Primer: Writers and Poets in Film.

With the release of the film Molière today, over on the main site Simon Augustine, in kicking off his new primer on Writers and Poets in Film asks, "Could writers working prior to the 20th century have imagined their creations and characters being expressed in films, with all the dramatic innovations that moving pictures afford?"

"The journey from book to film is reversed and turned in upon itself: we witness not the translation of the mind's eye of the writer into a visual, fixed medium," writes Augustine. "Instead, the fixed visuals of film are used to dramatize the writer in the act of using their mind's eye. In these films, viewers are hopefully exposed to new inroads toward understanding the traditional literary experience and its modes of creation."

Read on for a look at films depicting Bukowski, Plath, Capote, Rimbaud, Burroughs, Shakespeare and many others, as well as some of the best examples of fictional writer characters in moviedom, in this insightful new exploration of the writer's life on the screen.