Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry

Introduction: Cinema as Imaginary Medium in French Poetry

The introduction explains cinema's esthetic and sensorial appeal for French poets since Mallarmé, and defines cinepoetry (cinema-in-writing) as a corpus, despite its porous boundaries. After analyzing examples of cross-medium writing, the Introduction tackles the pre avant-garde works of Edmond Rostand and Jules Romains who sought in 1908 to integrate cinema in their poetry-before Futurism. Cinepoetry as ancillary text (imaginary film) and virtual film (still only text) then developed in concert with the poetics of L'Esprit Nouveau, Dada and Surrealism. Heralding cinepoetry was a major shift from the Romantic imagination to the 'imaginary', a rare word until it was used by Villiers de L'Isle-Adam to describe the cyborg's filmic realm in The Eve of the Future. The Introduction shows that the imaginary became a philosophical notion for Sartre, Bachelard and Lacan only when defined against cinema: Morin corrected this bias in 1956 by acknowledging cinema as the core of the imaginary. A final section revises the theory of text and images via the 'cine-graphic field' which put in motion texts and letters in the 1900-20 era, in movies (Cohl, Lumière bros., Perret, Feuillade), in writing (Proust, Roussel, Reverdy, Apollinaire), and especially through intertitle art (Gance, L'Herbier, Epstein, Dulac).