Embodied Cinematics & Poetry

ELT 49 : 4 2006 and Virginia's perspectives; clearly identifying the photographer, when known, would help articulate these differences. In addition, Humm sometimes refers to "the Woolfs' interest" in particular subjects, and more exploration of similarities and differences in their perspectives about these issues in the analysis would add another layer of complexity to the argument, especially since one portion of Humm's analysis discusses the well-circulated photo of Leonard and Virginia from 1912, taken after they were engaged but, as Humm points out, still looked as though they were "two separate 'unengaged' people." Humm presents the third section of images, from the 1930s, as more thoroughly revealing the relationship between the photographer and the sitter, particularly "the photographer's identification with the subject ," since the sitters "are photographed with distinct presences" and the photographers "increasingly displace the gap between themselves and their friends by a marked lack of foreground space." These claims are supported by the images in this section, since many are close-ups and suggest a friendly intimacy between photographer and sitter not seen in the two previous sections, not even in the nudes of Duncan Grant and also the Bell children included in Vanessa's album. Humm's explanation that Virginia and Vanessa were memorializing the many friends and family members who died in the 1930s and also combatting the very idea of death by emphasizing those still living is intriguing. Humm's hybrid critical approach is evident yet again. The biographical seems intimately connected to the pyschological and the cultural, especially since many readers understand the deep cultural impact of the deaths of the Bloomsbury circle on modernist literature and art. Humm's analysis enhances rather than detracts from the images in this volume and raises provocative issues about the influence of the photo album on better-known media such as literature and painting. Furthermore, the ideas presented here about how the album can function as mediator between the private and public spheres are compelling and should do much to advance readers' knowledge of this often overlooked medium. MOLLY YOUNGKIN California State University, DomÃ-nguez Hills Embodied Cinematics Si Poetry Susan McCabe. Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. χ + 284 pp. $75.00 478 BOOK REVIEWS THE NEXUS between writings of certain modernist poets and the advent of cinema has attracted various angles of scholarly focus, such as the anthology titled Close Up 1927-1933: Cinema and Modernism, edited by James Donald, Anne Friedberg and Laura Marcus (see ELT, 43:4,2000,480-85). Susan McCabe now opens a further field of connection . Her ambitious, innovative study, Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film, discovers a range of analogies: literary, film, and psychoanalytic theory are brought to bear in expository analyses of poems together with consonant silent films. The grand shifts of earlytwentieth -century literary style and sensibility catalogued as "modernist " are predicated by McCabe to be artistically organic with the impact of cinema. Four poets are studied in detail, a chapter each given to Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, H.D., and Marianne Moore; Eliot and Pound enter the introductory picture. McCabe's bold juxtapositions of ideas, such as some of the films she examines in conjunction with the poets' textual processes, may startle the viewer/reader into unexpected insights. McCabe emphasizes that Eliot's "dissociation of sensibility" integral to early-twentieth-century modernism is tied to the onset of the technological era designated by Walter Benjamin as "the age of mechanical reproduction." The human body is depicted in modernist poetry and in experimental film within a recurrent artistic theme of disjointedness— of the body seemingly divided from will—comparable to repetitive movements seen in patients suffering from hysteria; such uncontrollable gestures often reveal an unconscious agenda of repressed forms of sexuality. An overwhelming sense of fracture characterizes post-World War I culture. Newspapers and newsreels underscored physical and psychological disruption with photographic and filmic images of mutilated figures . G. W Pabst's Joyless Street, a film lauded by H.D., opens with a shot of a one-legged man making his way in a gloomy claustrophobic street. Man Ray's Emak Bakia projects repetitions of body parts moving...