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  • Light Upon The Darkness
  • Jessica Berger (bio)
All Movies Love the Moon
Gregory Robinson
Rose Metal Press
www.rosemetalpress.com
96 Pages; Print, $14.95

From Keaton to Chaplin, from Caligari (1920) to Sunrise (1927), silent film’s repeated collision of text and image is explored and exploited throughout Gregory Robinson’s collection of prose poems, All Movies Love the Moon. With the titular invocation of Georges Méliès’s celluloid magic, we’re off on a romp through time, space, and vision as Robinson’s brief works take us on a trip exploratory and surreal, joyous and, at times, ironic. There’s a sense of the early makings of a film textbook gone amiss here, as each bit of verse is paired opposite a captioned screenshot of a silent film’s title card. The screenshots boast lines real and fictitious, and with each turn of the page we continue our chronological journey from film to film, traversing the forgotten and the classic in equal measure. With each card, we’re provided a caption a la a history text; at first they are informative or occasionally interpretive, then, increasingly, abstract or observational. We learn something as we read, but often accidentally.

The set-up allows for a pleasing layout, and each captioned card acts as illustrative figure perhaps as much as they become additional lines or inciting incidents for Robinson’s prose poems. There’s a fascination with the mechanics of early cinema on display here, a nostalgia for a time unlived and an understanding that the true silent has become a sort of anachronistic anomaly. Even given twenty-first century Hollywood’s cyclical nature, the title card is a point of no return; a gimmick, but no longer an art form. Robinson finds the odd poetry of the title cards themselves, including those moments where the films opt to lift lines from literary works to illuminate the events captured in their flickering images. The result is a curious juxtaposition, an odd mash-up revealing something of our tour guide’s academic interest in the films as texts with something of an inability or disinterest in discussing them in the past tense. The films here are not simply evidence of a lost form; they’re given life, stripped of their antiquity even as the fact of their difference is gestured towards, time and again.

In his poems, Robinson is conversational and concise, his language modern and touched by a sense of the oddness of its entanglements. Each work becomes a short film in and of itself, illuminating the personal alongside the historical, twisting the space between title cards to reveal something of the cinematic slipstream folding in on itself; a place where Lillian Gish and Errol Flynn sit in your Netflix queue beside Sly Stallone, Justin Timberlake quotes, and a McDonald’s Happy Meal. “In analog days,” Robinson reminds us in “College Chums (1907)”, “text messages hurt as we hurled die-cast letters across immense spaces, putting out an eye or forming a new word. There is no greater sign of love between friends than unabashed vituperation.” The imaginative blur of technologies, the application of contemporary life to nostalgic antiquity is one repeated time and again, the merger one both playful and sinister, a sign of some modern death as much as some past life. When he takes on “Man with a Movie Camera (1929)” we’re regaled with the notion of a “Vertov Kino app, which makes the iPhone weigh 40 pounds and replaces the battery with a wooden hand crank,” a charming notion matched later with a meditation on time, on the lure of nostalgia and our own “drowning” in it. Hybridity clashes here again as mashed-up technologies displace our sense of the past via our understanding of the camera.

The hybrid nature of the text forces a type of disorientation from poem to poem, film to film. Robinson’s wandering thoughts often land on something melancholic and contemplative as he waxes on questions of art, the mercurial nature of the actor, nostalgia, and the peculiar way cinema creates specters, forever trapped in time. “Ghosts skip beats and travel in bursts, finding horror in the familiar...

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