The Poetics of Poetry Film

Film Poetry, Videopoetry, Lyric Voice, Reflection

Sarah Tremlett

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781789382686
• eBook ISBN: 9781789382709
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Set to generate and influence discussions in the field for years to come, this is an encyclopaedic work on the ever-evolving genre of poetry film. It will set the benchmark for all subsequent works on the subject, being the first book of its kind. 

Poetry films are a genre of short film, usually combining the three main elements: the poem as verbal message; the moving film image and diegetic sounds; and additional non-diegetic sounds or music, which create a soundscape. This book examines the formal characteristics of the poetic in poetry film, film poetry and video poetry, particularly in relation to lyric voice and time.

Provides an introduction to the emergence and history of poetry film in a global context, defining and debating terms both philosophically and materially. Examines the formal characteristics of the poetic in poetry film, particularly in relation to lyric voice and time. Includes interviews, analysis and a rigorous and thorough investigation of the poetry film from its origins to the present. This is a very important, groundbreaking work on film poetry. The ideas discussed here are of great importance, and the diversity and breadth of the volume is especially impressive and very useful. This book brings together in one place crucial ideas and information for practitioners, students and academics, and is clearly and accessibly written. 

Including over 40 contributors and showcasing the work of an international array of practitioners, this will be an industry bible for anyone interested in poetry, digital media, filmmaking, art and creative writing, as well as poetry filmmakers.  It explores working practices, processes of collaboration and the mechanisms which make these possible. It also reveals the network of festivals disseminating and theorizing poetry film and presents a compelling bibliography.

This is the most incisive and complete analysis of filmic poetry to date. It is poised to become a major text in the field.

Essential reading for academics teaching poetry filmmaking, moving image, film, media and media poetry, writing and art. Undergraduate and postgraduate students in those fields. Great potential for textbook adoption.

Also relevant to poets, filmmakers, visual artists, graphic artists and theorists, filmmakers, screenwriters, art historians, philosophers, cultural commentators, arts journalists.

Part One

Form and Structure

Terminology across Time

Poetry Films, Film Poems and Video Poems / Videopoems

The term ‘poetry film’ or ‘poetry-film’ (see on for use of the hyphen) as a film containing poetry (as verbal voice-over and/or subtitles or text-on-screen) was first given public credibility by Polish-born, American poet Herman Berlandt (1923–2017) in the title of his first ‘Poetry Film Festival’ (Bolinas, San Francisco, September, 1975). However, earlier records of the term survive. From 1967 to 1969 American Greg Sharits (1945–80), brother of experimental film-maker Paul Sharits (1943–93), managed the Filmmakers’ Cinematheque in Manhattan, with an ambitious and eclectic programme of acts and screenings, including, for example, Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol (1928–87). In his valuable, revealing and often personal account of 1960s experimental cinema – The Exploding Eye (1997) – Professor Wheeler Winston Dixon has included a fevered and enticing poster by Sharits. Amongst dance, music and ‘live and taped poetry’, the text tells of ‘phosphines’ (?), American poet John Giorno’s ‘raspberry fog machine’ and film-maker Mike Jacobson’s ‘fluorescent loops’; but, more specifically, at the bottom in small print, under the name Victor Alonso we see ‘poetry-films’.

Whilst the term ‘film poem’ (initially solely visually poetic abnegating verbal poetry) had been in existence for some time, developing particularly amongst Parisian avant-garde artists during the 1920s, the exact origin of the term poetry film (and its difference of meaning) is still under debate. Clearly it was already in use in America by the late 1960s; or alternatively, Sharits invented it. We might surmise that, as artist/film-makers left Europe for America under the shadow of World War II (such as artist and self-described ‘film poet’ German Hans Richter [1888–1976]), the related terms travelled with them.

By 1947, Richter created the full-length film Dreams that Money Can Buy, where an artist renting a room finds he can look inside himself when looking in a mirror (Richter 1947). This film consists of lyrical dream sequences by seven Dada and Surrealist artists, such as German Max Ernst (1891–1976) and French-American artist Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), with music by avant-garde, American composer John Cage (1912–92). Importantly, it showcases the concept of narration as rhyming voice-over (talking to the protagonist).

Richter’s later film Dadascope, 1916–1924 (Richter 1961) also features a number of leading international artists (including Duchamp again), but in this film, they contribute a multilingual collection of Dadaist punning poetry, sound poems and prose, alongside Richter’s choice of visuals and sound. In 1957, Richter was interviewed by Lithuanian film-maker, poet and founder of Film Culture magazine, Jonas Mekas (1922–2019), see Mekas (1957). Richter described film poetry (defined as a genre by Mekas) as ‘inner happenings externalized’, and a useful term to separate it from the ‘film novel’ or entertainment film, although all experimental film to him was film poetry. He later noted (1971) that there are parallels in composing film and poetry, and that the essential poetic element is montage, creating metaphor.

Whilst Dreams That Money Can Buy contains rhyme and Dadascope could definitely be defined as the first poetry film collection (in one film) by different authors (see Collections and also Humphrey Jennings’s earlier use of different poems in one film), Richter did not choose to identify them under a different term. However, as film poetry researcher Fil Ieropoulos has pointed out in his valuable essay ‘Film poetry: A historical analysis’ (2010), Hans Richter noted (1971) in relation to Dadascope that editing to poetry instead of music could give you a new form of film, but Ieropoulos states that this was not one of Richter’s primary interests. Perhaps, this was also because Richter still revered the purity of cinematic (visual not verbal) language (alongside other avant-garde European film-makers surfacing in the 1920s), and he retained this bond in later works.

Wherever or whenever the term ‘poetry film’ was first coined (and perhaps we shall never know), Herman Berlandt is wholly associated with the enduring promotion and definition of the genre through festival screenings. Importantly, he wanted to emphasize the inclusion of poetry in film, rather than a film poetic (film poem) approach. It was at The Poetry Film Festival that American poet and co-founder of City Lights Booksellers and Publishers Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b. 1919) won a prize with the film Assassination Raga (Ferlinghetti and Crosley 1972). Centred on the Kennedy assassinations, and his eponymous poem from the bestselling A Coney Island of the Mind (1968), this poetry film has set a benchmark for politicized statement as poetry film ever since. Hence poetry films are not, as French-born author Anaïs Nin (1903–97) has proposed of film poems, solely about converting reality to reverie (Nin 1963), although, of course, this approach is very common. The National Poetry Association’s Poetry Film Festival ran for more than 30 years, alongside their educational poetry film workshops run by American poetry film-maker and creator of the term Cine(E)-Poetry: George Aguilar (see Artists’ Voices).

Pioneer Works

Setting aside the early mirror verses, the earliest form of ‘moving’ image with projected poetry began with the magic lantern (originating in the seventeenth century). By the mid-Victorian era, it was common to present poems on slides and to give poetry readings accompanying the narratives (performing to the projected image is not new), and poets were viewed as celebrities of their day. The projection of the first hand-painted, animated moving picture cartoons in 1892 by French inventor and artist Émile Reynaud (1844–1918) continued the tradition. In 1893, American inventor Thomas Edison (1847–1931) created 20-second films; and in 1895 the aptly named French inventors Auguste Lumière (1862–1954) and his brother Louis (1864–1948) screened the longer short film La Sortie des ouvriers de l’usine Lumière (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory) often called the first motion picture.¹ French illusionist George Méliès (1861–1938) became known for filming fictional narratives using staged sets and scripts, and pioneering editing techniques such as slow motion, dissolves, superimposition and stop motion. This resulted in perhaps his most famous work: Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) (Méliès 1902), with all the fantasy and charm of earlier magic lantern storytelling. During this period, French pioneer film-maker Alice Guy Blaché (1873–1968) experimented with both frame by frame hand-tinting to create colour films, and also with wax cylinders to synchronize picture and sound (Dixon and Foster 2002: 1). In terms of visual text, the Lumière Brothers’ Écriture à l’envers (‘Upside down writing’) (1896), shows a vaudeville performer writing the words ‘Mesdames et Messieurs nos Remerciements’ back to front and upside down on a board (probably signifying the end of a programme) (Wall-Romana 2012). The visual effect produced resulted in a fantastical unwritten message, reversing the action, producing text as magical, uncanny or estranging spectacle.

With the birth of cinema came the birth of a new form of visual poetry. As early as 1864, the young Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98) strove to create in poetry ‘not the thing, but the effect it produces’ (Bohn 1986). In its spatial marriage of effect and content, the much-cited Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, ‘A throw of the dice will never abolish chance’ ([1897] 2007), has exerted a singular influence on subsequent poetry movements (see Figure 29). In Un coup de dés, which extends over 21 pages, the fragmentation of the irregular lines and the spaces surrounding them echo waves, the perils of a flying sea bird and the theme of a shipwreck. As visually spatial verse, the poem is read and viewed simultaneously. According to Christophe Wall-Romana (2012) in his writings on cinepoetics, it was probably the influence of the early silent films that inspired Mallarmé, one year before his death, to create this extraordinary creative departure from his usual approach to verse.

The first known example of a narrative-based poetry film (though not defined as such at the time) was The Night Before Christmas (Porter 1905), directed by American film pioneer Edwin S. Porter (1870–1941) for the Thomas A. Edison Manufacturing Company. It contained intertitles based on the poem ‘A Visit from St Nicholas’ or ‘’Twas the Night Before Christmas’ (1823) by either writer and American professor of Oriental and Greek literature Clement Clarke Moore (1779–1863) or American poet Henry Livingston Jr (1748–1828). In the tradition of George Méliès, this film also includes an animated turntable diorama of Santa and his reindeer flying across the sky. It was also in 1905 that Porter made The Whole Dam Family and the Dam Dog (Porter 1905) using animated titles called ‘jumble announcements’, which, according to known records, are the first example of kinetic text on film. In financial terms, basing a short film on a poem was an ideal way to trial and develop the new cinematic form for larger-scale cinematic production. In 1910, American D. W. Griffith (1875–1948) directed The Unchanging Sea (1910) based on the eponymous poem by British author Charles Kingsley (1819–75).

In 1913, Russian Futurists Velimir Khlebnikov (1885–1922) and Aleksei Kruchenykh (1886–1968) invented zaum (1913), a transrational language with indeterminate meaning (Terras 1985) creating neologisms, attention to pure sound and destruction of syntax. At this time, Marinetti was a war reporter, and, in witnessing the siege of Adrianople (1912–13) he created the artist’s book Zang Tumb Tumb (1914). This included both object letters and oral, composed vocal scores, as an onomatopoeic poem to be loudly declared, where a typographic word evoked gunfire, telegraphic message sending, or for example, trains. By referencing the verse form, but also creating ideographic, dynamic words as sounds and images, he prefigured Concrete poetry. In the following extract typography indicates oral notation; for example, the A’s increase in size also suggesting increase in pitch: ‘Parole in Libertà vivaaaaAAA il FUTURISMO finalmente finalmente finalmente finalmente finalmente’ (Marinetti 1914).

In Europe, Dadaist (Zurich, 1916) oral poetry (and music) centred on subversive cabaret, becoming reduced to their basic elements of phonetics and sound (Pfeiler 2003); whilst through synthetic criticism, Dada and Surrealist artists rewrote sequences from films. The Russian Futurist poet Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (1893–1930) was one of the first poets to declare a link in his work between the poetic line and cinematic cuts as shots (see ‘A Cloud in Trousers’, 1915). His poetry influenced the Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948) in relation to his theories of montage (1924, 1929), and the theories, film language and script layout of film director, poet and theorist Dziga Vertov (aka Denis Kaufman) (1896–1954). Eisenstein had already labelled Alexander Pushkin’s (1799–1837) narrative poem ‘Poltava’ (1829) a montage script, amongst others (Temple and Williams 2000), and Vertov noted in his diary, after reading Mayakovsky that he was a film poet (Vertov 1984). Rapid montage editing was invented by Vertov and his students out of necessity. Denied access to raw stock to shoot new films, they learned how to cut film (in bursts of hyperedited frames) by re-editing DW Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) – a style that would become the hallmark of Soviet silent cinema (Dixon and Foster 2002).

In 1919, Hungarian Mihály Kertész (1886–1962) (later known as Michael Curtiz, directing Casablanca, USA, 1942), directed Jön az Öcsem (My Broth...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Frontispiece
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction: Poetry, Song, Philosophy – The Combined Lyric Aesthetic
• Part One Form and Structure
• Part Two Artists’’ Voices
• Part Three Selected Narrative Forms
• Overview
• Examples of Leading Poetry Film Festivals
• References
• Artists and Authors Index
• Back Cover