Cinepoetry

Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry

Christophe Wall-Romana

• Publisher: Modern Language Initiative
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780823245505
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: French Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Cinepoetry analyzes how French poets have remapped poetry through the lens of cinema for more than a century. In showing how poets have drawn on mass culture, technology, and material images to incorporate the idea, technique, and experience of cinema into writing, Wall-Romana documents the long history of cross-media concepts and practices often thought to emerge with the digital.In showing the cinematic consciousness of Mallarmé and Breton and calling for a reappraisal of the influential poetry theory of the early filmmaker Jean Epstein, Cinepoetry reevaluates the bases of literary modernism. The book also explores the crucial link between trauma and trans-medium experiments in the wake of two world wars and highlights the marginal identity of cinepoets who were often Jewish, gay, foreign-born, or on the margins.What results is a broad rethinking of the relationship between film and literature. The episteme of cinema, the book demonstates, reached the very core of its supposedly highbrow rival, while at the same time modern poetry cultivated the technocultural savvy that is found today in slams, e-poetry, and poetic-digital hybrids.

Part One: The Early Poetic Sensorium of the Apparatus

Chapter One: Mallarmé Unfolds the Cinématographe

“…a series of <imaginary mental written> images <linked b[y]> connected by a thread…”

—Stéphane Mallarmé, draft preface for Un Coup de dés, April 1897¹

In 1898, Stéphane Mallarmé became the first poet to comment in writing on the new Cinématographe.² Concurrently, he wrote the first poem mediated by cinema—Un Coup de dés—and began to plan a live performance combining poetry, cinema, and other media, an unfinished project that came to be known as Le Livre, possibly with the Paris World Fair of 1900 in mind.³ We will examine what led him to consider cinema as at once a new imaginary medium for the text, a virtual expansion of the poem as a form, and the ideal technical supplement for poetry’s public enactment.

Mallarmé’s oeuvre has long been held as typifying modern literature’s inner and outer limits. It signaled both the waning of the romantic sensibility and the dawning of “the great divide” of modernity, that between art as social participation (whether via popular literature or political vanguard) and art as withdrawal (whether as art for art’s sake or reactive vanguard).⁴ Critics like Blanchot, Barthes, Derrida, and Kristeva have sought to rescue Mallarmé from the “wrong” side of modernity by foregrounding the radical historicity of his conception of subjectivity, made famous by his injunction to “relinquish the initiative to words,” and make language the primary agency within the poetic subject. For modernist studies, Un Coup de dés, the first modern visual poem, and Mallarmé’s thoughts on music and dance, all point to notions of the total work of art, the dialectics of form and whole versus randomness and fragmentation, the materiality of signifiers, the writing of finitude, and a general philosophical alteration of the logos (Figure 14). Yet the myth of Mallarmé as pure poet, fueled by disciples such as Paul Valéry and Wallace Stevens, has led to a sustained lack of critical attention to the breadth of his interests: sociality, commodity and specular culture, corporeality, and the everyday.⁵ Rectifying this situation, recent commentators have studied Mallarmé’s fascination with concerts, modern dance and theater, newspapers and the women’s press, postal poetry, photography, and pulp novels.⁶ For instance, in the Doucet archive in Paris I have found a small undated comic strip by Mallarmé, showing the arrival at the Melun train station of his muse/mistress Méry Laurent (nicknamed “The Peacock”). This is a significant clue that the poet was attentive to cartoon art, such as that of Émile Cohl, who later pioneered film animation in 1908, and that he was actively interested in the poetics of serial images (Figure 15). Cinema clearly belongs to this constellation of mass and visual culture interests. What sets it apart, however, is that as a new medium and apparatus reframing interrelations between language, image, time, and space, it had the potential to affect fundamental aspects of textual and literary representation. I will endeavor to show that Mallarmé’s late projects—with Un Coup de dés and Le Livre—from roughly 1890 to his death in 1898, must be understood as a radical alteration of the medium of writing through its permeation by cinema and cinematic thought.⁷

Figure 14. A page from Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés, 1897.

Figure 15. Comic strip by Stéphane Mallarmé, “La journée du 12,” ca. 1890. It shows the arrival of Méry Laurent, nicknamed “Le Paon—the Peacock,” at the train station of Melun. © Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet / Madame Marie-Thérèse Stanislas.

Cinema in Mallarmé

In the neat version of its origin tale, cinema sprang to life full-blown on December 28, 1895, in Paris, when the Lumière brothers opened their Cinématographe to the paying public. The record points instead to a great deal of exchange and rivalry among competitors throughout the late 1880s and 1890s.⁸ Nonetheless, very quickly the Cinématographe spread through the public sphere, first for its magical photo-mimetic automorphism projected on screen, and second because its apparatus was remarkably compact and portable, as well as reversibly usable as camera and projector. The two journalists present at the inaugural December 28, 1895, show insisted on a third feature as well, exulting the fact that “it is life itself, it is motion recorded live [sur le vif],” “death will cease to be absolute…life will have left an indelible trace [trace indélébile],” “life is reproduced.”⁹ Their excitement sprang from the perceived dissolution of the barrier between life and death.

Only two weeks later, it would seem in a world apart, Mallarmé declared his candidacy for the honorary position of “Prince of Poets” left vacant by the death of his friend Paul Verlaine a week earlier. Traditionally bestowed by acclamation, the position was put up for election instead, in a spirit of democracy and because poets from different groups were vying for the position and publicity. Mallarmé, as presumptive heir, was asked to write and publish a short electoral platform:

Poètes,

D’un geste, se conçoit, à l’heure—où prestige matériel évanoui, hélas!—en lumière pure se résout le fantôme humain.…

[Poets, It can be conceived through a gesture, now that—the material prestige having vanished, alas!—the human ghost resolves itself in pure light.]¹⁰

The translation is approximate because of Mallarmé’s willfully elliptical style. This “pure light,” I argue, is not only a metaphor for the departed Prince of Poets’ soul, but a multiple formulation pointing to the genesis of cinema. For while clearly addressing the posthumous glory of Verlaine, Mallarmé’s image not only echoes the shock of cinema, still reverberating in the press, and the new posthuman era it opens,¹¹ but it also refers back to a crucial literary work of precinema.¹²

In 1886, Mallarmé’s friend Villiers de l’Isle-Adam had published his poetic novel L’Ève future, the focus of which is a female automaton belonging to a new race of “electrical ghosts” (fantômes électriques).¹³ With this work Villiers presciently extrapolated the cinema that was to come out of chronophotography, correctly positing that Edison would be its inventor:

…on the large white canvas…was refracted the life-size apparition of a very pretty and quite young red-haired woman. The vision, transparent flesh, miraculously photochrome, was dancing.…The movements had the quality of flow of Life itself, thanks to the process of serial photography which, on a six-yard-long ribbon, can capture ten minutes of the motions of a being on microscopic glass-slides, later reflected back through a powerful lamposcope.…Suddenly a flat and heavy voice, silly and harsh resounded.…The gestures, gazes, lip movements…were reproduced.¹⁴

For Villiers, the “electrical ghost” and the filmic image are synonymous. In a written eulogy after the death of Villiers in 1889, Mallarmé speaks of him as a “luminous ghost” (fantôme lumineux)¹⁵ and shows great familiarity with L’Ève future, quoting a long passage from the novel that mentions “the automaton [automate]…fabricated by Edison.”¹⁶ It seems to me that the luminous ghosts in Mallarmé have Villiers’s cyborg, and thus cinema, as intertext.¹⁷

What directly links Villiers’s 1886 L’Ève future and Mallarmé’s 1896 tangential reference to cinema is a front-page article from May 8, 1893, in Le Figaro titled “Une visite chez Edison,” the first eyewitness account of a picture show in a leading French newspaper.¹⁸ The author, Octave Uzanne, recounts how “voiceless, incapable of the slightest possible expression, in sheer disbelief,” he viewed a short movie of a Tyrolian man dancing, through the peephole of a Kinetograph box. Uzanne adds that “these shots…reproduce, with all the expression of life and the acceleration of movement, the human gesture [le geste humain] methodically recorded.” For several reasons, we can be certain Mallarmé read this article. He was a regular subscriber of, and contributor to Le Figaro, and Uzanne was a close friend and correspondent; he and Mallarmé belonged to a tight circle called the “dinners of the occult,” with Octave Mirbeau and Édouard Manet.¹⁹ More to the point, Uzanne and Mallarmé had exchanged letters regarding the welfare of Villiers’s widow. Uzanne could hardly have visited Edison’s laboratory without thinking of Villiers’s book—which takes place almost entirely in Edison’s laboratory—and probably did so because Villiers’s fiction was about to become reality. In the longer version of the interview published the same year in his book Vingt jours dans le Nouveau Monde (Twenty days in the New World), Uzanne indicates that he asked Edison point-blank “whether he had read L’Ève future or whether someone had told him of the novel”—the scientist muttering dismissively that he never read novels.²⁰ For these reasons it is very likely that Uzanne discussed his experience at Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory with Mallarmé—including Edison’s prognostic that production was “eighteen months to two years away.”²¹ It may have been at that point that the poet began to consider how the impending implementation of some kind of cinema apparatus would affect literature.

Let us now turn to a number of interactions and connections that Mallarmé had with figures key to the emergence of cinema in France. In November 1894, Arthur Meyer, owner of the Musée Grévin and the newspaper Le Gaulois, asked performer Émile Reynaud to start using “instantaneous photographs” in his projected Pantomimes lumineuses.²² Mallarmé knew Meyer (having met him in December 1895 at the latest), and would have been fascinated by Reynaud’s animated projections, in particular the Pauvre Pierrot—a key figure for Mallarmé.²³ In August 1894, a poem by Henri de Régnier, a close friend and disciple of Mallarmé, had been staged by Lugné-Poe at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, with “ghosts” (fantocini) moving “behind a veil of gauze” and “mimicking the words pronounced by actors.”²⁴ Was this a performance akin to the shadow puppetry made popular at the Montmartre’s Chat noir cabaret—or was it the earliest attempt at cinepoetic staging?²⁵ It is quite likely as well that Mallarmé knew firsthand of the development of the camera/projector. In May 1896, he writes a letter to his friend, the photographer Paul Nadar (son of pioneer photographer Félix Nadar, also a close friend), chiding him for working too hard and thanking him for going sailing together.²⁶ On June 24, Paul Nadar would apply for a patent for a reversible cinematographic camera, whose prototype he had been feverishly constructing, and abo...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Cinema as Imaginary Medium in French Poetry
• Part One: The Early Poetic Sensorium of the Apparatus
• 1. Mallarmé Unfolds the Cinématographe
• 2. The Pen-Camera: Raymond Roussel’s Freeze-Frame Panorama
• 3. Le Film surnaturel: Cocteau’s Immersive Writing
• Part Two: Telepresence of the Marvelous: Cinepoetic Theories in the 1920s
• 4. Jean Epstein’s Invention of Cinepoetry
• 5. Breton’s Surrealism, or How to Sublimate Cinepoetry
• 6. Doing Filmic Things with Words: On Chaplin
• Part Three: Cinepoetry and Postwar Trauma Cultures
• 7. The Poem-Scenario in the Interwar (1917–1928)
• 8. Reembodied Writing: Lettrism and Kinesthetic Scripts (1946–1959)
• Part Four: Cinema’s Print Culture in Poetry
• 9. Postlyricism and the Movie Program: From Jarry to Alferi
• 10. Cine-Verse: Decoupage Poetics and Filmic Implicature
• Part Five: Skin, Screen, Page: Cinepoetry’s Historical Imaginary
• 11. Max Jeanne’s Western: Eschatological Sarcasm in the Postcolony
• 12. Maurice Roche’s Compact: Word-Tracks and the Body Apparatus
• 13. Nelly Kaplan’s Le Collier de ptyx: Mallarmé as Political McGuffin
• Conclusion: The Film to Come in Contemporary Poetry
• Notes
• Bibliography