- published: 08 Apr 2015
- views: 27518
Charles Pierre Baudelaire (French: [ʃaʁl bodlɛʁ]; April 9, 1821 – August 31, 1867) was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the 19th century. Baudelaire's highly original style of prose-poetry influenced a whole generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé among many others. He is credited with coining the term "modernity" (modernité) to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility art has to capture that experience.
Baudelaire is one of the major innovators in French literature. His poetry is influenced by the French romantic poets of the earlier 19th century, although its attention to the formal features of verse connect it more closely to the work of the contemporary 'Parnassians'. As for theme and tone, in his works we see the rejection of the belief in the supremacy of nature and the fundamental goodness of man as typically espoused by the romantics and expressed by them in rhetorical, effusive and public voice in favor of a new urban sensibility, an awareness of individual moral complexity, an interest in vice (linked with decadence) and refined sensual and aesthetical pleasures, and the use of urban subject matter, such as the city, the crowd, individual passers-by, all expressed in highly ordered verse, sometimes through a cynical and ironic voice. Formally, the use of sound to create atmosphere, and of 'symbols', (images which take on an expanded function within the poem), betray a move towards considering the poem as a self-referential object, an idea further developed by the Symbolists Verlaine and Mallarmé, who acknowledge Baudelaire as a pioneer in this regard.
Actors: Alexander Smolowe (editor), Elise Kermani (writer), Elise Kermani (director), Rinde Eckert (actor), Sirus Kermani (producer),
Plot: A flamboyant Charles Baudelaire, French poet and time-hopping traveler, has arrived in the present-time United States to lecture about his American literary colleague E. A. Poe with a 8mm film projector, a popular form of film projection invented in the 20th century. With the help of Techne, the Goddess of Technology, Baudelaire projects scenes from Poes life on stage, blurring the boundary between what is real and what is imagined. Fictional scenes from Poe's stories cross fade into factual events from Poe's life in New York-such as when Virginia, his young wife, dies of tuberculosis. As Baudelaire continues his lecture, his desire to meet Poe and his regret at never being able to talk to him in person (Poe died in 1849) deepens and brings Baudelaire to a point of despair. Techne (goddess of technology) helps Baudelaire to realize that he can use a new modern technology to bring Poe back to life, and magically, Baudelaire brings Poe on stage. Poe wavers between the living and the dead and finally crosses over to the land of the living. The two greet each other and sit down to discuss their ideas of philosophy and art.
Genres: Drama,Actors: Stephen Southouse (producer), Stephen Southouse (editor), Stephen Southouse (director), Stephen Southouse (writer), Roxanne Gregory (actress), Cyrus Trafford (actor), Jade Alexander (actress), Ruggero Dalla Santa (actor), Claire-Monique Martin (actress), John Heartstone (actor), Mina Renoir (actress), Dee Grant (actress), David Furlong (actor), Naomi Wagner (actress), Karim Kronfli (actor),
Genres: Drama,