[Symes is a film editor, director, and producer for the BBC. In the following essay, he discusses working with Tony Harrison on the verse film The Blasphemers' Banquet ]

In 1936, delivering a lecture to the North London Film Society, W. H. Auden concluded that to enable poetry to work with film ‘there was a difficulty finding the right kind of support to enable such experiments to be carried out. It is financial support that is required for these experiments, without restriction on the director's independence of outlook either by commercial or departmental policy.’ This is certainly true, but he ignored the other vital part of the film/verse equation.

Possibly because what he was required to do at the GPO unit was to provide verse for existing film material, rather in the manner of a composer writing music, Auden failed to mention the necessity of writer and film team being able to work closely together. It may seem a truism, but it is remarkable how misunderstood is the process, even by insiders, and its success depends entirely on the closest of relationships developing between all parties engaged on the project. If the work is approached in a conventional way, with the writer relegated to a secondary position, the results will be at best dull. Perhaps more than for any other film the writer has to remain as the engine of the production, supported by a team that both understands and can interpret his or her requirements. Idealistic? Possibly. But the goal of any film maker working with verse should be to enable. Unless the poet's own creativity is allowed to inform the film-making itself, you might just as well use prose, and produce a conventional commentary, because what we are talking about is not verse commentaries but films which are driven by the poetic imagination, something that will infuse not only the words, but the sounds and pictures too.

If it had not been for a peculiar set of circumstances, and the fact that these things are still possible in the BBC, the five films I have made with Tony Harrison would not have happened, and yet their success makes me puzzled at the low profile verse possesses on the screen. After all it is central to pop music, is used more and more in advertising, and is gloriously proclaimed upon the football terraces. But take a proposal to use it on the television screen to most commissioning editors in television and it will be treated with great scepticism. From various people at various times I have experienced the classic development of ‘verse never works’ through ‘well of course it works with death’ （after our first collaboration） to the final ‘well of course it works with Harrison’ （after the triumphant evidence that poetry could take a topical subject and be more dangerous and challenging than reportage）. It might be argued that the gainsayers have a point in claiming that only Tony Harrison could carry off this feat since so little other work of this kind exists, but it is certainly impossible any longer to say that the technique itself does not work.

The Blasphemers’ Banquet, Tony Harrison's angry defence of Salman Rushdie, was transmitted in the Panorama slot on BBC 1 in 1989, in spite of demonstrations and a request from Lambeth Palace to ‘postpone’ it. It all seems a long way from that first meeting in a Soho restaurant when I approached Tony with the offer of writing and presenting Loving Memory, four films on death and commemoration. I had assumed some poetic content, but he made it clear that it would have to be all or nothing—he only wrote verse, and that would be all we would get. I gulped and agreed. Luckily my superior at the time, John Shearer, had the vision and the courage to agree too.

Loving Memory had started life as a series about great cemeteries of the world, one of those catch-all monsters the BBC flirts with from time to time, and had rapidly hit problems. Brought in at a late stage, and with little flexibility, I found myself hurriedly filming around Europe and was only able to involve Tony when about half the material had been shot. However, once he had agreed, he involved himself closely in the remaining filming, and then, more importantly, became a central part of the editing process, something he had not done in such an intense, collaborative way before. He was soon intrigued by the closeness of the work of the film editor to his own techniques. In both, the creator manipulates image and rhythm; in both he is concerned with momentum, structure and repetition; and in both there is the same tinkering and fine-tuning, the same running and re-running of sequence and of whole until the process appears to be working. Tony would work from his notes and our research, writing and re-writing as we juggled with sound and picture, coming up not only with description and explanation but with ideas, powerful verbal imagery and structure.

The first film to be edited happened to be Mimmo Perrella Non è Piu, a film which had been shot by the Assistant Producer Mike Hutchinson and was being edited by a very experienced Bristol editor, Liz Thoyts. It started out as a conventional if startling documentary about Neapolitan funeral customs, requiring the usual explanatory commentary, and Tony sat day after day with the editor wrestling both with that requirement and with the need for a more formal structure. Then it became clear that a second shoot was necessary for the All Souls’ Day celebrations in the cemetery, and so he was able to accompany the crew to Naples. This provided proof, if proof was needed, of how vital his presence was to be while filming takes place: one idea, glimpsed in a Neapolitan street, can be the difference between success and failure.

One of the strange customs Neapolitans embrace involves the advertisement, usually in the shape of a large poster on a wall, of the death of a relative. Lighting on one which advertised the departure of a certain Mimmo Perrella, Tony quickly wrote and filmed a wonderful opening for the film, and then proceeded to use the idea of Mimmo as a representative shade to guide us through each processional stage of both funeral custom and film. He also grasped the gift of the ‘non è piu’, turning it into a rhythmical incantation of great power:

Mimmo Perrella non è piu.
Mimmo Perrella is no more.
This gate his body will be carried through
he walked past into work not days before.
Mimmo Perrella non è piu.
Let's follow Mimmo Perrella's fate,
or, rather, not one single fate but two,
that of the body brought in through this gate
and put under marble in a dark, dry hole
where Vesuvius's soil makes it like leather,
and that other fate, meanwhile, of Mimmo's soul
exposed to an uncertain, otherworldly weather.

Back in the cutting-room, and with this framework now in place, Tony began to explore some of the other advantages verse can offer documentary, not least that of the subjective voice. Neapolitans dig their loved ones up after two years in order to inspect them and then move them to a niche in one of the many walls provided, a strange and rather gruesome ritual, and I can still remember sitting in the cutting-room and hearing him transform this sequence into something both moving and extraordinary by turning the verse over into the first person while we watched the widow standing by the grave:

Was this the Vincenzo who I slept beside?
Vincenzo Cicatiello non è piu.
Now, now I know You've really died.
Till now I only half-believed it true.
Being seen in such revolting tatters
wouldn't suit him. He was much too proud!
Although he's dead, she still believes it matters
that they make him feel he looks right in his shroud.

This sequence is a particularly telling one when discussing the power that verse can bring to documentary. Again, towards the end, as the shrouded remains of the skeleton are carried out on a sort of tray covered with a cloth, two lines clearly illustrate the ability of this type of commentary to both lift the image and enlarge it. ‘Under a blanket with a yellow cross’ is a simple descriptive line, supporting what we can see. It is the sort of line too many commentaries would leave to stand on its own, a redundant comment on something visually obvious. Here Tony only uses it in order to expand the image, and intensify it, because he then follows it with a verbal image of much greater power than anything seen on the screen:

Under a blanket with a yellow cross
he clutches a crucifix in leather claw
and leaves a wife and sister with the wounds of loss
that won't heal till they too are “no more”.

This sequence should leave the viewer in no doubt of verse's great advantage over prose: its ability to draw people in, and then tell them uncomfortable things without having them turn away; its ability to be subjective; its ability to transform and illuminate. We were beginning to discover exciting things—not only the power of the technique, but new and subtle ways of pacing the cuts so that their rhythm and that of the commentary did not cancel each other out; unthought of possibilities for shots previously considered functional or bland; ways around the contention that the two imageries, visual and verbal, tended to cancel each other out. Cheating the Void, the last film to be worked on in this series, took us further down this road.

In one way this was a much greater challenge for Tony, in that he was presented with a lot of disparate material of a Cook's Tour around the great European nineteenth-century cemeteries, yet paradoxically this allowed him greater freedom both to structure and invent. It was in this film that the subjective voice given to Vincenzo's widow was given to statues and to the dead, and in which an exhumation took place on the sound track of the artists buried in Père Lachaise, the famous Parisian cemetery. It was also in this film that we were occasionally able to dispense with image and go to black, a strong and unusual event on a medium scared of darkness and silence, and a perfect vehicle for the echoing line: ‘Oblivion that all our art defies’.

Tony had chosen to see these great nineteenth-century exercises in commemoration as an example of the struggle between memory and oblivion, something poignantly illustrated in the English graveyards where most of the tombs are now decayed, but there was a twist. He produced a critic's review of one of the first films ever made, in which the reviewer had written that such was the power of these moving pictures, death was now no longer absolute. We found this film which shows workers leaving a factory, and since it was French, we started our film in Paris, but framed the whole with the archive material, under the control of Tony himself. Our film is started by him in vision, and ended by him, sitting at the editing machine. The tour becomes an exploration through two centuries of the battle between memory and oblivion, but remains conscious of its origination on film:

Oblivion is darkness, memory light.
They're locked in eternal struggle. Which
of these two forces really shows its might
when death's doors are thrown open by a switch?

Having got this far by the spring of 1987, we were keen to take it further, but there followed two frustrating years when we went our separate ways while trying and failing to work together again. A film about rattlesnakes, set in a town in Florida that glories in the name of Arcadia, failed to find funding, and it wasn't until the Ayatollah intervened that a new project emerged. When I met Tony in Bristol in the spring of 1989 he was engaged on a National Theatre touring production of his version of The Misanthrope. The Rushdie affair appeared to be dying down, and he was angry that both government and people seemed to be allowing what he saw as a monstrous threat to freedom of speech to pass with inadequate remonstration. As luck would have it, there was a gap in the Byline series, a regular summer feature on BBC 1 which allows strong opinions to be aired, and so there was an unusually quick agreement to proceed. Here we were, more by luck than judgement, suddenly together again. As we were both busy we could do very little until early May, when the location recess began. Production was then quick and intense: more research, a filming start on May 27 which ended in Paris on June 5, and then an edit through to July 14. Transmission took place on 31 July 1989.

When I was considering this piece, I looked through the schedule and found that it provided the simplest way of explaining how the film evolved, and how our own working practice had developed. It proved to be an interesting summary of the evolution of an unusual film, and it illustrates clearly Tony's extraordinary technique and working method.

The Blasphemers’ Banquet is a passionate defence of Salman Rushdie's right to freedom of speech, even if it involves blasphemy. This defence unfolds through the deceptively simple structural conceit of a restaurant meal in Bradford （the town where a copy of The Satanic Verses was burnt in public） to which blasphemers past and present are invited. None of course turns up, most because they are already dead, Rushdie because by then he was in hiding for his life. Into this simple frame is introduced a rich tapestry of ideas and meditations involving the nature of blasphemy （Voltaire, Molière, Byron）, the curse of fundamentalist religions, and the joy of our fleeting but passionate life all seen from the perspective of a militant unbeliever. How was it achieved?

Anyone who has worked with Tony will be familiar with the famous notebooks. These are of a particular kind, blue covers with a red binding of the sort much prized by Victorian diarists, and they multiply in his satchel with such alarming speed that I am sure more than one physiotherapist has been called upon to realign the poet's backbone. Into these repositories everything goes: cuttings from papers; pictures; ideas; snatches of verse. It was from one of these at an early meeting that he produced a cutting about the recent spate of stonings then taking place in Iran, and particularly of one stoning in which the unfortunate condemned had been buried up to their chests in the sand. Calling the project Heads in the Sand, Tony wanted to use this as the framework for the film, the condemned to be given a musical line celebrating life while all around them the forces of fundamentalism would be chanting their mantras to extinguish it.

In addition he was annoyed by the outbreak of ‘yes … but’ statements from public figures, and by the sudden wave of fundamentalist demonstrations （threats to abortion clinics in the U.S., to Dante's monument in Ravenna and so on）. Could we use the singing heads as a life enhancing operatic element, and start researching the ‘but-ters’ which, with other archive examples, we could use to create a dramatic whole? Although all the early files in the office bear the title Heads in the Sand, causing considerable clerical confusion, anyone familiar with the film will know that both the heads and the prevarications are absent from the finished product. It is an illustration of the way ideas developed and of the fluid and exciting process that was involved. Quite quickly the idea of blasphemy and blasphemers began to displace the heads, sparked off by the Molière production mentioned earlier which happened to be touring in Bradford. Soon requests began to arrive for everything we could find on Voltaire as well. I have a sheaf of photocopies of pictures of Voltaire covered in scrawled notes and requests: could we go to the Musée Voltaire in Geneva; could we recreate the scratching by the imprisoned writer of a poem on the prison wall; what about a visual mix from a silhouette of the seated man to one of Tony, in similar stance, with the anti-Rushdie demonstrations in the background; what about using the famous crowning of Voltaire on the stage of the Comédie Fran‡aise with a laurel wreath; wasn't the circular wreath itself worth thinking about? These, and many others, illustrate not just the evolution of the ideas but also the preoccupation with sound and picture that makes a collaboration with Tony such a delight for a film maker. Anything becomes possible. The medium is there to be stretched and pushed in every direction.

By the time the filming deadline was approaching the heads had gone, but the desire for a musical motif remained, and the ‘butting’ politicians had developed into a full-blown search for fundamentalist lunacy. While researchers ploughed through miles of old film and dug around uncomplainingly for facts about Shi'ism and strange plants, I set off with Tony to spend three days in Bradford, principally to explore the possibilities of using the square where the book was burnt, but also to look at the numerous redundant Christian churches that cover the city. As we walked and drove around, we realised that these symbols of impermanence were in their own way extraordinary. No longer serving their ‘singing Sabbath congregations’ they are now carpet warehouses, auction rooms, temples and, famously, restaurants. I had no idea where the film was going at this stage, but when we discovered that one ex-church was a restaurant called the Omar Khayyam, and that this was about to change too, its owners having decided on a new name, the city and its churches took on a new significance:

Where there was passionate preaching and packed pews
are King Prawn Rogan Josh and Vindaloos.
For Bradford devotees of Indian food the OMAR KHAYYAM restaurant is “good
news”.

It's difficult here to give a sense of the excitement involved in this process, and equally difficult to convince people that it could afford to be so flexible, but once Tony felt confident with the basic blocks we started to film. With film being an expensive and time-consuming business, I had an obligation to be careful, but I knew from past experience it was well worth trusting Tony, and I was quite happy to start without a script, and with neither of us really knowing how things would work. We still operated to a tight schedule, and an agreed list of priorities, with Tony accompanying us everywhere, but the way we would incorporate the material gathered was not clear at this stage.

The churches were filmed, a further discovery of more Omar was made in the local cemetery （on a gravestone）, and the film crew were treated to constant inexplicable requests to film bits of graffiti and to be sure to concentrate on ‘O's’—the O on the gravestone inscription, the O of the Omar Khayyam sign as it was removed from the restaurant, the O on various signboards. Even the director was by this time wondering where it would all end! By May 31, when we were due to film in the Bradford square, Tony had decided to use the Edward Fitzgerald quatrain employed in the Rubai'yat translation as his verse form, but had only written the few verses needed for this shoot. Designed as a beginning, they now occupy a place a little further down the film than originally intended:

This isn't paradise but the Bradford square
where Rushdie's book got burnt, just over there.
By reading it, where fools had it cremated,
I bring it whole again, out of the air.
Near where the National Theatre does a play
by one priests smeared as Satan in his day
I read a book by one dubbed Satan now
whose work, like Molière's, is here to stay.
And of the afterlife I have no heed.
What more could a godless mortal need
than a samosa and a can of beer
and books, like Rushdie's, to sit here and read?

The crew moved to Paris, to film Voltaire and the Comédie Fran‡aise, and while there we heard the news of the death of the Ayatollah. The scribbling in the notebooks intensified, and we returned to England and the cutting room to present the editor Peter Simpson with a new beginning, the bizarre funeral of the Ayatollah, and a strange collection of material: old churches, restaurant signs, demonstrations, archive films of ranting fundamentalists, statues and plenty of ‘O's’.

Taking possession of a room next door to the one in which the editing was being done, Tony started to write, read and meditate while below us in another area containing some alarmingly modern devices for musical composition, the composer Dominic Muldowney began to experiment with some of our sound effects and with an Islamic scale （a different scale from Western music, tuning every B and E on the keyboard flat by one quarter tone, thus giving three-quarter tone intervals）. The brief was that he should use a minimum of conventional instruments, taking instead our own sound tracks （shouts, water noise, helicopter blades turning） as his music instead. He had also to compose the crucial life-affirming lines to be given to a soprano at certain points during the film.

It was really only at this stage that the idea of the banquet became central to the whole, and was erected as the skeleton upon which the flesh of the argument could be hung. Working with certain strong ideas （the Islamic dream of a paradise of water and shade; the impermanence of religions as evidenced by the churches; the inability of creeds to ‘split the world of the spirit from the world of shit’） the film was roughly assembled, with more time being spent on individual sequences than on the whole. The fundamentalists rapidly emerged as a very strong one, a fusion of the film editor's art and the composer's, and an interesting illustration of the collaborative nature of the whole enterprise. It was quite clear that as this bravura piece of editing emerged there was nothing Tony could add to it, and it became one of the sequences left to speak for itself. Meanwhile he concentrated on using the material gathered in Bradford and Paris, where, after our experience on Loving Memory, we had been careful to obtain shots that could carry verse well. Long tracking shots, close and abstract shots, lengthy holds all offered better opportunities for Tony to set up strong ideas and strong verbal images. All of this against a constant backdrop of toing and froing between rooms, with everyone throwing in suggestions and ideas. Although risky, this flexible approach to film-making offers enormous benefits: images, words, music and sounds all contribute to the whole on their own terms, and not as some weaker accompaniment, so while the verse remains the linchpin of the whole operation the other elements are never downgraded. The end result is a highly structured film, the structure always carried by the verse, but carrying with it sequences where image alone or sound alone or a powerful combination of the two are interwoven with the rest.

The process of writing and experimenting with the verse is a continual one throughout editing. Tony would sit in his own room writing, reading and issuing requests for further research. Then would come the summons to record. The room was wired with a microphone on a direct line to a 16mm film recording bay, and every time Tony felt he had something worth trying we would switch on and record him, take the section of recorded film straight to the editor, and try it out. It would then be assessed, reworked by Tony, re-recorded, and so on indefinitely.

This also worked for the music. If Dominic came up with a line that needed more length we could usually oblige and similarly he would take away a half-cut sequence and start playing with it, returning it to us with a sound track which we could then fine cut to. When we were about halfway through, the positions of the sung refrain had become apparent, and Teresa Stratas arrived from New York to record them. At the same time, Tony had begun to finalise the beginning and end of the film. It was only at this stage that the structural device of the meal was formalised, and the sequence shot in a studio. A final visit to Bradford to film an auction also took place about this time, my nervous mutterings about the budget and ‘was it really necessary?’ triumphantly overruled by the resulting sequence, one that was also topped out in the studio with some additional controlled shooting and the recording of Tony to camera:

Time, that gives and takes our fame and fate
and puts say, Shakespeare's features on a plate
or a Persian poet's name on a Tandoori
can cast aside all we commemorate.

By July 14 Tony's work was substantially finished, and the whole was handed over to the editor to prepare the sound for dubbing. Over the previous forty odd days I think none of us had more than one or two days away from the project, and we were exhausted. Nevertheless I still look back on the experience with great pleasure. Here was an unusually integrated film which relies on all its parts to succeed, which demanded great teamwork, and from which nothing could be removed without a loss to the whole. There is little fat on it. But the crowning glory of the piece, the engine which drives it with such assurance through its forty minutes, is the seventy-two quatrains with their passionate and powerful message:

‘I'm an unbeliever. I love this life.
I don't believe their paradise is true.’

He may be an unbeliever, and I can't speak for the poetry, but he is a damn good film maker!