Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry by Christophe Wall-Romana (review)

The major claim of Cinepoetry is that French poetry since roughly the end of the nineteenth century ‘has been thoroughly and continually impressed with and imprinted by cinema’ (p. 1). This principle does not, however, limit the status of cinema to a thematic concern of literary, written works, but demands the invention of a new ‘cross-medial’ (p. 1) term — ‘cinepoetry’, designating works in which, for example, ‘the screen becomes the page’ (p. 3). The implications of this claim are carried through to the historical and theoretical level; the extent to which cinema has influenced and inflected literary and textual practices constitutes a challenge to the canonical privileges of high modernism and the divisions between high and low cultures with which they went hand in hand. Christophe Wall-Romana thus appends a social and a historical critique to the formal agenda of his study. The corpus examined is, accordingly, ‘eclectic’, featuring writers who ‘flicker at the edges of the canon’ (p. 6). Two key terms in the negotiation of the cross-medial influence and practice Wall-Romana pursues are the ‘imaginary’ and the ‘cine-graphic’. The thesis is that theories of the imagination, and indeed the currency of the term ‘imaginary’ as a substantive, were indebted to the new technologies of cinema. In parallel, the cinema raised the profile, in poetry, of the visuality of words and letters — the cine-graphic. Here, despite a wealth of theoretical points of reference, the theoretical core of the argument is, perhaps, less substantial than the historical detail that the book offers. Without a convincing argument concerning the relation between images and words, language and the visual, linguistic cognition and visual perception, it is difficult to grasp exactly how cinepoetry is more than a mimetic writing practice that intends a parallel with film, or to be ‘like’ the cinema in its disposition, its effects, and its apprehension. This said, the book proposes a dazzling array of intriguing contributions to a different history of French and francophone poetry of the twentieth century, venturing also into the contemporary and including detailed analyses of poetic and critical texts by Mallarmé, Roussel, Apollinaire, Jarry, Cocteau, early film theorist Jean Epstein, Breton, and the Surrealists. The chapters on the figure of Chaplin and on lettrism give a sense of the wide scope of the account, and a flavour of its cultural breadth. The fifth and final part of the book focuses on less well-known and more recent writers such as Max Jeanne, Maurice Roche, and Nelly Kaplan. Through these focal points Wall-Romana accumulates a very substantial and exhaustive account of an important seam in French poetry, accompanied by a rich illustrative apparatus and tending often towards very fine analyses of the figural and spatial intricacies of the texts. Here it has to be said that the book would have benefited from the inclusion of the original French for the longer quotations; although subsequent analyses specify the original French terms, the nature of the cinegraphic demands the prominence of the letter.