Art made during Covid––more specifically during quarantine and before / at the very beginning of the vaccine rollout––will surely hold an added weight as history is written. In those very hard times, what did we write? What did we read? What did we watch? T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, directed by Sophie Fiennes and performed by her brother Ralph, is a decidedly worthwhile artifact of this precarious time.
An adaptation of the series of four poems written just before––and then during––World War II by Eliot, the film is an elevated recording of the stage performance Ralph Fiennes took on in 2021. Fiennes himself is credited with the stage direction, his sister with the film direction, both working well. Hildegard Bechtler’s production design is spare yet effective, the lighting by Tim Lutkin pointed and emotional. The camera remains mostly stationary, though the editing jostles between full-frame wides and quietly intense close-ups.
An adaptation of the series of four poems written just before––and then during––World War II by Eliot, the film is an elevated recording of the stage performance Ralph Fiennes took on in 2021. Fiennes himself is credited with the stage direction, his sister with the film direction, both working well. Hildegard Bechtler’s production design is spare yet effective, the lighting by Tim Lutkin pointed and emotional. The camera remains mostly stationary, though the editing jostles between full-frame wides and quietly intense close-ups.
- 5/2/2023
- by Dan Mecca
- The Film Stage
In college one night, I got very stoned and read T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” I was gripped by it, and felt I understood it — a feat I’ve never come close to accomplishing since. Yet I don’t think I was under some delusion about having glimpsed the poem’s essence. Eliot was a mystic doomsayer whose verse was torn, as if by shrapnel, with fragments of misanthropy and heartbreak. He channeled the despair of the 20th century but did it with a glint of rapture (to contemplate it was to be alive). To connect with his poetry, you almost need to leave rationality behind, to give yourself over to the experiential quality of Eliot’s words. I think the reason I could grasp Eliot while stoned is that I forgot I was reading “poetry,” forgot that I was facing stanzas arranged in elegant pieces on a page. Instead I was living each word,...
- 4/26/2023
- by Owen Gleiberman
- Variety Film + TV
Sophie Fiennes on Ralph Fiennes starring and staging T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets: “The thing that Ralph does brilliantly is the distribution in the space of the ideas. How he places them.”
In the second instalment with Sophie Fiennes we discuss her superb and faithful capturing of Ralph Fiennes’ stage production of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, Helen Gardner’s The Art Of T.S. Eliot, Grace Jones: Bloodlight And Bami, Samuel Beckett, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Elizabethan and Metaphysical poetry.
Sophie Fiennes with Anne-Katrin Titze on T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: “I possibly wouldn’t have been as interested in becoming a filmmaker if I hadn’t had become acquainted with that poem at a very early age.”
Within days of speaking with Sophie, by chance every film I happened to watch contained a quote from the Nobel Prize-winning poet.
In the second instalment with Sophie Fiennes we discuss her superb and faithful capturing of Ralph Fiennes’ stage production of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, Helen Gardner’s The Art Of T.S. Eliot, Grace Jones: Bloodlight And Bami, Samuel Beckett, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Elizabethan and Metaphysical poetry.
Sophie Fiennes with Anne-Katrin Titze on T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: “I possibly wouldn’t have been as interested in becoming a filmmaker if I hadn’t had become acquainted with that poem at a very early age.”
Within days of speaking with Sophie, by chance every film I happened to watch contained a quote from the Nobel Prize-winning poet.
- 4/25/2023
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
There has always been something otherworldly about Ts Eliot, a spectral quality deeply in accord with cinema. Francis Ford Coppola knew to include in Apocalypse Now (1979) a scene in which Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) reads parts of Eliot’s The Hollow Men, that in the epigraph (“Mistah Kurtz – he dead”) quotes Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the basis of the film. Dennis Hopper, playing the photojournalist, paraphrases the poem’s famous last line.
Sophie Fiennes’ superb and faithful capturing of her brother Ralph Fiennes’ stage production of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets yields wonderfully thoughtful camera movements and angles (cinematography by Mike Eley) and also takes us out of the theater space to breathe the same landscapes Eliot so unmatchedly described in Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding. He was always already there. “And...
Sophie Fiennes’ superb and faithful capturing of her brother Ralph Fiennes’ stage production of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets yields wonderfully thoughtful camera movements and angles (cinematography by Mike Eley) and also takes us out of the theater space to breathe the same landscapes Eliot so unmatchedly described in Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding. He was always already there. “And...
- 4/23/2023
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Sophie Fiennes with Anne-Katrin Titze on Slavoj Žižek: “I absolutely love working with him. Just being immersed in those ideas.”
From her short, Lars From 1 - 10, with Lars von Trier on Dogma 95, to Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami with Grace Jones; The Pervert's Guide To Ideology and The Pervert's Guide To Cinema with Slavoj Žižek; Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow with Anselm Kiefer; a short in Hopper Stories (commissioned by Arte France and produced by Didier Jacob), inspired by the Edward Hopper painting First Row Orchestra, and now the remarkable documentary T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, starring Ralph Fiennes - Sophie Fiennes is one of the most discerning and astute filmmakers on the subjects she chooses to document.
Slavoj Žižek Cantor Film Center at NYU on October 14, 2015 Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
Slavoj Žižek's musings on our enjoyment of ideology, and the fact that stepping out of it hurts, were...
From her short, Lars From 1 - 10, with Lars von Trier on Dogma 95, to Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami with Grace Jones; The Pervert's Guide To Ideology and The Pervert's Guide To Cinema with Slavoj Žižek; Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow with Anselm Kiefer; a short in Hopper Stories (commissioned by Arte France and produced by Didier Jacob), inspired by the Edward Hopper painting First Row Orchestra, and now the remarkable documentary T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, starring Ralph Fiennes - Sophie Fiennes is one of the most discerning and astute filmmakers on the subjects she chooses to document.
Slavoj Žižek Cantor Film Center at NYU on October 14, 2015 Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
Slavoj Žižek's musings on our enjoyment of ideology, and the fact that stepping out of it hurts, were...
- 4/22/2023
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
April is the cruelest month, but evidently not for one-man shows starring Oscar nominee Ralph Fiennes.
The “Schindler’s List” and “Harry Potter” star’s sister Sophie Fiennes directs a film version of “T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets,” the stage production he brought to London and throughout the UK back in 2021. During the lockdown, Fiennes committed to memory the “Wasteland” poet’s four epic poems written during World War II about man’s relationship to time and the divine. His performance, praised as “magnetic” by The Telegraph, was filmed at the end of his run.
IndieWire shares the exclusive trailer for the film version, opening April 28 at the IFC Center in New York City, courtesy of Kino Lorber. An expansion in theaters nationally will follow.
Fiennes’ filmed performance of Eliot’s masterworks is a co-production between The Bath Theatre Royal and Royal & Derngate, Northampton and Lone Star Productions, Amoeba Film and Lonely Dragon Films.
The “Schindler’s List” and “Harry Potter” star’s sister Sophie Fiennes directs a film version of “T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets,” the stage production he brought to London and throughout the UK back in 2021. During the lockdown, Fiennes committed to memory the “Wasteland” poet’s four epic poems written during World War II about man’s relationship to time and the divine. His performance, praised as “magnetic” by The Telegraph, was filmed at the end of his run.
IndieWire shares the exclusive trailer for the film version, opening April 28 at the IFC Center in New York City, courtesy of Kino Lorber. An expansion in theaters nationally will follow.
Fiennes’ filmed performance of Eliot’s masterworks is a co-production between The Bath Theatre Royal and Royal & Derngate, Northampton and Lone Star Productions, Amoeba Film and Lonely Dragon Films.
- 4/5/2023
- by Ryan Lattanzio
- Indiewire
Exclusive: Kino Lorber has acquired all North American distribution rights to Four Quartets, the film version of the Ralph Fiennes-starring stage adaptation of T.S. Eliot’s seminal poem.
Directed by Sophie Fiennes, the film will get its U.S. premiere at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival later this week followed by a theatrical release this spring.
One of the giants of modern literature, the poet, playwright, critic, and editor T.S. Eliot is best known as one of the central figures of the Modernist movement in poetry. Consisting of four poems published over a six-year period – Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding, each titled after the landscape that inspired their writing – Four Quartets is widely considered Eliot’s masterpiece and the culminating achievement of his career as a poet, offering four interwoven meditations on the nature of time and the quest for spiritual enlightenment.
Directed by Sophie Fiennes, the film will get its U.S. premiere at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival later this week followed by a theatrical release this spring.
One of the giants of modern literature, the poet, playwright, critic, and editor T.S. Eliot is best known as one of the central figures of the Modernist movement in poetry. Consisting of four poems published over a six-year period – Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding, each titled after the landscape that inspired their writing – Four Quartets is widely considered Eliot’s masterpiece and the culminating achievement of his career as a poet, offering four interwoven meditations on the nature of time and the quest for spiritual enlightenment.
- 2/8/2023
- by Andreas Wiseman
- Deadline Film + TV
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