Tyger

Every year in Brazil, the educational wing of the British Council there (its sexy name is Cultura Inglesa) has a festival and funds a few art projects for it. The only criteria is that the works reference British culture. The film short TYGER, one of those chosen in 2006, is based on the similarly named poem "The Tyger" by William Blake. It is flat-out incredible. It gave me nightmares and boners.

Directed by Guilherme Marcondes (seriuosly, the Latinos have to be stopped), TYGER wasn't designed as a direct interpretation of the poem per se, but if you watch the film you should also read the poem because the two works really enhance the effect of each other.

According to a short and brain-tantalizing interpretation posted online by Ed Friedlander (who clearly knows his Blake), the poem's author had a personal myth about creation that many of his works reference. This myth is essentially a tweaked, happier version of Gnosticism–the creepy belief that the world we know was created but is a mistaken, or imperfect, creation. [Gnosticism actually overlapped and competed with Christianity in the first century only to lose out because of inferior marketing. It still has fans; me for instance.] Friedlander points out that "The Tyger" works on two levels–as a continuation of the Blake myth and its archetypes, and as a meditation on the cold, blind heart of the natural world, which is beyond good and evil. Both the poem and the film illustrate the way the amoral power of the tiger, like nature itself, can still be beautiful, which poses a sort of problem for some. Notice that Blake doesn't even front an answer and the poem finishes open-ended. (My kind of guy.) One thing Friedlander doesn't address, but I think is worth mentioning, is the way the line "When the stars threw down their spears" resembles Biblical prophesy and the eerie way its authors used pre-technological language to describe the way war would look two thousand years later. The film really brings the dystopian futurism of this line to life.

THE TYGER (from Songs Of Experience)

By William Blake

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

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