Lyrical Television

Lyric poetry has ancient roots. Aristotle distinguished the lyrical as one of the three broad categories of poetry (along with the dramatic and the epic). Over the centuries, many have attempted precise definitions of the lyric/lyrical, but most would agree with the classic understanding of the lyric as "a brief subjective poem strongly marked by imagination, melody, and emotion, and creating for the reader a single, unified impression."¹ Most definitions also specify that the lyric poem is an openly subjective expression of the poet.

P. Adams Sitney was perhaps the first film scholar to understand that while the commercial motion picture is generally dramatic and/or epic, cinema has its own lyric tradition, epitomized by the films of Stan Brakhage and Bruce Baillie. Sitney's definition of the cinematic lyric:

The lyrical film postulates the film-maker behind the camera as the first-person protagonist of the film. The images of the film are what he sees, filmed in such a way that we never forget his presence and we know how he is reacting to his vision. In the lyrical form there is no longer a hero; instead, the screen is filled with movement, and that movement, both of the camera and the editing, reverberates with the idea of a person looking. As viewers we see this mediator's intense experience of seeing.²

That independent cinema, particularly what has usually been called "avant-garde film," has often been understood as generally "poetic" and specifically lyrical by commentators is no surprise, since so many of those who shepherded cinema and cinema studies into academe had received their academic training as students of literature and language. Indeed, it is probably fair to say that the lyrical film remains an academic idea: the audience for the kinds of lyrical cinema Sitney explored in Visionary Film remains largely confined to colleges and universities and to museums/archives—though this is by no means an insubstantial audience. After all, much the same might be said of lyrical poetry itself.³

Despite (or perhaps because of) the long literary history and the more recent cinematic history of the lyric, however, the idea of "lyrical television" can still seem strange—even to some of those for whom television is an object of serious study. And yet, the lyrical is very much alive within commercial television, in both obvious and subtle ways.

1. The Commercial Lyric

For those committed to the idea that poetry must inevitably be non-commercial—if not in its distribution, at least in its initial motivation—my arguing that many television commercials are poetic lyrics might seem anathema. Indeed, one could argue that even the most lyrically poetic of advertisements is not a truly subjective expression in the traditional sense, since the manufacturers of the product advertised are making an institutional decision to hire an ad agency to produce the ad. Nevertheless, it seems obvious that certain advertisements are lyrical in their impact and that these ads do express the enthusiasm and commitment of the producers of the advertised product as well as the excitement on the part of those who create the ads, if not about the specific item advertised, at least about the wonders of new technologies and the opportunity to sing their praises. The 2014 ad for the Apple iPad Air can stand as a useful instance.

The 90-second iPad commercial (by kinokid 77) is made up of 74 shots, accompanied by music and a voice-over by Robin Williams. The visuals offer both panoramic landscapes and intimate views of natural and architectural wonders, as well as scenes of adults and children interacting with others during artistic and sporting activities. The images are deftly edited and, to paraphrase Sitney's definition, fill the screen with movement, both of the camera and the editing, and reverberate with the idea of a person looking. The interplay between the montage of images and the voice-over and evocative music is complex and precise.

The voice-over, recycled from Peter Weir's The Dead Poets Society (1989), is the now powerfully poignant encomium to poetry by the John Keating character, played by...