A short history of the poetry film.

1. A Short History of
Poetry Film

2. TheNight
Before
Christmas
 In 1905 Edwin S. Porter made a silent film which
illustrated Clement Clarke Moore’s poem Twas the
Night before Christmas.
 You’ll see that scenes in the film are introduced using
lines of the poem.
 It includes a panoramic shot of Santa Claus riding his
sleigh over hills which was created using cut out
models and a painted backdrop.
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkNWfwOrVH0

3. Manhatta
 The Documentary Film Manhatta was directed by Paul
Strand and Charles Sheeler in 1921 and was inspired
by Walt Whitman’s poem ‘Manahatta’.
 The film presents a day in the life of lower Manhattan
using a series of images interspersed with intertitles
from ‘Manahatta’ and other poems in
Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
 Lines such as:
 High growths of iron
Slender
Strong
Splendidly uprising
Toward clear skies.
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuuZS2phD10&ab_
channel=GettyMuseum

4. NightMail
 Another early film to adopt film and poetry was the
1936 documentary film by Harry Watt and Basil
Wright, Night Mail.
 It was produced by the GPO film unit and featured
music by Benjamin Britten and poetry written for the
documentary by W H Auden. It follows the London,
Midland and Scottish Railway mail train from London
to Scotland. Although it was made as a 30-minute
documentary, the 3 minutes where Auden’s poem
appears can be seen as a poetry film in itself.
 Auden’s lines rhythmically echo the chug of the train
….
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmciuKsBOi0

5. CinqMinutes
duCinemaPur
 The pre-surrealist French avant-garde of the 1920s
introduced the notion of poetry within film, in contrast
to the storytelling nature of narrative film.
 It was argued that what made film poetic was
abstracting detail from its reality, and its stress on
movement and rhythm to create form.
 One example of a filmmaker using this approach is
Henri Chomette’s in his 1926 Cinq Minutes Du Cinema
Pur (Five Minutes of Pure Cinema).
 In this film, abstract objects and light shapes dance,
rotate and flash.
 Many of these were made as silent films so that sound
didn’t distract from what was happening visually.
 https://youtu.be/_PNhjdHyOxs

6. L’EtoiledeMer
 The photographer Man Ray was the first to use the
specific term cinepoem as a hybrid construction.
 Man Ray’s 1928 film L’ Etoile De Mer uses a poem by
surrealist poet Robert Desnos.
 Man Ray translates actual images of poetry into
cinematic poetic images.
 For example, one line which (translated) reads,
‘Women’s teeth are such charming objects’, is set
against a shot of a woman fixing her garter.
 https://youtu.be/csEDMzs3SXo

7. dadascope
 German experimental filmmaker Hans Richter proposed
that it was the lyric quality of poetry film that was its
distinguishing mark – making the invisible visible.
 Hans Richter saw the potential of images being
used as words and phrases to create meaning and
metaphor.
 Richter’s 1957 film Dadascope combines original Dadaist
poetry and visuals that create free associations and
disorientating juxtapositions.
 Dadascope is a portrait of the Dada movement – some of
the things we see in the film: Marcel Duchamp reciting
puns whilst sitting in a tree, strange creatures and
statues, a man is in a bull costume, a man in a washing
machine, and so on.
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsMyHNUCgM4&feat
ure=share&ab_channel=RMutt
 The poems are in multiple languages.

8. WilliamWees
 As consumer video cameras started to become available
in the 70s, they were used to record and create poems.
 William Wees, the American writer on film and
cultural studies, called the combination of image and
text, the Poetry-film genre (hyphenating poetry and
film).
 Wees’s idea is that through words and images, poetry-
films produce associations, connotations, metaphors
and symbols that cannot be found in either their verbal
or their visual texts taken alone.

9. GeorgeAguilar
 By the 1990s open access to the means of production
continued to develop. During this decade George
Aguilar took the opportunities of the emerging
technologies of the time to pioneer what he termed
Cin(E)-Poems.
 Making the most of the technology offered by the latest
Mac, and later the internet, Aguilar’s mission was to
bring video poetry to the masses.
 Aguilar made The San Francisco-based Poetry Film
Workshop Archive, available to educational
organisations.

10. GeorgeAguilar
cont’d
 Aguilar was also receiving an increasing number of
videos on CD as entries for the San Francisco’s Poetry
Film Festival (which had been started in 1975 by
Herman Berlandt).
 Aguilar then toured the US promoting video-poetry as
the Director of the National Poetry Association and
later on his own. George Aguilar described video poetry
as: “a mixed-media format in which poem, image and
sound interact symbiotically”.

11. Beyond
 The influence of music videos and the continuing
development of affordable technology has led to an
increasing number of artists and poets making poetry
film.
 Collaborations between artists of different genres exist
internationally and have led to a large body of new
work as well as remixes from material available
through Creative Commons License.
 Festivals devoted specifically to poetry film have been
established and there are an increasing number of
poetry festivals and online poetry platforms that
include poetry film.
 A more recent example of the poetry film is the HBO
series Lovecraft Country (2020).
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kteJ6dQ0AEc