Rewatching and rereading with Rhiannon McGavin
Former Youth Poet Laureate of Los Angeles Rhiannnon McGavin is releasing her second book of poetry, Grocery List Poems with Not a Cult. It’s not just a book of poetry, but also a book that feels like it reaches us through a thin layer of celluloid: each stanza could be a shot from a movie. The title is derived from an interview with director Agnes Varda, who described her filmmaking approach as cinécriture, or “cinewriting.”
So we inquired about the films that have made a permanent imprint on Rhiannon.
A movie you couldn’t watch again because it was too much:
I love rewatching and rereading; it feels really foundational, you want to see how your perception changes through time. So it means a lot when I say that I physically cannot watch Before Sunrise again. It took me two tries to get through it, because it’s so charming and intimate and like, we’ve all missed those trains. I’m waiting until I’m in the best possible emotional space to finish the trilogy. Tears flavor the popcorn.
A movie that feels like more than just a movie:
When I saw Slums of Beverly Hills as a teenager, I just immediately absorbed it as memory. I didn’t feel the thrill of recognition so much as sliding into a bath at exactly my body temperature like ah, yes, my life. In an artistic sense, every frame of Portrait of a Lady on Fire is an absolute oil painting. About every two weeks last summer, I’d watch that movie, spread out and a bit stoned on the floor. I usually avoid LGBT period pieces like that, because it’s so rare they end nicely for anybody involved, but that film takes such care with its audience. I know going into it that the lovers won’t be together forever, but that doesn’t invalidate the romance and feelings they had.
A line from a movie that has stayed with you:
I watched all of Agnes Varda’s movies in order last year, and I’d write a paragraph about my favorite scene as a little exercise. It’s so fun watching somebody’s language change over time, what becomes a motif, what new tricks they pick up. Some of those paragraphs become poems for my book, and one of those scenes is the opening mural in Mur Murs. It’s her documentary on public art in Los Angeles in the 70s. It’s real dreamy watching it, recognizing some street corners and buildings and murals, or at least their ghosts. The first mural in the flick is Old Woman of the Freeway by Kent Twitchell, and it’s introduced as “A face suddenly in close-up with a persistent gaze”. Something about that phrase just rings, the way it rushes up at you. It can be really alienating to walk around LA and only see cars and ads for blocks, and those murals are such necessary interruptions.
What do movies get wrong about writing?
I don’t think this is limited to writers, but the tortured artist shtick is so weird, right? Somebody who’s decided that they’re the chosen one, treating their creativity as a burden to take out on everyone around them, and all that individual and residual suffering make the Art better somehow. This idea that talent and kindness are incompatible. The way that destroying yourself has been sold as the only way to live as an artist is bonkers. It can be an interesting plot, but in real life I’m more interested in people building sustainable creative practices for their work.
A movie that feels like poetry:
Sympathy for Lady Vengeance just rocks. I waited a long time to watch it because I can’t handle violence, but it’s so worth it. The structure reminds me of sestinas: six stanzas where the final words of one stanza repeat in the next in a kind of spiral, with a final tercet flourish with all the refrain words. John Ashbery described writing sestinas as “riding downhill on a bicycle and having the pedals push your feet”, and I feel the same way about Lady Vengeance. All the spiraling memories in the first half as you piece together the mystery, and then the flashbacks fall away entirely as the rest of it unfolds, strike by strike. I love when Geum-ja looks at the camera in the first scene too, when she walks out of prison and is supposed to repent for her crimes. It feels like a question: what could the audience offer her, would we believe her, would we trust where she’s going. It’s a film rooted in the collective to the same extent that she commands the frame.
What does the word mean cinematic to you ?
The best definition of cinema I ever got was from a neuroscience class. Film as the culmination of every other art form- music, all kinds of visual art, theatre, dance, writing, everything all at once, all the spectacle and craft. When a film acknowledges and fulfills those different forms and legacies and responsibilities, that feels cinematic.
It’s similar to what feels poetic- when the form and content of a poem are complementary, in harmony with each other, the best way to say what you’re saying, even if language sometimes feels like blowing bubbles compared to the windstorm of what you really meant to say.