Imagining The Ancient Mariner through the Cinematic Medium

In my essay on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, I wrote about the relationship between the reader, the narrator, the wedding guest, and the poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I discussed how the Wedding Guest functions as a figurative stand-in for Coleridge?s audience, working as a one man "Greek chorus" commenting on the Mariner?s presence and story. The Wedding Guest reflects the reaction of a reader of ?The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; his confusion mirrors our own, and he often jumps in to comment on the narrative, breaking up its flow. For my creative project, I considered the disjunction between the Mariner and the Wedding Guest, and attempted to come up with a visual representation of it. To do so, I thought about how the "Ancient Mariner's" narrative could be adapted for another medium. I ended up writing a screenplay for the first part of the poem and drafted a storyboard, illustrating how the film's shots would be broken down. Adapting The Rime of the Ancient Mariner for the screen proved to be a tricky endeavor, precisely because the transmission is so confused and the narrative so complicated. The story rapidly switches from the Mariner's point of view to the Wedding Guest's point of view to the omnipresent narrator's point of view, and vice versa. I thought carefully about the action/reaction shots of the Wedding Guest to the Mariner, and how the story drifts back and forth from the narrative proper to the Wedding Guest?s interactions with the Mariner. The project was an interesting one for me--I thought carefully about how and why the transmission of "The Rime" is complicated, and what I would do, in retelling the story, to make the connections more clear to an audience. It proved to be a difficult task, because I had to negotiate Coleridge's vision with my prerogative to connect with a modern day audience in a different medium.