Alchemy Of The Word writer-director Jessica Benhamou talks us through her period poet passion project.
This article first appeared in Film Stories issue 54.
Alchemy Of The Word, the brilliantly trippy short film about two (very real) 19th century French poets stuck in a Camden bedsit, has been a long time coming.
“I’ve been obsessed with Arthur Rimbaud since I was 17,” director Jessica Benhamou says. “He started writing poetry when he was 15 – some of the most celebrated poetry in France he wrote as a 15-year-old, and then he dramatically stopped writing poetry aged 20.”
“I remember being so upset when I finished his biography. I’ve only got three years left! This was a person that really followed their passions, went into things absolutely, and there’s something quite romantic about that.”
Though he might not be a household name in the UK, the legacy of Rimbaud’s evocative, esoteric and fantastical prose isn’t hard to find. The likes of Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan, the Clash, and Allen Ginsberg all name-dropped him as an inspiration. In Patti Smith’s 2010 memoir, Just Kids, she describes reading his poetry as “the best sex [she] ever had”. The Godmother of Punk is the current custodian of his childhood home in Roche.
“If you come across him at a young age, he really stays with you for life,” Benhamou says. “It becomes someone that you feel very creatively connected to, in terms of his approach to things. I feel like he deserves a renaissance in the UK.”
With a life as short and eventful as Rimbaud’s, it could be difficult to decide where to start with a film.
“In thinking about how to make a film about someone like that, I don’t think you can make a straightforward biopic,” Benhamou says. “Having him both as your source material and as a creative inspiration really does push you into thinking: ‘How can we make a short film that’s different to other short films? How can it embody the spirit, not just of the person, but of his poetry?’”
The answer was to take Rimbaud’s poetry and work backwards. His most famous piece, 1873’s A Season In Hell, was written amidst the lusty, tempestuous fog of his relationship with fellow poet Paul Verlaine. Holed up in a Camden townhouse and living off a particularly small kind of unappetising fish (“there’s debate as to whether it was a Red Herring or a seabass”, according to Benhamou – the team settled on the herring), the pair understandably went a bit nuts.
“For me, this is a lockdown film,” Benhamou says. “I felt like it was this kind of inescapable mental prison where you were just ruminating on things far too much. There was something about going fully into that headspace where I started to see the poem in a different way. I’d seen it as this spiritual journey, I’d seen it as this romantic relationship, but this idea of going just a little bit mad… It just all came to life in the pandemic.”
Unstoppable force, immovable object
“You can get two schools of writing,” Benhamou says. “Either you can write in the most isolated, remote cabin away from all people, where you can concentrate, or you believe that a writer should kind of experience things in order to be able to write great stuff.”
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Rimbaud, according to The Alchemy Of The Word, was very much in the latter camp. Verlaine, inconveniently, was the former. “You’ve got, fundamentally, two writers that did not go together,” Benhamou says. “They cannot both be creative at the same time. I think that’s interesting – you get these romantic, creative collaborations, and you both have to also be creative in the same way for it to work, not just romantically.”
The pair bicker and squabble in a bedsit that makes Withnail & I’s flat look like a paragon of clean living. What little furniture there is has been hidden beneath dirty plates and wine glasses. Sketches on the walls are recreations of those the pair drew in 1873. But it’s a minimalist squalor that owes as much to the feel of the period than its history – the beautiful location on London’s Princelet Street was arguably much larger than the pair could have afforded in reality, but had a certain quality that was too good to let up.
“It would have been one tiny space,” Benhamou says, “but that was where we pushed it into more playful directions. Did they really have a bath? I don’t know, but if they did, it would be filled with books. [There’s] a blue that you see in Parisian kitchens, that’s on the walls – I wanted something like a warped, domestic version of what Verlaine might have been missing.”
That approach to historical accuracy also stretched to the costumes. “How do you create this kind of anachronistic person that doesn’t really belong to any time, and put him in a 19th century world?” Benhamou says. “We ended up making the costumes inappropriate dress for the Victorian era. They’re dressed in a dandy, ridiculous way for indoors. Is it in-keeping with the history books? Probably not, but these are the kind of guys that would do that.”
Beyond the short film, Rimbaud’s life contains plenty more stories to tell. “When he was dying, they tried to bring in a priest,” Benhamou explains. “And when he was hallucinating, rather than thinking about God, he was dreaming about this boat, which we believe is a reference to one of his very early poems – he thinks he needs to board, but he doesn’t know where it’s going. He abandoned literature, but in a sense, on his deathbed, the spiritual calling that he had was not about God, but about creativity. I think I just love that.”
Alchemy Of The Word will premiere at the Cinequest Film Festival in March 2025.
