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  • Imágenes de la ciudad. Poesía y cine, de Whitman a Lorca
  • Roberta Ann Quance
Dario Villanueva , Imágenes de la ciudad. Poesía y cine, de Whitman a Lorca. Valladolid: Cátedra Miguel Delibes-Ensayos Literarios. 2008. viii + 280 pp. ISBN 978-84-8448-456-1.

This book has grown out of a series of lectures delivered as a doctoral course in the autumn of 2007 at the Center for Graduate Study of the City University of New York. As Professor Villanueva observes, there could be no better place than New York City, associated with Walt Whitman and Lorca's masterpiece Poeta en Nueva York, to discourse on the impact of the urban setting and its representation in avant-garde poetry. However, unlike other scholars who have approached the topic through the influence of cubism and surrealism, Villanueva emphasizes a different avant-garde growing in the shadow of expressionism and cinema. The result is a very suggestive study that encompasses nearly all the ismos's contributions to the topic at the same time as it nuances our approach to Lorca's work, which many have related primarily to surrealism. In addition to expressionism, the reader will find a discussion of unanimisme, which has been traced to Whitman's expansive vision, and ultraismo, thus bringing the contributions of Borges and Guillermo de Torre to the fore.

Villanueva approaches the topic through a dynamic interplay of poetry and film imagery that brings Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass into contact with the early experimental (silent) films taking the city as their privileged subject. In the beginning the result is what he calls ecphrasis in reverse (40-41): a cinema which, like the early classic Manhatta (1921) by Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler, translates imagery which appeared in poetry, while poetry, as in Whitman's case, lauded the power of the eidolon (Greek, 'image'). Villanueva considers several avant-garde classics that focus on city life, such as Berlin, die Symphonie der Grossstadt by Walter Ruttman and Rien que les heures by Alberto [End Page 633] Cavalcanti, arguing that these films, together with Joris Ivens' Regen and Fritz Lang's Metropolis, formed essential viewing for avantgardists. Vindicating expressionism particularly (and therefore taking his cue from Laura Sager (2004)), Villanueva suggests that Lorca and others would have imbibed this culture through the Spanish Cineclub promoted by Ernesto Giménez Caballero from 1928 to 1931.

Villanueva's book could be considered a genealogy, above all, for Lorca's Poeta en Nueva York, for it offers a careful contextualization of this work in terms of both the literary and visual arts of the period, identifying the precedents of the nightmarish view of the city we find in the text. On the one hand the avant-garde admired the architecture of modernity, as is evident in texts celebrating monuments such as Tour Eiffel (1918) by Vicente Huidobro, or the city skylines sung in Hélices (1923) by Guillermo de Torre. Works such as these point to a moment of optimism and defiance, which was not, however, always backed unqualifiedly by the theory of modern architects. McMullan (2002), for example, has pointed to criticism of New York in Le Corbusier's Urbanisme (1925) and linked this to the negative valence in Lorca's text. By arguing that the cinematic image of the city infiltrates early avant-garde art, Villanueva nonetheless offers one of the few serious evaluations of Guillermo de Torre's poetic weight (mostly dismissed up to now) and shows how his work established a subject and perhaps even pointed to a new syntax. On the other hand, he also argues that it is the dark vision of filmmakers such as Fritz Lang or the angry expressionist drawings of George Grosz that are nearest in spirit to Poeta en Nueva York. Taking as the centrepiece of his study the poem 'La aurora' (a poem which Derek Harris singled out in 1998), he convincingly places Lorca's poems in the cinematic line while, at the same time, pinpointing their references to the real New York City skyline (citing Fernández Cifuentes' careful documentation). This line of argument is convincing. When the poet decries the spectacle...

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