Last night we watched Dead Poet’s Society. Believe it or not I had never seen it before,, but Dom suggested putting it on. There is something strange about watching a film starring an actor you know has recently died: the film feels different, like when you look at a painting under a new light. It felt as if it had gained a weird melancholy, or even an ominousness; a feeling of punctum but one divorced from ideas of the contingent or accidental. It was like looking at a photo of people taken before some great war, and thinking ”those poor fools”. I suppose this applies especially to Dead Poets Society given that it deals with a suicide.

For me, the odd thing to reflect upon was how the feel of the film was changed completely, simply through knowing what had happened in the ‘real world’. Every line Williams delivered seemed somehow more profound, tinged now with sadness. It seems to me that we can never again watch any of this man’s films without sighing, without reflecting on the fact that the unbridled joy, wit and energy we see on screen is a mere charade; the teacher may have extolled the wonders of life and poetry to his students, but it seems now that such joix d’vive only went so far. The feeling of these films has changed forever.

[img description=”undefined image” align=”centre”]/images/captain my captain.jpg[/img] ”Captain my captain!’