Abstract

The chapter argues that one of the lasting imprints of silent film culture on poetry was the movie program: a heterogeneous assemblage of newsreels, comic and fiction films, both short and long footage. Key modernist poets influenced by cinema such as Pierre Reverdy and Max Jacob re-problematized the question of the prose poem and the poem collection based in large part on differing attitudes vis-à-vis the movie program. Through discussions of Walter Benjamin's readings of Baudelaire's collection Les Fleurs du mal, and illustrations of movie programs in cinepoem sets by Jacob, Jarry, Segalen, Hillel-Erlanger, Dugas and Alferi, which respectively refract films by the Lumière bros., Méliès and television/cable programs, the chapter shows the continuing poetic productivity of assemblages of moving image works.

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