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289 warren sonbert Narrative Concerns Cinema has provided poetry with many points of reference, from Hart Crane’s The Bridge to Frank O’Hara’s “Ave Maria” and John Ashbery’s “Daffy Duck.” Less familiar are avant-garde cinema’s contributions to poetics, from the modernist period to the present. Warren Sonbert (1947–95) was a San Francisco experimental filmmaker with close ties to poetry, particularly New York School and Language writers. His essay, as part of the “Symposium on Narrative” (PJ 5), addresses his limited use of narrative in nonnarrative films: narrative may provide images with emotional power, but images should be kept from being overdetermined by plot. Influenced by Soviet directors such as Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, by the French New Wave, by a selective canon of Hollywood masters and genre films, and by the avant-garde from Andy Warhol to Stan Brakhage, Sonbert’s films are complex realizations of the material and affective possibilities of cinema. His thinking on cinematic technique—from shot selection to larger combinatory principles—owes much to Eisenstein and Vertov’s theories of montage. However, it is his use of these techniques to produce visual sequences that are both intellectually complex and emotionally rich that makes his films of particular interest to poets. Sonbert’s poetic cinema anticipated the recent emergence of“Neo-Benshi”performances, where avant-garde poetry is read with film and often music, in the Bay Area and elsewhere. The strengths of narrative as well entail its limitations. On one level narrative could be defined as the eventual resolution of all elements introduced. This classical balance is always satisfying: when the various strands are climactically tied together. But this also implies a grounding that may often enough be deadening. A fairly interesting Jacques Tourneur film, Nightfall (1956), illustrates this point. At the opening, a man, ostensibly the hero, since he’s also the star (Aldo Ray), walks into a city bar at night. He is being watched, unawares, by two men in a car. Once in the bar a third man also begins to observe him. While seated at the bar Aldo is approached by a woman (Anne Bancroft) to borrow some money to pay for her drink as she’s mistakenly left her money at home. At this juncture the possibilities are rampant: three different sets of strangers have either approached or are observing the protagonist. What could they all want from him? What is below the surface of this rather ordinary-looking 290 warren sonbert hero? Then, are any of the three sets involved with one another or are they working separately? Is Bancroft’s plea a ruse or the truth? If a ruse, is it a sexual pickup or something more ominous? At this moment when anything can happen, narrative is at its most fascinating. (In my own films I generally try to include an image of forward motion on train tracks in which several lines converge but cut before any actual track or direction is taken—it’s a metaphor for possibilities open.) In Nightfall’s case the questions are answered all too soon perhaps. Bancroft is telling the truth, the single trailing man is on his side, the men in the car are against him and none of these initial strangers are working together. But the frissons with which the first scene of the film are filled almost carry over into the entire unraveling of the work. Though settling down into a very good, standard thriller, nothing quite matches this opening assault of question marks. Beyond this initial barrage of possibilities open, narrative can partake of shiftings in value identification as another one of its strong suits. The opening chapter of Balzac’s Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans has this in spades, in that the author always seems two moves ahead of the reader: the focus of viewpoint remains unanchored amidst a wide variety of conflicting identity figures. This avoidance of set bearings is all to the good as it supplies one of the prerequisites of art. The changing stress between comedy and tragedy in Renoir’s Rules of the Game is another instance of a profound, unsettling, architectonic strategy. Again, the major works of Hitchcock brim with this tension of paying for your laughs. (In my Noblesse Oblige shots of a “cute” kitten at play is immediately followed by an image of someone being wheeled into an ambulance, and briefly enough displayed to hopefully be disturbing). Any given must fairly soon be qualified...

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