Whitman East and West: New Contexts for Reading Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman at the Movies: Cultural Memory and the Politics of Desire

Walt Whitman at the Movies Cultural Memory and the Politics of Desire kenneth m. price
In 1855 Walt Whitman claimed — bravely if not wisely — that “the proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it” (LG 729). We’ve yet to experience what Whitman foresaw, a time when farmers, mechanics, and bus drivers routinely go to work with copies of Leaves of Grass in their back pockets. Yet the movie industry has in a sense justified his bold prediction, enabling versions of “Whitman” (ranging from the puerile to the subtle) to reach the vast audiences that eluded him in his lifetime. Whitman’s relation to film is a complex, fascinating , and largely neglected topic.1 This essay explores three interrelated matters. Initially, I note the affinities between Whitman’s poetry and film and observe how his poetry developed concurrently with the earliest attempts at animated photography, coming to fruition in the Philadelphia area as artists and inventors, notably Eadweard Muybridge and Thomas Eakins, were advancing the field of motion studies. Next, I consider how in the silent era the groundbreaking American film theorist Vachel Lindsay , the leading director D. W. Griffith, and a pair of pioneering avantgarde filmmakers, Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler, all responded directly to Whitman. Finally, I analyze the appropriation of Whitman in films during the past sixty years, and especially the flurry of interest since 1980, for what it tells us about cultural memory and the politics of desire.2 Cinema, Leaves of Grass, and Celebrity Culture Whitman’s career coincided with the conceptual and technical breakthroughs that made possible the art of film. Animated photography was attempted as early as 1851, and in 1878 Muybridge published the first series of cinematographic pictures depicting a galloping horse taken on Leland Stanford’s farm in Palo Alto, California (see fig. 1). The importance of Muybridge’s pictures was immediately perceived by Whitman’s friend Eakins. When Muybridge gained an appointment at the University of Pennsylvania in 1884 to continue his study of animal and human locomotion , Eakins served on the commission that supervised his work. In addition , Eakins engaged in his own motion studies and advanced beyond Muybridge in approaching the effect of a motion picture camera by using a single camera instead of a whole battery of cameras. In 1885 Eakins lectured on his photographic motion studies, and the following year he exhibited one of his works, History of a Jump (see fig. 2). In differing ways, Eakins, Muybridge, and Whitman each benefited from the PhiladelphiaCamden locale, a center of interest in photography and in its new applications for art.3 Whitman did not live to experience the nickelodeon (the initial permanent exhibition outlets for films), but his contemporaries imagined cinema before it was realized. As André Bazin has argued, cinema, an “idealistic phenomenon,” existed in a well-developed conceptual form long before the “obstinate resistance of matter” was overcome by a series of technical breakthroughs.4 Whitman kept current about new applications in photography through his dealings with leading photographers and inventors, including Eakins and James Wallace Black, who was instrumental in the development of the magic lantern, a widely popular means of photographic display.5 Early film visionaries yearned to advance beyond lantern slide lectures, to portray the world in a seamless fashion combining motion, sound, and color. Thomas Edison (who expressed a desire to “obtain a phonogram from the poet Whitman”) sought to link sound and sight by attaching the phonograph to the kinetoscope (an apparatus for viewing recorded images that was widely available in Whitman’s time). Like Edison and others, the poet welcomed new technological tools, as is suggested by the wax cylinder of what is apparently Whitman’s own voice reciting lines from “America.”6 New inventions enhanced Whitman’s tool kit, improving his ability to convey an illusion of presence. As Whitman remarked , “The human expression is so fleeting; so quick; coming and going ; all aids are welcome” (WWC 5:479). Leaves of Grass anticipated many techniques we now associate with filmmakers . When Whitman argued in 1872 that a “modern Image-Making Walt Whitman at the Movies 37 1. Eadweard Muybridge’s serial photographs of Edgington trotting on Leland Stanford’s farm in California. These photographs capturing high-speed motion inaugurated a new era in photography. Courtesy of Print & Picture Collection, Free Library of Philadelphia...