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Film Poetry Historical
Film Poetry Historical
The concepts of film poetry and the film poem have been used on a number
of occasions throughout the history of film by different filmmakers and
theoreticians. Each of these writers applied their own understanding of what
the film poem might be and rarely took different perspectives into
consideration. Some use the term film poem, others prefer cinepoem,
whereas some later writers seem to place importance in the existence of the
hyphen between the words film and poem and hence talk about the filmpoem. Some writers refer to the notion of film poetry, while others talk about
poetry film. This essay will be an attempt to present some of the most
important writings on the notion of film poetry and the film poem and more
generally on the connection between film and poetry. Although the essay will
incorporate different perspectives, it will mainly focus on what is widely known
as avant-garde (or experimental) practitioners and theoreticians, as opposed
to texts on the poetics of narrative cinema.
There is a number of problems inherent in the notion of drawing parallels
between film and poetry, which explain how the concepts have been used by
different writers in such different (at times contradictory) ways. First of all,
before even attempting a definition of the notion of film poetry one is faced
with the problem of the definition of poetry itself. In the earliest ever attempt to
define poetry, Aristotle compares poetry and history suggesting that Poetry in
general seems to have sprung from two causes, each of them lying deep in
our nature. First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood.
() Next, there is the instinct for harmony and rhythm, meters being
manifestly sections of rhythm.1 Those notions have been influential for
hundreds of years, yet imitation seems to have given its place to personal
expression already by the years of romantic poetry. In his attempt to describe
what a poet is Samuel Taylor Coleridge suggests that the poet () brings the
whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each
other according to their relative worth and dignity.2 Hence for the romantic
poets, poetry was primarily an inwards (towards the soul) rather than
outwards (towards the world) movement. With the coming of the modernist
era, most attempts to define poetry become unimportant if not impossible. The
notion of harmony was questioned by free verse, which in Ezra Pounds
words is to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the
sequence of the metronome.3 People like T.S. Eliot composed prose poems,
redefining completely the notion of poetic form.
Secondarily, the whole notion of drawing direct parallels between different art
forms is a problematic notion in itself. Literary poetry has been developing for
thousands of years, whereas film is comparably still in its adolescence (if not
infancy). It is arguable even whether we could be talking about visual
Aristotle, On the Art of Poetry, (Trans by Ingram Bywater), Oxford University Press, 1920, pg
28
2
(Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, pg. ????????????)
3
Kennedy, X.J. & Gioia, Dana, An Introduction to Poetry, New York: Harper Collins College
Publishers, 1994, pg. 194
1
languages and whether the cinema is a language system in itself. Yet, this is
not the first time that the notion of poetry has been applied to a non-literary
space. Almost fifty years before the creation of the first cinematographic
machines, romantic composer Franz Liszt had used the notion of the
symphonic poem to describe his work. The reason romantic composers
would decide to use the word poem seems to be almost opposite to those of
film-makers: a symphonic poem is a symphonic piece which narrates a story.
On some occasions, symphonic poems were based on already written poems.
In this case poetry is not used in the transcendental, expressionist, abstract
way, but more in the Aristotlean imitation of the world way. This is possibly
understandable considering the de-facto abstract nature of tonal music.
Considering all these problematics, what was it then that attracted filmmakers
and critics in the notion of poetry to make parallels in the filmic world? In a
way, the very confusion of the definition of poetry could be useful to describe
modern unclassifiable film works. But more than that despite the differences
in poetry definitions, there is one thing that always remains the same: the
importance of the individual, the poet, the author as the driving source of
creation. Whereas literary poetry as mentioned above has a long history
as an art, filmmaking became part of an industry almost immediately after its
conception. Within this environment, avant-garde filmmakers have to reclaim
their status as artists. In this respect, they became film-poets in the original
Greek sense of the word poet as maker. In his review of the American
avant-garde, James Peterson claims: in practice, the film poem label was
primarily an emblem of the avant-gardes difference from the commercial
narrative film4 giving a very general understanding of the notion of the film
poem, as an avant-garde practice. Yet, even within the experimental tradition
there were a number of different ways writers referred to the notion of film
poetry and these writers did not adopt the same positions.
1. Germaine Dulac & The French Impressionists
The earliest mentioning of the notion of poetry within a discussion of film can
be found in the writings of the pre-surrealist French avant-garde of the 20s,
otherwise known as cinemas Impressionists (the reason for this name will
not be discussed here). Germaine Dulac, Henri Chomette and Luis Delluc
tried to establish the notion of pure cinema (cinema-pur) and found the poetic
analogy useful to strengthen their position. When referring to mainstream
cinema, Dulac is the first to establish the notion of narrative cinema as a
novelistic, prosaic one: it [cinema] became a new means of expression for
novelistic or dramatic literature, and since cinema was movement, it was
confused with the interrelating of actions, of situations, it was put in the
service of a story to tell5. For Dulac, narrative cinemas only purpose is to tell
a story, whereas the avant-garde film tries to go deeper in the realm of what
could be poetic. As Eugene Mc Creary argues When Delluc referred to film
as () visual poetry he was not simply employing elegant metaphors to
Peterson, James, Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order,, Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1957, pg. 29
5
Dulac, Germaine The Essence of the Cinema: The Visual Idea in Sitney, Adams, P. (ed),
The Avant-Garde Film, New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1987, pg. 38
4
establish films pedigree among the muses. He was invoking something quite
specific the creative act of isolating and stylizing the significant detail6.
Poetry for the impressionists is the action of isolating and stylising a detail.
In poetry, detail is more or as important as the whole and the way a detail is
presented (stylized) affects the content itself.
Interestingly enough, although the Impressionists drew from the notion of
poetry, they believed in films total separation from the other arts in order to
find what is essential to itself. Dulacs stance is polemical in this respect:
every cinematic drama () must be visual and not literary7, a real film cant
be able to be told, since it must draw its active and emotive principle from
images formed of unique visual tones8. It is important to understand that
although the impressionists used the poetic analogy, they certainly did not
believe in a literary inclusion of poetic text in the form of intertitles, that they
were generally against. What was it then in the poetic that attracted the
impressionists?
When referring to Henri Chomettes Cinq Minutes Du Cinema Pur, Al Rees
argues that What really makes it a poem () is its stress on rhythm as an
aspect of form, expressed both in variable shooting speeds and in the pace of
cutting9. Hence for the impressionists the notion of the poetic was primarily
useful as a stress on rhythm as an aspect of form. Rhythm has always been
connected to poetry even the modernists that neglected the notion of
specific syllables per line and rhyming did so because they believed that free
verse expressed a different rhythmic pattern. Dulac went even further in her
writings in attempting to define a series of rules or proofs on / of how pure
cinema works. She states:
1. That the expression of a movement depends on its rhythm;
1. That the rhythm in itself and the development of a movement constitute
the two perceptual and emotional elements which are the bases of the
dramaturgy of the screen;
2. That the cinematic work must reject every esthetic principle which does
not properly belong to it and seek out its own esthetic in the
contributions of the visual
3. That the cinematic action must be life
4. That the cinematic action must not be limited to the human person, but
must extend beyond it into the realm of nature and dream. 10
In its celebratory nature, this statement poses a number of problems
considering the way cinema pur works. When Dulac refers to life in number
4, it seems that she is asking for a primarily documentarist esthetic,
something which she goes to contradict in number 5. Perhaps it is exactly this
contradiction in cinema pur for which the poetic analogy is useful: it is a
McCreary, Eugene, C. Louis Delluc, Film Theorist, Critic, and Prophet in Cinema Journal
Vol 16, Issue 1, Autumn 1976, pg 20
7
Dulac, Germaine, From Visual and Anti-visual Films in in Sitney, Adams, P. (ed), The
Avant-Garde Film, New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1987, pg. 31
8
Ibid, pg 33
9
Rees, Al, A History of Experimental Film & Video, London: BFI, 1999, pg 35
10
Dulac, Germaine, The Avant-Garde Cinema in in Sitney, Adams, P. (ed), The Avant-Garde
Film, New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1987, pg. 47
6
12
improvisation were so important that it can be argued that his films were
simply almost automatic improvisations. As he claims all the films I have
made are improvisations. I did not write scenarios. It was automatic cinema 18.
The notion of automatism was something that interested modernist poets as a
mode of expressing some kind of more pure sensibility. Yet the possibility for
automatism in the cinema has been problematised by the whole notion that
generally a film happens in various stages: the writing of a script, shooting,
editing, possibly more. By neglecting the need for a script, Man Rays Emak
Bakia becomes primarily an automatic shooting exercise. The notion of the
camera being used a pen in the sense of capturing reality as directly and
automatically as possible has later been expanded by documentarist
filmmaker Alexadre Astruc. I would like to call this new age of cinema the age
of the camera-stylo, he claims. By it I mean that the cinema will gradually
break free from the tyranny of what is visual, from the image for its own sake,
from the immediate and concrete demands of the narrative, to become a
means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language19. Although
Astruc takes a much more anti-formalist perspective than Man Ray, the notion
of the camera-stylo as a metaphor for the direct capturing of reality is very
useful for Man Rays work. The metaphor of writing in film could even be
expanded in Man Rays case to include his Rayograms, which could be seen
as an example of automatic light writing.
Man Ray was also a pioneer in attempting to create the adaptation of a poem,
a tendency which will later occur often in the film poem. His third film L Etoile
De Mer was based on a poem written by surrealist poet Robert Desnos.
When Man Ray first heard the poem, he visualized various images and
decided that the poem could be used as a sort of scenario to a poetic film.
According to Man Ray Desnoss poem was like a scenario for a film,
consisting of fifteen or twenty lines, each line presenting a clear, detached
image of a place or of a man and a woman20. Similarly to Man Rays previous
work, Desnoss poem seemed to be focusing more on the disconnected
fragment and as such it was a perfect script for Man Ray. The notion of
adapting an already written poem in an attempt to create a poetic vision in film
would become popular significantly later. Yet what is very important was that
even at that stage, Man Ray realized the peculiarities and problematics of
adaptation. As Adams P. Sitney suggests the very subtitle of the film poeme
de Robert Desnos tel que l a vu Man Ray, draws our attention to the
difference between text and sight and bids us look for the particulars of Man
Rays vision.
Hence the film was not a simple photographing Desnos poem, but attempted
to somehow translate literary into visual poetics. As Schwartz argues parts of
it [the film] were shot through partially obscuring gelatine film the better to
convey the poems atmosphere21. The applying of gelatine film as a means of
obscuring the picture giving it a more poetic atmosphere is a very simple
Schwarz, Arturo, Man Ray: The Rigour of Imagination, Lodnon: Thames & Hudson, 1977,
pg 287
19
Astruc, Alexandre, The birth of a new avant-garde: Le camera-stylo, in Graham, P. (ed)
The New Wave, London: BFI, 1968, pg 18
20
Man Ray, (Manuscript for L Etoile de Mer, trans Kuenzli, Rudolf) in Kuenzli, Rudolf, Dada
& Surrealist Film, New York: Willis Locker & Owens, 1987, pg. 208
18
Poetica Kino was the first major contribution to both the study of the
relationship between film and poetry but more generally the notion of film
semiotics. What must be clarified is that the title of the book is slightly
deceiving, as in reality only a small part of the book analyses poetics and for
the largest part notions of the more general notions of film language and
structure are defined. For the purposes of this essay, the focus will be poetics
and not an overview of Russian formalist film theory.
In his article Problems of Cine-Stylistics, Boris Eikhenbaum attempts the
earliest written direct applications of literary language on film. He talks about
the cine-phrase: If by the word phrase we generally understand a certain
basic type of articulation, which is actually perceived as a segment (verbal,
musical etc) of moving material, then it can be defined as a group of elements
clustered around an accentual nucleus25. Thus a cine-phrase for Eikhenbaum
is a shot whose montage can be lengthened and shortened. In some cases
the long shot can have considerable significance lengthening it gives the
impression of a long, slowly developing phrase26. If we accept the notion of
the shot as a phrase then the next question that naturally arises is the
connection between the shots / phrases. Eikhenbaum takes the analogy even
further and talks about the construction of the cine period, stating that a cineperiod in filmic terms is a spatio-temporal linking of shots/phrases. In his
words The movement of frames, once started, requires a meaningful linking
according to the principal of spatio-temporal continuity. It is a question,
naturally, of the illusion of continuity27. This definition of the cine-period is
extremely useful for the film poem, as it is by neglecting this exact notion of
the period (as continuity) that film poets function. Dziga Vertov, for example,
can be argued to use shots/phrases but not construct them in cine-periods.
Another important issue Eikhenbaum mentions (but does not analyse deeply)
in his article is the notion of internal speech in the film, especially in relation to
symbolic and metaphoric language. The notion of a metaphor, a statement
that one thing is something else, which, in a literary sense, it is not28, is very
important for most poetry and the possibility of visual metaphors is something
that always interested filmmakers of the poetic oeuvre. Eikhenbaum suggests
that the cine-metaphor is feasible only on the condition that it is supported by
a verbal metaphor. The spectator can understand it only in circumstances
where there is a corresponding metaphorical expression in his stock of
language29. In this respect, he suggests that film viewing is always
accompanied by a process of internal speech, of verbalizing what is seen in
order to understand it and therefore problematises the possibility for Dulacs
purely cinematic languages. His theory will later be questioned by the
American avant-garde and primarily Stan Brakhage, who believed in the
notion of the untutored eye and the visual mind.
Eikhenbaum, Boris Problems of Cine-stylistics in Eikhenbaum, B. M. (ed, 1927) / Taylor,
Richard (trans, 1982) Russian Poetics in Translation, Vol 9: The Poetics of Cinema, 1982,
pg 22
26
Ibid, pg 23
27
Ibid, pg 24
28
Kennedy, X.J. & Gioia, Dana, An Introduction to Poetry, New York: Harper Collins College
Publishers, 1994, pg. 98
29
Op. Cit., pg. 30
25
For the purposes of the essay, the most influential text in Poetica Kino was
Viktor Shklovskys short essay Poetry & Prose in the Cinema. Almost
simplistically, but in a clear way, Shklovsky attempt to give a definition
between what is poetic and what is prosaic in the cinema: The fundamental
distinction between poetry and prose lies possibly in a greater geometricality
of devices, in the fact that a whole series of arbitrary semantic resolutions is
replaced by a formal geometric resolution30. He further explains that poetry
and prose in the cinema are distinguished from one another not by rhythm, or
not by rhythm alone, but by the prevalence in poetic cinema of technical and
formal over semantic features, where formal features displace semantic and
resolve the composition31. Shklovsky realizes the problematics of separating
poetry and prose purely based on rhythm from his analyses of literary works,
where poetic language could be used in an overall prosaic work. It is
important to notice the choice of words Shklovsky talks about prevalence of
one over the other and not a choice between the two. In this respect the
notion of a poetic prose is possible in the cinema and it is the work which
overall adheres to narrative semantics but includes poetic illuminations. Such
work could for example be the work of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky,
whose biographer suggests I have no hesitation of describing Tarkovskys
cinema as poetic32. Similar analogies could be applied to filmmakers like
Antonioni, Bergman and others.
Yet in a purely poetic film work (a film poem), it is according to Shklovsky the
geometrics of structure that prevail. Hence sementics are replaced by a
geometry of form, which should be used as the only means of achieving some
kind of resolution in a composition. It is not surprising therefore that Shklovsky
quotes Vertovs kinesthetic work as poetic: there is no doubt that Dziga
Vertovs A Sixth Part of the World is constructed on the principle of poetic
formal resolution: it has a pronounced parallelism and a recurrence of images
at the end of the film where they convey a different meaning and thus vaguely
recall the form of a triolet33. Although Vertov used representational images
from the world around him, his primary interest was the reconstruction of
these images, adhering thus to formalist principles. Shklovskys definition of
filmic poetry further helps establish the role of an audience and the ideas of
reception of a film-poem. Instead of attempting to establish a semantics of
continuity, the audience of a film-poem should search within the geometry of
formal structures for resolutions and answers.
Dziga Vertov was the most important formalist filmmaker of the time and
arguably one of the most important figures in the history of the avant-garde.
Although Vertovs work has been frequently analysed in terms of the notions
of socialist realism and formalism, the connection between Vertovs work and
poetry/poetics has rarely been presented (exceptions quoted here). Vertovs
interest in poetry was possibly the greatest of all the filmmakers discussed in
Shklovsky, Viktor, Poetry and Prose In Cinema in Eikhenbaum, B. M. (ed, 1927) / Taylor,
Richard (trans, 1982) Russian Poetics in Translation, Vol 9: The Poetics of Cinema, 1982,
pg 88
31
Ibid., pg 89
32
Turovskaya, Maya, Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry, London: Faber and Faber, 1989, pg. 101
33
Op Cit, pg. 88
30
this essay with the exception of Stan Brakhage. Vertov wrote poetry himself
and even his scripts were realized in a poetic language. He often collaborated
articles on poetry in publications of his time, focusing primarily on poets of the
modernist era. Vertov also described himself as a film-poet: I am a writer of
the cinema. I am a film poet. But instead of writing on paper, I write on the film
strip34. The parallel between characteristics of Vertovs work and poetry can
be divided in three parts, each one based on a particular tradition of poetry
and each one analysed by a different writer.
Vlada Petric, who has analysed the work of Vertov thoroughly, presents
Mayakovsky as the most important writer for Vertov, as belonging in the
tradition of formalist poetry that emerged in the Soviet Union of the 20s.
Although Mayakovskys writings on the cinema varied from very enthusiastic
to dismissing it completely as an art form, it is his poetry that provided an
important basis for the construction of Vertovs cinematic language. As Vlada
Petric suggests rather than restrict himself to traditional poetic forms,
Mayakovsky expanded the stylistic features of his poetry, much as Vertov was
preoccupied with experimenting with image and sound to form his unique
cinematic style35. Petric takes the parallel even further and suggests that in
Mayakovskys poem Morning the structuring of the lines, some of which
consist of only one or one-and-a-half words (!), is reminiscent of Vertovs use
of a single frame as a shot or montage unit36. Whether Vertov was aware of
this specific poem and tried a visual analogy to this extent in his films is
arguable, but what remains is that Vertov influenced by Mayakovsky was
certainly interested in the notion of a unity of form and content. A late script of
Vertovs of a film - which was never realized - exemplifies these poetic
tendencies:
A girl is playing the piano
she is watched
through the open windows of a
terrace
by a starry night.
The moon illuminates her hands.
The moon illuminates the keyboard.
And to her it seems not sounds
but rays of distant, invisible worlds,
rays of glimmering stars
that sing from under the fingers
Clearly influenced by Mayakovsky, Vertovs script uses the vertical placement
of words in lines as a means of establishing his personal stylistics. The
question that remains is of course how a script like this would materialize as a
shot film. At this point it is important to notice a surprising correspondence
as Petric suggests37 between Vertov and the American filmmaker Maya
Vertov, Dziga More on Mayakovsky in Michelson, Annette (ed), Kino-Eye: The Writings of
Dziga Vertov, London: University of California Press, 1984, pg 182
35
Petric, Vlada, Constructivism In Film: The Man With A Movie Camera, New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1987, pg 27
36
Ibid, pg 26
37
Ibid, pg 155
34
Hans Richter was interested in the lyrical potential of film. He states I have
always been especially fascinated by the possibilities of the film to make the
invisible visible: the functioning of the invisible subconscious, which no other
art can express as completely and as drastically as the film. It is the lyric
quality of this film form that is probably its distinguishing mark. With this lyrical
form goes a greater freedom in its use of the raw material as there is not
necessarily a story to tell40. Here Richter uses the notion of the lyrical which
although he seems to do almost instinctively, it is important to point out. In the
discussion of film poetry until that time, it was rare that filmmakers or
theoreticians distinguished between the different strands of poetry. Richter
explains that it is the lyrical aspect of poetry that he is interested in. Lyric
poetry originally as the name suggests was to be accompanied by music
(lyre). Yet in the post-romantic period the definition of a lyric poem changed
roughly to a short poem expressing the thoughts and feelings of a single
speaker41. What Richter is interested in therefore is not the formalist,
rhythmical aspects of film, but the freedom of personal expression, which a
lyric poem free of having to tell a story has. As in lyric poetry, words can
be manipulated freely to stress emotional qualities, in the film poem shots
(what Richter calls raw material) can be used in any order or way.
Furthermore, Richter draws a parallel between the way poetry is written and a
film poem is composed. He quotes: One of the main characteristics of film
poetry, I would say, is the way the film poem is made. () Whereas the
commercial film has to be laid out ironclad from the beginning to the end, has
to follow the script to the point, () the film poem follows a different process.
There is a general direction, there is an aim, a meaning, a mood in the
process of production. But all that grows is not foreseen. It is a result of the
creative process itself. It is not so much planning as it is feeling along the path
which the theme takes. In other words, the material you accumulate during
the shooting is more or less raw material: though it has been planned to
contribute to a specific scene or aim, it might, in the end assume a different
meaning altogether. This I would call sensitive improvisation42. There is a
number of points to notice in Richters statement. First of all he suggests that
in the film poem there is an aim, a target, but not a clear script. This is
important as it is reminiscent of the way in which poetry usually deals with a
subject, has a concept, but does not clearly tell a story. Also, Richter seems to
be placing importance in the notion of improvisation, again stressing poetrys
more intuitive nature.
Shots for Richter are simply words or phrases which could be used in a
number of ways to create meanings. As filmmaker and theoretician Pier Paolo
Pasolini argues A dictionary of images does not exist. There are no images
classified and ready for use. () While the writers work is esthetic invention,
that of the filmmaker is first linguistic invention, then esthetic43. When
Richter, Hans, Hans Richter, London: Thames & Hudson, 1971, pg 144
Kennedy, X.J. & Gioia, Dana, An Introduction to Poetry, New York: Harper Collins College
Publishers, 1994, pg. 6
42
Op Cit, pg 144
43
Pasolini, Pier Paolo, The Cinema of Poetry in Nichols, Bill (ed), Movies & Methods, Vol. 1,
London: University of California Press, 1976, pg 545
40
41
the meaning of a work of art rests not in elements which appear in it, but in
the relationship of those elements, taking a much more structuralist approach
than someone like Man Ray or Richter who believed primarily in the power of
the fragment. Deren refuses the use of specific symbols and suggested that if
she uses a shot of a bird, she does so not because this action has a particular
symbolic significance for her, but simply because of the action itself - with the
knowledge of all the possible concepts that can be derived from such an
image. Natural phenomena, she states dont intend anything, as the
setting of the sun might be the beginning of an ominous night for one, the end
of a perfect day for another. Sun has no intention emotionally, so one may
attach any emotions58. Thus, it is the placement of the image of the sun within
the context of someones life that can explain the importance of the sunset for
a person. This notion that elements make sense within a context could be
argued to be contradicting Derens vertical vs horizontal theory (especially if
seen as an extension of the paradigmatic / syntagmatic axis).
In order to examine this apparent contradiction it is important to point out that
Derens notion of the vertical does not neglect the possibility or even more so
the importance of the linking between the different elements that make up a
cinematic experience. The difference really lies on the mode in which the
relationship between parts is overall seen. To make this clearer we can
examine Derens attitude towards narrative editing devices. Renata Jackson
quotes: for Deren, flashbacks and parallel editing sequences, while breaking
a narrative out of strict uni-directional or chronological development, both
simply re-present actions in space, whereas true innovation in the realm of
temporal manipulation would consist in reversed, accelerated, or slow motion,
which not only can make perceptible movements that the naked eye would
otherwise fail to register, but which also can create alternative space-time
relationships59. Therefore, the montage in someone like for example
Eisenstein still remains largely linear, as despite the modernist touches of
perplexing the narrative, it is still to be understood as a fixed spatio-temporal
continuum and not as a re-constructed time and space which can only be
poetically experienced. Slow motion especially has a particular power for
Deren which is strongly connected to her notion of poetic illumination: when
you see slow motion you are affected not by the rate of movement of the
object, but you are affected by the fact that it is the wrong rate, which you
recognize by your own pulse60.
In order to finish the discussion of Derens contribution to the ideas of the
relationship of poetry and film, it is useful to mention Derens unfinished
project of creating film-haikus and her subsequent writings in 1961. Just as
the haiku consists not of the butterfly but of the way the poet thinks and
speaks of the butterfly, so my filmic haiku could not consist of movements of
reality but had to create a reality, most carefully, out of the vocabulary and
syntax of film image and editing61, Deren states. Yet despite this basic
Deren, Maya, from a lecture given at the Cleveland Museum on April 6th, 1951 in Film
Culture, No. 29, Summer 1963, pg 65
59
Jackson, Renatta, The Modernist Poetics & Experimental Film Practice of Maya Deren,
New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002, pg 89
60
Op Cit, pg 67
61
Deren, Maya, On A Film In Progress in Film Culture, No 22-23, Summer 1961, pg 161
58
reacting to his vision66. Sitney does not explain exactly what the relationship
is if any between the type of film he describes and lyric poetry. Yet if we
think of the definition of poetry his choice of a the term lyrical seems
appropriate. According to Kennedy and Gioia a rough definition of a lyric as it
is written today [is]: a short poem expressing the thoughts and feelings of a
single speaker67. Brakhages films seem to have all of those characteristics
they are made by a single person, they express this persons thoughts and
feelings and they tend to be short in terms of length. Furthermore, lyric poetry
seems an appropriate parallel as it tends to be a structurally free form of
expression. As James Peterson suggests lyric poetry is not distinguished by
a particular structure, but by an approach to structure that leaves open the
possibility of almost any global structure whatsoever or even none at all68.
Equally Brakhages films take various forms and structures and sometimes
even feel so open-ended that they are almost structure-less.
In an earlier analysis of Brakhages Dog Star Man, one of his most important
works, Sitney claims that the objective and subjective point of view are nevr
quite clear. In Sitneys words it is difficult to be precise always in dividing the
objective from the subjective. Perhaps this is best for the sake of a poetic
ambiguity in film69. This difficulty in distinguishing between the subjective and
the objective is increased by Brakhages use of what is known in linguistics as
radical metaphors. A radical metaphor is the metaphor in which the
metaphorical replacement is seen but not the original term, which the
metaphor refers to. In his comparison between the work of Eisenstein and
Brakhage, James Peterson explains: Near the end of Eisenstins Strike
(1925), we see both the Cossacks attack on the workers and [his emphasis]
the slaughter of the bull. The metaphor emphasizes the innocence of the
workers and the brutality of the attack, but the narrative sequence would be
comprehensible even if we were to mis the metaphor, because all the key
events are explicitly shown. But because a radical metaphor shows only the
vehicle and not the tenor, missing the metaphor poses a more serious threat
to comprehension. In Reflections in Black [by Brakhage], a blind man sees
several couples abortive attempts to interact. The last episode ends with a
shot of coffee pot boiling over, but there is no explicit resolution of the
personal relationship70. Brakhages images could be subjective or objective,
literal or metaphorical, internal or external without any diegetic pass between
the different consciousness worlds.
A different between a number of experimental film-makers and Brakhage is
the question of whether the creation of images is a process from the inside
out or vice versa. Bruce Elder suggests that Brakhages adherence to the
Romantic tradition involves a commitment to the idea that what happens on
the inside is all of a piece with what occurs on the outside; furthermore,
Sitney, Adams P., Visionary Film, New York: Oxford University Press, 1979, pg 142
Kennedy, X.J. & Gioia, Dana, An Introduction to Poetry, New York: Harper Collins College
Publishers, 1994, pg 6
68
Peterson, James, Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order,, Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1957, pg 47
69
Sitney, Adams P., Imagism In Four Avant-Garde Films in Film Culture, No. 30, Fall 1963,
pg 19
70
Op Cit, pg 44
66
67
until the 80s, its supporters soon were so involved that they started
considering the hybrid art form as a somewhat natural result of the
investigation of the relationship between film and poetry, falling in a sense in
the same fundamentalist trap that Wees accused the modernists of. In a Film
and Poetry film festival that took place in Buxton in 1997, this approach was
clear if we examine the criteria under which films were chosen: the films
should in some way be overtly linked to poetry, either containing spoken or
written poetry or taking a poet as subject. Stating that if the event was to be
repeated I would like the programme to be more influenced by the
filmmakers perspective, and to investigate more directly the formal similarities
between film and poetry90. Thus, the poetry-film tradition has arrived to the
point where the notion of the filmmaker as the main person behind a filmic
creation has to be reclaimed and the modernist appropriation of poetics on
film are an alternative viewpoint. This in a sense showcases how chaotic the
notion of the film-poem has been in the last 80 years and how an attempt for a
specific definition is almost impossible, since even the historical analyses of
the film-poem are often written by individuals who have interests in promoting
particular characteristics of it.
Bibliography
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Brakhage, Stan Metaphors on Vision Film Culture, No. 30, Fall 1963
- Brakhage, Stan On Music, Sound, Color, And Film in Film Culture, No.
67-8, 1979
Brakhage, Stan Gertrude Stein: Meditative, Literature & Film in
Millennium Film Journal , Issue No. 25, Summer 1991
- Deren, Maya, from a lecture given at the Cleveland Museum on April 6th,
1951 in Film Culture, No. 29, Summer 1963
Deren, Maya, On A Film In Progress in Film Culture, No 22-23, Summer
1961
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symposium in Film Culture No 29, Summer 1963
-
Hill, Jerome Brakhage and Rilke in Film Culture, No. 37, Summer 1965
Jenkins, Bruce & Carroll, Noel Text of Light in Film Culture, No. 67-8,
1979
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- Mekas, Jonas (ed), Hans Richter on the Nature of Film Poetry (excerpts
from interviews) in Film Culture, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1957
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Nin, Anais, Poetics of the Film in Film Culture, Vol. 30, ??????