Film-Poetry Synthesis and the Birth of Experimental Cinema in France
Date of Award
2009
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelors
Department
Humanities
First Advisor
Van Tuyl, Jocelyn
Keywords
Film, Poetry, Aesthetics, France, Experimental, Avant-Garde, Desnos, Robert, Man Ray, Dulac, Germaine, Film Theory, Apollinaire, Guillaume, 20th Century
Area of Concentration
French
Abstract
French poet Guillaume Apollinaire’s 1917 lecture “L’Esprit nouveau et les poètes” announced the beginning of the Parisian poets’ sincere engagement with cinema: in the following decade, the French literary community became increasingly involved in the development of film theory and criticism, and France’s young generation of experimental filmmakers began to consider modern poetry as a potential inspiration for their work. Some theorists and filmmakers even proposed the widely interpreted concept of a cinépoème: a cinematic poem. This thesis examines the presence and influence of French poetry in three such cinépoèmes made in the late 1920s. In Emak-Bakia, Man Ray employs the Surrealist process of automatic writing and, adopting the approach of late Symbolist and Cubist poets, breaks down the realist logic of conventional cinema into its basic components. Influenced by the artistic philosophy of the Symbolist poets, Germaine Dulac reinterprets a famous poem by Baudelaire in L’Invitation au voyage and illustrates the independence of the filmic image from the written word. In his script for Étoile de mer, Surrealist poet Robert Desnos makes use of visual repetition, intellectual montage, and unconventional intertitles to translate his trademark manipulations of language to the screen. Together, these films provide evidence of how this first wave of experimental filmmakers used poetry as a springboard in their greater search for cinema’s own, unique voice.
Recommended Citation
Ross, Scott, "Film-Poetry Synthesis and the Birth of Experimental Cinema in France" (2009). Theses & ETDs. 4172.
https://digitalcommons.ncf.edu/theses_etds/4172