is quite capable of expressing more poetic or narrative features as well. In this scene from Doctor Zhivago, the young poet attends his mother's funeral. What may take a few pages to describe in a novel, the way he feels, is done here by silent acting and visual poetry. Things that would be clumsy if they were told in a dialogue, and probably less effective via simple narration. A way to describe a sensitive person in film is to guide the camera to see what he perceives from what is going around him. The fall of the leaves and the blow of the wind, the slow but powerful accumulation of gentle feelings interrupted by the disturbing reality of the sight of someone whom one had seen living, walking, breathing... enclosed motionless in a box and buried underground. Meanderings of a perception quite easily attracted by the subtle ways reality is wrapped around us, among which death is only one; one, perhaps not fully understood at the first encounter, one that may not even seem more important than others, yet stubborn and unalterable. A poet's way to introduce a poet...