Film Poetry: A Historical Analysis

My PhD at the University of the Creative Arts, 2010

Over the last few years several essays have been published which include a comparison of Deren’s concept of vertical and horizontal film form with Deleuze’s theory of movement-image and time-image; for example, Annette Michelson’s and Renata Jackson’s essays in Maya Deren and The American Avant-garde (2001) and Erin Brannigan’s discussion of Deren’s work in Dancefilm (2011). Given the tentative nature of their comparison this essay will undertake a more systematic review of the relation between film and language which underpins Deren’s and Deleuze’s terminologies and further investigate both similarities and differences between them. The intention is to further clarify Deren’s legacy within experimental film and interdisciplinary discourses.

A Companion to American Poetry (eds. Mary Balkun, Jeffrey Gray, and Paul Jaussen), 2022

On March 4, 2010, The Poetry Foundation published a poem sampler on their website titled "Poetry Goes to the Movies: A collection of poems about the big screen." "In the last 100 years," the editors write, "perhaps no other artistic medium has provided more fodder for poetry than the cinema." The list is divided into four sections or categories of movie poems-celebrating film, the cinema experience, cinema technique, and Hollywood-and the poems range from the coy humor of Mary Jo Salter's "Video Blues," with its complaint, repeated with a difference, "My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy,/which makes some evenings harder to enjoy," to the righteous anger of Amiri Baraka's "A New Reality Is Better Than a New Movie!" The latter poem first establishes the unreality of film: "On all the/screens of america, the joint blows up every hour and a half for two dollars an fifty cents" and then contrasts filmic fantasy with the needs and demands of people in revolt. "The real terror of nature is humanity enraged, the true/technicolor spectacle that/hollywood/cant record. They cant even show you how you look when you/go to work, or when you/come back" (Baraka 1961, pp. 163, 164). Both poems, though almost diametrically opposed in style and tone, lament the gap between the promise or illusion of films and life beyond the screen or outside of the theater. For many of the poems selected by The Poetry Foundation, a poem "goes to the movies" when it meditates on the gap between film and reality. Film is often either illusion, drug, dream, escape, or fantasy. Movie poems highlight and then collapse the gap between film illusion and reality; nature is "real terror" but also "technicolor spectacle." The poem tangles the relationship between film, world, speaker, and audience, revealing film fantasy only to build a new or different illusion. Similarly, in Frank Bidart's "An American in Hollywood," the speaker and audience are first transformed into the werewolf on screen before the poem announces, "Crazy narrativesthat lend what is merely/in you, and therefore soon-to-be-repeated,// the fleeting illusion of logic

UP CAL Thesis, 1989

In the Philippine scene, short subject films have not been fully defined in the light of its function in our filmmaking industry and, moreover, its substantial presence in the scene of Philippine art and culture. At present, a more specific form of short films, namely, ‘experimental’, has been stirring up the creative minds of our young filmmakers. An aspect of these experimental short films has captured my attention, that is, its parallelism to the art of poetry. This interest will then serve as my foundation to further my discursive quest for the dormant artistic sense in film.

1973

The genre of screenwriting began right from the days of cinematographic history and so is over a hundred years old. Yet many people scoff at the idea of defending the screenplay as a form of literature and serious critics maintain that it is not an end-product, that it is just a stop-gap measure. A brief survey of this art-form shows that in the first few decades of this century, instead of according literary recognition to the screenplays of that day, critics were concerned in discussing not the individual merits of the writer but instead their literary motivations. Did they write for the screen in order to express themselves in a way impossible in any order medium, yet with the same dedication and meticulousness as writers in the more traditional literary arts? Or did they consider their screen writing endeavours as mere "hack" assignments, undertaken only to give them the financial support necessary to embark on a real "labor of love," such as writing a good n...

2013

Beckett and nothing, 2020

" Tagore [Rabindranath Tagore] was able to create a suspension of disbelief amongst his readers even when he described this series of events [referring to cycle of events in Tagore's novella " Nastanirh " ], partly by taking advantages available naturally to writer of literature, and partly through his own eloquent language. No filmmaker could possibly achieve what Tagore did. " 1-Satyajit Ray Linguistic expression of literature has no palpable limit as the psychological realm of audience is infinite. The author can make the reader laugh, cry; sympathize with the lucid narrative of his writing. Readers construe these chronicles of events in some way or other in connotation with memory and other subliminal experience. They imagine them instinctively in relation to their own experiences and commiserate with archetypal rendering of emotion, poetry, realism and humanitarian qualities. Every moving image has its own implication until it's juxtaposed or interwoven to elicit some other abstraction or dialectical implication. The lyrical quality of literal narratives can be attempted to adapt into cinema by means of carefully imprinted stream of image and sound. But it may be argued that to what extent can cinematography objectively narrativize literary portrayal is a debatable topic-with all wide range of the tonal variations that literature can afford to represent. Here the idea of obligation comes into consideration. Cinematography is saddled with the obligation of imbuing the subtlety into cinema from literature, which has the advantage of being figurative and subtextual. Considerations for choosing creative tools, lensing, lighting, camera movement and rhythm become very crucial when it comes to concretize the characters, plots, milieu and motifs instilled in literature. Even the contrapuntal coordinates of time and space have brought cinematographic compulsions to new high as everything in literature can't be interpreted in a singular progression keeping in mind the layered experience it etch out in the reader's mind. Cinematographer, as the creator has the freedom to choose from sharply intrusive or delicately choreographed shot with subjective or objective perspectives to render abiding impressions. This paper wants to discuss various considerations, implications, limitations of cinematography and its intricate relationship with the pictorial analogue of the source literature vis-à-vis various coherent theories and practices intrinsic to both the art forms.

2021

The paper attempts at collecting and interpreting a dozen or so film poems, by authors such as S. Grochowiak, K. Rodowska, A. Kuśniewicz, B. Zadura, K. Hoffman, J. Oszelda, G. Olszański. Out of numerous cases of transmedia relations (film – literature), examples which could be classified as ekphrases according to the rhetorical tradition are distinguished. The phenomenon of poetic film ekphrases has been completed with a cultural context, related to the different traditions of film telling, treated as a common practice (amateur, professional, artistic) and conceptualized with the framework of cinema anthropology. c i n e m a a n t h r o p o l o g y film poetry E k p h r a s i s