The Only Tone for Terror: Tony Harrison and the Gorgon’s Gaze

Abstract

This chapter introduces the reader to Tony Harrison’s audiovisual poetry, composed for and broadcast on British television through the late 1980s and 1990s. Harrison has to date made twelve full documentary film-poems, and one film-poem feature, entitled Prometheus (1998). They all brim with the darker side of European history, current affairs and class politics, and explore what limits of what poetry might do, and how it might do it, in the televisual age. The chapter sets Harrison’s film poetry in its cultural context by paying attention to the poet’s major influences in the experimental medium (John Grierson’s GPO film unit and early Soviet filmmaking), before homing in on his 1992 film-poem The Gaze of the Gorgon as a species of social psychotherapy. The act of gazing at the Medusa-like and thus usually petrifying image of twentieth-century atrocity is offered here not as a ‘dope’ to mankind, but a stimulant towards its cure. The film-poem draws explicitly on Nietzsche’s concept of ‘Dionysiac art’ and Simone Weil’s pacifist notion of ‘force’, and Robert Jay Lifton’s work on trauma and the holocaust. Harrison’s hugely ambitious and uniquely accessible film-poems are currently publically unavailable. Are they the ‘missing link’ in the evolution of contemporary film and video poetry?