Don't look, author is working

Last night I went to the international premiere of a movie called "Black Butterflies" at the Tribeca Film Festival, a Dutch biopic of the South African poet Ingrid Jonker. I didn't know much about Jonker going in, but she was a confessional poet who launched her career concurrent with the rise of apartheid; her early poems were very personal and then she became politicized. Ironically her father was a conservative political leader and on the national censorship board, so they were often at odds (and he frequently overruled on votes to ban her books). She also suffered from some ill-defined mental illness and ended up committing suicide in her early 30s.

This movie was beautifully shot and mostly well acted (well, Rutger Hauer as the father seemed to be somewhere else, but that's not new) but the dialogue was pretty hackneyed. I would have liked it to go more into how young Ingrid started writing; from what I've read since going in, she was sort of a prodigy. At first when the "political awakening" began I was apprehensive as to how it would be handled, but for the most part it was done well.

It strikes me that there are a few stock ways to show onscreen that someone is writing:

• Hand with a pen moving over the paper (or fingers moving over the keys) 
• Author staring at the wall above the typewriter, or at the screen
• Author looking up wistfully, sometimes accompanied by voiceover
• Author reading a page, then crumpling it up and throwing it out (is there ANYTHING more satisfying than this? naught can compare, and that's from someone who writes on the computer 85 percent of the time) 
• Montage of the first four images

One sort of neat device used in this film was showing Jonker's childhood bedroom -- actually the servants' quarters of her father's house, where she and her sister had to live along with his next wife and stepchildren -- with poetry scrawled over the walls, but it wasn't clear when she had written those or whether they were more in her head than visible (although another character reads them later).

Sadly I think the most realistic recent movie about writing is "Stranger Than Fiction" and -- if I remember correctly -- you hardly even see Emma Thompson's character in the act of writing. (Anyway, this is apples-to-oranges in the case of "Black Butterflies," which deals with a real person.) Like the rest of us, Hollywood just wants to skip through that dull middly bit of actually writing to get to the other side.