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The Poetics of Film: Four Poets on How Cinema Influences Their Work

On dracula , anna may wong, secret sunshine , and “horror poetry”.

Whether seen as adults or children, for pleasure or research, films can be as formative for a writer as any literary text. They can shape our aesthetics, our relationship with language, and can provide a sense of lineage. They can awaken our civic consciousness, and help us to see and be seen. In this roundtable, which originally took place at the 2022 AWP Conference, four poets explore how the cinematic world has informed their poetic one, and how films have inspired their craft, identity, and passion for the cross-pollination of artistic mediums.

–Christopher Kondrich

Sara Eliza Johnson on Poetry, Trauma, and the Aesthetics of Horror

I’ve loved horror films since I was a kid. But it was only after I started working on an essay collection about my relationship with horror and horror films, and their relationship to my own traumatic memories, that I realized how much cinema has also influenced my poetry practice. I’ve now come to terms with the fact that what I’m writing, is, to some extent, “horror poetry.”

I find myself gravitating towards horror for inspiration in my poetry writing, in addition to my nonfiction writing, not just because of its thematic resonances, but also because that resonance is often tied up in the visual viscerality of horror. The thematic heart of horror is trauma, so it only makes sense that I gravitated back to it. And the primary metaphorical language of horror cinema is the visceral moving image. The movement of the image is important because it facilitates the metaphorical transformation.

And this has been integral for me. As I’ve started to work with trauma in my poetry more consciously, the primary language of my poetry has become the visceral moving image. In sum, watching so much horror led to a symbiotic relationship between my work and the horror film that I believe shows the potential for horror cinema as a lens when “writing trauma,” which I think shows the potential for greater relationships between poetry and film more broadly.

A cinematic scene is orchestrated in a way that is useful for poets to study if they want their poems to have complex and dynamic movement on the page, to switch perspectives or angles, to work through shifts in psychology. For example, in a slasher scene, you might take on multiple roles in the scene based on the camera’s view, moving from both perpetrator to victim and observer perspectives. In a body horror scene, you might enter the inside of the body, then move back out. Cinema often also works with montage and floating fragments, which is useful for poetry (or, at least, has been for mine).

It took me some time to understand this development in my own work. I didn’t realize how often I was writing about bodies being torn apart, reconstituted, torn apart again, and annihilated, or how often wounds became the central point of emotional and metaphorical pressure in my poems. An important note here is that my book doesn’t deal with bodily annihilation in itself, but the sensation of annihilation that trauma can engender for a person. And my quest was to create that sensation, not only engage with a concept, and this is one realm in which horror cinema has helped me.

Overall, horror or not, the multimodal complexity of film has been immensely helpful for me for thinking through the dynamic movement of the poem’s “bodily” presence on the page, and in helping me develop the materiality of poetic language, which has been essential for me when trying to develop emotional and psychological intensity in my poetry.

Chase Berggrun on Erasing Dracula

My book, R E D (Birds LLC, 2018), is a full-length erasure of Bram Stoker’s Victorian horror Dracula . Each of the collection’s 27 poems, corresponding to Dracula ’s 27 chapters, is composed exclusively of language sourced sequentially from the novel: no words were changed, added, or otherwise manipulated, only deleted; then relineated on the page into a more recognizable poetic shape.

R E D is an original story, unrelated to Dracula, of violence, sexual abuse, power dynamics, vengeance, and feminist rage, and wrestles with the complexities of gender, transition, and monsterhood. It features an unnamed narrator, who contends with her relationship to herself and her body, as well as an abusive husband, over the course of the book, ending in a climactic scene of revenge and resolution.

Erasing Dracula was a long, arduous process of sifting through more than 160,000 words into what became a manuscript of 5,750. I decided that as I was working on the book, I was going to “watch every vampire movie,” an absurd and impossible commitment. Obviously, this plan failed—but I did, in fact, get through quite a lot of them.

Watching all these films made me think about why exactly it is that Dracula has been adapted to cinema so very many times since its publication in 1897, and my theory is, beyond the obvious attraction and popular captivation with vampires, that the narrative structure of Dracula is particularly suited to adaptation. The events of the book contribute to a ramping up of tension and dread—an introduction of the vampire in a spooky castle, mysterious events and deaths told of through interviews, journal entries, and news clippings, then the organization of an intrepid team, a montage of planning, an international hunt, and a final confrontation.

The cinematic arc of Dracula ’s 27 chapters informed and constrained the structure of my erasure poems much more than I had anticipated. Without even intending to, the poems began to take on the pace, the arc, the urgency of Dracula , almost in parallel. Particularly vivid scenes from the novel offered their language to new and equally vivid moments in the poems, but in markedly different contexts.

For all its flaws, Dracula remains a massive tree in the grove of pop culture, growing new branches literally by the day. Swimming amongst its various iterations while creating a new story from the inside out was a fascinating and exciting process—one that very literally took place during my own transition—and what is gender if not an adaptation, however faithful or rebellious, of a preexisting script? The films I watched alongside the writing of R E D excited and enlarged my idea of the vampire and the limitless potential within the constraint of the various tropes, rules, and popular conceptions of that monster, and monstrosity in general.

Sally Wen Mao on the Agency of Chinese American Actress Anna May Wong

When the iconic Hollywood actress Anna May Wong arrived in Shanghai in February 1936 aboard the S. S. President Hoover , thousands of fans greeted her alongside reporters and her brother, James. At the time, Shanghai was near the tail end of its “Golden Age” and experiencing a period of intense growth and cosmopolitanism. While the West was experiencing a Great Depression, Shanghai was abuzz with glamour, art, and intrigue, even as the threat of civil war and foreign invasion loomed.

To the disappointment of the local Shanghai press, the 31-year-old Anna May Wong didn’t speak any Mandarin. She was the first Asian American internationally renowned movie star, born and raised in Los Angeles as a second-generation Chinese American of Taishanese descent. Though Anna May Wong’s whole film career in both America and Europe pushed her to “represent” China, she had never been to China before. She intended her visit to be geared toward education—to learn Mandarin and study the Chinese theater.

To be caught between two worlds, one of which rejected the other, how could one negotiate identity?

For many Chinese Americans, China can be a paradox: at once close, and at once far away. To some, it is hard to know whether visiting China is an arrival or a return. And in 1936, a time when the Chinese Exclusion Acts were still written into the laws of the United States, it was even more complicated for Anna May Wong. To be caught between two worlds, one of which rejected the other, how could one negotiate identity? In Wong’s account of her visit to China, she declared, “I am going to a strange country, and yet, in a way, I am going home.”

Chinese reporters, critics, and officials treated Anna May Wong with a mixture of interest and disdain. They decried the roles she had to play—in particular, the shame she caused the country playing evil stock characters in Hollywood that cast China in a mocking light. According to Anna May’s account of a reception in the Department of Cinematography in Nanjing hosted by the Kuomintang government, the Chinese officials “all took turns berating [her] for the roles [she] had played.” Yet, it was also clear that Anna May Wong had a reverence for China, a desire to understand it, to fully connect and engage, using her newfound knowledge to cement her future as an actress who will portray the real China.

Sartorially, Wong’s lack of belonging across America and China compelled her to assert a new identity for herself. In the footage from her initial journey to Shanghai on a boat, Anna May draped herself in a luxurious fur coat and donned a black wool hat. On the street, she wore a long qipao and black leather gloves, with a fox fur draped around her. She was a tourist, essentially—but in a sense, she was also observing the street scenes of Shanghai, taking on the role of a female flaneur and participating in its urban life with her movements and her style of dress. If Anna May Wong’s film roles expressed a series of stereotypes, a set of tragedies, or a lack of agency, then fashion has always been Anna May Wong’s assertion of her identity, her sense of connection to her culture, and consequently, her agency.

Christopher Kondrich on Secret Sunshine and the Failures of God

Is there a more profound betrayal than to be betrayed by God, to feel that God has betrayed you personally despite your devotion?

In Secret Sunshine , written and directed by Lee Chang-dong, Shin-ae, a single mother whose husband died before the film opens, whose son Jun is kidnapped, held for ransom, and found dead by a riverbank, decides she must visit her son’s killer in prison to deliver the news of her forgiveness, as well as the news of God’s love, a love she has found, or has convinced herself that she has found, in the wake of her son’s death. Expecting to find him in need of her forgiveness, she learns that God has already done so.

“God reached out to a sinner like me,” her son’s killer explains, completely at peace. “He made me kneel to repent my sins. And God has absolved me of them.”

“God has forgiven your sins?” she asks, barely able to speak. Within Shin-ae’s question is the realization that God has betrayed her, that she has been deprived of her one opportunity to regain a sense of meaning and purpose in her life, as well as the incredulousness that someone who committed such a heinous act could be forgiven so easily.

In an interview with Dennis Lim for Film Comment , Lee Chang-dong explained that the question of what cinema is for is one he asks himself all the time. Several years ago, while watching Secret Sunshine for the first time, I asked myself the same question, though from the perspective of a parent already wracked with anxiety about the health and safety of his child. What is a film for when it depicts what we fear most? Why would I subject myself to this, I thought, which was then followed by the question why would I not?

I believed then, as I do now, that art must show us what we would rather not see, tell us what we’d rather not hear. If this was what I truly believed, rather than what I simply told myself I did, why would I turn away? I’ve also come to believe that art should explore why we’d rather not see or hear certain things. It wasn’t that I simply did not want to see violence befall a child, it was that I did not want to entertain the thought that my daughter was mortal.

I have difficulty believing in God, and often do not. Nevertheless, how could God do this to me—make my child mortal? The question, which Secret Sunshine prompted me to ask, compels me to write. “In short,” as Allen Grossman writes in his essay “My Caedmon, “the speaker in the poem is moved to begin speaking by the failure of God to make sense.”

Sara Eliza Johnson  is the author of Bone Map , which won the National Poetry Series and was published by Milkweed Editions in 2014, and Vapor , which will be published by Milkweed Editions in 2022. Her work has been featured on Poetry Daily , Verse Daily , and the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day series. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including a NEA fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and currently teaches at the University of Alaska–Fairbanks.

Chase Berggrun  is a trans woman poet and the author of R E D (Birds, LLC, 2018). Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Nation, Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review , and elsewhere. She lives in New York City, where she works as a literary assistant to the poet Gerald Stern.

Sally Wen Mao  is the author of Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014) and Oculus , published by Graywolf Press and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. Her work has won a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Pushcart Prize and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers. She was the 2015-2016 Singapore Creative Writing Residency Writer-in- Residence, a 2016-2017 Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library, and the 2017-2018 Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington at the George Washington University. Currently she is the 2021 Shearing Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas.

Christopher Kondrich

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Poetry Film Live

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Film Poetry: A Historical Analysis by Fil Ieropoulos

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 ‘film-poem’. 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 Pound’s 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 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-garde’s difference from the commercial narrative film” [4] 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.  

• 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 cinema’s ‘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 tell’ [5] . For Dulac, narrative cinema’s 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 establish film’s pedigree among the muses. He was invoking something quite specific – the creative act of isolating and stylizing the significant detail” [6] . 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 film’s total separation from the other arts in order to find what is essential to itself. Dulac’s stance is polemical in this respect: “every cinematic drama (…) must be visual and not literary” [7] , “a real film can’t be able to be told, since it must draw its active and emotive principle from images formed of unique visual tones” [8] . 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 Chomette’s ‘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 cutting” [9] . 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;

• 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;
• 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
• That the cinematic action must be life
• 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 cinema at once impressionistic and expressionistic, which both observes and creates anew.

One of the major problems with the theories of Dulac and the impressionists for our purposes is the notion of rhythm in relation to music. If rhythm is suggested to be the basis of expression than music seems to provide a more appropriate analogy than poetry. Not surprisingly, Dulac refers to the symphonic poem when referring to the up-and-coming avant garde film scene: “The conception of the art of movement, and of the systematically paced images came into its own, as well as the expression of things magnificently accomplishing the visual poem made up of human life-instincts, playing with matter and the imponderable. A symphonic poem, where emotion bursts forth not in facts, not in actions, but in visual sonorities”. [11] The impressionists did not distinguish between the use of ‘poetic’ and ‘musical’ languages. Their urge to create a non-narrative and more form-based art was such that any model that stresses form over content would be applied, whether poetic or musical, with no differencing between the two. Delluc claims “Just as in a symphony each note contributes its own vitality to the general line, each shot, each shadow moves, disintegrates or is reconstituted according to the requirements of a powerful orchestration” [12] .

Overall, the use of the ‘poetic’ in the writings of the French film impressionists is generally loose and the attempts to exemplify how it illustrates itself in the films themselves are unconvincing. Dulac seems to use the notion of the poetic as an extension of the musical, the rhythmical, which is problematic in itself. Ian Christie suggests that the writings of the impressionists were “rooted in a romantic aesthetic which invokes the nineteenth-century notion of synaesthesia in its call for a cinema based on the supposed common ‘essence’ of poetry and music, the two traditional time-base arts” [13] . Yet, the writings of the impressionists are very important, as they are a basic discussion of the notion of the difference between a prose and poetry cinema, a difference that the formalists will deal with and Maya Deren will expand in much more detail.

• Man Ray – The Fragment, Adaptations, Light Writing

Of all the filmmakers mentioned in the essay, Man Ray’s involvement with film was the shortest and one that was characterized by continuous disillusionment with the medium. Man Ray made four films in the space of seven years and made then a conscious decision to drop filmmaking in order to dedicate himself fully to the art of photography, for which he is primarily known. Yet his short involvement with the cinema is of great importance for the discussion of the relationship between film poetry for a number of reasons. First of all, Man Ray was the first filmmaker that actually spoke of a film poem (cinepoem) as a generic construction. Describing his second film ‘Emak Bakia’ he suggested that “a series of fragments, a cinepoem with a certain optical sequence make up a whole that still remains a fragment. Just as one can much better appreciate the abstract beauty in a fragment of a classic work than in its entirety so this film tries to indicate the essentials in contemporary cinematography. It is not an ‘abstract’ film nor a story-teller; its reasons for being are its inventions of light-forms and movements, while the more objective parts interrupt the monotony of abstract inventions or serve as punctuation” [14] .

Not only did Man Ray talk about a ‘cinepoem’ but he even discussed some of the principles behind its notion. For someone generally disinterested in the art of film – as it proved from his later career, his discussion was certainly prophetic – he refused the notion of storytelling and stressed form by even using modernist literary concepts as ‘punctuation’. More than anything what is important in what Man Ray argues is the notion of the fragment versus the whole. As in modernist poetry, in the work of Man Ray – and particularly Emak Bakia – the fragment becomes the most important segment of creative construction. Susan McCabe has compared the work of Man Ray with that of American poet Gertrude Stein: “The kinship between modern poetry and film (…) hinges upon the subordination of plot to rhythm, but also upon a montage aesthetics that privileges the fragment and its abrasion of other fragments” [15] . This notion of the importance of the fragment seems to be close both to Dulac’s notion that a film has to be primarily visual and Deren’s notion of ‘verticality’ in poetry (discussed later).

Another similarity McCabe points out between the work of the filmmaker and the poet is that they both refuse to follow a single character. “Like Stein’s writing, Man Ray’s film denies a stable subjectivity” [16] , McCabe argues. This places Man Ray’s film language closer to that of the modernist poets than the romantics who believed that the language of poetry was the expression of the poet’s internal visions. At the same time, Man Ray refuses to use the shot-countershot tradition to show us what his ‘characters’ might be seeing. The shot-countershot technique is the convention of a 120 or 180 degree camera angle change to signify the perspective of different people appearing in a scene, e.g. talking to each other. As Adams P. Sitney argues in his discussion of Man Ray’s ‘L’ Etoile De Mer’, “this is the earliest ‘narrative’ film I know that deliberately avoids shot-countershot after the institutionalization of that figure” [17] . Thus, Man Ray’s vision is neither clearly a romantic expression of a personal vision nor a narrative-based characterized vision as in classic prose. It can be any and both, shifting between the two, as a modernist poem could shift between ‘I’, ‘he’ and ‘she’.

Another important factor that Man Ray stressed which is important for our purposes is the notion of automatism. For Man Ray notions of ‘play’ and ‘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 Ray’s 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 language” [19] . 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 Ray’s work. The metaphor of ‘writing’ in film could even be expanded in Man Ray’s 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 “Desnos’s 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 woman” [20] . Similarly to Man Ray’s previous work, Desnos’s 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 Ray’s 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 poem’s atmosphere” [21] . The applying of gelatine film as a means of obscuring the picture giving it a more poetic atmosphere is a very simple manifestation of what would later be a discussion on the notion of modernist poetics of the image itself (for example in the work of Stan Brakhage) and discussions of the relationship between image and sound, as presented by cultural critics like Christian Metz. Man Ray was aware that in order to achieve a poetic adaptation of a literary work, it is essential to consider the language of the medium he worked on. At the same time, not taking a fundamentalist approach, he did not neglect the possibility of poetry’s appearance in the film in a literary form as intertitles. Modernist filmmakers of the time neglected the use of intertitles claiming that it was a concession of filmic language to literature. Dziga Vertov in his famous manifesto in the introductory sequence of the ‘Man with a movie Camera’ suggests that it is a ‘film without the need for intertitles’ [22] , which works on a purely visual language. Although Man Ray generally shared this idea, in ‘L’ Etoile De mer’ he “was the first to make free use of poetic captions that are not meant to comment on or explain the images they accompany, but rather to add a new dimension to them” as Schwartz argues. By doing so, Man Ray’s film is the first poetry-film hybrid, which will be discussed later.

Despite Man Ray’s short involvement with film, his influence was enormous in the discussion of the relationship between film and poetry and the project of a modernist film practice. As narrative cinema took over and film became more and more realistic, Man Ray decided to abandon filmmaking, as for him filmmaking was something intrinsically poetic. In fact ever since he abandoned filmmaking in 1929 his only re-involvement with film was in collaboration with poets, like Jacques Prevert, Andre Breton and Paul Eluard in attempts that materialized in scripts which were however never realized as films.

• Vertov, Shklovsky & the Russian Formalists

The Russian school of formalist writers and artists was the first one to attempt an analysis of film poetics and more generally the language of film. In the 1927 book ‘Poetics of Cinema’ (Poetica Kino) formalist writers Boris Eikhenbaum, Viktor Shklovsky and others analysed the relationship between visual and literary languages and tried to apply theories of formalist poetry on film. This visual / literary parallel the formalists attempted has been often criticized. Paul Schmidt suggests that “the major assumption with which they began, that film was like literature’ led them to propose a ‘language’ of film, analogous to natural language” [23] . Although indeed the notion of drawing parallels between new and pre-existing arts is problematic (and Tynyanov realizes this: “to name the cinema in relation to the neighbouring arts is just as unproductive as naming those arts according to the cinema” [24] , the formalists’ 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 nucleus” [25] . 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 phrase” [26] . 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 cine-period 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 continuity” [27] . 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 not” [28] , 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 language” [29] . 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 Dulac’s 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’. For the purposes of the essay, the most influential text in Poetica Kino was Viktor Shklovsky’s 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 resolution” [30] . 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 composition” [31] . 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 Tarkovsky’s cinema as poetic” [32] . 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 Vertov’s kinesthetic work as poetic: “there is no doubt that Dziga Vertov’s ‘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 triolet” [33] . Although Vertov used representational images from the world around him, his primary interest was the reconstruction of these images, adhering thus to formalist principles. Shklovsky’s 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 Vertov’s work has been frequently analysed in terms of the notions of socialist realism and formalism, the connection between Vertov’s work and poetry/poetics has rarely been presented (exceptions quoted here). Vertov’s interest in poetry was possibly the greatest of all the filmmakers discussed in 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 strip” [34] . The parallel between characteristics of Vertov’s 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 Mayakovsky’s 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 Vertov’s 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 style” [35] . Petric takes the parallel even further and suggests that in Mayakovsky’s poem ‘Morning’ “the structuring of the lines, some of which consist of only one or one-and-a-half words (!), is reminiscent of Vertov’s use of a single frame as a shot or montage unit” [36] . 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 Vertov’s 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, Vertov’s 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 suggests [37] – between Vertov and the American filmmaker Maya Deren in her theory of film’s ‘vertical possibilities’. Deren’s theory will be analysed in a further chapter.

Similar to the theories of the formalists, but slightly more aggressive – and slightly predating them – are those of the futurists. The futurists believed in the destruction of early twentieth century notions of aesthetics and beauty. In futurist poetry this manifested in an increasing interest in the word – as opposed to the phrase – as the basis of expression and even a further deconstruction of the word into letters and sounds. In her description of A. Kruchenkh’s futurist poem ‘Pomada’ (and further comparison to Vertov’s work), Anna Lawton suggests that: “the images in this poem are liberated from any kind of causal relationship and arranged in rhythmic segments… endowing the text with a new and fresh meaning based on analogical relationships” [38] . This statement could be applied to Vertov’s work, in which there is a tendency to fragmentise – from the sequence to the shot, from the shot to the frame. As in furturist poetry, even the smallest particles are important and useful for Vertov, which explains his frequent use of short-length, almost subliminally visible shots.

• Singer examines Vertov’s work in relation to the poetry of Walt Whitman. Although it is probably more difficult to draw parallels between Vertov and Whitman, as they are chronologically significantly far apart, there is a number of instances in Vertov’s work that showcase not only an interest on, but a direct influence from Whitman’s poems. Singer notes a number of similarities in the stylistics of the filmmaker and the poet (realist, fast-paced etc), but most importantly mentions the imagistic characteristics they share. He argues: “both exhibit a style of imagistic effusiveness, richness, and intensity of presentation” and “in both, the creating eye is omnivorous, seizing the diverse physical environment with a voracious eclecticism” [39] (Singer, pg. 250). The notion of eclectic representation is very important, as it could be argued that it is this eclecticism that separates the poetic and the prosaic text. At the same time, both Whitman and Vertov have a celebratory stance towards the world – they both seek to ‘sing’ the world around them constructing ethnographic poetics.
• Hans Richter

One of the most important writers and practitioners on the ‘film poem’ is German experimental filmmaker and artist Hans Richter. He started writing on the poetic nature of film already in the 20s, but it was not until significantly later that his writings were framed as writings on film poetry. A significant amount of his early published material was revised and republished in the 50s when the notion of the film poem regained importance in the American avant-garde film movement. For this reason, it is very difficult to examine how prophetic and revolutionary his writings were; yet, they remain extremely important for the study of the film poem today.

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 tell” [40] . 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 speaker” [41] . 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 improvisation” [42] . There is a number of points to notice in Richter’s 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 poetry’s 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 writer’s work is esthetic invention, that of the filmmaker is first linguistic invention, then esthetic” [43] . When collecting footage, then, Richter practically compiles his visual dictionary, a dictionary which is only a starting point for creativity, what Pasolini calls ‘linguistic invention’. In this respect, the essential poetic element of cinema is for Richter montage. As David Finch suggests “Film montage and language metaphor use some of the same mental processes. (…) Metaphor in both film and language can produce a third thing from the combination of two elements, an image not producible in any other way” [44] . Thus, film montage is the equivalent of putting together two phrases for metaphorical effect, as it happens often in poetry.

Richter also foresaw what would later be named poetry-film, the genre in which literary poetry and film art are combined in a new form (analysed later). His film ‘Dadascope’ which is a semi-abstract documentary on dadaist poetry consists of the combination of dadaist poetry read on top of visuals (or vice-versa). “When you use poems as a background instead of music, and you let your hand, or scissors in the case of editing, wander together with the poem, that could give you a new form of film” [45] he claims. Indeed the notion of using actual poetry read on top of or together with filmed material was to later form a new genre. Yet this is not one of the primary interests of Richter.

Richter’s view on the role of the audience also uses the notion of the poetic, against as opposed to the straightforward narrative: “The direct action-form of the entertainment film (…) has been replaced in film poetry by the rather free use of the symbol. (…) The accent, therefore, has been shifted from asking the audience to understand clearly, to asking the audience to swing with the symbols freely, and to respond to their meaning, whether universal or personal, in an intuitive way, by opening up, by giving itself freely to the special work of art” [46] . What Richter suggests is that the symbolic language of the film poem is more open to interpretation than that of the novelistic entertainment film. Furthermore, he calls the audience to ‘swing with the symbols freely’ and become an active interpreter of what is presented. He stresses the notion of intuition and in a way suggests that the film poem should primarily be felt or experienced as opposed to understood.

Despite the fact that Richter’s writings are extremely important for a research towards the notion of ‘film poetry’, there is a significant problem that emerges from most of his writing. Richter seems to be confusing the notion of ‘modernist film’, or what has been called the avant-garde with the notion of the film poem. In fact he states that: “The reason I use the word ‘poetry’ is to set it off against the ‘film novel’, which is represented by the entertainment film, or the reportage which is represented by the documentary. Where I would consider the entertainment film as ‘novel’, I would describe the exploration into the realm of mood, the lyrical sensation as ‘poetry’. I would call all experimental films ‘film poetry’ [47] . Although this quote is useful in establishing a notion of poetry vs prose in the cinema, it is very problematic to include all experimental films in the category of ‘film poetry’. Such a statement seems to be taking for granted that all experimental films are the lyrical exploration of a mood, something which certainly is not a primary interest in the more essayistic nature of the structural film. At the same time, it is not clear why what he calls the ‘entertainment’ film or the documentary could not possess the same mood exploration, lyric qualities he suggests. Documentarist film poets such as Margaret Tait would certainly disagree with him.

• Maya Deren & the Cinema 16 Symposium

Maya Deren was the first major theorist to write extensively about the relationship between film and poetry and actually make the notion of ‘poetics of film’ the basis of her theory and practice. Being one of the first filmmakers in a long tradition that would later be known as the new American avant-garde, her writings were extremely influential and had a certain polemic tone. Arguing for a new, modern cinema, Deren adopted the modernist model inherited by people like Dziga Vertov, of cinema based on its total separation from the other arts. Sounding significantly like Dulac, Deren believed that the ‘real’ essence of film lies on the visual elements of camera and montage, elements that are particular in the art of film. Renata Jackson quotes: “Deren was quite adamant about the avoidance of literary or theatrical adaptation, abstract animation, or the imitation of objective reality for the creation of film-art. It is very telling then that, of all the art-forms referred to ‘Anagram’ [a text about art, film and poetics] other than film, poetry is not only the most sympathetically portrayed, but also is the only one from which Deren condones the borrowing of analogous creative methods, without her familiar warnings to the film-artist against misappropriating the expressive means of the other arts” [48] .

Although Deren believes that film should not be influenced by or reduced to a presentation of the other arts, she does not find contradictory to refer to the art of poetry as an art that works in similar ways as film. Within the same text, the ‘Anagram’, a text on the nature of film, art and the ways in which she herself works, she incorporated a fundamentalist medium-specific notion of what film is: “the capacity of the camera to represent a given reality in its own terms, to the extent that it is accepted as a substitute proper for that reality” [49] as well as made parallel to literary poetics: “just as the verbal logics of a poem are composed of the relationships established through syntax, assonance, rhyme, and other such verbal methods, so in film there are processes of filmic relationships which derive from the instrument and the elements of its manipulations” [50] . Although Deren believed in medium-specificity, she did not find it problematic to refer to draw a model of her film from a literary art. It is interesting at this point to note that this contradiction is also evident in Dziga Vertov’s writing, as Vertov also believed in medium-specificity [the introductory sequence of ‘The Man With A Movie Camera’ is a ‘proud announcement that it is an art of cinema based on its seperation from the other arts], but at the same time found poetic models useful. To stress the similarities even more, it is worth noticing that both filmmakers shared an interest in documentary cinema, but both believed that reality is only a starting point for expression.

Deren’s concepts on the relationship between film and poetry were best expressed in a symposium held in 1953 by pioneering film society Cinema 16, in which a number of writers, filmmakers and poets discussed the possibilities of drawing parallels between the two media. In this symposium Deren described her notion of verticality in relation to the structure of film, a theory which would later have a strong influence on the whole of the American avant-garde: “The distinction of poetry is its construction and the poetic construct arises from the fact that it is a ‘vertical’ investigation of a situation, in that it probes the ramifications of the moment, and is concerned with its qualities and its depth, so that you have poetry concerned in a sense not with what is occurring, but with what it feels like or what it means” [51] . The notion of trying to pinpoint what poetry was generally not well-received by other members of the panel and the reactions were numerous, from poet Dylan Thomas crudely parodying the theory, to writer Arthur Miller suggesting that what Deren calls the ‘vertical’ and the ‘horizontal’ can not actually be separated. Deren used a number of examples to illustrate what each of the two movements meant, for example she referred to the notion of the establishing shot in a narrative film as a poetic moment, a moment where the narrative does not evolve but there is an illumination of a place, a person or some form of theme. She suggested the same for dreaming sequences, as well as the poetic monologues in Shakespeare.

Although Deren’s arguments were not well received at the time, in retrospect it seems that Deren’s notions of the horizontal and the vertical are simply a more visual rephrasing of notions of the paradigmatic and syntagmatic that the structuralists had already mentioned and that were widely accepted by that time. Structuralist theorist Roman Jakobson made a distinction between language’s substitutable elements (the paradigmatic axis) and non-substitutable, linear elements (the syntagmatic axis). In his analysis of Jakobson’s work, Richard Bradford suggests that “the syntagmatic, combinative pole is that which anchors language to the prelinguistic world events and impressions, while its paradigmatic, selective counterpart is that which effects a more subjective and perhaps bizarre relationship between the mind of the addresser and the code of linguistic signs” [52] . According to Annette Michelson, Deren’s writing argued for “a recognition for the cinema, in cinema, of the duality of linguistic structure, that very duality that Jakobson was to propose… as the metonymic and metaphoric modes on which contemporary film theory eventually builds” [53] . Whereas the syntagmatic / metonymic modes called for unity and linearity, the paradigmatic / metaphoric modes called for fragmentation and since film was primarily an entertainment industry, it was the syntagmatic mode that developed significantly more and in expense of the paradigmatic. Michelson continues: “it was against this hegemony and in validation of a commitment to the substitutive metaphor as an essential constructive element that Deren spoke, and the set of formal strategies entailed by this position and deeply grounded in montage was to generate an entire rethinking, not only of composition and production, but eventually, of distribution, exhibition, and reception as well” [54] .

It almost seems that Deren’s writings of the poetic possibilities of film were not simply an artist’s statement on their work, but a foundation for the polemics of a new era for film and a requestioning of all the aspects of film. What is even more important in the case of Deren – and specifically important for the purposes of this essay – is that Deren’s theries were always connected to her practice. Michelson points that one of the similarities between Deren and film therist and practitioner Sergei Eisenstein is ‘the sense of a constant and intimate articulation of theory with practice, a relentless concern with systematization, the determination to ground innovative practice in theory. And, of course, the manner in which both practice and theory stand in relation of fruitful, unresolved tension, at variance with those of industrial production in her time” [55] . All of the theoreticians mentioned in this essay were practitioners themselves,but in the case of Deren the relationships between theory and practice were almost ‘scientific’. Whereas Dulac, Ray, Richter and Vertov all talked about the poetic possibilities of film, they seemed to work relatively intuitively in their own practice. Deren’s application of theory into practice (and back and forth) would go all the way to attempting to create ‘film-haikus’ or analyse in a very detailed formalist manner her personal work.

In her attempts to define the film poem, Deren has mentioned a number of characteristics, which she believes film poems share. She mentions that these films are usually short, because as she argues “it is difficult to maintain such intensity for a long period of time” [56] and as such parallelises them with lyric poems. The notion of the possibility of longer lyrical works would later be criticized by the feature length works of people like Stan Brakhage and Gregory Markopoulos. Also Deren suggests that in the metaphoric language of film, the element of montage is essential, but then arrives to the problematic conclusion: “film, I believe, lends itself particularly to the poetic statement, because it is essentially a montage and therefore, seems by its very nature to be a poetic medium” [57] . The notion that film is an inherently poetic medium is not useful for the purposes of this essay. At the same time, it is a statement that contradicts Deren’s whole attempt to separate between poetic and non-poetic filmic expression.

When Deren places such importance on montage, it is because she believes in structures. In a lecture she gave about her films in 1951, she states that “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 “…don’t 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 emotions” [58] . Thus, it is the placement of the image of the sun within the context of someone’s 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 Deren’s 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 Deren’s 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 Deren’s 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 relationships” [59] . 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 pulse” [60] .

In order to finish the discussion of Deren’s contribution to the ideas of the relationship of poetry and film, it is useful to mention Deren’s 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 editing” [61] , Deren states. Yet despite this basic principal Deren finds a number of problems in the parallel, primarily to do with the notion of structuring her film haikus together: “one has random access to a book of haiku… but a film made up of haiku would necessarily be in an imposed sequence” [62] , arriving to the unquestionable “what is the principal, the form which would determine such a sequence? (…) Common locales? (…) Increasing intensity? Contrast? Perhaps like the movements of a musical composition?” [63] . After years of dealing with the parallel between film and poetry, Deren still arrives to basic questions of form, which showcases the fact that she was such an ever-questioning spirit, but also probably highlights the difficulty if not impossibility to apply rules in the attempt of literary / cinematic form parallels.

• Stan Brakhage as a Modernist/Romantic Poet

Stan Brakhage is arguable the single most discussed filmmaker in terms of the relationship between film and poetry. The formal complexity of his work has been often paralleled with this of the modernist poets, whereas his reclusive life seems to resemble the romantic poets’ stance towards society. Brakhage also lived in a place and time where the ground for such research was opened up by filmmakers and theoreticians. Brakhage himself was a poet and had personal relationships with poets. Already in 1966 he stated that “poetry and painting have alternately proved more growth-engendering sources of inspiration than either the trappings of the stage or the specific continuity limitations of any ‘making up a story’, novelistic tendencies etc” [64] [the influence of Abstract Expressionist painting on Brakhage is very important although it will not be discussed here]. Poets themselves appreciated the work of Brakhage and felt that he realized in visual terms what they worked on verbally and establishing connections between their work and Brakhage’s. American poet Robert Kelly writes that “we loved him [Brakhage] when he moved against the narrative, and counterposed against old narrative a deeper new sense of telling. Telling the eyes, not telling the story… We loved him for erasing any pre-existent story, and allowing to come forward only the story that the film/ing editing/ could tell, could tell by making us see… Anybody can write. A writer is someone with an eraser. So that the writing of the film might properly be spoken of, and I do speak it, Brakhage wrote (erased) his films. We saw (were denied the sight)” [65] .

One of the most important writers on Brakhage and the American avant-garde of the 60s is Adams P. Sitney. In his analysis of the work of Brakhage, Sitney refers to the ‘Lyrical Film’, a definition which is not exactly a film genre with specific characteristics, but rather an approach to filmmaking. Sitney states: “The lyrical film postulates the film-maker behind the camera as the first-person protagonist of the film. The images of the film are what he sees, filmed in such a way that we never forget his presence and we now how he is reacting to his vision” [66] . 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 speaker” [67] . Brakhage’s films seem to have all of those characteristics – they are made by a single person, they express this person’s 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 all” [68] . Equally Brakhage’s films take various forms and structures and sometimes even feel so open-ended that they are almost structure-less.

In an earlier analysis of Brakhage’s ‘Dog Star Man’, one of his most important works, Sitney claims that the objective and subjective point of view are nevr quite clear. In Sitney’s 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 film” [69] . This difficulty in distinguishing between the subjective and the objective is increased by Brakhage’s 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 Eisenstin’s ‘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 relationship” [70] . Brakhage’s 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 “Brakhage’s 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, Brakhage’s transformations of the image have the end of revealing the operations of the imagination… Deren believed to the contrary that cinematography, as a photographically based medium, has a strong commitment to unmanipulated reality” [71] . For Deren, as for Dziga Vertov before her, the essence of film is capturing what is in front of the camera out in the world and therefore creation is a process from the outside towards the inside. Brakhage’s imagination plays such an important role to his work that towards the end of his career he even developed a theory of ‘closed eye vision’ which resulted in creating some of his most abstract works.

In this respect, Brakhage’s work is less of a documentary / diary nature and closer to abstract expressionism. This kind of expression is for Ken Kelman the central aspect of the film-poem: “Film-poem must be primarily developed in terms of personal, ‘abstract’ expression; and only secondarily to that may narrative, or any other formal effect, be introduced” [72] and adds that “when the film-poem utilizes ‘real’ characters and situations, it must transform them to symbols of the filmmaker’s thoughts and feelings” [73] . A definition of the film-poem like this would define a work as the ‘Man with a Move Camera’ as impressionistic, since images do not symbolized an internal state and therefore inappropriate to be called a film poem. On the contrary in Brakhage “the external world is transfigured by the internal; the internal world is objectified by the outer. Physical ‘reality’ is not shown for its own sake, so much as for that of the subjective emotion associated with it” [74] . Although, this is a useful way of approaching Brakhage’s films, this statement is slightly problematic as it could be argued that the interplay between the internal and the external is found in any filmmaker’s work. At the same time, stressing Brakhage’s imagination as a driving force might mean disregarding his absolute commitment to immediate perception, a characteristic he shared with poet Charles Olson. According to David James “Olson’s stress on immediate perception and on the poem’s continuous self-generation out of its present are nodes around which Brakhage’s own theories and the details of the style he created during the sixties fall into place: his total and physical involvement in the shooting process” [75] .

One of the most polemical supporters of the work of lyrical filmmakers was Jonas Mekas, the most consistent member of the New York Filmmakers Coop from the sixties until today. Ironically, Mekas was initially one of the harshest critics of the new American filmpoem. In his 1955 essay ‘The experimental film in America’ (which caused an uproar between others for its homophobic stance) Mekas states that “The film poets, not unlike most of our contemporary writers, are so fascinated by their personal worlds that they do not feel a need to communicate nor give to their characters or stories a larger, more human scope” [76] . Only seven years later, Mekas sees this personal stance of the film poet not as a self-indulgent practice, but as a means of arriving to a personal truth. On his article ‘Notes on the New American Cinema’ he states “Like the new poet, the new film-maker is not interested in public acceptance. The new artist knows that most of what’s publicly said today is corrupt and distorted” [77] and calls Brakhage, Menken and Breer the ‘pure poets of cinema’.

David James adds another, more political and biographical dimension to the notion of Brakhage as a personal poet. He claims that “the ideal of an anti-technological, organically human cinema (…) was lived by Brakhage in his retreat from the city to a nineteenth-century log cabin in the Colorado wilderness, where with his family he could be most free (…) to re-create the Romantic problematique” [78] . In this respect, Brakhage comes across as a romantic poet not only because of the quality of his work, but also of the choices that inform the context in which this work was created. This strategy of removing one’s self from the ‘distractions’ of the social world in order to create was a typical romantic strategy from Thoreau to Wordsworth and Coleridge. This choice “necessitated a working organization, a mode of production and distribution, alternative to the technology, labor practices, and institutional insertion of Hollywood” [79] . As the romantic poet was displaced from a social environment, the film-poet (and for our purposes Brakhage) created outside the industrial capitalist system, whose strict ‘professional’ mode of production is not open enough for personal expression. Brakhage considered himself an amateur in the original sense of the word, someone who loves what they do as opposed to a professional who works for commercial gain.

Leaving the personal element aside, Brakhage’s work has often been thought of as poetic for its formal qualities. This time it is not the romantic but modernist poet model that is applied – mainly modernist free verse. Both Sitney and Mekas when referring to ‘Dog Star Man’ use a parallel between visual and linguistic elements. Mekas suggests that in the ‘prelude’ of the film “the images

• ‘Poetry-film’: a cross-discipline genre          

This essay has so far approached the notion of film poetry from a somewhat modernist, purist perspective: poetry in film not in a direct literal inclusion of poetic text, but as an application of poetic concerns on film. This approach, which was prevalent until the 80s, was a result of the writings of the early modernist film critics, who wanted to establish an independent filmic language. Both for Vertov and Dulac as we have seen in the chapters above film a purely visual medium and therefore any ‘poetics’ incorporated within film should arrive from the image itself. Hence, both of these filmmakers opposed strongly to the use of intertitles, as they believed that intertitles somehow undermined the visual continuity of film in the name of establishing clear concepts and a linear narrative. The coming of sound in the cinema permitted for intertitles to be abandoned, however – to the regret of early experimental filmmakers – a significantly more strictly narrative tradition was established. As William Wees suggests: “the union of words and images strengthened cinema’s ties to realism and narrative. By closing the spatial-temporal gap between characters speaking and the words they spoke, it eliminated a nagging reminder of cinema’s artifice, its technological mediation between the spectator and the ‘world’ of film [80] .

Not everybody in the modernist avant-garde as it developed between the 20s and the 70s was opposed to the notion of words not only being used in a film, but actually enhancing the poetic qualities of a film. As already mentioned Man Ray used text in his ‘Etoile de Mer’ cine-poem. Even someone who believed very strongly on the visual qualities of film like Maya Deren did not consider the possibility of using spoken language as a contradiction to film’s visual value. In the ‘Poetry and Film’ symposium and in answer to Arthur Miller’s claim that words should not be used in films, Deren suggests that words “would be redundant in film if they were used as a further projection from the image. However, if they were brought in on a different level, not issuing from the image which should be complete in itself, but as another dimension relating to it, then it is the two things together that make a poem” [81] . American filmmaker Ian Hugo worked in this way in his 1952 work ‘Bells of Atlantis’. As Abel Gance argues “the marriage of image, text, and sound is so magical that it is impossible to dissociate them in order to explain the favorable reactions of one’s unconscious” [82] .

This combination of image and text (at once independent and interdependent) forms what William Wees has called the ‘Poetry-film’ genre. As he suggests “a number of avant-garde film and video makers have created a synthesis of poetry and film that generates associations, connotations and metaphors neither the verbal nor the visual text would produce on its own” [83] . It is important at this point to notice that Wees uses a new term, instead of sticking to the over-used ‘film poem’. Wees continues, explaining the reasons why poetry-films have been generally discarded: “while film poems have long been recognized as central to the avant-garde film tradition, poetry-films have received little special attention (…) because poetry-films are a kind of hybrid art form and, therefore, seem less ‘pure’, less essentially cinematic, in the high modernist sense” [84] . This approach was first proposed in Wees’ influential essay ‘the poetry film’ published in 1984. In this essay, Wees claims that it was possibly because of poets increasingly being interested in film that the hybrid art form emerged, quoting poetry-film workshops organized in San Francisco by filmmaker and poet Herman Berlandt, which did not neglect the old definition of the film poem, but was also interested in the new combinative form.

Illustrating this combination process, Wees argues that poetry-film “expands upon the specific denotations of words and the limited iconic references of images to produce a much broader range of connotations, associations, metaphors. At the same time, it puts limits on the potentially limitless possibilities of meaning in words and images, and directs our responses toward some concretely communicable experience” [85] . Thus, poetry-films expand the possibilities of visual / conceptual connections and offer different way in researching the notion of a visual metaphor, while at the same time using audio-visual temporal specificity make possible for more direct metaphorical connections. The ways literary poetry will be incorporated in a whole are various: “sometimes the poets are shown reciting their poems… in ‘bells of atlantis’ he hear Anais Nin’s voice, but see her only as a mysterious figure in a dream world; whereas in a number of instances we hear the poets but do not see them at all. Sometimes, the words themselves become images and appear as visual text on the screen” [86] . The poetry-film is interested in the fine line between text as word or image, spoken voice as words or sounds and the question of whether image or concept come first in a human mind, discussions that were prevalent in 20 th century literature and analysed by people like Italo Calvino and others.

The new hybrid art form resulted in a number of poetry-film festivals starting to appear in the 90s in the US. It was, however, in the UK that poetry-films became such a popular genre that even television channels started commissioning poets and filmmakers to create poetry-films. Literary poetry societies soon got interested and the 90s saw the publication of ‘Film Poem Poem Film’, a periodical brochure of the South London Poem Film Society. The National Film Theatre presented a number of ‘Film Poem’ programmes, curated by Peter Todd, who was involved with the publication of ‘FPPF’. The more literary and mainstream the concept of film poetry became, the more definitions started to blur. William Wees’ notion of the ‘poetry-film’, which was fundamental for the new hybrid genre was used less frequently and soon the new poetry-films were classified under the more general and less useful notion of the film poem, which Wees clearly saw as a distinctly different genre than that of the poetry-film. Filmmaker Ian Cottage refers to the ‘poem film’, while filmmaker and poet Tony Harrison prefers the notion of the ‘film-poem’ with a hyphen. Robert Speranza, who has studied the work of Harrisson and the British film-poem suggests that the new poets and filmmakers that came together “attempted a spontaneous creation of film and verse calling the results film/poems or film-poems. (…) I use the hyphen to easily distinguish between these and other film poems” [87] .

Unfortunately, the use of hyphen which Speranza sees as significant was often forgotten resulting in a further confusion about the concept of the film poem (which was confusing before the poetry-film anyway). Thus the NFT screenings of ‘Film Poems’ seem like a very loosely connected curation of films, some of which used spoken or written poetry, hence belonged in the new poetry-film tradition, some of which belonged in the more general tradition of the film poem as it was established in the American and European avant-garde and some that fell in between, that were simply considered poetic attempts by their makers. In an interview with Speranza, Todd gives very general – if not contradicting – definitions, suggesting that film poems “are driven by poets themselves, wishing to explore new areas and ideas, or alternatively, they might be looking for an area which is somewhere between the poetry they are writing and visual material”, hence using the poetry-film model. Later in an attempt to include the less straight-forward, non-literary film poems, he argues that “the film poem does not have the structure that a traditional Hollywood script or traditional play would have. It does things that sometimes you could say poetry might do, such as different rhythms, repetitions, you might be dealing more with trying to conjure up a mood rather than a narrative” [88] . While this definition sounds slightly like Deren’s notion of the vertical, the notion of the film poem simply being a non-Hollywood structure is not very useful, as it could encompass not only all kinds of experimental filmmaking, but even the more artistic European traditions of film and basically suggest that all non-clearly-narrative film is a film poem.

In an attempt to clear the area, the new British film poets who were working primarily on poetry-film set up a number of ‘rules’ for making these films. Ian Cottage lists 14 characteristics / rules of the film poem, some of which were reflecting on the romantic notion of poetry (as seen in Brakhage): (No. 6): “A minimal crew must be used for the shoot. Preferably the filmmaker and a camera”, others seem almost random: (No. 5) “The poem film must be shot on film”, (No. 3) “The film and poem should be created in no more than three days”, while others where so general that were simply not useful: (No. 4) “Both poet and filmmaker should push the boundaries of the poem film” [89] . The polemic language used showcases that Cottage’s interest is not in creating a clear discussion of the possible interests behind the notion of the film poem, but to create a ‘dogma’ (similar to the Danish Dogme 95 filmmakers), which can create some hype and therefore a support for the new hybrid art form. It is not surprising in that respect that a large number of the films Todd selected for his NFT nights are British, equally showcasing a support for local production and pushing the establishment of the idea that film poetry has been an influential concept in the film history of a country that historically has not shown a great interest in it, at least in the notion of film as lyricism / modernism as it appeared in the American / French / Russian avant-garde.

Despite the fact the notion of the poetry-film was a significant opposition to the way in which the relationship between film and poetry had been examined 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 filmmaker’s perspective, and to investigate more directly the formal similarities between film and poetry” [90] . 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.

Film Poetry: A Historical Analysis is reprinted here by permission of the author, Fil Ieropoulos

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[1] 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

[4] 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

[6] 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

[11] Ibid, pg 46

[12] McCreary, Eugene, C. “Louis Delluc, Film Theorist, Critic, and Prophet” in Cinema Journal Vol 16, Issue 1, Autumn 1976, pg 23

[13] Christie, Ian, “French Avant-Garde in the Twenties” in Curtis, David & Francis, Richard (eds), Film As Film: Formal Experiment In Film , London: Arts Council of Britain, 1979, pg 39

[14] Man Ray, “Emak Bakia”, Close-Up , Vol 1, No 2, August 1927, pg. 43-4

[15] McCabe, Susan, “Delight In Dislocation: The Cinematic Modernism of Stein, Chaplin, and Man Ray” in Modernism/Modernity , Vol 8, No 3, pg 431

[16] Ibid, pg 434

[17] Sitney, Adams P., Modernist Montage, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, pg 33

[18] 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

[21] Schwarz, Arturo, Man Ray: The Rigour of Imagination, Lodnon: Thames & Hudson, 1977, pg 296

[22] Vertov, Dziga, Man With A Movie Camera (Introductory Manifesto Sequence), 1929

[23] Schmidt, Paul, “First Speculations: Russian Formalist Film Theory” in Texas Studies in Literature and Language , vol 17, 1975, pg. 327

[24] Tynyanov, Yuri, “The Fundamentals Of Cinema” in Eikhenbaum, B. M. (ed, 1927) / Taylor, Richard (trans, 1982) Russian Poetics in Translation , Vol 9: “The Poetics of Cinema”, 1982, pg 36

[25] 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

[30] 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

[34] 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

[38] ??????, maybe Lawton, Anna, Cinema & The Russian Avant-Garde , Purdue University Paper, 1985, pg ???

[39] Singer, B., “Connoisseurs of Chaos: Whitman, Vertov and the ‘Poetic Survey’” in Literature Film Quarterly , Vol, 15, 4, 1987, pg 250

[40] Richter, Hans, Hans Richter , London: Thames & Hudson, 1971, pg 144

[41] 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

[44] Finch, David, “A Third Something: Montage, Film & Poetry” in Danino, Nina & Maziere, Michael (eds), The Undercut Reader , London: Wallflower Press, 2003, pg 63

[45] Richter, Hans, Hans Richter , London: Thames & Hudson, 1971, pg 155

[46] Mekas, Jonas (ed), “Hans Richter on the Nature of Film Poetry” (excerpts from interviews) in Film Culture , Vol. 3, No. 1, 1957, pg 7

[47] Ibid, pg 6

[48] Jackson, Renata, The Modernist Poetics & Experimental Film Practice of Maya Deren , New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002, pg 111

[49] Deren, Maya, “An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film” in Nichols, Bill (ed) Maya Deren & The Avant Garde , London: University of California Press, 2001, appendix, pg 30

[50] Ibid, pg 48

[51] Deren, Maya speaking in Maas, Willard (chairman), “Poetry & The Film: A symposium” in Film Culture No 29, Summer 1963, pg 56

[52] Bradford, Richard, Roman Jakobson: Life, Language, Art , London: Routledge, 1994, pg 13

[53] Michelson, Annette, “Poetics and Savage Thought: About Anagram” in Nichols, Bill (ed) Maya Deren & The Avant Garde , London: University of California Press, 2001, pg 26

[54] Ibid, pg 26

[55] Ibid, pg 27

[56] Deren, Maya speaking in Maas, Willard (chairman), “Poetry & The Film: A symposium” in Film Culture No 29, Summer 1963, pg 56

[57] Ibid, pg 59

[58] Deren, Maya, from a lecture given at the Cleveland Museum on April 6 th , 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

[62] Ibid, pg 161

[63] Ibid, pg 161

[64] Brakhage, Stan “On Music, Sound, Color, And Film” in Film Culture , No. 67-8, 1979, pg 130

[65] Kelly, Robert “Notes on Brakhage” in Steinhoff (ed), Stan Brakhage: Correspondences (Chicago Review), 47:4 Winter, 48:1 2001 Spring 2002, pg 164-7

[66] Sitney, Adams P., Visionary Film , New York: Oxford University Press, 1979, pg 142

[67] 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

[71] Elder, Bruce R. The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein & Charles Olsen , Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier Univ Pr, 1998, pg 502

[72] Kelman, Ken “Film as Poetry” in Film Cutlure , No. ???, ????, pg 23

[73] Ibid, pg 24

[74] Ibid, pg 26

[75] James, David “The Film-Maker as Romantic Poet: Brakhage and Olson” in Film Quarterly , Vol. 35, No. 3, pg 39

[76] Mekas, Jonas “The Experimental Film in America” in Sitney, Adams P. (ed) Film Culture Reader , New York: Praeger Film Books, 1970, pg 22-3

[77] Mekas, Jonas “Notes on the New American Cinema” in Sitney, Adams P. (ed) Film Culture Reader , New York: Praeger Film Books, 1970, pg 103

[78] James, David “The Film-Maker as Romantic Poet: Brakhage and Olson” in Film Quarterly , Vol. 35, No. 3, pg 38

[79] James, David E., Allegories Of Cinema , Princeton University Press, 1989, pg 32

[80] Wees, William “Introduction” in Wees, William & Dorland, Michael (eds) Words and Moving Images , Mediatexte Publications, 1984, pg 10

[81] Deren, Maya speaking in Maas, Willard (chairman), “Poetry & The Film: A symposium” in Film Culture No 29, Summer 1963, pg 59

[82] Gance, Abel quoted in Nin, Anais, “Poetics of the Film” in Film Culture , Vol. 30, ??????, pg 14

[83] Wees, William C., “Poetry-Films and Film Poems” in The Lux website, http://www.lux.org.uk , retrieved in 5 th March 2005 also originally published in ‘Film Poems’ programme notes, April 1999

[85] Wees, William “The Poetry Film” in Wees, William & Dorland, Michael (eds) Words and Moving Images , Mediatexte Publications, 1984, pg 109

[86] Wees, William “Poetry Film” in Todd, Peter (ed) Poem Film Film Poem , Newsletter 4 of the South London Poetry Film Society, March 1998, pg 5

[87] Speranza, Rob, Verses in the Celluloid (PhD), University of Sheffield, 2001, pg 119

[88] Todd, Peter in interview with Speranza, Rob in appendix of ibid., no pages indicated

[89] Cottage, Ian “Making Poem Films” in Peter Todd (ed) “Film Poem” programme notes, Arts Council of Britain and British Film Institute, 1999, pg 11

[90] Buxton Fringe Film Festival, “Film & Poetry in Buxton” in in Todd, Peter (ed) Poem Film Film Poem , Newsletter 2 of the South London Poetry Film Society, November 1997, no pages indicated

Experimental Cinema

News and resources on experimental films, the cinema of poetry, rating: .

Informed by the criticism of iconic filmmaker Pier Pasolini, The Cinema of Poetry offers spirited explorations of poetry's influence on classic films by Dimitri Kirsanoff, Ingmar Bergman, and Andrey Tarkovsky. It also highlights how avant-garde films made by Joseph Cornell, Lawrence Jordan, Jerome Hiler, Gregory Markopoulos, and others found rich, unexpected sources of inspiration in a diverse group of poets that includes Stéphane Mallarmé, Emily Dickinson, H.D., Ezra Pound, Robert Duncan, John Ashbery, and Aeschylus. Written with verve and panache, it represents the culmination of P. Adams Sitney's career-long fascination with the intersection of poetry, film, and the avant-garde. 

Since the publication of his foundational work, Visionary Film , P. Adams Sitney has been considered one of our most eloquent and insightful interlocutors on the relationship between American film and poetry. His latest study, The Cinema of Poetry, emphasizes the vibrant world of European cinema in addition to incorporating the author's long abiding concerns on American avant-garde cinema. The work is divided into two principal parts, the first dealing with poetry and a trio of films by Dimitri Kirsanoff, Ingmar Bergman, and Andrei Tarkovsky; the second part explores selected American verse with American avant-garde films by Stan Brakhage, Ken Jacobs, and others. Both parts are linked by Pier Paolo Pasolini's theoretical 1965 essay "Il cinema di poesia" where the writer/director describes the use of the literary device of "free indirect discourse," which accentuates the subjective point-of view as well as the illusion of functioning as if without a camera. In other words, the camera is absent, and the experience of the spectator is to plunge into the dreams and consciousness of the characters and images presented in film. Amplifying and applying the concepts advanced by Pasolini, Sitney offers extended readings of works by T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Charles Olson to demonstrate how modernist verse strives for the "camera-less" illusion achieved in a range of films that includes Fanny and Alexander , Stalker , Lawrence Jordan's Magic , and several short works by Joseph Cornell. 

Table of contents: - Preface - Introduction: An Autobiography of Enthusiasms I - Pier Paolo Pasolini and "The Cinema of 'Poetry'" - Dimitri Kirsanoff's Ménilmontant - Ingmar Bergman's Primal Scene - Andrey Tarkovsky's Concept of Poetry II - Poetry and the American Avant-garde Cinema - The Dialectict of Experience in Joseph Cornell's Films - Lawrence Jordan's Magical Instructions - Stan Brakhage's Poetics - Nathaniel Dorsky, Jerome Hiler, and the Polyvalent Film - Gregory J. Markopoulos and the Temenos

Google Books data: 

• P.Adams Sitney
• Stan Brakhage
• Lawrence Jordan
• Joseph Cornell
• Jerome Hiler
• Nathaniel Dorsky
• Gregory J. Markopoulos

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Literature and Film: A Brief Overview of Theory and Criticism

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The close relationship between literature and film has existed since the advent of cinema due to the strong visual characteristics of both media. D. W. Griffith wanted to film in the same way as Charles Dickens wrote novels. Similarly, Tolstoy wanted to write like a camera films (Paech, 1988, pp. 122–3). George Bluestone, in establishing the limits of both the novel and the film, argues that novelist and film director meet in the attempt “to make you see”, the former through the mind; the latter through the eye. For him, the root difference between the two media “lies between the percept of the visual image and the concept of the mental image” (1957, p. 137). He considers the end products of novel and film as representing different aesthetic genera, since each is autonomous and each is characterized by unique and specific properties (p. 139). Bluestone states that “a film is not thought; it is perceived” (p. 141). Therefore, film cannot have direct access to the power of discursive forms because it is a presentational medium (except for its use of dialogues). Whereas “the novel discourses, the film must picture” (p. 140).

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Experiencing the Filmpoem: A Film-Phenomenological Inquiry

Use the arrow to scroll through each film in the playlist above.

Author: Susannah Ramsay Format: Digital Video Duration: 5 x 2-4 minutes Published: March 2020 https://doi.org/10.37186/swrks/10.1/7

Research Statement

Experiencing the Filmpoem: A Film-Phenomenological Inquiry My interest in exploring the production of the filmpoem developed through experiencing Margaret Tait’s work, specifically her films that depict natural elements and the Scottish landscape. Tait, a self-proclaimed filmpoet from Orkney made over 30 films from the 1950s until her death in 1999. Studying at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome from 1950-52, Tait’s work was inspired by the Italian neo-realism movement, which she adopted in her own experimental style of filmmaking (Neely, 2017 pp. 9-10). Her work included film portraits, filmpoems, hand-painted animations, experimental films, plus the feature length film, Blue Black Permanent (1992).

The inspiration for my approach came from watching Aerial (Tait, 1974), a sensorial filmpoem, which is emotionally and philosophically charged. In Aerial , Tait presents a non-narrative reflection on the relationship between formal structure, the natural elements and human nature. The experience of watching Aerial left a lasting impression on me. In turn, this prompted me to question the different ways in which the filmpoem, as an art form, can engage in philosophical thinking.

Sarah Neely’s (2017, p. 110) assertion stating that filmpoems ‘can be meditations on reality, on what we see and how we look’ directed me towards how I could use film-philosophy in my work. Pursuing this avenue, I thought that film-phenomenology would be a good way into developing the potential of the filmpoem further. Moreover, the style of Tait’s filmpoem, a contemplative approach using semi-abstract images and rhythmical editing to evoke emotion, suggested to me that Aerial was inspired by a desire to connect the viewer intersubjectively. From this, I started to question to what extent does film-phenomenology inform, and impact the production and exhibition of the filmpoem?

Considering the nature of this question, I began to explore theories posited by Laura U. Marks (2000) and Jennifer Barker (2009) regarding the haptic and tactile image. As Marks suggests, the haptic image is a blurred image that invokes a form of looking analogous to touch (2000, p. xi). Barker’s theory of cinematic tactility relates to a reciprocal relationship between the viewer and screen, ‘a tactile mode of being in the world’, one that evokes bodily sensations and responses (2009, p. 29). Determined through my own intersubjective position, a perspective already inscribed in the real world, my approach uses the haptic and tactile image to emphasise my own sensorial experiences and perceptions. My creative practice transposes deep-seated ideas regarding my relationship with myself and the natural world through film form, e.g., camera movement, slow-motion, lens manipulation and editing. Insight is provided through this relationship to produce a reciprocal experience for the viewer.

In terms of exhibiting the filmpoem, I had a desire to question the different viewing conditions to understand how the filmpoem can be experienced.

Historically, the filmpoem has been viewed through traditional screenings, for example film festivals, small community venues, or as part of larger experimental film programmes. Viewing filmpoetry in these contexts preserves the integrity of the format (and filmmaker) through unique one off screenings; however, the ephemeral nature of these viewing conditions means that access to the work is limited after the event. Currently, a new wave of filmpoetry exists on the Internet; therefore, I began to explore the advantages and disadvantages of an online presence for the filmpoem?

Extracting aspects of Erika Balsom’s (2017, p. 81) suggestion regarding the legitimacy of web-based artist-led platforms, the advantage of an online presence for the filmpoem allows for curation, preservation and access to resources for learning and research. Following in the tradition of artists’ moving image websites, such as lightcone.org, circuit.org.nz and LUX.org.uk, which offers sales and distribution options also, dedicated filmpoetry websites, such as movingpoems.com, filmpoem.com and poetryfilmlive.com, provide instant access to films and filmmakers biographies. In broad terms, positive viewing conditions such as these minimise the disadvantages of work being screened without permission from the filmmaker. In terms of Experiencing the Filmpoem , instant access provides potential experiential opportunities and responses for the online audience, the advantage of which is articulated through the structure of the project, for instance, my work can be viewed as a whole project or as individual films.

In addition to questioning these modalities, I decided to produce filmpoems as moving image installations, again to advance ideas surrounding the viewing conditions. In terms of the phenomenological experience of viewing filmpoetry in an art gallery context, for example, I used Chrissie Iles’ concept regarding the inclusion of the projected image into a gallery space (2001, p. 33). Fostered by 1960s Minimalist art criticism, Iles recognised that for the viewer, an exhibition space became sculpturally and phenomenologically transformational when an object such as a film projector was integrated (2000, p. 252). To understand this further, I have interpreted Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the reflexive body, a phenomenological response to perceiving and experiencing modern art, to include moving images (1964, p. 124).

Merleau-Ponty’s notion suggests that the gallery-goer can embody the artwork through a dialogue between how their body experiences space, their heightened sense of perception and self-awareness (1964, p. 134). Responding to this Pontian perspective, the exhibition of The Essence of Place (2017), a nocturnal outdoor site-specific film installation, demonstrates the experiential impact of my work. For example, restructuring the Scottish landscape to include an exhibition format typically encountered in an art gallery context provided the itinerant viewer with an alternative way to view filmpoetry, in situ. The Essence of Place (2017) was commissioned by RSPB Loch Lomond to engage the public in wildlife and conservation issues in a creative way. Understanding the significance of place as a site for meaning resonates with Maeve Connolly’s (2009) work. In terms of viewing site-specific artworks, Connolly refers to place or the location of the work as prompting public memory (2009, p. 63). Therefore, artworks such as The Essence of Place can have the potential to impact on the social, environmental, conservational and historical awareness of the audience.

Context Historically, artists synonymous with the Italian and Russian Futurist movements were some of the first to synthesise painting, sculpture and photography with film to create the cine-poem – an explicit experimental film (Rees 1999, pp. 33-34; Christie 1998, p. 449; O’ Pray 2003, pp. 8-9).

More recently, William C. Wees’ (1999, p. 1) distinction combining film and poetry takes a two-pronged approach. Wees distinguishes between the filmpoem and poetry-film stating that the former is metaphorical and includes a non-narrative perspective using semi-abstract images, rhythmic editing and little or no spoken word, while the latter incorporates on-screen text and spoken word together with images of an illustrative nature. Key examples of poetry-film include, Manhatta (Sheeler & Strand, 1921), L’etoile de mer (Man Ray, 1928) and Bells of Atlantis (Hugo, 1952), while Meshes of the Afternoon (Deren & Hammid, 1942) has become a classic example of a filmpoem, according to Wees. My creative practice aligns with the filmpoetry distinction. Following this formal structure allows me to express emotion philosophically more freely, perhaps in a way that ordinary language or text cannot.

During the mid-to-late twentieth century, experimental filmmakers such as Jonas Mekas, Marie Menken, Margaret Tait and Joanna Margaret Paul continued to develop this personal form of filmmaking. Aligning with contemporary artists’ moving image practices, a term that includes film work typically inspired from the static art traditions of painting or sculpture, my work also speaks to the film practices of Uta Aurand, Helga Fanderl, Roxana Vilk, James Edmonds, Peter Todd, Guy Sherwin and Alastair Cook.

In terms of presenting the work in the best possible way, dedicated filmpoetry festivals such as the Weimar Filmpoetry Festival, Zebra Filmpoetry Festival (both Germany), Festival Silêncio, Portugal and the Athens International Videopoetry Festival are strategic. Considering the filmpoem in these contexts allows for a greater understanding of this experimental work, particularly in a time when such work is increasingly marginalised from mainstream film contexts.

Methods As a former Avid Media Composer editor for the television industry, exploring my own approach to filmpoetry meant that I could redefine my work from conventional filmmaking perspectives to experimental cinematic practices. Blurring the boundaries between formal constraints and creative practices, this development allowed me to become more artistically responsive towards my work. For instance, West of Dalabrog , Dislocation and The Essence of Place were shot on HD video and predominantly used formal techniques such as, composition that follows the rule of thirds and tripod-based camera movements. In contrast, Imprint and always carry a camera were shot on Super 8mm film and employed a hand-held approach to framing and movement. Moving from using HD video to Super 8mm film introduced my work to a tactile approach to filmmaking synonymous with Materialist film concepts (Gidal 1989). For instance, in Imprint (2018), I incorporated the sprocket holes, dirt and chemical residue on the filmstrip as content. Moreover, when combined with film-phenomenological concepts regarding the evocation of the senses through haptic and tactile images, this shift demonstrated how profound meaning could be produced beyond the subject matter.

Resonating with Helga Fanderl’s tactile approach to observing the natural world through her Super 8mm camera, my approach to filmmaking using my analogue camera differs from my approach to using an HD video camera. For example, Fanderl intimates the importance of how her body moves with her camera; how she perceives and expresses through the camera lens (Fanderl 2010, p. 18). Advancing this notion informed by film-phenomenological concepts, I use my Super 8mm camera to embody the landscape, simultaneously as I move and breathe within it. Immediately, as I perceive, I experience emotions to which I respond by actioning my Super 8mm camera. Movement, the use of lens manipulation and in-camera editing are formal aspects that I employ when responding to an emotion. Filming in this manner, I can express, in as much purity as possible, the natural landscape that surrounds me, a landscape that is always explicitly personal to me. This contrasts with digital filmmaking, where I typically held the camera at a distance, viewing the image through the LCD screen appendage, a perspective that separated me from the subject matter. Crucially, therefore, the tactile way in which I engage with my Super 8mm film camera emphasises the intersubjective nature of the project.

Outcomes Experiencing the Filmpoem explores the filmpoem format as an art form; as a poetic composition that interweaves experimental film practices with film-phenomenological concepts and creative self-expression. Key points of discussion concern how my approach to the production and exhibition of this format can connect to the sensorial memories and emotions of the viewer. Emerging from this discussion, an intersubjective relationship between the haptic and tactile image, the viewer and myself is engendered. Therefore, access to understanding emotional and sensorial embodied responses to film form and the subject matter is foregrounded for practitioners and academics. Moreover, in contrast to Jennifer Barker’s (2009) work regarding cinematic tactility, which typically refers to narrative cinema and how the body physically responds to a film when experiencing a heightened state of emotion, my work focuses on the subtlety of tactile responses. Echoing the reflective nature of the filmpoem, my approach invites a sense of caesura: an opportunity for empathic reciprocity between the viewer and myself, subtly oscillating between motion and stillness, inner and outer worlds, inhaling and exhaling breath.

For instance, this intended viewer reciprocity was foregrounded during the Screenworks review process for Experiencing the Filmpoem . Dr. Claire Henry, who agreed to be identified here, responded with a series of short poems to accompany her evaluation of the submission which sparked further dialogue, as she explained in email correspondence:

• Lines of the poems were prompted by the films as I viewed them and came in fragments, which were then pieced together analogous to the way I edit video (more than the way I edit academic writing). It just seemed appropriate that the call and response of the submission and review be in similar languages of cine/poetry – taken further, I might have responded in the medium of video. However, the format of written poetry seemed most appropriate for the kind of articulation, translation, and critique involved in reviewing this submission, while building off poetic and rhythmic responses that came naturally in reply to the work.

While Henry makes no claims at being a poet, these full responses are included alongside her review below.

In addition to Margaret Tait’s style of filmpoetry, the formal elements of my work are inspired by Peter Todd’s contemplative approach to filmmaking. Todd’s work utilises the quite observation of everyday objects found in the filmmaker’s immediate surroundings. In many ways my work speaks to Todd’s lingering, hand-held camerawork in Three Films Form the Room (2009), for example. This style of filmmaking offers a sense of tactile response for the viewer, emotions borne from the familiarity of objects. Echoing Todd’s momentary reflections that mirror the tradition of still life painting, contemporary filmmaker James Edmonds’ formal approach in Movement and Stillness (2015), for example, resonates with my approach to framing semi-abstract imagery in both Imprint and always carry a camera (both 2018). Extending these ideas for further discussion, I have drawn on traditions that invoke my creative inspiration, i.e., stills photography, the analogue film format and experimental cinema to observe the Scottish landscape. My filmpoems present a dialogue between hapticity and tactileness, rhythmic movement and asynchronous sound to invoke metaphorical connotations and emotional responses. In contrast to perhaps Tait’s and Todd’s style, my camerawork, editing and aesthetic approach in my later work is more in harmony with Edmonds’ fluidity and emotional responses to landscapes, as seen in his triptych Fleeting Landscapes (2007/2016).

Dissemination The scholarship for my research was a doctoral training partnership funded by the AHRC and SGSAH (Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities). Throughout my doctoral process, I have secured further funding from the University of Stirling at a faculty and departmental level for organising exhibitions and events to disseminate my work.

My work has been screened in a variety of contexts. For additional information please visit my website: www.susannahramsay.co.uk .

Flim screening: Film in Focus, Orkney Film Festival, 2019.

Film exhibition: An Lanntair Arts Centre, Stornoway, Isle of Lewis, 2018.

Film screening: Athens International Filmpoetry Festival 2018.

Film screening: filmpoetry event, including guests Guy Sherwin, Jen Hadfield and Jennifer R. Wicks, Macrobert Arts Centre, University of Stirling, 2017.

Film installation: Single-channel, outdoor, site-specific installation, RSPB Loch Lomond, 2017. For a review: https://theartsofslowcinema.com/2017/10/26/the-essence-of-place-susannah-ramsay-2017/

Official selection best international filmpoem, West of Dalabrog : Festival silêncio, Portugal 2017.

Best doctoral research nominee West of Dalabrog , AHRC Research in Film Awards 2016.

Film screening and presentation: Taigh Chearsabhagh Arts Centre, Isle of Uist as part of film artist Shona Illingworth’s Lesions in the Landscape exhibition, 2016.

Film screening and presentation: John Schueler art, poetry and film event, University of Stirling, 2016.

Film screening: Outside-in/Inside-out Poetry Festival, Glasgow, 2016.

West of Dalabrog and Dislocation screened on movingpoems.com, 2018.

Other screening contexts:

Assistant Teaching: Filmpoetry lecture and seminar, University of Stirling, 2019.

Assistant Teaching: Artists’ Moving Image Exhibition Practices, lecture and seminar, University of Stirling, 2019.

Film-Philosophy Conference, University of Brighton, 2019. Film screening and Presentation.

Film-Philosophy Conference, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, 2018. Film screening and Presentation.

MeCCSA Conference, London Southbank University, 2018. Film screening and presentation.

Practice-Based Research Conference, Film City, Glasgow, 2018. Film screening and presentation.

Film-Philosophy Conference, Lancaster University, 2017. Film Screening and Presentation.

Impact Two key incidences have demonstrated the impact that my practice-based research has had beyond contributions to academia.

In 2017, during the event commissioned by RSPB Loch Lomond, evidence that multi-sensorial experiences and memories had been evoked were informally translated to me after the audience had experienced The Essence of Place . As the visitors engaged in a mini-pilgrimage on a pathway through a subtly illuminated woodland area to the audio-visual experience, they intimated that their minds quietened and their senses became sharper. Through the intertwining of a sense of place with the external forces such as darkness and the late-October weather, it was apparent that the visitors’ inner worlds and perceptions could be challenged. For example, people familiar to the area suggested afterwards that the nocturnal setting became a rich palette of sensorial experiences that were previously unavailable to them. This arts-based event, therefore, was impactful through connecting with wildlife and nature conservation, which, in turn, resonates with perhaps the interaction we should be engaging with to highlight the current environmental issues.

A review of the experience can be viewed here: https://theartsofslowcinema.com/2017/10/26/the-essence-of-place-susannah-ramsay-2017/

The second incident happened at the exhibition of my work at An Lanntair Arts Centre, 2018. On the final night of the exhibition a man with learning difficulties was so overcome with emotion and excitement at seeing a deer jump in The Essence of Place , that he proceeded to name all the landmarks synonymous with the Isle of Lewis and Harris, which I had incorporated in my three-channel installation always carry a camera . According to the information I received, this animated expression of emotion was very much out of character for this person. The incident can be viewed on my blog page: https://www.susannahramsay.co.uk/single-post/2018/11/27/Exhibition-Experiencing-the-Filmpoem-at-An-Lanntair-Arts-Centre-Stornoway-Isle-of-Lewis-2018

Both occurrences carry impact beyond academia particularly the latter, which proved critical in understanding how my practice can contribute to the health and wellbeing of the audience. Focusing on the arts in health sector, I am investigating how the reflective qualities of the filmpoem can have further impact. Through working with Tayside Arts and Health Trust as a lead artist, I have facilitated a filmpoetry workshop for adults with aphasia (varying degrees of communication problems as a result of brain injury or stroke). Following the evaluation report, I will be looking to re-write this workshop for other groups.

References Balsom, E. (2017) After Uniqueness. A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation. New York: Columbia University Press.

Barker, J.M. (2009) The Tactile Eye. Touch and the Cinematic Experience. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Christie, I. (1998) ‘The Avant-Gardes and European Cinema before 1930’. In John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson, (eds.), The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 449-454.

Connolly, M. (2009) The Place of Artists’ Cinema. Space Site and Screen. Intellect Books: Bristol, UK/Chicago, USA.

Fanderl, H. (2010) ‘Film Live’, Sequence , Issue 1. Available at: http://helgafanderl.com/text/ (Date Accessed 7 th March 2018).

Gidal, P. (1989) Materialist Film. London and New York: Routledge.

Iles, C. (2000) ‘Video and Film Space’. In: E. Suderburg (ed.), Space, Site, Intervention. Situating Installation Art . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 252-262.

Iles, C. (2001) ‘Between the Still and Moving Image’. In: Chrissie Iles, (ed.), Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977 . New York: Whitney Museum, pp. 33-70.

Marks, L. U. (2000) The Skin of the Film. Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964) ‘Part II. Philosophy of Art. Chapter 5. ‘Eye and Mind’. In: The Primacy of Perception. And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics , J. M. Edie (ed.). Northwestern University Press, pp. 121-149.

Neely, S. (2017) Between Categories. The Films of Margaret Tait: Portraits, Poetry, Sound and Place . Bern: Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers.

O’ Pray, M. (2003) Avant-garde Film. Forms, Themes and Passions. London and New York: Wallflower Press, pp. 8-9.

Rees, A. L. (1999) A History of Experimental Film and Video. From the Canonical Avant-Garde to Contemporary British Practice. London: BFI Publishing, pp. 33-34.

Wees, W.C. (1999) ‘ Poetry-Films and Film Poems’. In Peter Todd (ed.), Film Poems – Programme Notes . Arts Council of England, pp. 1-2.

Filmography Manhatta (Sheeler & Strand, 1921, USA)

L’etoile de mer (Man Ray, 1928, France)

Bells of Atlantis (Hugo, 1952, USA)

Meshes of the Afternoon (Deren and Hammid, 1942, USA)

West of Dalabrog (Ramsay, 2016, UK/Scotland)

Dislocation (Ramsay, 2016, UK/Scotland)

The Essence of Place (Ramsay, 2017, UK/Scotland)

Imprint (Ramsay, 2018, UK/Scotland)

always carry a camera (Ramsay, 2018, UK/Scotland)

Aerial (Tait, 1974, UK/Scotland)

Blue Black Permanent (Tait, 1992, UK/Scotland)

Three Films Form the Room (Todd, 2009, UK)

Fleeting Landscapes (Edmonds, 2007/2016, UK)

Movement and Stillness (Edmonds, 2015, UK)

Online resources www.circuit.org.nz

http://filmpoem.com

https://lightcone.org/en

https://lux.org.uk

www.movingpoems.com

http://poetryfilmlive.com

https://www.susannahramsay.co.uk

Peer Reviews

All reviews refer to original research statements which have been edited in response to what follows:

Review 1: Accept submission subject to minor revisions. The wash of Susannah’s cinepoems sparked a syndochic image of the city I live in: a collection of shells, driftwood, pebbles, and tumbled glass gathered like a memorial near the doorstep of my old place in a central suburb of Wellington. The capital of New Zealand is wrapped in coastline and these gathered objects (or rather, the image of them in my memory) collect the beach strolls, the friends I went with, the times of day, and the seasons that wrap around the memory of the time I spent living in that place.

Just as these imaged souvenirs anchor a past to a place, Ramsay’s filmpoems draw attention to the materiality of place-based memory and their images, and play with the way that specific places are sensorially embedded in the flicker of our memory. She works with these ideas through montages of haptic images strongly evocative of specific places (that are yet reminiscent for those who have never been there). As a viewer so geographically distant from the places Ramsay depicts and remembers, the form enables intersubjective experiences and provokes sensory memories of similar landscapes of my own. The immediacy of voices and choices in the filmpoem hook the viewer into what Ramsey describes as the ‘personal affect and intimacy with the subject matter’ central to the essence of a filmpoem. The elegance of filmpoetry reveals to us how to touch and to hold what is far away in terms of both space and place, time and memory.

Poetic expressions of a relationship to place also highlight its nature as illusive and elusive. One can collect shells on a beach, and arrange them on a porch or windowsill at home, but while such a display presents both a material and haptic relationship to the beach, and evokes memories of a particular coastal place and time, it also highlights the ever ‘elsewhereness’ of these places. The dislocation is captured in the shells’ metonymic role to the beach, a place that in itself is a dislocated and multifaceted symbol with meanings at once deeply personal and commonly shared. Just as poetry in text offers lines to emotion and memory, Ramsay’s poetry in texture offers condensed articulation of sensory memory, and their arrangement (in montage and split screens) highlight connections and loss, location and dislocation. You’ve seen this before, and yet you haven’t; you’ve never been here before, and yet you dream to return.

always carry a camera (2018) Driving a windy coast With the window half down The thuddering wind takes me back. The ocean laps over the microphone My senses bounce between vistas. Coherence and dislocation A tension between eyes.

Imprint (2018) I am centred between sprocket holes. The viewer bracketed Between left and right eye. You surface a superimposition To my left, Shield a lens flare From my right. Holding me in dual perception.

The Essence of Place (2017) The birds elegiac above the landscape. My muscles are connected to bones, Yet I vibrate on leaves, land, and water. Flutters and ripples, Tickle and separate.

I am a surface tremour on this land. Blink between and brush past, A setting sun and a speckled leaf. Frame inside and cut between, Lapping waves and flocking birds.

West of Dalabrog (2016) Memories tug like a rip. Our eyes crawl over sand to follow focus. You take me to a place I cannot take in All at once. You choose how close I am to the textures Of your memory. Still I know how warm the gritty sand is, And how fast the returning wave sucks the sand From under my feet.

Dislocation (2016) The rocks held my eye As the beach grass touched my face. Our islands dislocated And all I have is the next shot The next sound You offer To piece together The place you cast Your camera next.

Review 2: Accept submission subject to minor revisions. Your supporting research statement is clearly written, topical and well researched but can be improved by inserting some more specifics. First of all, you have not given your statement a title. A more evocative title, instead of ‘supporting research statement’ can help to draw the reader into your world right from the start.

Furthermore, in the first section; ‘research questions’ you have included a good choice of authors as references but it would be helpful to demonstrate the proposed relationships more clearly. This could be done by including one or two succinct citations referring to what you call ‘the haptic and tactile image’. Such citation could help the reader to understand what this exactly entails. Secondly, to state that your research ‘seeks to distance itself’ from the context of film festivals and the internet seems both not entirely honest and unnecessarily negative. The reader of this journal will experience your work through an internet connection and you have shown your work on festivals. You could simply replace ‘distance’ with ‘expand’ but you might also find it interesting to review this statement and explore the advantages/disadvantageous of the different platforms in some more depth.

In the second section, you are referring to avant-garde works made on 16mm film. Please correct the spelling of Man Ray’s L’etoile de mer . It is also important to mention that there are many other contemporary filmmakers who are working in this form besides Peter Todd. Important examples could include Ana Vaz and James Edmonds but there are numerous others.

In the third section, ‘methods’ you again mention phenomenology but it is not entirely clear how this concept is being used. You also mention the use of HD video in contrast to HD video. It would be interesting to explore some of the differences and specificities of these formats, especially in the light of your earlier references that are exclusively shot and edited on 16mm film.

In the final section, Impact, you evocatively describe the experience of visitors to your exhibition. This is a strong section, underpinning your earlier statements concerning your desire to exhibit your film-poems in a new context. It would be useful to introduce this in one of the earlier sections, describing in some more detail how you have integrated the specifics of place with the projected image. What is particularly interesting here is how you are combining exterior with interior worlds; the landscape around the gallery, the shooting location, cinematic space and the experience of the audience. This also seems apt in regard of the renewed attention for nature that has grown out of the climate crisis and a shift from the urban to the rural driven by austerity and gentrification. Placing your research and practice in such a broader perspective could also be productive.

This is a thoughtful and strong project that deserves to be presented in the best possible way.

All reviews refer to original research statements which have been edited in response.

Moving Poems

Poetry in video form, poetry and film: an essay in two voices.

Marie Craven: If you have the time and inclination, Dave, I’m interested to hear your thoughts about the piece on Haunted Memory , by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin, that we published recently on the main Moving Poems side of the site.

Dave Bonta: It was an interesting essay, but I do feel that if its makers call something an essay film or an audiovisual essay, it’s not entirely fair to re-brand it as a film poem just because that’s what our site is about. I’m wary about a kind of hegemonic impulse that leads critics to expand the bounds of their favorite genre beyond a point that’s helpful for the average reader, listener or viewer. (I feel that TriQuarterly , for example, does this all too often for the pieces in their video section, branding them all as “video essays” even when they’re clearly adaptations of texts termed poems by their authors.)

Yes, Haunted Memory is very lyrical and resembles a lot of poetry films, but proponents of creative nonfiction would argue I think that it is a separate category distinct from journalism on the one hand and poetry on the other. So by the same token I’ve resisted the temptation to showcase especially poetic documentaries over the years, though there’s clearly plenty of overlap and mutual influence, and one can find examples of film-makers who work in both genres, such as Lori H. Ersolmaz and Roxana Vilk .

MC: Thanks for the feedback.

In one way, I see critical and theoretical writing about any art as inherently hegemonic, in that a position is adopted above the field it is mapping. But I take your point about re-branding, especially the part about stretching things to a point beyond what might be helpful to audiences.

About TriQuarterly : they published one of my videos in their current issue as a video essay. I have no problem with it. That piece, Kitsch Postcards , from a poem by Amanda Stewart, fits both categorisations, I think. Perhaps from a film-maker’s point of view, there is an element of pragmatism in how and why we may identify with certain genres or forms. The terminology may be more fluid for a film-maker than a critic or theorist.

DB: It’s not a bad thing to keep continuously challenging the rules, even one’s own rules. It’s entirely possible that I’ve gotten a little hide-bound about Moving Poems over the past ten years. And I can see where you’re coming from as a film-maker. But all categories are ultimately arbitrary and fluid; the question is, do they help or hinder our understanding? Poetry itself is notoriously hard to define, and I tend to side with those who simply say that a poem is whatever a poet says it is. So if a video artist declares themselves a poet and starts making what they call videopoems, I’ll consider their work for the site on that basis.

I’ve also somewhat arbitrarily ruled out films or videos lacking in anything that might be considered text, either in the soundtrack or on screen. I follow Tom Konyves in that regard. If I don’t also attempt to distinguish between poetry films and videopoems in a thoroughly Konyvesian fashion, that’s mainly because I see myself as a curator rather than a critic. It would simply be too confusing, and possibly off-putting, for general visitors to Moving Poems to try and navigate between separate videopoem, film poem, poetry film, and cinepoetry categories, for example, so I’ve treated all these things as roughly synonymous and let it go at that. I guess you could say I’m trying to respect the populist impulse of the avant-garde without succumbing to its more elitist tendencies, because I want the site to appeal to people from all kinds of educational and cultural backgrounds.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying yes, I agree with your pragmatic outlook, but I do feel that some distinctions are still useful.

MC: I like the idea that “a poem is whatever the poet says it is”. Artists are often not given that much power over their own work in the broader culture arising around them. I guess we have to leave something to the critics/theorists, who draw on our work to inspire what they do in their own distinct fields of endeavour. I wonder if what they do is a kind of appropriation? I might be less ambivalent about critical theory if I were to view it as a new creative work arising from one that came before it.

Another thing that may have prompted some of what I wrote about Haunted Memory , is an email I recently received from someone in the German-speaking world who is very dedicated to our area of interest. They mentioned how unhelpful they find the term “videopoetry”. As I understood this email, most of their dislike of the term seemed to be about funding policies in that part of the world, as they relate to staging festivals and events in our genre. But they consider the term old-fashioned too, belonging to the 1990s at the latest.

There was also a recent discussion in the Poetry Film Live group on Facebook, in response to a post about the terminology most acceptable within a PhD. Alongside responses from several others highly engaged in our field, I confessed that I tend to interchangeably use terms like poetry film, film poetry, poetry video, videopoetry, and any others in this vein. Part of that discussion was also about whether videopoetry (or whatever) is a “genre” or a “form”. I find this to be of little real consequence (except in the context of a PhD), and again tend to use the terms interchangeably.

DB: Well, there’s no doubt that the Germans, like the Brits, consider “film” the proper term, and are snobby about “video”. And I can well believe that funding organizations might be more impressed by applications using a term perceived to have more gravitas and prestige. But most of the rest of the world goes with some version of “video”.

The form vs. genre discussion is interesting I suppose, but to me a poetic form implies fairly strict rules, so for example a sonnet ought to fit or at least strongly suggest the received opinion of what constitutes a sonnet. What sorts of rules define a videopoem? Precious few. So videopoetry as I understand it is a genre of poetry, yes — as well as a genre of film/video. But not a form.

One could make the distinction that videopoetry or film poetry is a genre of poetry , whereas poetry film, including most animations, is a genre of film . And I think that can be a useful way of thinking about different tendencies or orientations in the work we see. But in reality, I think, many poetry videos emerge from collaborative partnerships between a writer and a film-maker, in which sometimes the text does not precede the project but arises in response to images or music. Or sometimes it might have had a separate life in print or as live performance, but becomes a new thing when adapted to film/video. So the question of whether to consider the final product a film adaptation or an original videpoem becomes fairly academic. They’re poles on a continuum, basically.

MC: Poles on a continuum, yes. I think that videopoetry is both a genre of poetry, and a genre of film. It is a hybrid embodying the histories of both art forms.

In terms of “the Germans” and “the Brits”, it could be argued that “video” is the term that should always be adopted, as it is the most accurate description of the technology we are using, i.e. digital video. The term “film” fundamentally describes moving images on celluloid. There are global subcultures that can be snobby about anything other than celluloid film, especially in the experimental film world. I was once one of them, back when video and film were more clearly different things, and video was recorded on magnetic tape.

DB: Not to beat a dead horse, but it’s worth remembering that the term “video” was invented decades before the advent of video cassettes, and deployed as early as 1937 to describe what was broadcast on television. Nobody talks about “film games” or “online film hosting”. So I do feel it’s a better, more neutral catch-all term for moving images in the era of mass communications.

I guess one thing I’ve learned over the years is that one can become a great videopoet or film poet without necessarily being a brilliant poet on the page or the stage. Just as Arthur Waley was a great poet with a distinctive voice only when he translated other people’s poems into English, so, for example, is someone like Marc Neys able to develop a distinctive and powerful poetic voice in videopoetry despite not being a page poet himself. Over the years, I’ve really grown to appreciate how rare a truly original eye is, and how a genuinely great poetry film-maker’s work might as well constitute a unique new genre.

And then there are all the poets I’ve come to know who learn how to make videos themselves and find that it revitalizes their writing, and sometimes also changes their whole perspective on publishing, simply because the way videos are hosted and shared online tends to make a hash of traditional, scarcity-based publication models.

Which brings me in a somewhat circuitous fashion back once more to the film vs. video distinction. To the extent that screening work in festivals (or in rare occasions in limited theater runs) may prevent it from being freely shared online, it might still make sense to distinguish between something shared as if it were a scarce artifact analogous to a celluloid film , versus something that can be shared as if it were an endlessly replicable composition analogous to a poem .

MC : You mentioned Marc Neys. I almost see videopoetry as revolving around his work. It embodies something unique in the contemporary genre. To me, what he has done represents a true expression of the avant-garde in our midst, opening ways forward that many of us haven’t yet seen. Much art is labelled avant-garde, but not so much fits the description. It’s not that I feel we all should emulate what he has done (on the contrary), but there is much to learn from the spirit of his approach.

Jumping on to another of your thoughts: it’s wonderful for me to think of video revitalising the work of poets. Poetry certainly has reinvigorated film-making to a huge degree for me. This give and take between the parts of the hybrid form is inspiring.

I like what you say about distribution as well. Online publishing is liberating in relation to the older models. Scarcity-based distribution seems so tied up with capitalism. I like things free.

DB : Amen to that. Thanks for the discussion.

• About the Author
• Latest Posts

Marie Craven is in Queensland, Australia, and a film-maker since 1984. Over the decades her short films have screened widely at international festivals and events, and gathered many awards. Since 2014 she has made over 70 videopoems, in collaboration via the net with poets, visual artists and musicians in different countries.

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Dave Bonta is a poet, editor, and web publisher from the Appalachian mountains of central Pennsylvania.

• Moving Poems re-launch and next steps
• Poetry film screening 'Fear and Yearning' at The MERL
• Janet Leigh is Afraid of Jazz by Marsha de la O

Thanks to Marie & Dave for featuring and discussing our audiovisual essay HAUNTED MEMORY in MOVING POEMS. Cristina & I tend to think of our work in this area – we’ve made around 100 such videos together since 2013, and Cristina started solo in 2009 when she co-founded the Spanish website TRANSIT – as “creative criticism”, a kind of expanded form of film criticism/analysis/appreciation. We have always tried to give it a poetic element – which we also think is true of our “literary” writing about film! I am reminded of Jean Cocteau, who merrily branded everything he did as some avenue of poetry: poetry of cinema, poetry of theatre, poetry of painting, even … critical poetry! We don’t think of our own work as “essay films” (or film essays!) in the vein of Chris Marker or Agnès Varda, because we are always fixed solely on a film, several films, or simply the elements of one film scene, or some general aspect of cinema – we don’t address the “wider world” in a broadly essayistic way. We leave that to others, better ot worse suited to the task! “Audiovisual essays” (also known as “videographic criticism”, among other contested labels) fit into a small, intense world of international activity – just as “videopoetry” seems to be its own, intense world. There is usually not much overlap or communication between these “subcultural” worlds, although there could be. For instance, in the world of film criticism/theory where I hail from, all reference to “film poetry” goes via a consideration of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s famous mid 1960s writings on the “cinema of poetry”, where he distinguished between a cinema of poetry and a cinema of prose – not saying there are absolute examples of each, but rather that these tendencies can co-exist in every work. A good third of my own book MYSTERIES OF CINEMA (2018) is devoted to this quest for defining poetic cinema. Likewise, Raúl Ruiz (a big influence on me) held to the notion that “all films are inherently poetic”, that they contain poetic elements – which perhaps need to be brought out by making another work in response. In the academic part of the audiovisual essay scene today (where Cristina & I don’t actually dwell or belong – we’re freelance film critics), a popular idea is that such audiovisual essays exist on a continuum between the poetic and the pedagogical. Cristina and I always try to find a different balance, a new (at least for us) hybrid between those extremes. One of our own favourite examples is “Wish I Had a River” (2017) in our monthly THE THINKING MACHINE online video series for DE FILMKRANT magazine in the Netherlands, which starts as a typical close analysis, but then the montage becomes more lyrical … https://vimeo.com/199978539 . One thing that does seem to separate or distinguish audiovisual essays from videopoetry (at least, those examples I have watched) is that, where videopoetry uses either self-generated imagery and music or “creative commons” sources (such as the Prelinger Archive), audiovisual essays (certainly, the ones we make) are based almost entirely on the “found” or sampled images and sounds from the films (sometimes very “commercial” films, sometimes not) we are analysing (although we sometimes do our own music, too). Montage – on all levels – is for us the essential thing, the essential operation that is both analytical and creative at the same time. We really take things apart shamelessly, but in order to reconstitute them in another way! Well, they are my random thoughts in response to your discussion; thanks again for featuring us.

Thanks so much, Adrian, for your interesting, substantial reply to our discussion inspired by “Haunted Memory”, and for opening up the current critical and creative processes of you and Cristina.

Your final words regarding the sources of film footage being different for audiovisual essays and videopoetry is on the surface accurate (though not all videopoems include found footage by any means). Yet, the frequency of this collage-like (or montage-like) approach to making videopoems, actually emphasises for me the similarities with audiovisual essays. It is much more the norm for films to be made with original, custom-designed camera footage. So two genres that commonly draw on “found” films seem to me to possibly have a lot in common!

Great to read a well your expansion on definitions of poetry in relation to film, as understood beyond the existing bounds of videopoetry.

Your description of both genres as arising from small, intense sub-cultures, also spot on. Long live the passion!

This is a thought provoking conversation, one which I truly appreciate. Thank you Marie and Dave for creating this post and it is one I have pondered over the last 10 years. Also, thank you for including my work as an example. I feel that Marie’s comment about film-makers having more fluidity with the film form certainly relates to me. For one, I took (3) haibun and (3) haikus from Dave’s “Failed State” manuscript and created a “Triptych Filmpoem” and I absolutely loved working on the piece! Prior, I had no idea what a haibun was. I followed that up with a poetic film, or as Dave remarks, “lyrical” from a personal essay a friend wrote about the suicide of her brother. As it happens my father committed suicide when I was nineteen and felt the time was right to come out from behind the shadows and approach the subject matter. The distribution of this piece will be with mental health professionals as a way to engage family members who are left behind. The thought is to mentor people of all ages to use poetry, art, writing, music and visuals as creative expression to share feelings and speak out, but not in the same manner as a documentary.

I enjoy the free expression of form and tend not to get muddied up in what exactly I’m doing. From the start I either called my projects poetic films or “filmpoems on a mission.” I create the work to express feelings I have at certain times in my life and somehow it always touches on socio-political themes which emerge from the narrative—poem, haiku, haibun or essay. Recently, I began taking personal journal posts to create 6-line pieces to use with my visuals. I don’t come from the poetry and written word arts. I’m strictly visual and have no rules to break. Having said that, I am sensitive when collaborating with poets because I will not alter anything without permission. And often when creating filmpoems, no matter what the genre, I fine-tune the narrative. Most likely because I re-read, view and listen repeatedly. Lately my films take three months from start-to-finish.

I’m one of the elitist snobs about “video.” Mainly because I feel the average viewer/audience conjures up “wedding videographer.” I like to think the films I make, as well as my highly talented colleagues (who inspire me with their work) are special. Coming from the documentary form and having worked on media advocacy for policy initiatives I rather like the distinction of a cultural artifact which engages audiences in discussion in person, or face-to-face venues—the old fashioned way. My thinking is that film festivals offer the potential for a higher level of engagement to explain exactly what the genre and form are, as well as discussion about the films themselves. As far as branding and curating content goes I think a consistency in how we explain the film form would be an asset for funding and financial support of the work. And…there’s always room for a hybrid model for financial support. Our work is worthy of it. Or we’ll have to wait until we die. Ha!

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Defining the Cinematic Essay: The Essay Film by Elizabeth A. Papazian & Caroline Eades, and Essays on the Essay Film by Nora M. Alter & Timothy Corrigan

When it came time for the students to create their own documentaries, one of my policies was for them to “throw objectivity out the window”. To quote John Grierson, documentaries are the “creative treatment of actuality.” Capturing the truth, whatever it may be, is quite nearly impossible if not utterly futile. Often, filmmakers deliberately manipulate their footage in order to achieve educational, informative and persuasive objectives. To illustrate, I screened Robert Flaherty’s 1922 film Nanook of the North and always marveled at the students’ reactions when, after the screening, I informed them that the film’s depiction of traditional Inuit life was entirely a reenactment. While many students were shocked and disappointed when they learned this, others accepted Flaherty’s defence of the film as true to the spirit, if not the letter, of the Inuit’s vanishing way of life. Another example that I screened was a clip from controversial filmmaker Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine (2002) which demonstrated how Moore shrewdly used editing to villainise then-NRA president Charlton Heston. Though a majority of the class agreed with Moore’s anti-gun violence agenda, many were infuriated about being “lied to” and “misled” by the editing tactics. Naturally these examples also raise questions about the role of ethics in documentary filmmaking, but even films that are not deliberately manipulative are still “the product of individuals, [and] will always display bias and be in some manner didactic.” (Alter/Corrigan, p. 193.)

To further my point on the elusive nature of objectivity, I screened Alain Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard ( Night and Fog , 1956), Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983) and Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008.) Yet at this point I began to wonder if I was still teaching documentary or if I had ventured into some other territory. I was aware that Koyaanisqatsi had also been classified as an experimental film by notable scholars such as David Bordwell. On the other hand, Nuit et brouillard is labeled a documentary film but poses more questions than answers, since it is “unable to adequately document the reality it seeks.” (Alter/Corrigan p. 210.) Resnais’s short film interweaves black and white archival footage with colour film of Auschwitz and other camps. The colour sequences were shot in 1955, when the camps had already been deserted for ten years.   Nuit et brouillard scrutinises the brutality of the Holocaust while contemplating the social, political and ethical responsibilities of the Nazis. Yet it also questions the more abstract role of knowledge and memory, both individual and communal, within the context of such horrific circumstances. The students did not challenge Night and Fog’s classification as a documentary, but they wondered if Waltz with Bashir and especially Sans Soleil had entirely different objectives since they seemed to do more than present factual information. The students also noted that these films seemed to merge with other genres, and wondered if there was a different classification for them aside from poetic, observational, participatory, et al.  Although it is animated, Waltz with Bashir is classified as a documentary since it is based on Folman’s own experiences during the 1982 Lebanon War. Also, as Roger Ebert notes, animation is “the best way to reconstruct memories, fantasies, hallucinations, possibilities, past and present.” 2 However, it is not solely a document of Folman’s experiences or of the war itself. It is also a subjective meditation on the nature of human perception. As Folman attempts to reconstruct past events through the memories of his fellow soldiers, Waltz with Bashir investigates the very nature of truth itself. These films definitely challenged the idea of documentary as a strict genre, but the students noticed that they each had interesting similarities. Aside from educating, informing and persuading, they also used non-fiction sounds and images to visualise abstract concepts and ideas.

Sans Soleil (Marker, 1983)

Sans Soleil has been described as “a meditation on place […] where spatial availability confuses the sense of time and memory.” (Alter/Corrigan, p. 117.) Some of my students felt that Marker’s film, which is composed of images from Japan and elsewhere, was more like a “filmed travelogue”. Others described it as a “film journal” since Marker used images and narration to describe certain experiences, thoughts and memories. Yet my students’ understanding of Sans Soleil was problematised when they discovered that the narration was delivered by “a fictional, nameless woman […] reading aloud from, or else paraphrasing, letters sent to her by a fictional, globe-trotting cameraman.” 3 Upon learning this, several students wondered if Sans Soleil was actually a narrative and not a documentary at all. I briefly explained that, since it was also an attempt to visualise abstract concepts, Sans Soleil was known as an essay film. Yet this only complicated things further!  The students wondered if other films we saw in the class were essayistic as well. Was Koyaanisqatsi an essay on humanity’s impact on the world? Was Jesus Camp (Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, 2006) an essay on the place of religion in society and politics?  Where was the line between documentary and the essay film? Between essay and narrative? Or was the essay just another type of documentary?  Rather than immerse myself in the difficulties of describing the essay film, I quickly changed the topic to the students’ own projects, and encouraged them to shape their documentaries through related processes of investigation and exploration.

If I had been able to read “Essays on the Essay Film” by Nora M. Alter & Timothy Corrigan and “The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia” by Elizabeth A. Papazian & Caroline Eades before teaching this class, I still may not have been able to provide definitive answers to my students’ questions. But this is not to say that either of these books are vague and inconclusive! Each one is an insightful collection of articles that explores the complexities of the essay film. In her essay “The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments” featured in Alter and Corrigan’s “Essays on the Essay Film” Laura Rascaroli wisely notes that “we must resist the temptation to overtheorise the form or, even worse, to crystallise it into a genre…” since the essay film is a “matrix of all generic possibilities.” (Alter/Corrigan, p. 190) Fabienne Costa goes so far as saying that “The ‘cinematographic essay’ is neither a category of films nor a genre. It is more a type of image, which achieves essay quality.” (Alter/Corrigan, p. 190) It is true that filmmakers, critics, and scholars (myself included) have attempted to understand the essay film better by grouping it with genres that bear many similarities, such as documentary and experimental cinema. Yet despite these similarities, the authors suggest that the essay film needs to be differentiated from both documentary and avant-garde practices of filmmaking. Both “Essays on the Essay Film” and “The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia” illustrate that this mutable form should not be understood as a specific genre, but rather recognised for its profoundly reflective and reflexive capabilities. The essay film can even defy established formulas. As stated by filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin in his essay “Proposal for a Tussle” the essay film “can navigate from documentary to fiction and back, creating other polarities in the process between which it can operate.” (Alter/Corrigan, p. 270.)

Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan’s “Essays on the Essay Film” consists of writings by distinguished scholars such as Andre Bazin, Theodore Adorno, Hans Richter and Laura Mulvey, but also includes more recent work by Thomas Elsaesser, Laura Rascaroli and others. Although each carefully selected text spans different time periods and cultural backgrounds, Alter and Corrigan weave together a comprehensive, yet pliable description of the cinematic essay.

“Essays on the Essay Film” begins by including articles that investigate the form and function of the written essay. This first chapter, appropriately titled “Foundations” provides a solid groundwork for many of the concepts discussed in the following chapters. Although the written essay is obviously different from the work created by filmmakers such as Chris Marker and Trinh T. Minh-ha, Alter and Corrigan note that these texts “have been influential to both critics and practitioners of the contemporary film essay.” (p. 7) The articles in this chapter range from Georg Lukacs’s 1910 “On the Nature and Form of the Essay” to “Preface to the Collected Essays of Aldous Huxley” which was published in 1960. Over a span of fifty years, the authors illustrate how the very concept of the essay was affected by changing practices of art, history, philosophy, culture, economics, politics, as well as through modernist and postmodernist lenses. However, these articles are still surprisingly relevant for contemporary scholars and practitioners. For example, in an excerpt from The Man Without Qualities , Robert Musil writes that, “A man who wants the truth becomes a scholar; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity may become a writer; but what should a man do who wants something in between?” (p. 45.) Naturally, this reminded me of my class’s discussion on Sans Soleil and Waltz with Bashir. It concisely encapsulates the difficulties that arise when the essay film crosses boundaries of fiction and non-fiction. However, in his 1948 essay “On the Essay and its Prose”, Max Bense believes that the essay lies within the realm of experimentation, since “there is a strange border area that develops between poetry and prose, between the aesthetic stage of creation and the ethical stage of persuasion.”  (p. 52.)  Bense also notes that the word “essay” itself means “to attempt” or to “experiment” and believes that the essay firmly belongs in the realm of experimental and avant-garde. This is appropriate enough, given that writers, and more recently filmmakers and video artists have pushed the boundaries of their mediums in order to explore their deepest thoughts and emotions.

Alter and Corrigan follow this chapter with “The Essay Film Through History” which details the evolution of the essay film. Writing in 1940, Hans Richter considers the essay film a new type of documentary and praises its abilities to break beyond the purportedly objective goals of documentaries in an attempt to “visualize thoughts on screen.” (p. 91) Eighteen years later, Andre Bazin celebrates Chris Marker’s thought-provoking voice-over narration as well as his method of “not restricting himself to using documentary images filmed on the spot, but [using] any and all filmic material that might help his case.” (p. 104) Bazin even compares Marker’s style to the work of animator Norman McLaren, supporting the idea of the essay film’s use of unfettered creativity. By the time the reader gets to the third chapter, “Contemporary Positions”, he or she is well aware of the capricious and malleable nature of the essay film. As Corrigan remarks:

As it develops in and out of those documentary and avant-garde traditions, the history of the essay film underlines a central critical point: that the essayistic should not necessarily be seen simply as an alternative to either of these practices (or to narrative cinema); rather it rhymes with and retimes them as counterpoints within and to them. Situated between the categories of realism and formal experimentation and geared to the possibilities of “public expression,” the essay film suggests an appropriation of certain avant-garde and documentary practices in a way different from the early historical practices of both, just as it tends to invert and restructure the relations between the essayistic and narrative to subsume narrative within that public expression. The essayistic play between fact and fiction, between the documentary and the experimental, or between non-narrative and narrative becomes a place where the essay film inhabits other forms and practices. (p. 198)

Alter and Corrigan’s volume implies that the essay can inhabit many forms, styles or genres. More importantly is the idea that it should be recognised for its intentions and capabilities. Whatever form it takes, the essay is an attempt to seek, explore, understand, visualise and question, without necessarily providing clearly defined answers. The essay film also places considerable value on the intellect and opinion of the viewer, since it is an invitation to reflect on the thoughts, experiences, emotions and perceptions that are being conveyed. “Essays on the Essay Film” sensibly concludes with the chapter entitled “Filmmakers on the Essayistic”. Notable filmmakers, such as Lynn Sachs and Ross McElwee provide valuable insight into their own practices. The featured filmmakers, documentarians and video artists in this chapter do not focus specifically on what form their work takes, but what they are trying to achieve. For instance, in her article “On Writing the Film Essay,” Lynn Sachs proclaims that “My job is not to educate but rather to spark a curiosity in my viewer that moves from the inside out.” (p. 287.) Admittedly, Sachs’s statement contradicts the idea that documentary films seek to educate, inform and persuade, which I taught in my own classes. Yet Sachs’s insights, as well as those of the many other filmmakers in “Essays on the Essay Film” demonstrate how the camera is as versatile as the pen when communicating thoughts, emotions and ideas.

Tree of Life (Malick, 2011)

Elizabeth A. Papazian and Caroline Eades have also compiled several surprising, challenging and thoroughly captivating articles that exemplify the many forms that the essay film can take. The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia includes articles by several prominent scholars that explore the essay film’s place throughout history as well as within various cultural settings. Like Alter and Corrigan, they also present a convincing argument that the essay film is distinct from both documentary, avant-garde and narrative filmmaking, since it is “characterized by a loose, fragmentary, playful, even ironic approach […] and raises new questions about the construction of the subject, the relationship of the subject to the world and the aesthetic possibilities of cinema.” (Papazian/Eades, p. 1) Papazian and Eades explore how essayistic tendencies can manifest in narrative, documentary, avant-garde, and even video art through careful analyses of specific films and videos. The book opens with Timothy Corrigan’s “Essayism and Contemporary Film Narrative” which explores how the essayistic can inhabit narrative film, specifically through Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life and Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross , both released in 2011. Corrigan observes that The Tree of Life “continually seems to resist its own narrative logic” (p. 18) by presenting a highly fragmented and non-linear plot.  Instead of placing it into the hybrid realm of experimental-narrative, however, Corrigan argues that:

Rather than locate a linear connection between past, present and future, the narrative flashbacks in The Tree of Life become a search for genesis – or more accurately many geneses – which might be better described as disruptive recollections that never adequately collect and circulate, as fractured and drifting images and moments producing not evolutionary lines, but the spreading reflective branches of essayism. (p. 19-20.)

The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia continues with essays by other acclaimed, yet indefinable filmmakers such as Jean Luc-Godard and Claire Denis. Essays by Rick Warner and Martine Beugnet explore how these filmmakers defy closure and continuity, even while appearing to work within established forms and genres. Ann Eaken Moss explores the essayistic approach that Chantal Akerman imbues within her experimental “home movies.”   News from Home (1977) is a meditation on Akerman’s own sense of dislocation from her home in Belgium while she adapts to life in New York City. In “Inside/Outside: Nicolasito Guillen Landrian’s Subversive Strategy in Coffea Arabiga” Ernesto Livon-Grosman investigates Landrian’s means of furtively including his own political agenda within a government-sanctioned documentary. What was meant to be a propagandistic documentary about the benefits of Cuban coffee plantations becomes an essayistic critique on the power structure of Fidel Castro’s government. (Livon-Grosman.) Papazian and Eades conclude their volume with an afterward by Laura Rascaroli, affirming that “it is with the potentiality of all essay films to question and challenge their own form”. (p. 300) The essay film may be distinct from narrative, documentary and the avant-garde, but it itself has no discernable style or formula. The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia clearly illustrates how the essay film, although bordering on established genres “must create the conditions of its own form.” (pp. 301-302.) Every filmmaker’s unique thoughts, experiences, meditations, questions and perceptions cannot neatly fit into a strict set of generic guidelines. However, this does not make the essay film more difficult to understand, but further implies that it is a unique practice rather than a specific form.

News from Home (Akerman, 1977)

Even with the insight provided by these two volumes, I do not regret introducing the essay film to my documentary students, despite their questions and confusion. As illustrated throughout Essays on the Essay Film and The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia it has typically been an esoteric and transgressive form, and perhaps including it with better known genres such as documentary and experimental films could be an effective way of introducing it to beginning filmmakers and scholars. Then again, perhaps it should be taught as a form separate from documentary, narrative and the avant-garde. I do wish that I was able to speak more about it at length during that particular instance, since the essay film deserves a considerable amount of thought and attention. Whether or not there is a correct pedagogical approach to teaching the essay film, both of these volumes are tremendously illuminating, but also open the door to further discussion about this compelling form of cinema.

• Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary , 2nd ed. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010). ↩
• Roger Ebert, “Waltz with Bashir”, rogerebert.com , January 21, 2009, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/waltz-with-bashir-2009 ↩
• Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Personal Effects: The Guarded Intimacy of Sans Soleil”, The Criterion Collection , June 25, 2017, https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/484-personal-effects-the-guarded-intimacy-of-sans-soleil ↩

Step By Step Guide to Writing an Essay on Film

By Film Threat Staff | December 29, 2021

Writing an essay about a film sounds like a fun assignment to do. As part of the assignment, you get to watch the movie and write an analytical essay about your impressions. However, you will soon find that you’re staring at an empty sheet of paper or computer screen with no idea what to write, how to start writing your essay, or the essential points that need to be covered and analyzed. As an  essay writing service proves, watching the movie countless times isn’t all there is to write a film analysis essay. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you with an essay service :

1. Watch the Movie

This is the obvious starting point, but surprisingly many students skip this step. It doesn’t matter if you’ve watched the movie twice before. If you’re asked to write an essay about it, you need to watch it again. Watching the film again allows you to pay more attention to specific elements to help you write an in-depth analysis about it.  

Watching the movie is crucial because it helps you not specific parts of the movie that can be used as illustrations and examples in your essay. You’re also going to explore and analyze the movie theme within your structured plan. Some of the critical elements that you have to look out for while watching the movie that may be crucial for your essay are:

• Key plot moments
• Editing style
• Stylistic elements
• Scenario execution
• Musical elements

2. Introduction

Your introduction will contain essential information about the film, such as the title, release date, director’s name, etc. This familiarizes the reader with the movie’s primary background information. In addition, researching the filmmaker may be crucial for your essay because it may help you discover valuable insights for your film analysis.

The introduction should also mention the movie’s central theme and explain why you think it was made that way.

Do not forget to include your thesis statement, which explains your focus on the movie.

3. Write a Summary

According to an  essay writing service  providing students   help with essays , a movie summary comes after the introduction. It includes the film’s basic premise, but it doesn’t have to reveal too many details about the film. It’s a summary, after all. Write the summary like your readers have not heard about the movie before, so you can mention the most basic plots but assume you have minimal time so you won’t be going into great details.

4. Write Your Analysis

This is the central part of the essay in which you analyze the movie critically and state your impressions about the film. Ensure to support your claims with relevant materials from the movie.

There are also several creative elements in a movie that are connected to make the film a whole. You must pay attention to these elements while watching the movie and analyze them in this part of the essay.

In this, you are looking out for the dialogs, character development, completion of scenes, and logical event sequences in the film to analyze.

Ensure you try to understand the logic behind events in the film and the actor’s motives to explain the scenario better.

The responsibility of different parts of the movie, such as plan selection and scenario execution, falls on the director. So, your analysis here focuses on how the director realized the script compared to his other movies. Understanding the director’s style of directing may be crucial to coming up with a conclusion relevant to your analysis and thesis.

The casting of a film is a significant element to consider in your essay. Without a great actor, the scriptwriter and director can’t bring their ideas to life. So, watch the actor’s acting and determine if they portrayed the character effectively and if their acting aligns with the film’s main idea.

• Musical element

A movie’s musical element enhances some of the sceneries or actions in the film and sets the mood. It has a massive impact on the movie, so it’s an essential element to analyze in your essay.

• Visual elements

This includes special effects, make-up, costumes, etc., which significantly impact the film. These elements must reflect the film’s atmosphere. It is even more crucial for historical movies since it has to be specific about an era.

Ensure to analyze elements relevant to your thesis statement, so you don’t drift from your main point.

5. Conclusion

In concluding your essay, you have to summarize the primary concepts more convincingly to support your analysis. Finally, you may include a CTA for readers to watch or avoid the movie.

These are the crucial steps to take when writing an essay about a film . Knowing this beforehand prevents you from struggling to start writing after watching the movie.

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It’s really amazing instructions! I have got the great knowledge.

[…] now and then. Unfortunately, not all of us can afford to get cinema tickets to do so.  Some…Writing an essay about a film sounds like a fun assignment to do. As part of the assignment, you get…Since a few decades the film and entertainment sector have undergone some drastic transformation. […]

I can’t list the number of essays that don’t follow this format in the least. But then I find most reviews of movies terrible and most people who purport themselves to be writers as people who need to spend more time drafting and editing before publishing.

Thanks for this

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Essays About Movies: 7 Examples and 5 Writing Prompts

Check out our guide with essays about movies for budding videographers and artistic students. Learn from our helpful list of examples and prompts.

Watching movies is a part of almost everyone’s life. They entertain us, teach us lessons, and even help us socialize by giving us topics to talk about with others. As long as movies have been produced, everyone has patronized them.  Essays about movies  are a great way to learn all about the meaning behind the picture.

Cinema is an art form in itself. The lighting, camera work, and acting in the most widely acclaimed movies are worthy of praise. Furthermore, a movie can be used to send a message, often discussing issues in contemporary society. Movies are entertaining, but more importantly, they are works of art. If you’re interested in this topic, check out our round-up of screenwriters on Instagram .

5 Helpful Essay Examples 

1. the positive effects of movies on human behaviour by ajay rathod, 2. horror movies by emanuel briggs, 3. casablanca – the greatest hollywood movie ever (author unknown).

• 4.  Dune Review: An Old Story Reshaped For The New 2021 Audience by Oren Cohen

5. Blockbuster movies create booms for tourism — and headaches for locals by Shubhangi Goel

• 6. Moonage Daydream: “Who Is He? What Is He?” by Jonathan Romney
• 7. La Bamba: American Dreaming, Chicano Style by Yolanda Machado

1. My Favorite Movie

2. movies genres, 3. special effects in movies, 4. what do you look for in a movie, 5. the evolution of movies.

“​​Films encourage us to take action. Our favourite characters, superheroes, teach us life lessons. They give us ideas and inspiration to do everything for the better instead of just sitting around, waiting for things to go their way. Films about famous personalities are the perfect way to affect social behaviour positively. Films are a source of knowledge. They can help learn what’s in the trend, find out more about ancient times, or fill out some knowledge gaps.”

In this movie essay, Rathod gives readers three ways watching movies can positively affect us. Movie writers, producers, and directors use their platform to teach viewers life skills, the importance of education, and the contrast between good and evil. Watching movies can also help us improve critical thinking, according to Briggs. Not only do movies entertain us, but they also have many educational benefits. You might also be interested in these  essays about consumerism .

“Many people involving children and adults can effect with their sleeping disturbance and anxiety. Myths, non-realistic, fairy tales could respond differently with being in the real world. Horror movies bring a lot of excitement and entertainment among you and your family. Horror movies can cause physical behavior changes in a person by watching the films. The results of watching horror movies shows that is has really effect people whether you’re an adult, teens, and most likely happens during your childhood.”

In his essay, Briggs acknowledges why people enjoy horror movies so much but warns of their adverse effects on viewers. Most commonly, they cause viewers nightmares, which may cause anxiety and sleep disorders. He focuses on the films’ effects on children, whose more sensitive, less developed brains may respond with worse symptoms, including major trauma. The films can affect all people negatively, but children are the most affected.

“This was the message of Casablanca in late 1942. It was the ideal opportunity for America to utilize its muscles and enter the battle. America was to end up the hesitant gatekeeper of the entire world. The characters of Casablanca, similar to the youthful Americans of the 1960s who stick headed the challenge development, are ‘genuine Americans’ lost in a hostile region, battling to open up another reality.”

In this essay, the author discusses the 1942 film  Casablanca , which is said to be the greatest movie ever made, and explains why it has gotten this reputation. To an extent, the film’s storyline, acting, and even relatability (it was set during World War II) allowed it to shine from its release until the present. It invokes feelings of bravery, passion, and nostalgia, which is why many love the movie. You can also check out these  books about adaption . 

4.   Dune Review: An Old Story Reshaped For The New 2021 Audience by Oren Cohen

“Lady Jessica is a powerful woman in the original book, yet her interactions with Paul diminish her as he thinks of her as slow of thought. Something we don’t like to see in 2021 — and for a good reason. Every book is a product of its time, and every great storyteller knows how to adapt an old story to a new audience. I believe Villeneuve received a lot of hate from diehard Dune fans for making these changes, but I fully support him.”

Like the previous essay, Cohen reviews a film, in this case, Denis Villeneuve’s  Dune , released in 2021. He praises the film, writing about its accurate portrayal of the epic’s vast, dramatic scale, music, and, interestingly, its ability to portray the characters in a way more palatable to contemporary audiences while staying somewhat faithful to the author’s original vision. Cohen enjoyed the movie thoroughly, saying that the movie did the book justice. 

“Those travelers added around 630 million New Zealand dollars ($437 million) to the country’s economy in 2019 alone, the tourism authority told CNBC. A survey by the tourism board, however, showed that almost one in five Kiwis are worried that the country attracts too many tourists. Overcrowding at tourist spots, lack of infrastructure, road congestion and environmental damage are creating tension between locals and visitors, according to a 2019 report by Tourism New Zealand.”

The locations where successful movies are filmed often become tourist destinations for fans of those movies. Goel writes about how “film tourism” affects the residents of popular filming locations. The environment is sometimes damaged, and the locals are caught off guard. Though this is not always the case, film tourism is detrimental to the residents and ecosystem of these locations. You can also check out these  essays about The Great Gatsby .

6. Moonage Daydream:  “Who Is He? What Is He?” by Jonathan Romney

“Right from the start, Brett Morgen’s  Moonage Daydream  (2022) catches us off guard. It begins with an epigraph musing on Friedrich Nietzsche’s proclamation that “God is dead,” then takes us into deep space and onto the surface of the moon. It then unleashes an image storm of rockets, robots, and star-gazers, and rapid-fire fragments of early silent cinema, 1920s science fiction, fifties cartoons, and sixties and seventies newsreel footage, before lingering on a close-up of glittery varnish on fingernails.” 

Moonage Daydream  is a feature film containing never-before-seen footage of David Bowie. In this essay, Romney delves into the process behind creating the movie and how the footage was captured. It also looks at the director’s approach to creating a structured and cohesive film, which took over two years to plan. This essay looks at how Bowie’s essence was captured and preserved in this movie while displaying the intricacies of his mind.

7. La Bamba:  American Dreaming, Chicano Style by Yolanda Machado

“A traumatic memory, awash in hazy neutral tones, arising as a nightmare. Santo & Johnny’s mournful “Sleep Walk” playing. A sudden death, foreshadowing the passing of a star far too young. The opening sequence of Luis Valdez’s  La Bamba  (1987) feels like it could be from another film—what follows is largely a celebration of life and music.”

La Bamba  is a well-known movie about a teenage Mexican migrant who became a rock ‘n’ roll star. His rise to fame is filled with difficult social dynamics, and the star tragically dies in a plane crash at a young age. In this essay, Machado looks at how the tragic death of the star is presented to the viewer, foreshadowing the passing of the young star before flashing back to the beginning of the star’s career. Machado analyses the storyline and directing style, commenting on the detailed depiction of the young star’s life. It’s an in-depth essay that covers everything from plot to writing style to direction.

5 Prompts for Essays About Movies

Simple and straightforward, write about your favorite movie. Explain its premise, characters, and plot, and elaborate on some of the driving messages and themes behind the film. You should also explain why you enjoy the movie so much: what impact does it have on you? Finally, answer this question in your own words for an engaging piece of writing.

From horror to romance, movies can fall into many categories. Choose one of the main genres in cinema and discuss the characteristics of movies under that category. Explain prevalent themes, symbols, and motifs, and give examples of movies belonging to your chosen genre. For example, horror movies often have underlying themes such as mental health issues, trauma, and relationships falling apart. 

Without a doubt, special effects in movies have improved drastically. Both practical and computer-generated effects produce outstanding, detailed effects to depict situations most would consider unfathomable, such as the vast space battles of the  Star Wars  movies. Write about the development of special effects over the years, citing evidence to support your writing. Be sure to detail key highlights in the history of special effects. 

Movies are always made to be appreciated by viewers, but whether or not they enjoy them varies, depending on their preferences. In your essay, write about what you look for in a “good” movie in terms of plot, characters, dialogue, or anything else. You need not go too in-depth but explain your answers adequately. In your opinion, you can use your favorite movie as an example by writing about the key characteristics that make it a great movie.

From the silent black-and-white movies of the early 1900s to the vivid, high-definition movies of today, times have changed concerning movies. Write about how the film industry has improved over time. If this topic seems too broad, feel free to focus on one aspect, such as cinematography, themes, or acting.

For help with your essays, check out our round-up of the  best essay checkers .

If you’re looking for more ideas, check out our  essays about music topic guide !

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Viggo Mortensen on Trump, corruption and why classic Westerns are like the best poetry

The Dead Don’t Hurt captures the dusty feel of the frontier, but it’s also quietly revolutionary

Viggo Mortensen in The Dead Don't Hurt. Image: Marcel Zyskind

Since Westerns first started weaving celluloid tales of cowboys and ‘Indians’ in the early 20th century, they have acted as a sort of origin story for the United States. “It’s a kind of justification” for the settlers’ treatment of Native American people, “and unbridled capitalism, as well, and lawlessness,” says actor and director Viggo Mortensen, best known as Aragorn in Peter Jackson ’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and for his starring role in David Cronenberg ’s A History of Violence .

Relaxing in the plush foyer of a Glasgow hotel – having arrived to promote his own Western, The Dead Don’t Hurt , at the Glasgow Film Festival alongside co-star Solly McLeod – Mortensen admits he’s always been attracted to Westerns. “I grew up watching them,” he says. “I’m the first one to recognise that most Westerns are pretty simple and naive, and not terribly original stories, but occasionally, the best of the classic Westerns are on a level of the best poetry, the best tragedies written by human beings since ancient times.”

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It is to these heights Viggo Mortensen aspires with his brooding take on the Wild West. Set in the 1860s, The Dead Don’t Hurt stars Phantom Thread ’s Vicky Krieps as fiercely independent French-Canadian woman Vivienne Le Coudy. She falls for Danish immigrant Holger Olsen (Mortensen) and the pair move to a frontier town in Nevada as the Civil War looms. When Holger decides to fight for the Union, Vivienne is left alone in a dangerous town, at the mercy of corrupt mayor (Danny Huston), his rancher business partner (Garret Dillahunt) and the rancher’s violent son (Solly McLeod). 

Mortensen not only stars in The Dead Don’t Hurt , he also wrote, directed and produced the film, as well as composing the score. He set out to be “respectful” of classic Westerns. “The story and the look of the people, the way they speak, the way they ride, the weapons – everything should feel real.” 

This meant meticulous attention to detail, and a crash revision course for his crew. “You must have sent me 30, 40, 50 films,” laughs McLeod. Just 24, the Orkney-born actor (previously seen as the eponymous hero in ITVX miniseries Tom Jones ) grew up in a time when Westerns “just weren’t a thing”.

“I sent him a lot of movies saying, ‘I’m sorry, it’s really bad, you don’t have to watch all of it. But look at the way the guy puts on his hat, or how he rides a horse,’” Mortensen says. “Or to the set designer, I’d say, ‘Look at this. It’s a terrible movie but the saloon is amazing.’”

Its crew thus immersed in genre history, The Dead Don’t Hurt captures the dusty feel of the frontier, but it’s also quietly revolutionary. Viggo Mortensen has long been known for his political activism – he endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2016 and recently signed an open letter to president Joe Biden calling for an Israeli ceasefire – so he was always going to kick against the more reactionary side of this all-American mythology.

The Dead Don’t Hurt paints a truer picture of the melting pot of the West, says Mortensen, “full of people that don’t even speak English, or that speak English with an accent from another language”. But most noticeably of all, it puts a woman’s story centre stage. 

“Not only that, but when her male companion goes off to war, we don’t see a second of that, we stay with her,” he adds. “The goal was to tell a story about an unusual woman, who’s very stubbornly independent and strong-willed.”

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Viewing the world from a female perspective goes a long way to upend the power dynamic of the traditional Western. There’s as much homesteading as there is gunslinging. The human consequences of the era’s lawlessness are thrown in sharp relief. Viggo Mortensen shows the brutality inherent in America’s origin story, thus reframing how the US got to where it is now. 

“The power and the impunity,” of the corrupt men in charge holds a particular parallel to current leaders, he says. “It’s not too hard to compare to Donald Trump and his offspring. The way they speak and feel empowered to do and say whatever they want. As long as they continue to not really pay a price for it, they’ll keep doing it.

“But this happens anywhere. You could talk about Vladimir Putin, and his brutal ambition and grotesque corruption. Whether it’s Trump or Putin, what do you do? You could be a completely non-violent person, but at a certain point you have to defend yourself or you have to defend law.”

For Mortensen, the first step is to stay informed. He “makes it a daily exercise” to review a range of news – including “really right-wing sources” – to give himself the tools to make up his own mind. “If you make that effort, you can find out what really might be happening.”

The Dead Don’t Hurt is in cinemas from 7 June.

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He tells me he’s a parolee looking for a good woman but he’s been bad so bad trapped in a sheet of ice wrapping the meat in paper shudders I shouldn’t be eating red meat with my hypertension and high cholesterol the steaming calf He says he’s been out six months but still it’s hard you know how it is the wrong people their bright ideas attempts to rise his bloody apron a recipe buckles and gives me an extra pound

Copyright © 2024 by JoAnne McFarland. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 6, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets. 

Essay on Reentry

At two a.m., without enough spirits spilling into my liver to know  to keep my mouth shut, my youngest learned of years I spent inside a box: a spell, a kind of incantation I was under; not whisky, but History: I robbed a man. This, months before he would drop bucket after bucket

What Follows Is a Reconstruction Based on the Best Available Evidence

      1 .   I ate eggs from a chafing dish while the baker reminded us: the only thing that will hurt you out here are your own bad decisions

      2 .   I felt fettered then un-

      3 .   I listened to the rain

      4 .   I listened to the rain hitting the Carrier compressor, the gravel walk

I Consider Violence

When the starvation-hair appears all over my body, you call it fascinating, which is not the same as beautiful. I never decide what to wish for first, food or you. Or rather, eating food again or never again eating you. Your favorite part of me, my cupped hipbone, empty as a half mango scooped clean of its flesh. Your least favorite part, my hunger.

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To capture grief in poetry is to describe the ineffable. Here’s why Tennyson did it best

And the stately ships go on               To their haven under the hill; But O for the touch of a vanish’d hand,               And the sound of a voice that is still!

In this short, the US video essayist Evan Puschak (also known as the Nerdwriter) makes his case that Alfred Tennyson ( 1809-92 ) is the ‘great English poet of grief’. Combining biography and literary criticism, Puschak details how the sudden death of Tennyson’s best friend at a young age moulded him into an extraordinary writer on a subject that he surely wished he didn’t understand so acutely. In particular, Puschak centres his analysis on the poem Break, Break, Break (1842), which, in just 16 lines , traces the trajectory of a life from boyhood to the grave. Through this, Puschak argues, the work captures the feeling of an ‘incessant reaching for something that’s not there’ and the jarring indifference of the greater world that characterise bereavement.

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100 Years of Hemingway's Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923) and in our time (1924)

100 Years of Hemingway's  Three Stories and Ten Poems  (1923) and  in our time  (1924)

In 1923, the relatively unknown American expatriate writer Ernest Hemingway published his first book,  Three Stories and Ten Poems  (Paris: Contact Publishing), which featured the stories “Up in Michigan,” “Out of Season,” and “My Old Man.” That same year he wrote the vignettes that would be collected as  in our time  in 1924 (Paris: Three Mountains Press). This panel seeks to investigate Hemingway’s early innovations, their immediate impact on modernism, and their lasting influence on American literature. What impact do these early works have on Hemingway’s development as a writer? How can we connect them to his other fiction and nonfiction? How do they anticipate other experiments with genre, by Hemingway and by other writers? In what way does the Hemingway style operate (or not) within these stories?  How does the Hemingway style operate in works by his contemporaries or works by the generations of writers to follow?  Are the vignettes an early attempt at what we now call flash fiction or are they prose poems? Why did Hemingway never make a name for himself as a poet? We invite papers on any of the works in these small but impactful books; papers on Hemingway and other authors or Hemingway and modernism more generally are welcome.

Please send a 250-word proposal and short CV to  Ross K. Tangedal  (University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point) at  [email protected]  by  January 10, 2024,  for full consideration. Your submission will be confirmed via email. 

ALA Conference Information

The American Literature Association’s 35th annual conference will meet at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago, Illinois, on May 23-26, 2024 (Thursday through Sunday of Memorial Day weekend). For further information, please consult the ALA website at  www.americanliteratureassociation.org .