Before Night Falls

April is National Poetry Month. Now I know what you’re thinking. It seems like there’s a national month for just about everything – National Hug your Postal Worker Month, National Pocket Lint Awareness month. But April is different. Even though it’s wildly unpopular and seemingly archaic, good poetry can do more to encapsulate the beauty, tragedy, and mystery of everyday life than almost any other art form. As William Carlos Williams once wrote, “It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”

So it seems appropriate to begin April with a film about a poet. Directed by Julian Schnabel and released in 2000, Before Night Falls tells the life story of Cuban-born poet, novelist, and memoirist Reynaldo Arenas. Arenas was born into abject poverty in the jungles of Cuba in 1943, joined the revolution as a young man in 1959, but then came into conflict with the new government as his open homosexuality, candid writings, and increasingly disenchanted views of Fidel and company made him a political dissident. After years of persecution and spending time in and out of brutal Cuban prisons, Arenas eventually made it to New York City where he lived and wrote. He was diagnosed with AIDS in 1987 and in 1990 ended his own life with an intentional overdose of drugs and alcohol.

The film telling his story is itself poetic and almost dream-like at times. Told in beautifully photographed vignettes, the movie doesn’t try to tell every single aspect of Arenas’s brief life, but instead tries to make impressions using carefully shot and arranged images of the tropical landscape, a mobile, sometimes wandering camera, and occasional period footage of Cuba itself. The director, Julian Schnabel, was actually a prominent painter and visual artist before beginning his career in film. His visual sensibilities make Before Night Falls not just a moving story about art, censorship, intolerance, and survival, but a work of art itself, a kind of cinematic poem that is meant to send you away not necessarily comforted or uplifted, but provoked to thought and reflection. 

 

Arenas is played by Javier Bardem in his first major English speaking role, and he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor that year. His performance is complicated and believable. He doesn’t play Arenas as a persecuted saint, but rather as a human – filled with all the contradictions, anger, and hopes that most humans have.

Toward the end of the film, Bardem reads lines from Arenas’s poem “The Parade Ends.” The poem and its delivery are both beautiful and sad, angry and hopeful. Like any good poem and any good poet, the film is many things all at once, and it’s an excellent cinematic representation of an underappreciated art form.

Before Night Falls is part of Delta’s LGBTQ Film Festival and will screen Monday April 6 in room S-105. The screening is free to everyone and a special broadside of one of Arenas’s poems will be given out to the first fifty attendees.