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From The Cinema of Poetry to The Poetry of Cinema Tracing the Vertical in the Horizontal
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f we use the phrase »Utopian vision« today to describe the
global influence of the Bauhaus, born here in Weimar in 1919, we can also apply the phrase to an event fifty years later, in 1969, when the Portuguese TV Station RTP broadcast (and immediately destroyed) a 2' kinetic text work with voice-over on videotape by the experimental and concrete poet Ernesto Manuel de Melo e Castro, aptly titled, Roda Lume or Wheel of Light, which came to be known as the first videopoem. In his essay about videopoetry for Eduardo Kac's 1996 anthology, New Media Poetry, de Melo e Castro writes, »a new medium is at first seen and judged against the medium that came before it.« The medium that came before it, a so-called Cinema of Poetry, had no such precursor, as it attempted to fuse two mediums, one that depicted with images, the other that described with words, two »art forms« that had, for centuries, opposed one another.
does not embrace the perfect art which was able to synthesize both these principles into a new quality, cinema. Within each art form … there are illuminated the rudiments of the opposing features – not as something alien to it but as the potential data for the next synthesizing step.« To some extent, he was right. Film, like painting, does present itself as a framed image; at the same time, unlike painting, it reveals its meaning like poetry, sequentially, one word, one frame at a time. In between 1919 and 1969, the Utopian vision best described by Dick Higgins as »an ongoing human wish to combine the visual and literary impulses«was fiercely opposed by experimental filmmakers, like Dziga Vertov, who called for »a decisive cleaning up of film-language, for its complete separation from the language of theater and literature«, but he 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 strip.« [2] (One can’t help hearing Pasolini's voice here, declaring decades later that cinema is »the written language of reality«.)
In the 1920s, these polemic and often poetic statements about the nature of cinema were all over the expanding word-cloud centered on this new art form. There was the »cinema pur« of We only need to rewind a mere 200 years, when the German Henri Chomette, echoed by Germaine Dulac, who claimed that philosopher and art critic, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, speci»If cinema is merely… an animated reflection of literature … it fied that there should be necessary boundaries between the is not an art. The new aesthetic is to divest cinema of all elevisual and verbal arts because the nature of the visual is of ments not particular to it, to seek its true essence in movement space while the verbal is of time, warning artists and poets to and visual rhythms.« The elements »not particular observe the limitations of their medium to avoid a [1] Sergei Eisenstein, ›Laocoon‹, in: to it« were the presence of words, displayed as dangerous confusion of genres. Selected Works, vol. 2: Towards a intertitles. Theory of Montage, Michael Glenny Fast-forward to Sergei Eisenstein’s essay on the Laocoon of Lessing in Towards a Theory of Montage. »I believe,« he writes, »that this strict separation into incompatible opposites is explained by the fact that in Lessing’s day neither Edison nor Lumière had yet supplied him with that most perfect apparatus for research and assessment of the aesthetic principles of art: the cinematograph.« [1] For Lessing, time belonged to the poets and space to the painters. Cinema, according to Eisenstein, synthesized the two: »His (Lessing’s) discussion
and Richard Taylor (ed.), London: BFI 1991, 153–54. [2] Fil Ieropoulos, The Film Poem, 2010. Metaphorically, of course. Scratching words into film was a technique used by Su Friedrich »Gently Down The Stream« (1981), Maurice Lemaitre »L’Amour réinventé« (1979), Peter Rose »Spirit Matters« (1984), Stan Brakhage »Novalis« (1994), Nick Carbo »Can you lower your trope please«(2005).
As mainstream cinema becomes more and more popular, the proponents for its status as the seventh »art« focus on distancing cinema from the other arts, particularly literature and theatre; in its quest for purity, arguments for its legitimacy therefore invoked the purest form of its rival, literature, namely poetry. »The cinema is poetry’s most powerful medium,« wrote Jean Epstein; »within five years we will be writing film poems."
essays
»There is an old proverb which says: Don't try to do two things at once and expect to do justice to both.« – Buster Keaton, Sherlock Jr. (1924)
