Experiencing loss

I recently listened to a wonderful talk by the poet Malcolm Guite in which he explores these lines from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling / doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven / as imagination bodies forth the form of things unknown.’

Shakespeare is calling our attention to the way the artistic imagination can give shape and form to things ‘unknown’, so that earth and heaven, the temporal and eternal, matter and meaning, are connected. These words were rolling around my mind as I watched two films which explore the experience of loss from the inside out.

The Father

Anthony Hopkins won an Oscar for best actor, playing Anthony in Florian Zeller’s The Father. The film starts with Anthony greeting his daughter Anne (Olivia Coleman) as she arrives at his central London flat announcing she has bought a chicken for dinner. But a few minutes later, like a horror version of Groundhog Day, the same scene repeats, but with a woman Anthony doesn’t recognise (Olivia Williams) claiming to be Anne.