Poetry and Film: Cinema as Publication
Background
Cinema has always been an unusually derivative art form. It evolved first as an extension of the still photograph, and soon after as an extension of the magic show; and it was not until D. W. Griffith and others recognized that theater and prose fiction, and especially the novel, offered a model for extending narrative development that the feature film became a possibility. Of course, commercial film has never really left these influences behind. Most screenplays are based on novels or parts of novels, and the screenplay itself is, as the word suggests, a derivation of the theatrical drama. But this dimension of cinema is not confined to the commercial feature. Even those forms of the motion picture that are generally understood as "critical"—that is, as offering critiques of the commercial feature and the audience that has developed for it—are comparably derivative, though the sources of these critical forms are different from the sources of the narrative feature.
The body of films most obviously critical of cinema's various histories is what is usually called "avant-garde" or "experimental" film.1 And from the outset, this history has been particularly dependent on two cultural sources: the fine arts, particularly music, painting, and collage; and the literary arts, particularly poetry. While much early cinema, including commercially oriented cinema, was experimental in rather obvious senses, it was not until the 1920s that something like an avant-garde film movement developed.2 What is usually considered the first film avant-garde—Hans Richter, Man Ray, Henri Chomette, Germaine Dulac, Viking Eggeling, Oskar Fischinger, Salvador Dali, Luis Buñuel, Fernand Léger, Dudley Murphy, Marcel Duchamp, [End Page 37] René Clair et. al—was a result of fine artists exploring cinema as a new artistic tool for creating Dada, abstract, and/or surrealist works. But the influence of poetry was also present from very early on. In Manhatta (US, 1921), often considered the first American avant-garde film, photographer/painter Charles Sheeler and photographer Paul Strand intercut between modernist cinematography of Manhattan and intertitles made up of excerpts from Walt Whitman's "A Broadway Pageant" (1860), "From Noon to Starry Night: Mannahatta" (1860), and "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" (1856).3
Click for larger view | Figure 1 Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand's Manhatta (1921). Courtesy of Jan-Christopher Horak. |
When an audience formed for critical forms of cinema, first during the 1920s and 1930s in Europe and the United Kingdom, as the ciné-club movement spread from nation to nation, and in the 1940s and 1950s in Canada and the United States, as film societies proliferated (often emulating Frank Stauffacher's Art in Cinema in San Francisco and Amos Vogel's Cinema 16 in New York), poetry became as important for filmmakers as the visual arts.4 While there were relatively few instances where previously published poetry was incorporated into films or where films made visual use of poetically arranged words—exceptions include L'Etoile de mer/Starfish (FR, 1928), adapted by Man Ray from a poem of the same name by Robert Desnos, and Marcel Duchamp's Anemic Cinema (FR, 1926), which intercuts between spiral designs and spirally-arranged sentences full of puns and wordplay—there was an increasing sense that certain approaches to the visual image and to the [End Page 38] organization of visual imagery within a film were "poetic." In the program announcement for the first Art in Cinema film series, for example, Stauffacher and Richard Foster (his collaborator, early on) included as their ninth category, "Poetry in Cinema."5 The single presentation announced for this show was Jean Cocteau's Le Sang d'un poet/ Blood of a Poet (FR, 1930), which was widely seen and influential, in part because it represented to many what poet/filmmaker James Broughton would later describe as "an unforgettable example: a poet making a poetic film!"6
The meaning of "poetic" as used in...
