Abstract

This thesis examines the correlation between film and poetry by amalgamating literary works with cinematic ones. The first part, Rashomon 06 , updates the story of Rashomon as it would be told by writers such as Julio Cortazár and Alain Robbe-Grillet, and directors such as Martin Scorsese, Alain Resnais and Michaelangelo Antonioni - all filtered through the stylistic influence of Jeffrey Conway, Lynn Crosbie and David Trinidad's Phoebe 2002. It uses interludes to interweave a poetic essay on film and a quasi-Kunderan examination of the characters between testimonies of the various witnesses to the story in the style of Ryonosuke Akutagawa's In A Grove. The second part, A Near-Life Experience , updates William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet through a Baz Luhrmann-esque modernization, but by using characters from films that specifically deal with the themes of creation, dreams, and memory - and using a hybrid dialogue from the films and the original play. I use pieces of existing creations and evolve them into something new in order to deeply examine the essence of the poet, through the outlook of dreams, surrealism, existentialism, imagination, characterization, cliché, and most importantly, poetry itself. The result is a look at how different writers from different eras, and their creations, might interact on an even surface, and at the ripples that the various poetic and philosophical themes create when made to collide.