University of Alberta

Kino-Poiesis: Towards a Poetics of Poetic Film

by

David Paul Foster • '* ••- -'

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English and Film Studies

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1+1 Canada For Alison. Abstract

"Kino-Poiesis: Towards a Poetics of Poetic Film," considers the possibility of theorizing a poetic mode of filmmaking. While critics often apply the term 'poetic' as a placeholder for words such as difficult, beautiful, or inchoate in relation to film, this dissertation argues that there are discernible qualities in certain films that warrant the name poetic. This poetics contends that the poetic film draws on the literary sense of the poetic to engender a mode of filmmaking that is reflexive, lyrical, and challenges narrativity. This dissertation focuses on the work of four filmmakers - Chris Marker, Andrei Tarkovsky, Stan

Brakhage and Guy Maddin - whose work exemplifies the qualities of the poetic film and engages directly or indirectly with poetry itself. This dissertation proceeds coordinates critical theories on poetry, intertextuality, lyricism, metaphor and poetics with film theory on narrative, subjectivity, and adaptation.

Ultimately, it defines poetic film as a mode of direct expression whose metaphoric structure and lyric orientation challenge the limits of other filmic modes and maps a discursive space between fiction and non-fiction film.

This dissertation is organized around four formal concerns that are essential to defining the poetic film. Its first chapter addresses the direct connection between poetry and film by exploring critical and theoretical approaches to film adaptation and applying these theories to short films that adapt poems. Chapter two explores the limits of narrative in the poetic film by proposing a theory of narrative poeticization that considers how film style and other discursive forms disrupt or obscure narrative discourse. Chapter three examines the role of reflexivity in producing poetic in film. Poetic film emphasizes its 'poeticalness' through reflexive strategies, exploring intertextual connections, and developing visual metaphors. Finally, the fourth chapter considers poetic film in relation to theories of lyricism, both in terms of the literary lyric and theories of lyric film. In describing the poetic film as lyrical this chapter draws on the modernist lyric and lyrical prose form Denkbild (thought- image) along with theories of the representation of subjectivity in film to articulate the recreation of lyricism in the poetic film. Acknowledgements

I want to begin by thanking my supervisor, Jerry White, whose guidance, enthusiasm, and patience have been exceedingly valuable to me, and whose passionate approach to his work I greatly admire. I also want to thank the other members of my examining committee, Doug Barbour, Ono Okome, Liz Czach, and Elena Siemens who all have provided kind feedback and support. And many thanks to Bill Wees of McGill University for his generous comments as external examiner.

Other members of the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta provided advice and encouragement during the completion of this project and also deserve thanks, especially Bill Beard, Don Perkins, Nora Stovel and the late Bruce Stovel. Early on, Gene Walz and Brenda Austin-Smith of the University of Manitoba helped suggest to me that this project was both possible and worthwhile, and I thank them for that initial interest.

This project benefited greatly from research conducted at a number of institutions, and I would like to thank the staff of the following: the Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art, Toronto, especially Sarah Robayo Sheridan; the Bibliotheque du film at the Cinematheque Francaise, Paris; and the Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris.

Elements of this dissertation have been presented at the Film Studies Association of Canada's Annual Conference at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in 2006 and 2007, and at the "Alternative Non-Fictions" Graduate Conference at the University of Chicago in 2008. I appreciate the questions and feedback of participants at those conferences.

My research was generously supported by a University of Alberta PhD Scholarship and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada's PhD Canadian Graduate Scholarship. To Mary Chan for her assistance in the final stages of preparing this dissertation: your competence is only exceeded by your kindness. To Nathan Dueck for his debate and friendship.

To my sister Katherine, who is also on this PhD journey, though in a different discipline and city, I thank you for your support and strength. To my parents for their love, thank you for instilling in me a desire to learn.

Finally, to Alison whose love and artistry have been constant inspirations, there are insufficient words to give you thanks. Table of Contents:

Introduction 1-27

Chapter One 28-89 Film Adaptation and Poetry: Theory and Practice

Chapter Two 90-169 Poetic Frontiers, or the Zone Beyond Narrative: Poetic Film and Narrativity from Narrativization to Narrative Poeticization

Chapter Three 170-247 Seeing As, Looking Back, and the Reflexive Turn: Metaphor, Transtextuality, and Reflexivity in Poetic Film

Chapter Four 248-349 'Kino-I': Lyric Possibilities in Poetic Film

Conclusion 350-361 Kino-Poiesis: Poetic Film, Moving-Poetry

Works Cited 362-386 List of Figures

Figure One: Page 245 From Un Chien Andalou Directed by Luis Bufiuel and Salvador Dali (DVD. Transflux Film, 2004)

Figure Two: Page 245 From Man with a Movie Camera Directed by Dziga Vertov (VUFKU, 1929. DVD. Kino, 2004.)

Figure Three: Page 246 From Man with a Movie Camera Directed by Dziga Vertov (VUFKU, 1929. DVD. Kino, 2004.)

Figure Four: Page 246 From Man with a Movie Camera Directed by Dziga Vertov (VUFKU, 1929. DVD. Kino, 2004.)

Figure Five: Page 247 From Man with a Movie Camera Directed by Dziga Vertov (VUFKU, 1929. DVD. Kino, 2004.)

Figure Six: Page 247 From Man with a Movie Camera Directed by Dziga Vertov (VUFKU, 1929. DVD. Kino, 2004.) Introduction:

Towards a Poetics of Poetic Film

"Poetry in general does not exist, but variable conceptions of poetry exist and will continue to

exist, not only from one period or country to another, but also from one text to another."

- Tzvetan Todorov, "Poetry without Verse" (71)

What is Poetic Film? Why Poetic Film?

In his conversations with Michael Ondaatje in the book The

Conversations, Walter Murch compares writing poetry to film editing:

The decision where to cut film is very similar to the decision, in writing

poetry, of where to end each line .... By ending it where he does, the poet

exposes that last word to the blankness of the page, which is a way of

emphasizing the word. If he adds two words after it, he immerses that

word within the line, and it has less visibility, less significance. We do

very much the same in film: the end of a shot gives the image of that last

frame an added significance, which we exploit. In film, at the moment of

the cut you are juxtaposing one image with another, and that's the

equivalent of rhyme. It's how rhyme and alliteration work in poetry, or

how we juxtapose two words or two images, and what that juxtaposition

implies. (268)

Murch's comments suggest an affinity between poetry and film. But one wonders if there is a connection beyond this metaphoric affinity Murch describes. Is there

a connection between poetry and film beyond the mechanical similarity Murch

1 sees between the line break and the cut, or between the juxtapositioning or rhyming of words and that of images? These questions have led me to consider

further, is there something 'poetic' that poetry and film share? Indeed, since one might describe certain films as poetic, what is poetic film? As the title of this

dissertation - Kino-Poiesis - implies, the question at the heart of this project

concerns the possibility of understanding film, moving images, as poetic.

To begin to answer these questions, this dissertation endeavours to present

a poetics of poetic film. But the very term poetic frustrates the kind of precision that a poetics demands. Noel Burch begins his book Theory of Film Practice by

stating: "The terminology a film-maker or film theoretician chooses to employ is

a significant reflection of what he takes a film to be" (3). Burch's observation is particularly relevant when considering how the term 'poetic' is applied to film.

What might seem like a simple adjective proves complicated when either joined with the general noun film, as 'poetic film,' or used to describe a specific film, as

in 'that film was poetic' Part of the problem comes from the various definitions

of 'poetic' itself. A brief summary of the definitions provided by the Oxford

English Dictionary helps to illustrate this difficulty. A few of the OED's

definitions of 'poetic' include: 1) "Of, belonging to, or characteristic of poets or poetry ... Formerly fictitious or imaginary"; 2) "that is a poet, that writes poetry.

Later also: having the sensibility, insight, or faculty of expression attributed to poets"; 3a) Composed as poetry; consisting of, or written in verse"; 3b) Having the style or character proper to poetry as a fine art; elevated or sublime in

expression"; 6) "Making, creative, formative; relating to artistic creation or

2 composition"; 7) "Having a poetic style"; 8b) "The creative principles informing any literary, social or cultural construction, or the theoretical study of these; a theory of form." Three main currents of meaning are apparent in these definitions. First, there is the sense of poetic as that which relates to poetry, as the literary mode or discursive expression in general and specific instances of this mode. Second, there is the sense of poetic as a quality of something, variously described as imaginary, elevated, or sublime. This quality is in turn related to poetry as a mode of discourse. Third, there is the sense of poetic as a process, a way or style of making, of creating, of writing, of composing, or of constructing.

When film is graced with the adjective poetic, the resulting 'poetic film,' therefore, can certainly suggest all these three currents applied to or in relation to film. Thus, poetic film might be film that is related to the literary mode poetry.

Poetic film might refer to a particular quality of a film that is imaginative, affective, beautiful, or otherwise associated with qualities that might be called poetic. And poetic film might describe an approach or style of filmmaking, film writing, film editing, or other creative aspects involved in film production.

Because of these possibilities, when critics, reviewers, filmmakers, and others speak of film as being poetic or of poetic film, such usage begs the question as to the meaning of poetic and poetry in this context.

Take, for instance, Andre Bazin's use of the terms poetry and poetic in his well known and frequently anthologized essay "De Sica: metteur en scene" from

3 What Is Cinema?: Volume 2.x In this essay, Bazin enlists the words poetic or poetry seven times, and in each usage the words take on different connotations.

The first instance occurs when Bazin discusses Vittorio De Sica's early film

Sciuscia, when Bazin says of the film: "The scenario occasionally succumbs to melodramatic indulgence, and the direction has a certain poetic elegance, a lyrical quality, that today it seems to me De Sica is concerned to avoid" ("De Sica" 61).

Here the word poetic seems a negative or at least manque descriptor, especially when associated with "melodramatic indulgence." One might read poetic and the related term lyrical as meaning sentimental or over-wrought, and implying a forced stylistic tendency, maudlin in its beauty or craftsmanship, especially in comparison to Bicycle Thieves. Bazin echoes this sense of poetic as a stylistic quality in the sentence: "It is by way of its poetry that the realism of De Sica takes on its meaning, for in art, at the source of all realism there is an aesthetic paradox that must be resolved" ("De Sica" 64). But here poetry as a quality of a realist aesthetic is a positive appraisal of De Sica's neorealism, one that Bazin associates with beauty, but beauty in an immanent and phenomenological sense ("De Sica"

64-65). If poetry is a phenomenological quality, then one might think of it as an experience of style on the part of the viewer. Following Daniel Frampton's account of the possibilities of film phenomenology, however, one might also extend this phenomenology of poetry in film to an experience of "film-being" and

1 This essay is not the only instance of Bazin's shifting use of the terms poetry or poetic. Other essays, such as "The Virtues and Limitations of Montage" and "The Stylistics of Robert Bresson" from What is Cinema?: Volume 1 and "An Aesthetics of Reality" from Volume 2 make a similar variety of uses of poetry and poetic, but the familiar "De Sica" essay makes the most frequent and varied use of the terms in a single essay.

4 "film-thinking" immanent in film itself (39). For Frampton, the experience of the

"film's experience of its characters and objects'''' are evidence of the working of

what he calls the "filmind" - the "film steering its own (dis)course ... 'the film

itself" (6). But Frampton insists that such an approach to the phenomenology of

the filmind must not appeal to metaphors of human thought or consciousness (7).

Instead, drawing from the work of Vivian Sobchack, Frampton proposes that the

phenomenology of the filmind, its experience of'thinking,' can be seen in the

way "film 'thinks' moods and desires through movement and colour and framing

etc., but not in the same way we experience our moods and desires" (47).2 In this

sense, when Bazin says the "Neorealism knows only immanence .... It is a

phenomenology" ("De Sica" 64-65), he not only speaks to viewer's experience of

De Sica's films as poetic, but also the poetry of how the film's style conveys the

experience of its world.

Bazin refers to poetry a third time saying: "On the contrary it is a positive

striving after poetry, the stratagem of a person in love, expressing himself in the metaphors of his time, while at the same time making sure to choose such of them

as will open the hearts of everyone" ("De Sica" 71). Again the word poetry

seems to suggest an aesthetic quality, one associated with beauty and this time

love, but also connected to the figurative device of metaphor and thereby related to a literary sense of poetry. In the fourth sentence, Bazin notes that when Andre

Suares criticizes Chaplin it must be because Suares is "impervious to the poetry of

2 Ultimately, Frampton rejects the possibility of film phenomenology because he believes it relies too heavily on anthropomorphic metaphors for understanding film subjectivity. Frampton says, "film cannot show us human thinking, it shows us'film-thinking'" (47).

5 the cinema" ("De Sica" 71). This time the term poetry not only suggests an

aesthetic quality, but also an affective quality that concerns spectatorial

engagement. The fifth, sixth, and seventh instances, referring to Miracle in

Milan, all relate poetry to love, as in the third usage, but this time as the aesthetic

expression. First Bazin says, "Poetry is but the active and creative form of love,

its projection into the world" ("De Sica" 74), which he then relates to Toto from the film, who has "an inexhaustible capacity for defense by way of poetry" ("De

Sica" 75), and finally he refers to Toto's dove as "an arbitrarily added possibility, to give poetry a material form" ("De Sica" 75). In this section poetry shifts from

suggesting the means of De Sica's expression of love (both his own humanist love

and love in the narrative) to being a narrative point, Toto's innocence and his behaviour, to a symbolic value embodied by the dove.

Bazin's variable use of the words poetry and poetic make clear the undecidability that the terms can have in critical discourse. But these examples are not intended to show a weakness or lack of clarity in Bazin's writing. Rather, they illustrate some of the potential difficulties that critics and reviewers face when employing poetry and poetic in relation to film and more so the difficulties readers encounter when attempting to decipher the meaning of these terms in particular contexts. The various references to poetic and poetry in Bazin's "De

Sica" essay follow the three currents outlined above, and they point to the questions that this dissertation will necessarily engage with in following these currents. In this dissertation I will wade into these currents not necessarily to fix a meaning onto poetic film, but to explore its possibilities. The question I will take

6 up is essentially, what is poetic film? But this question itself needs qualification and expansion, as it asks both what about film is poetic and what is the relationship between film and poetry? And from these questions more questions

follow. Does poetic film describe a particular quality in films, whether affective,

aesthetic, or ineffable? Or does poetic film describe an approach to filmmaking,

or to particular aspects of the construction of a film? Moreover, does poetic film describe a relationship to poetry based on an aesthetic resemblance, or similarities in content, theme, or style? Or is poetic film a matter of the adaptation of poetry

into film?

Given the number and scope of these questions, it is necessary that this

dissertation take a position and choose a critical point of view from which to

survey the interrelations of poetry and film. There are without a doubt a number of critical methodologies that could be drawn upon to address these questions.

And throughout each of its chapters, this dissertation will engage with a range of

critical and theoretical approaches. But to begin with, it is worthwhile to take as

an initial model Maya Deren's view of poetry and film and poetic film outlined in her responses at the Cinema 16 "Poetry and Film" symposium. In conversation with Willard Maas, Arthur Miller, Dylan Thomas, and Parker Tyler, Deren

explains her understanding of what poetry and the poetic entails:

Now poetry, to my mind, consists not of assonance; or rhythm, or rhyme,

or any of these other qualities we associate as being characteristic of

poetry. Poetry ... is an approach to experience, in the sense that a poet is

looking at the same experience that a dramatist may be looking at. It

7 comes out differently because they are looking at it from a different point

of view and because they are concerned with different elements in it.

Now, the characteristics of poetry, such as rhyme, or color, or any of these

emotional qualities which we attach to the poetic work, also may be

present in works which are not poetry, and this will confuse us. The

distinction of poetry is its construction (what I mean by poetic structure).

(173-174)3

For Deren, the difference between a poetic film and other film is a matter of the difference between a "vertical attack" and a "horizontal attack" (174). Poetic film, Deren asserts, is vertical, its construction or structure tending towards an investigation of a moment, an emotion, or an experience by way of associations, either of meaning, affect, or visual relation (173, 178-179). The horizontal attack, by contrast, is a development, a progression, or a sequence that Deren suggests follows narrative lines of" action-leading to another" (174). Completely vertical films, Deren says, "are comparable to lyric poems" (175). But Deren also notes that this vertical approach, this "poetic structure" is not exclusive to written or spoken poetry as in the lyric, but possible "in any one of a number of mediums"

(185). This vertical attack, then, is a way of "handling poetry and film, and poetry

3 By contrast, the other participants on the panel, especially Miller and Thomas, develop much more affective and vague concepts of what might be involved in poetry in film. Thomas sees poetry in film either as a matter of visually beautiful moments in silent UFA films or in sound films, moments in which "the words seem to fit," but generally dismisses Deren's theory, saying "I'm not quite sure that I want such a thing as a poetic film" (176). Similarly, Miller emphasizes poetry as a matter of emotional depth, and relates the poetic in film to dream, but also dismisses and disparages Deren's approach, while also evidently not understanding it (178, 184).

8 in film" (Deren et al. 175). Thus Deren provides an approach to poetic film that brings together the three currents mentioned above in a particular fashion.

Deren's theory of the vertical structure of poetry and poetic film offers a view of the relationship between poetry and film that emphasizes form and structure. Deren relates poetry directly to poetic film, but rejects looking for direct parallels between elements of poetry such as rhyme or assonance and elements in poetic film. Instead, Deren emphasizes the connection between poetry and poetic film as one of a similar approach to construction. This construction process has two important aspects. First, it is related to the creative expression of experience.

Second it proceeds along associative rather than narrative lines. Deren also emphasizes the importance of montage as a poetic process, stressing that she sees film, by way of montage, "by its very nature to be a poetic medium" (179). The associative editing of images, along with the use of sound in combination or juxtaposition, in film becomes the means by which to create this vertical and poetic attack (179).

A Poetics of Poetic Film

Deren's theory takes a formal approach to poetic film and the relationship between poetry and film, and it is this approach that inspires the method of this dissertation. Deren's attempt at elucidating the connection between poetry and film, and the ideas she suggests are involved in making poetic film sets out the four major concerns of this dissertation: first, the connection between literary poetry and poetic film; second, the role of narrative in poetic film; third, the construction, structure, or organization of poetic film and its associative qualities;

9 and finally, the experiential or even lyrical aspects involved in this poetic point of view. Moreover, Deren's emphasis on formal qualities such as montage and

sound will be a further guide to how this dissertation proceeds, taking as its

organizing principle the exploration of formal concerns relating to poetic film.

Following Deren, then, this dissertation will endeavour to explore a "poetics of poetic film."

Of course there have been many other critical attempts to understand what poetic film is and how it relates to poetry. Besides Deren, Pier Paolo Pasolini's theory of the cinema of poetry and P. Adams Sitney's work on the lyric film and

other connections between avant-garde film and poetry are two major efforts in

this regard, and I will take up both Pasolini and Sitney's work in subsequent

chapters. But poetic is also a descriptor that has been ascribed to many movements and periods in film history. Poetic is a term that has been applied

critically to movements such as French Poetic Realism of the 1930s and the

British documentary movement of the 1930s and '40s. Likewise, poetry and the poetic have also been ideas central to or part of filmmaking practices, such as

those of the European avant-garde of the 1920s and '30s including the work of

surrealist, Dadaist, and expressionist filmmakers, or those of the American

experimental film movement of the 1940s, '50s, and '60s. Filmmakers from Jean

Renoir to Jean Cocteau to John Grierson have all evoked poetry in describing or making their films or had the term poetic applied to their films (or in Grierson's

case, films he oversaw as a producer). Thus one approach to poetic film would be to trace the historical use of the term: its critical use as applied to specific films or

10 film movements, and its use by filmmakers in describing their films or the films themselves. And such a historically based project is one direction this dissertation could take. However, as both Bazin's essay and Deren's theories suggest, to pursue such a historical course requires that one first understand what is poetic in film and what might constitute poetic film. To discuss the history of poetic film without first providing at least some possible definitions of poetic film I believe would risk putting the cart before the proverbial horse4.

Moreover, one reason for turning the focus of this dissertation away from history is to hold off the instinct to compare poetic films from a specific period with poetry from that period. While this is sometimes a useful endeavour, say in the case of W.H. Auden's poetry and his work on Harry Watt and Basil Wright's

Night Mail or Stan Brakhage's interest in the poetry of Charles Olson, it can also lead to a too easy equation of filmmaking as inspired by or drawing on poetry of a period with poetic film. But that is not to say that this poetics of poetic film will be ahistorical. One cannot ignore history, and the place of individual films in film history, their relation to particular film movements or literary movements or historical periods will inform discussions of those films. Films such as Luis

Bunuel and Salvador Dali Un Chien Andalou, Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie

In the meantime, however, one brief but thorough (though by no means exhaustive) account of a history of poetry in film can be found in Scott MacDonald's article "Poetry and Avant-Garde Film." MacDonald traces the use of poetry in film from the early avant-garde of Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand's Manhatta (1921), with its citation of poetry by Walt Whitman, to the American experimental cinema of James Broughton, Stan Brakhage, Hollis Frampton, and Abigail Child, and finally to three recent film poems he analyzes in depth, Rick Hancox's Waterworx (1982), Matthais MUller's nebel (2000), and Clive Holden's Trains of Winnipeg (2004).

11 Camera, or Chris Marker's Le Tombeau d'Alexandre are inextricable from their

historical significance, and as such concerns of history will be involved in

considering these and other films. Thus while this dissertation is not organized

along historical lines, neither does it deny history.

Why a poetics of poetic film? This question has two parts, first why a poetics, and second why poetic film. To answer the first part also requires

clarifying what a poetics is in the context of this dissertation. The basic understanding of what a poetics entails that informs this dissertation comes from

Tzetvan Todorov. In his book Introduction to Poetics, Todorov contrasts poetics with two other approaches or what he calls "attitudes" to the study of literature:

"interpretation" and "science" (3-6). According to Todorov, interpretation is an

approach by which "to name the meaning of the text examined' {Introduction 4)

and encompasses ''''exegesis, commentary, explication de texte, close reading, analysis, or even just criticism''' {Introduction 3). Alternatively, science involves

"the establishment of general laws of which [each] particular text is the product"

and encompasses "psychological or psychoanalytic, sociological or ethnological

studies, as well as those derived from philosophy or from the history of ideas"

(Todorov Introduction 6). Whereas interpretation is "an ideal but invisible description" {Introduction 4), science is "a labor of decipherment and translation"

{Introduction 6). For Todorov, poetics comes between interpretation and science:

In contradistinction to the interpretation of particular works it does not

seek to name meaning, but aims at a knowledge of the general laws that

preside over the birth of each work. But in contradistinction to such

12 science as psychology, sociology, etc., it seeks these laws within literature

itself. Poetics is therefore an approach to literature at once 'abstract' and

'external' .... what a poetics questions are the properties of that particular

discourse that is literary discourse. Each work is therefore regarded only

as the manifestation of an abstract and general structure of which it is but

one of the possible realizations. {Introduction 6-7)

Yet as Todorov describes it, poetics does not abandon interpretation, as the two approaches are complementary since "A theoretical reflection upon poetics that is not sustained by observations of existing works always turns out to be sterile and invalid" {Introduction 7). But Todorov also rejects the possibility of reconciling poetics and the approaches of science, since poetics is already a "science of literature" {Introduction 8). While Todorov later tempered the extremities of his approach to poetics in his "Preface to the English Edition: Poetics, Past and

Future" allowing "interpretation" and "science" or "exegesis and theory" greater room and interaction within poetics {Introduction xxi), his sense of poetics as a study of the properties, qualities, and structures of a mode of discourse will guide this dissertation's approach to its poetics of poetic film.

But to expand on Todorov's definition of poetics further one can also look to Linda Hutcheon's Poetics of Postmodernism. As Hutcheon defines it, a poetics is "more than a fixed definition" it is "an open, ever changing theoretical structure by which to order both our cultural knowledge and our critical procedures .... It is both a way of speaking - a discourse - and a cultural process involving the expression of thoughts ... that a poetics would seek to articulate" {Poetics 14).

13 For my purposes, Hutcheon's use of "poetics" is also appropriate. The goal of this project, to develop a poetics of the poetic film, necessarily involves the kind of method Hutcheon suggests is involved in her own work. A poetics of the poetic film is at once a means of tracing the relationship of poetry to film - the ordering of cultural knowledge - as well as a way of presenting a critical approach to understanding what is poetic in film. Following David Bordwell, one could further describe the kind of poetics this dissertation will pursue as a

"theoretical poetics, constructing a systematic account of according to a series of abstract questions" like those presented at the beginning of this introduction

{Narration xiii). For these reasons, I will generally employ theoretical approaches that will aid in creating the kind of open poetics Hutcheon describes.

In this dissertation I will therefore look to theoretical models of engaging with poetic discourse, with poetry, and with film. These theoretical models will range from what might be called the Structuralist theories, such as those of

Roland Barthes and Gerard Genette, to Formalist and Neo-formalist theories, such as those of Victor Shklovsky and Roman Jakobson and David Bordwell and

Kristin Thompson, to Post-Structuralist theories, such as those of Jacques Derrida,

Julia Kristeva, and Gilles Deleuze. While there are certainly conflicts and contradictions between the theoretical approaches of these and other theorists that this dissertation will draw upon, in each instance these theories will help answer specific problems that this poetics must take up. But this dissertation is not solely devoted to theory, and following Todorov, I will support the theoretical claims put forward in each chapter by analyzing and interpreting individual films based on

14 the ground work this theory provides. As Todorov says, "Interpretation both

precedes and follows poetics: the notions of poetics are produced according to the

necessities of concrete analysis, which in its turn may advance only by using the

instruments of established doctrine" {Introduction 7-8). While the goal of this

dissertation is a poetics of poetic film, such a poetics can only exist in reference to

films that are indeed poetic.

To answer the second part of the question above is ultimately the goal of

this entire dissertation, but to begin with a fraction of this question can be

answered by considering poetic film as a mode of filmic discourse. By mode I

follow Bordwell's use of the term as indicating "a body of norms" or set of

discursive conventions (xiii). Bordwell distinguishes between modes and genres noting that whereas "A genre varies significantly between periods and social

formations; a mode tends to be more fundamental, less transient, and more pervasive" (150). Though modes have historical bearings, as Bordwell's poetics

of narrational modes in his book Narration in the Fiction Film demonstrates, they

tend to cross boundaries of period, nation, and even media. As a mode, poetic

film is not limited to specific films, specific periods, or even specific filmmaking practices such as animation, documentary, or fiction filmmaking. Unlike genre

films, which as Barry Keith Grant defines them, "are those commercial feature

films which through repetition and variation tell familiar stories with familiar

characters" (1), poetic films cannot be categorized as a set of themes, plot devices,

iconography, or characters. Rather a poetic mode of filmic discourse is characterized by stylistic and structural continuities. As a mode, poetic film is a

15 discursive approach, not a set of conventions. Moreover, poetic film is not a sub-

mode of either narrative fiction or documentary film, but a mode unto itself,

though it may share qualities with those other filmic modes.

The insistence on poetic film as a mode has further bearing on the

relationship between poetry and poetic film. The connection between poetry and

film in poetic film must not be considered simply as an analogy. Literary poetry

and poetic film, as Deren's theory of vertical attack suggests, share more than a

name; they share an approach to aesthetic practice, a way of structuring and

constructing. But while this dissertation will stress this connection, I will avoid

taking this connection too literally, or framing its analysis too tightly around poetry and poetic film. That is, this is not a comparative project and this

dissertation will not look to specific poems or poets in considering poetic qualities

in films or specific films themselves, with a few exceptional cases. This decision

is in part a matter of emphasizing the filmic-ness of poetic film as a way of

avoiding the pitfalls of trying to fit square-filmic-pegs into round-literary-holes.

Moreover, work of this type has been done exceedingly well by critics

such as Susan McCabe and P. Adams Sitney. In her book Cinematic Modernism,

McCabe considers the relationship between modernist poetry and film. McCabe

focuses on the influence of the cinema on the writing of modernist poets such as

Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, H.D. and

Marianne Moore. McCabe suggests, "Modernist poems, exposed to and coexistent with the emergent medium of film, likewise attempted to record kinesthetic processes and 'lived experiences of time'" (9). McCabe sees Pound's Imagism as

16 anticipating Eisenstein's dialectic montage (21), makes a connection between the

continuous present of Stein's "beginning and beginning again" and Deren's

"telescoping of time" (57), and finds a metaphor for cinematic editing in

William's insistence on the poet's "cleaving" (93). But McCabe focuses on the

appearances of cinematic elements in literary poems, and her movement from film

to poetry generally goes one way.

Similarly, Sitney looks at the connection between poetry and film as a more equal exchange in his work including his essay "Imagism in Four Avant-

Garde Films," his discussion of lyric film in Visionary Filmx and his book

Modernist Montage, which considers the shared "antinomy of vision" between modernist literature and modernist film {Modernist 2). In all three of these works,

Sitney considers film in light of poetry, especially looking to specific poets as models for comparison. For example in Modernist Montage, Sitney notes that

"within narrative cinema the nearest correlative to Charles Olson's concept of the poem - as a field or region which is bounded by form for the purpose of discovering its own secret care - would be Bergman's Persona''' (125). Thus while both McCabe and Sitney make compelling cases for connections between poetry and film, both their studies tend to focus on an exchange that amounts to the influence of film on poetry or poetry on film, rather than on what might be inherently poetic in film itself.

That said, McCabe and Sitney's identification of the relationship between poetry and film with the modernist period is also telling and in keeping with the kind of poetry and the theories of poetic discourse that I will be engaging with

17 throughout this dissertation. The reasons for this are three fold. Firstly, modernist poetry, notably poets such as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, have influenced, in one way or another, many of the filmmakers whose work this dissertation will examine. Secondly, the connection between film as a modern art and other modernist art movements such as Dadaism, Expressionism, Surrealism, and Constructivism, is particularly strong, as is the relation of these movements to concepts of poetic film. Some of the films taken up in subsequent chapters emerge directly from these movements - Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie

Camera, Jean Vigo's Zero for Conduct, Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali's Un

Chien Andalou, and Jean Cocteau's Le Sang d'unpoete - while others bear marks of their influence. Thirdly, many of the theoretical approaches concerning the poetic that this dissertation will make use of take modernist poetry or other modernist writing and art as their base models for poetry. Marjorie Perloff and

Sitney's interest in Pound, Jonathan Culler and Walter Benjamin's interest in

Charles Baudelaire, Deleuze's interest in Henri Bergson, and Genette's interest in

Marcel Proust, all converge towards modernism, broadly conceived.

Of course, modernism and modernity present difficulties of definition akin to those of the term poetic, but in the interest of clarity, I will offer a few attempts at sketching what modernism might mean in this context. Modernism might be considered as the broad literary and artistic movement associated with the historical period and experience of "modernity." For Peter Nicholls, modernism as a literary phenomenon has uncertain beginnings, but might be said to coincide with the mid-to late nineteenth-century poetry of Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud,

18 and Stephane Mallarme (1). Tom Gunning has discussed modernity as "a concept, a name for a series of transformations" that he associates with historical and technological developments such as the telephone, the railway, and "within films in terms of narrative and editing strategies" ("Modernity" 305). Similarly, as Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz characterize it, modernity is "an expression of change in so-called subjective experience ... a shorthand for broad social economic, and cultural transformations" (1). One could say, then, that this experience of modernity translated itself into the expressions of modernist artists.

Peter Childs suggest that modernism is "best understood through the works of modernist artists" such as Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Bertolt Brecht, Guillaume

Appolinaire, Pablo Picasso, Pound, and Eliot (4). But Childs emphasizes that it is

"perhaps both impossible and undesirable to speak of a single 'Modernism'" (12).

Rather one necessarily must think of continuities of "modernisms" that include various periods, movements, styles, genres, artists, and works.

But for the purposes of this dissertation, I would like to refer to a broad definition of modernism(s) to guide the relation of modernist art to this poetics of poetic film. Tyrus Miller describes a commonplace conception of modernist expression as follows:

Modernists interrogated the ways in which subjective perception and

thought mediated any possible apprehension of the world, and they sought

to account for the decisive material role that media such as language,

paint, and bodily movement played in articulating the artwork's relation to

reality. From this basic stance of modernist artists, ultimately, derived

19 many of the defining features of the modernist artwork: its tendency

towards difficulty, fragmentation, and abstraction; its self-reflexivity and

heightened self-consciousness; its prominent display of artistic technique;

its polemical, often mandarin withdrawal from everyday life and culture.

(225)

This definition is of course an acknowledged generalization, and cannot

encompass the diversity and range of modernisms in all artistic media, including

movements such as Futurism, Cubism, Dadaism Expressionism, Imagism,

Vorticism, and Surrealism, as well as works or individuals not directly associated with particular movements. But Miller's summary of modernism does suggest

something about the common processes, qualities, and perspectives that run

through modernist works. Three qualities that Miller highlights - fragmentation, reflexivity, and subjectivity - have a direct bearing on this dissertation's approach to poetic film. In fact, these qualities are related directly to the formal concerns that organize the final three chapters of this dissertation: narrative, reflexivity, and

lyricism.

The Plan

In the chapters that follow, I will focus primarily (though not exclusively)

on the work of four filmmakers: Stan Brakhage, Guy Maddin, Chris Marker, and

Andre Tarkovsky. At first glance the affinities between these filmmakers might

seem cursory at best. They are separated by geography, period, language, and

filmmaking practice: Brakhage, an American experimental filmmaker working from the 1950s until his death in 2003; Maddin, a Canadian underground fiction

20 filmmaker working from the 1980s to the present; Marker, a French filmmaker

making poetic/essayistic/documentary films from the 1950s to the present; and

Tarkovsky, a Russian feature fiction filmmaker who made films from the 1960s

until his death in 1986. Yet selecting these filmmakers also underscores the fact

that poetic film is not an isolated form, tied to a particular period, nation, artistic

movement, intellectual tradition, or method of filmmaking.

Moreover, these four filmmakers have, in one way or another, all

addressed the connection between poetry and film, especially in their writing.

Brakhage has made numerous statements on his poetic aims for his films and the

influence of poets such as Pound, Olson, and Stein on his work, as in his essays

"Poetry and Film" and "Gertrude Stein: meditative literature and film." Maddin

has called his early film The Dead Father a "garage-band film-poem" ("Live

Mothers" 34). Marker wrote poetry for the French magazines Esprit and he

Mercure de France in the late 1940s (Alter Chris Marker 180), continues to cite poetry in his films and essays and has adapted Eliot's "The Hollow Men" in his

recent multimedia installation Owls at Noon: A Prelude: The Hollow Men.

Tarkovsky not only possesses poetic pedigree (his father Arseny was a prominent poet in Russia), but in his book Sculpting in Time frequently makes reference to his desire to make his films poetic. Poetry is either at the heart of, or a palimpsestic presence in (and sometimes both) the work of all four filmmakers, a point that confirms their significance in this project.

So while choosing Brakhage, Maddin, Marker, and Tarkovsky as the focus

for this poetics is certainly not an arbitrary decision, it is also important to

21 acknowledge that there are many other films and filmmakers who would fit the

description poetic. Some individual films will be included as additional test cases

alongside these four central figures in specific chapters, including ,47 the Quinte

Hotel, Poen, the Trains of Winnipeg cycle, I Am Cuba, Primiti Too Taa, Man with

a Movie Camera, Un Chien Andalou, and Zero for Conduct. There are numerous

other films that could have been considered, but have been left off for reasons of

concision and because in most cases I believe the films I have chosen present

strong examples of the qualities of the poetic mode of film. Where I have chosen

to examine a film like Man with a Movie Camera, I might have just as easily

focused on Vigo's A Propos de Nice. Instead of Brakhage and Tarkovsky, I could

have perhaps opted for Maya Deren or Hollis Frampton and Alain Resnais or

Sergei Paradjanov. Vera Chytilova's Daisies could perhaps substitute for

Maddin's Eye Like a Strange Balloon. Alexander Sokurov's Moscow Elegy could

likewise substitute for Marker's Une Journee d'Andrei Arsenevitch. These and

other alternative choices would likely produce different emphases or underscore

other possibilities for poetic film, but the primary elements of this poetics-

narrativity, reflexivity, and lyricism - would remain the same. It is by

questioning and exploring these elements that this dissertation shapes its poetics.

I should also note that my choice of films and filmmakers in this

dissertation is focused on a Western context, with particular emphasis on

European and North American filmmakers. While other filmmakers from non-

Western traditions have been discussed in relation to poetry, as with Yasujiro

Ozu's pillow shots and their connection to haiku for example, I believe it is

22 beyond the scope of this dissertation to adequately address films from Asia,

Africa, and South America, because to do so would require expanding the sense

of poetry to include the very different poetic traditions of these regions. Since I

am looking to European and North American modernist poetry as a model for poetic film, as I have described above, it would be inappropriate to apply these

theories and practices to poetries of other traditions. That said, this poetics of

poetic film might be useful in engaging with poetic films from non-Western

filmmakers as a comparative model to be used in relation to these other poetic traditions as a future project emerging from this dissertation.

This dissertation will have four chapters corresponding to the four major

concerns of this poetics. Chapter one will consider one form of the direct relation

of poetry and film through film adaptation. Chapter one will begin by outlining a

range of theoretical approaches to film adaptation, following the important work

of Robert Stam. This chapter will explore possible approaches to adaptation

theory in contrast to what Stam calls "fidelity criticism." In place of a view of

adaptation that privileges faithfulness to source materials, Stam calls for a

multiple theory of adaptation that includes narratological, performative, and transtextual approaches. Following Stam, in chapter one I will consider the possibilities of adapting poetry to film, first theoretically, by examining the

applicability of Stam's approach to poetry and film, and secondly by applying

those theories to specific examples of film adaptation of poetry. In this chapter, I

will draw on six case studies: Poen; A Kite is a Victim; Elimination Dance; At the

Quinte Hotel; the Trains of Winnipeg cycle; and Owls at Noon: A Prelude: The

23 Hollow Men. In a sense, this first chapter is an imperfect miniature of the entire dissertation, as it sets theoretical grounds upon which the rest of the dissertation will play, and it tests a limit case of poetic film - film adaptations of poetry.

Chapter two considers the first of these theoretical continuities, the role of narrative in poetic film. Drawing on Tom Gunning's concept of narrativization in film, this chapter proposes a theory of narrative poeticization to explore how narrative functions and/or malfunctions in poetic film. I sketch this theory of narrative poeticization by coordinating three other theories, BordwelPs parametric narration, Barthes's third meaning, and Thompson's elaboration on third meaning as cinematic excess. From there I test this theory against three narrative films that demonstrate poeticized qualities, Tarkovsky's Nostalghia and Stalker, and

Mikhail Kalatozov's I Am Cuba. I then elaborate this theory further by considering poeticization in relation to the theories of the limits of narrative as expressed by Generte and Noel Burch. Finally, chapter two concludes with analyses of three films that occupy positions on these narrative frontiers:

Maddin's Eye Like a Strange Balloon, Brakhage's Dog Star Man, and Marker's

Level Five. Chapter two ultimately explores the ways in which narrativity ceases to be the dominant organizing factor in poetic film.

While the narrative poeticization of chapter two hypothesizes the breakdown of narrative in poetic film, chapter three proposes an alternative organizational principle in place of narrativity - reflexivity and its attendant elements, intertextuality and metaphor. Chapter three suggests that as narrative is displaced in poetic film, the discursive procedures of reflexivity, intertextuality,

24 and metaphor create connections that structure meaning in poetic film. The chapter begins by examining reflexivity in Ed Ackerman's Primiti Too Taa,

Brakhage's Mothlight, and Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera, and considers the ways in which these films reflexively reveal the production, consumption, and materiality of film as an organizing principle. Then chapter three turns to intertextuality as described by Mikhail Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, and Genette as another reflexive dimension by which film is organized in and by their relation to other films or works of art. This section takes Marker's La Jetee as its test case.

Finally chapter three considers metaphor as the fundamental procedure informing and driving the reflexive dimensions and organization of poetic film. This section initially considers Christian Metz and Noel Carrol's theories of metaphor in film before embracing Paul Ricoeur's view of metaphor as a process of hermeneutic

"seeing as." Examined through the lens of Un Chien Andalou, Maddin's Heart of the World, and Marker's La Jetee and Sij 'avais 4 dromedaires, this metaphoric

"seeing as" becomes the basis for the structure of poetic film and its lyricism.

The fourth and final chapter of this dissertation will explore possible forms that this lyricism can take in poetic film. This chapter begins by constellating a variety of theories relating to lyricism in poetry and film and subjectivity and point of view in film. By grouping together Northrop Frye,

Perloff, and Culler's theories on the literary lyric along with Pasolini, Deleuze,

Burch, and Edward Branigan's theories of filmic subjectivity and discourse this chapter shapes an array of possibilities for lyricism in film. Following this theoretical section, I test these possibilities through four films: Vigo's Zero for

25 Conduct, Brakhage's Window Water Baby Moving, Maddin's Brand Upon the

Brain!, and Tarkovsky's Mirror. In the final section of this chapter, I propose

further lyric possibilities, this time considering the intersection of poetic and essayistic discourse in poetic film. Using Gerhard Richter's account of the use of the poetic-prose form Denkbild by writers of the Frankfurt School such as

Benjamin and Theodor Adorno as a guide, I explore these poetic-essayistic possibilities through three films by Marker: Le Tombeau d'Alexandre, Une

Journee d'Andrei Arsenevitch, and Sans Soleil. The Denkbild, as Richter describes it, suggests possibilities for the intersection of poetic discourse and essayistic discourse that Marker's films realize, a sub-category of poetic film that one might call the poetic-essay film.

Finally, it is necessary to provide a caveat about the limits and difficulties of articulating what a poetics of poetic film might entail. To turn again to

Todorov, I would like to underscore the potential problems that the term poetic carries with it. Concluding his essay "A Poetic Novel," Todorov qualifies his entire analysis of what might distinguish certain novels as poetic with the following remarks:

We still need to ask whether the term poetic is fitting, or, from another

viewpoint, we need to inquire into the textual reasons for the inclusion of

these devices [which may define the poetic novel]. We can say at the

outset that no one of them is specifically poetic in itself, at least if we

confine ourselves to this general description .... These devices are poetic,

26 if at all, only through what unites them. We need to remember too, that

what I am describing here is my own intuition of the poetic. (58)

To echo and paraphrase Todorov, in working towards this poetics of poetic film, my own intuition of what constitutes poetic unavoidably and necessarily influences how this poetics unfolds. As noted above, part of this personal understanding of 'poetic' is connected to my broad understanding of modernisms and part of it is connected to the choices I have made in the films I will examine.

This intuition is also the source of my interest in exploring the possibilities of poetic film. That I personally perceive some films as poetic drives my desire to better understand what this perception involves and what it means. Like Bazin or like Deren, I see a connection between film and poetry, and my aim is to articulate more clearly how one might begin to describe the poetic in film. This dissertation works towards a poetics of poetic film as the first step towards this goal.

27 Chapter One

Film Adaptation and Poetry: Theory and Practice

"He did not want to compose another Quixote - which is easy - but the Quixote itself. Needless to

say, ... he did not copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would

coincide - word for word and line for line - with those of Miguel Cervantes." - Jorge Luis

Borges, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" (39)

Poetry and Film Adaptation: By Way of Introduction

Film adaptation is perhaps the most logical starting point for a discussion

of the relationship between film and poetry. Film adaptations of other literary modes are common, most notably novels and dramas, but also comic books,

graphic novels, biographies and other life writings. Indeed, in his 1980 essay

"The Well-Worn Muse," Dudley Andrew claims that "well over half of all

commercial films have come from literary originals" (10). And yet, film

adaptations of poetry are rare or at least elusive. As Robert Ray points out, '"film

and literature' has always meant film and the novel or film and drama, never film

and poetry, unless the poetry under consideration tells a story" (39). Because of their scarcity, however, film adaptations of poetry are particularly useful for

exploring how poetry and film are related. While on the one hand the lack of film

adaptations of poetry appears to suggest the difficulty of adapting poetic sources or the incompatibility of film and poetry, on the other hand the relatively few

examples of poems adapted to film can help illustrate the grounds on which a discussion of poetic film can be made. This chapter will examine poetry in

28 adaptation, first by considering the place of poetry in adaptation theory, second by

exploring the potential for such theory to be used in relation to poetry, and third

by investigating six recent examples of poetry adapted to film. By exploring

poetry and film adaptation in theory and in practice this chapter aims to

demonstrate how these adaptations help to identify points of intersection between

film and poetry, with the intention of using these points of intersection as the

basis of a discussion of poetry and film beyond adaptation.

What is adaptation? The term itself can be broadly applied, and as a result

is frequently left undefined or only vaguely so. For Linda Hutcheon, part of the

difficulty in defining adaptation lies in the fact that "we use the same word for the process and the product" (15). Frequently, commentators describe adaptation

with a variety of related tropes. Stam speaks of adaptation in "Darwinian" terms

involving "evolution" and "mutation" ("Introduction" 3). R. Barton Palmer prefers to employ the trope of translation when discussing adaptation, noting, "As

a trope, translation is useful because it emphasizes the ... shared identity of source

and adaptation" (262). Other tropes that present adaptation as "paraphrase" or

"re-reading" and "re-writing" are also common in discussions of adaptation

(Hutcheon 17; Casetti 82). But while these tropes are useful in defining certain

aspects of adaptation, Francesco Cassetti provides a more concrete definition of

adaptation as "the reappearance in another discursive field, of an element (a plot,

a theme, a character etc.) that has previously appeared elsewhere" (82). Similarly

Linda Hutcheon proposes a "double definition of adaptation" including adaptation

as product, an "extensive, particular transcoding" and adaptation as process, a

29 "creative reinterpretation and palimpsestic intertextuality" (22). Hutcheon also

suggests that adaptation can in part be defined by what it does not include: "short

intertextual allusions to other works or bits of sampled music" (170).

A Digression: Borges, Pierre Menard, and Adaptation

The difficulty of defining adaptation often leads to a misidentification or misunderstanding of adaptations, especially when they do not appear in the

familiar form of a novel adapted to film, announced as an adaptation. Such is the

case of Borges' short story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." Borges' story tells of a writer, Pierre Menard, who attempts to write - as Anne Milano Appel

emphasizes, "not 'rewrite,' not 'recreate'" -Don Quixote (448). As in the

epigraph above, the story's narrator notes that Menard "did not want to compose

another Quixote - which is easy - but the Quixote itself (Borges 39). Although

Menard's Quixote only "consists of the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of the first part of Don Quixote and a fragment of chapter twenty-two," the story's narrator

declares it "more subtle than Cervantes'" and in comparison "almost infinitely richer" because of the subtextual evidence of the effort Menard undertakes in writing his Quixote (Borges 39; 42). Menard's task, according to the narrator,

defies belief, as "to compose the Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth

century was a reasonable undertaking ... at the beginning of the twentieth, it is

impossible" (Borges 41). For instance, the narrator notes that while Cervantes, writing in the seventeenth century can easily present rhetorical praise of historical

truth, for Menard to write the same sentence in the twentieth century requires a

30 revision of his philosophical view of history that is "brazenly pragmatic" (Borges

43). Finally the narrator claims that

Menard (perhaps without wanting to) has enriched, by means of a new

technique, the halting and rudimentary art of reading: this new technique

is that of deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution. This

technique, whose applications are infinite, prompts us to go through the

Odyssey as if it were posterior to the Aeneid. (Borges 44)

Critics such as George Steiner have read "Pierre Menard" as an allegory for the process of translation. For Steiner, Borges' story is "the most acute, most concentrated commentary anyone has offered on the business of translation," recognizing that "to produce a text verbally identical with the original (to make of translation a perfect transcription), is difficult past human imagining" (70; 72).

Similarly, Appel sees the Menard story as raising "a host of questions which most of us [translators] consciously or subconsciously confront everyday: Should the translator try to duplicate the original work, or should he bring something of his own to it? ... Is it possible (or even desirable) to be one hundred percent faithful to a text?" (450-51).

Yet Borges's story could also (and perhaps more precisely) be interpreted as concerning the difficulties of the process of adaptation. After all, Menard's task is not strictly one of translation, since, although he is French, he writes his

Quixote in Spanish. And while the narrator's enumeration of Menard's other works includes "A translation, with prologue and notes, of Ruy Lopez de Segura's

Libro de al invention liberal y arte deljuego de axedrez" and "A manuscript

31 translation of the Aguja de navegar cultos of Quevedo," it also includes "a transposition into alexandrines of Paul Valery's Le cimitiere marin" (Borges 37-

38). This transposition suggests an act closer to adaptation than translation. So too, the narrator's assertion that Menard's "admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide - word for word and line for line - with those of

Miguel de Cervantes" suggests that Menard is adapting the Quixote into a new context, that is, one in which it is written by a French man in the twentieth century, rather than reproducing it in another language. The word "coincide" in particular suggest the work of adaptation, as it proposes that Menard's work exists simultaneously and alongside Cervantes as the Quixote, corresponding to and overlapping the "original," rather than converting or interpreting it into another language. Furthermore, the two works that inspire Menard to write his Quixote are a "philosophical fragment by Novalis ... which outlines the theme of a total identification with a given author" and, more importantly, "one of those parasitic books which situate Christ on a boulevard, Hamlet on La Cannebiere or Don

Quixote on Wall Street" (Borges 39). This second inspirational text is in fact an adaptation and emphasizes the adaptational roots of Menard's task. Similarly,

Jorge Luis Castillo notes that critical readings of "Pierre Menard" frequently see the story as "a metaphor of the twofold process of writing/reading" (416). In fact, the entire process described in "Pierre Menard" closely matches another of

Hutcheon's definition of adaptation: "an extended, deliberate, announced revisitation of a particular work of art" (170).

Moving Beyond Fidelity: Robert Stain and Adaptation Theory

32 Borges's "Pierre Menard" is useful because it highlights the problems and

difficulties in dealing with adaptations. Menard's task seems ridiculous, or, as

Michael J. Wreen suggests in his article "Don Quixote Rides Again!," alternately

impossible, parodic, and paradoxical. But as an adaptation, Menard's Quixote

also underscores the critical anxieties about the process of adaptation itself; that

adaptation is inferior and ultimately aims at an impossible goal: the faithful

reproduction of another text in another form entirely. Even the "field of literature

and film," and film adaptation studies in particular, as Ray points out, have long

been looked upon with disdain in academia (38). Recently, however, film

adaptation has experienced a critical resurgence, fuelled in particular by the work

Robert Stam. Stam and other critics such as Ray, James Naremore, David

McFarlane and Linda Hutcheon have proposed a reorienting of the critical

discourse of film adaptation studies.5 Stam in particular has called for a move

away from so-called 'fidelity criticism' that "has focused on the rather subjective

question of the quality of adaptation," towards critical and theoretical approaches

that address "the theoretical status of adaptation, and ... the analytical interest of

adaptations" (Stam "Introduction" 4). Beginning with his essay "Beyond

Fidelity" (2000) and through his recent works A Companion to Literature and

Film (2004), Literature Through Film (2005) and Literature and Film (2005),

Stam presents approaches to film adaptation that radically reassess the value of

the concept of fidelity in relation to adaptation and offer alternative modes of

5 See Naremore's collection Film Adaptation, which includes essays by Naremore, Ray and Stam, as well as McFarlane's Novel to Film and Hutcheon's A Theory of Adaptation.

33 inquiry into how adaptation works in both theory and practice. What follows will be an exploration of film adaptation theory following the course set by Stam, moving through an analysis of fidelity criticism to alternative modes of analysis based on structuralist and post-structuralist theories including performativity,

transtextuality and narratology. Such exploration will then be used as the

foundation of a discussion of adaptation theory as it applies to poetry as well as

analyses of specific examples of poetry adapted to film.

Critical discourse on film adaptation, as Stam points out, has largely

focused on concerns of fidelity and 'faithfulness.' Proof of this obsession with

fidelity, Stam says, can be found in the "profoundly moralistic" language of

adaptation criticism, where "Terms like 'infidelity,' 'betrayal,' 'deformation,' violation,' 'bastardization,' 'vulgarization,' and 'desecration' proliferate"

("Introduction" 3). Stam identifies eight assumptions and prejudices that can

account for the roots of and tendency to fidelity criticism in adaptation discourse: i) predisposition anteriority and seniority, or the privileging of the "original" over the "copy"; ii) dichotomous thinking that pits literature and film as opposite and opposed; iii) the iconophobic tradition of "prejudice against the visual arts ... traceable to the Judiac-Muslim-Protestant prohibition of'graven images,'"; iv)

logophilia that privileges the "word" and language over the "image" and visual representation; v) anti-corporeality that views embodiment as debased and corrupt; vi) the myth of facility that assumes that films are "easier" than literature in terms of both production and consumption; vii) class prejudice that identifies the production and consumption of film as a lower-class pursuit; and viii) the

34 view that film adaptations parasitically "steal" from literary sources

("Introduction 4-7). Even when critics attempt to justify or defend adaptations they often fall back on the assumptions of fidelity criticism, making "essentialist

arguments in relation to both media ... [assuming] that a novel 'contains,' an

extractable 'essence' ... an originary core, a kernel of meaning and events which

can be 'delivered' by an adaptation" (Stam "Introduction" 15). This sort of

"medium-specificity" criticism is an approach that "assumes that every medium is

inherently 'good at certain things and 'bad at' others" (Stam "Beyond" 58). Yet,

as Stam says, "when critics refer to the 'spirit' or 'essence' of a literary text what they usually mean is the critical consensus within an 'interpretive community'...

about the meaning of a work" ("Introduction" 15).6

Fidelity discourse, and the assumptions and prejudices that shape it, can be

found even in the canonical works of film adaptation studies. Bela Balazs, for

instance, defends the practice of adaptation by noting the difference between

"material" (story, setting, character etc.) which is easily transferable and

"content" (theme, subject, motif etc.) which is tied to form and requires

adaptation (7-9). For Balasz, an adaptation is successful when it pays attention to the changes in form the "content" undergoes, a "re-interpretation" of form (11).

And yet, Balasz emphasizes that some "themes can be adequately expressed in only one art form," a statement that reveals logophilic and dichotomous

6 While Stam does not identify many of these "fidelity" critics by name, he seems to suggest that such critics are those whose New Critical approaches tend toward the prejudices he identifies. Or perhaps Stam is targeting the more egregious errors of those critics who, despite claims of (post)structuralist methodologies, lapse into the "aporias of fidelity" ("Introduction" 14). A rare, specific example is Brian McFarlane, discussed below.

35 prejudices towards the practice of adaptation. Similarly, Balasz portrays film

adaptations as a necessary evil produced by the lack of "original film stories" and

"the undeveloped state and imperfection of script-writing" (6).

Andre Bazin, in his essays "In Defense of Mixed Cinema" and

"Adaptation, or Cinema as Digest" also attempts to justify adaptation, but in

doing so relies on the language and assumptions of fidelity criticism. Bazin

combats the tendency to privilege the novel and theatre over cinema because of

historical priority in "In Defense of Mixed Cinema," and stresses that

"borrowing" and adaptation is acceptable in other art forms, particularly theatre

and the novel (57; 61). Likewise, in "Adaptation, or Cinema as Digest," Bazin

attacks the.critical bias that art must be "difficult" and require "mental effort" as

cultural elitism that favours literature as high-culture and cinema as low-culture

(22). Yet in comparing film adaptation to the literary digest Bazin succumbs to

the myth of facility and cultural elitism, suggesting that the aim of adaptation is

"to simplify and condense" and to make literature more accessible ("Adaptation"

25; 26). Moreover, in both essays Bazin draws a distinction between "good" and

"bad" adaptations, demonstrating a preference for adaptations by directors such as

Robert Bresson or Jean Renoir, whose "genius ... is certainly as great as that of

Flaubert or Maupassant" ("Defense" 67). Bazin's avant-lettre auteurism replaces

the critical hierarchy of priority with one of individual authorial talent. While

condemning fidelity on the one hand, Bazin privileges the director as auteur as

one who can ensure fidelity to the "spirit" of a work:

36 For the same reasons that render a word-by-word translation worthless

and a too free translation a matter for condemnation, a good adaptation

should result in a restoration of the essence of the letter and the spirit.

But one knows how intimate a possession of a language and of the genius

proper to it is required for a good translation. ("Defense" 67-68)

Bazin's attempts to resists the lure of fidelity criticism are ultimately undermined by his desire to promote the director, the auteur, as the authorial genius in cinema.7

In addition to Bazin and Balasz's essays, the work most associated with fidelity criticism is George Bluestone's book Novels Into Films: The

Metamorphosis of Fiction Into Cinema. As James Naremore remarks,

Bluestone's Novels Into Films was "the first full-scale academic analysis of film adaptation in America," which "argues that certain movies ... do not debase their literary sources" but rather "'metamorphose' novels into another medium" (6).

Naremore, however, criticizes Bluestone's approach as tending to "confirm the intellectual priority and formal superiority of canonical novels, which provide the films he discusses with their sources and with a standard of value against which their success or failure is measured" (6). Bluestone's method of analysis also betrays a bias towards print media, as he first compares a film's shooting-script to

7 Yet, Bazin also ends "Adaptation, or Cinema as Digest" with a view of adaptation that prefigures Stam's transtextual model: "the literary critic of 2050 would find not a novel out of which a play or a film had been 'made,' but rather a single work reflected through three art forms, an artistic pyramid with three sides, all equal in the eyes of the critic ... The chronological precedence of one part over another would not be an aesthetic criteria" (26). Regrettably, while Bazin could imagine a future for film adaptation criticism, he did not see a place for such an approach at the time of his writing.

37 the novel it adapts before "viewing the film with a shooting-script at hand"

(Bluestone xi). With this method, Bluestone claims, "before each critical

evaluation, I was able to hold before me an accurate and reasonably objective record of how the film differed from its model" (xi). The objectivity of this method is of course disputable, as it is based first and foremost on the comparison

of a print novel with the print text of the script rather than the film itself, a fact that demonstrates not only predisposition towards the "original" and to logophilia, but also poor understanding of film as an audio-visual medium and the relationship of shooting-scripts to the finished film product. Other comments in

Bluestone's book such as, "when the filmist undertakes the adaptation of a novel,

given the inevitable mutation, he does not convert the novel at all. What he

adapts is a kind of paraphrase of the novel" and "what is peculiarly filmic and what is peculiarly novelistic cannot be converted without destroying an integral part of each," suggest further aspects of the assumptions of fidelity criticism that

Stam identifies (62; 63).

Yet the tendency to reproduce such assumptions is common even among

critics who profess a resistance to fidelity criticism. Brian McFarlane begins his book Novel to Film with an attack on fidelity criticism, proclaiming, "No critical line is in greater need of re-examination - and devaluation" (8). McFarlane proceeds to criticize the demand for fidelity in a manner similar to Stam's approach, noting the difficulties in determining the "spirit" or "essence" of a text, and that fidelity criticism obscures other important issues to adaptation theory,

such as intertextuality and concerns of production (10-11). To resist fidelity

38 criticism, McFarlane proposes comparatively examining narrative in film and literature. McFarlane distinguishes between elements of a novel that are

"transferable" and those that require "adaptation proper" (23). Transferable elements include story, character (and character function), and mythic and/or psychological patterns, as they "exist at 'deep levels' of the text... are not tied to a particular mode of expression ... and ... are susceptible to more or less objective treatment" and may be group as "narrative"(McFarlane 25-26).

Elements that require adaptation, on the other hand, are those related to the

"enunciation" or the "signifiers of narrativity" and concern the problems of the

"differences between two 'language' systems ... tense: film cannot present action in the past... and ... film's spatial ... orientation which gives it a physical presence denied to the novel's linearity" (McFarlane 26; 29).

And yet, despite his proclaimed opposition to fidelity criticism, McFarlane slips into those very critical tendencies. Naremore criticizes McFarlane's approach as effectively replicating the mode of criticism he initially rejects:

"McFarlaine [sic] himself is obsessively concerned with the problems of

textual fidelity - and necessarily so, because the major purpose of his

book is to demonstrate how the 'cardinal features' of narrative, most of

them exemplified by canonical, nineteenth-century novels from British

and American authors, can be transposed intact into movies." (9)

Besides its repeating the tendencies of fidelity criticism, Stam also criticizes

McFarlane's book for drawing "an overly neat distinction between narrative events ... and enunciation" while neglecting to recognize that "it is difficult to

39 separate narrative from enunciation" since "in a novel everything is in a sense dependent on language" and "cinematic enunciation ... changes the narrative in

an infinity of subtle ways" ("Introduction" 49). In this way, McFarlane returns to the type of "medium-specificity" criticism that argues concerns of "spirit" and

"essence" and ultimately "ends up falling back on the same binaries and truisms that he has gestured at discrediting" (Stam "Introduction" 49).

For all his criticism of fidelity discourse, Stam does offer a reminder that it

is important to "acknowledge at the outset that 'fidelity,' however discredited theoretically, does retain a grain of experiential truth" ("Introduction" 14). As

Stam says, "Words such as infidelity and betrayal in this sense translate our

feeling, when we have loved a book, that an adaptation has not been worthy of that love. We read a novel through our introjected desires, hopes, and Utopias,

and as we read we fashion our own imaginary mise-en-scene of the novel on the private stages of our minds" ("Beyond" 54). The tendency towards fidelity

criticism in the work of Balazs, Bazin, Bluestone and McFarlane, then, is valuable not only in its demonstration of the historical development of film adaptation

criticism, but also as an articulation of "our sense that... some adaptations are

indeed better than others, and ... some adaptations fail to realize or substantiate what we most appreciate in the source novels" (Stam "Introduction" 14).

Furthermore, these works point to what Stam calls "The Aporias of Fidelity," the

inherent contradictions in the arguments of fidelity discourse ("Introduction" 14).

The most glaring contradiction Stam identifies lies in the reliance of fidelity

discourse on "essentialist arguments in relation to both media" and the way "the

40 demand for fidelity ignores the actual process of making films" ("Introduction"

15; 16). In doing so, Stam says, critics fail to recognize the "Automatic

Difference" involved in the process of adaptation:

The shift, in adaptation, from a single-track, uniquely verbal medium such

as the novel to a multitrack medium like film, which can play not only

with words (written and spoken) but also with music, sound effects, and

moving photographic images, explains the unlikelihood, and ... even the

undesirability of literal fidelity .... filmic adaptation is automatically

different and original due to the change in medium. ("Introduction" 17)

It is through recognizing the aporias of fidelity and the automatic difference at the

heart of adaptation that Stam suggests other approaches to adaptation are possible.

In order to move "beyond fidelity," Stam proposes a number of different

paths for adaptation theory to follow based on "structuralist and post-structuralist

developments" in the fields of literary theory and film theory, which "subvert many of these prejudices and hierarchies" associated with fidelity criticism

("Introduction" 8). Stam identifies nine significant structuralist and post-

structuralist theoretical movements that can be usefully applied to film

adaptations. First, the related structuralist and post-structuralist theories related to

concerns of textuality, particularly Mikhail Bakhtin's "dialogism," Julia

Kristeva's "intertextuality," and Gerard Genette's "transtextuality," as ways of

"abolishing the hierarchy between novel and film" (Stam "Introduction" 8).

Second, Stam proposes the use of Derridean deconstruction as a way to subvert the hierarchy and binarism between film and literature. Stam highlights Jacques

41 Derrida's deconstruction of the notions of the "original" and the "copy," which suggests that "the prestige of the original is created by the copies, without which the very idea of originality has no meaning" and that the "'original' always turns out to be partially 'copied' from something earlier" ("Introduction" 8). Third,

Stam points to the structuralist and post-structuralist reimagining of the role of the

"author," especially in the work of Bakhtin and Michel Foucault, as calling into question the "authority" of the source text and the need for fidelity to "authorial intention" ("Introduction" 9). Fourth and fifth, Stam sees both the fields of cultural studies and narratology as offering strategies for resisting "vertical hierarchies" in favour of promoting "exploring 'horizontal' relations between neighboring media" and recognizing adaptation as "one more narratological medium" ("Introduction" 9-10). Sixth, Stam suggests that reception theory

"authorizes more respect for adaptation as a form," since in reception theory "a text is an event, whose indeterminacies are completed and actualized in the reading (or spectatorship)" ("Introduction" 10). Seventh, Stam looks to the work of Gilles Deleuze and its re-visioning of cinema as a "philosophical instrument" as a way to reexamine the myth of facility, as well as offering "new possible language for speaking of adaptations in terms not of copy but of transformational

One could extend Stam's reference to Derrida's deconstruction of the copy and the original into a context more directly related to visual media by looking to Jean Baudrillard's concepts of "simulation" and the "hyperreal." Just as Derrida points to the erasure of the notion of "the original," Baudrillard suggests that the hyperreal precedes the real, as it is only through the gesture towards the absence of the real that the real is said to exist (25). As such, film adaptation takes on the properties like that of Baudrillard's third and fourth successive phases of the images in which the image "masks the absence of a basic reality" and then "bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum" (11).

42 energies and movements and intensities" ("Introduction" 10). Eighth, Stam offers

performativity theory, including the work of J. L. Austin, Derrida, and Judith

Butler, as "an alternative language for addressing adaptation, by which both novel

and adaptation become performances, one verbal and the other visual, verbal, and

acoustic" ("Introduction" 10-11). Finally, Stam emphasizes the importance of

"the whole constellation of currents - multiculturalism, postcoloniality, normative

race, queer theory, feminist standpoint theory - revolving around issues of

identity and oppression" as further ways of disrupting not only the hierarchies and

assumptions behind fidelity criticism, but the "unmarked normativities" that

support them in favour of a recognition of marginalized points of view

("Introduction" 11).

Although Stam offers these various structuralist and post-structuralist

approaches as possible areas for future film adaptation studies, he focuses his own

discussion on exploring concerns of textuality (particularly intertextuality and

transtextuality) and narratology. Besides facilitating a movement away from

fidelity criticism, intertextual approaches to adaptation, Stam maintains, offer a

variety of tropes and concepts to adaptation theory that invert the negative

language of fidelity ("Introduction" 25). Intertextual tropes such as "adaptation as

'reading'" or "the metaphor of translation," while potentially "problematic as a

definitive account of adaptation," can help "[shed] light on a different facet of

adaptation" ("Introduction" 25). Although he notes numerous tropes and concepts

that could be applied to adaptation theory, Stam's analysis of intertextuality and transtextuality as they apply to film adaptation focuses on the related work of

43 Bakhtin and Genette. Stam begins with Bakhtin's dialogism, which "refers in the broadest sense to the infinite and open-ended possibilities generated by all the discursive practices of a culture, a matrix of communicative utterances which

'reach' the text not only through recognizable citations but also through a subtle process of indirect textual relay" ("Introduction" 27). For Stam, Bakhtin's dialogism is a way to "transcend the aporias of 'fidelity' and of a dyadic source/adaptation mode which excludes not only all sorts of supplementary texts but also the dialogical response of the reader/spectator" ("Introduction" 27). Stam cites the example of Cervantes's Don Quixote as a text that dialogically '"points' in many directions, back, forward, and sideways" to an abundance of intertexts, including the chivalric romance genre, Orson Welles' film Don Quixote, and Man from La Mancha (to which one could, of course, add Borges's "Pierre Menard")

("Introduction" 27).

As an extension of the intertextuality of Bakhtin's dialogism, Stam also suggests applying Genette's theories of transtextuality (itself an elaboration of

Bakhtin's work and that of Kristeva) to the analysis film adaptations. Quoting

Genette, Stam says that transtextuality "refer[s] to 'all that which puts one text in relation, whether manifest or secret, with other texts" ("Introduction" 27). Stam outlines Genette's five types of transtextuality, noting the potential for each to be useful to film adaptation theory. The first type, "'intertextuality' or the 'effective co-presence of two texts' in the form of quotation, plagiarism, and allusion," can be seen not only in allusions or citations of written or oral intertexts, but also

"medium-specific forms," such as camera movements that reference other films

44 (Stam "Introduction" 28). The second type, "paratext," refers to "the relation, within the totality of a literary work, between the text proper and its 'paratexts' - titles, prefaces, postfaces, epigraphs, dedications, illustrations ... in short all the accessory messages and commentaries which surround the text" (Stam

"Introduction" 28). Stam adds to the literary examples of paratext by identifying

"posters, trailers, reviews, interviews" and even DVD commentaries as film paratexts ("Introduction" 28). The third transtextual type is "'metatextuality' or the critical relation between one text and another, whether the commented text is explicitly cited or only silently evoked" (Stam "Introduction" 28). According to

Stam, "Adaptation in this sense, can be 'readings' or 'critiques' of their source novel," including adaptations that rewrite, parody, re-contextualize and "silently evoke" sources, declared or not ("Introduction" 28-30). Genette's fourth type of transtextuality is "architextuality," or "the generic taxonomies suggested or refused by the titles, or subtitles of a text" (Stam "Introduction" 30).

Architextuality is significant to adaptations, since a title different from its source can indicate an "unmarked adaptation," or "misleadingly labeled adaptation," both of which can bear on the status of an adaptation as an adaptation, including concerns of reception and legal issues (Stam "Introduction" 30-31).

Genette's fifth and final transtextual type, "hypertextuality," is also the category that Stam argues is "most clearly relevant to adaptation" ("Introduction"

31). As Stam says, hypertextuality "refers to the relation between one text, which

Genette calls 'hypertext,' to an anterior text or 'hypotext,' which the former transforms, modifies, elaborates, or extends" ("Introduction" 31). There is a

45 communication between texts in Genette's concept of hypertextuality, in the sense that the hypertext "speaks" to and of its hypotext, and would be unable to exist without it (Genette 5). Similarly, hypertexts and hypotexts are involved in processes of reading and rereading in hypertextual chains such as the one Stam tracks from The Odyssey through TheAeneid, James Joyce's Ulysses, Alberto

Moravia's Dizprezzo and Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mepris, (recalling the new technique of reading Menard is said to have uncovered) ("Introduction" 31).

Thus hypertextuality plays a part in "the ongoing whirl of intertexual reference and transformation, of texts generating other texts in an endless process of recycling, transformation, and transmutation, with no clear point of origin" (Stam

"Introduction" 31). One approach to an analysis of an adaptation, then, would be to examine its hypertextual connections, not only to a single hypotext, but also to other hypertexts.

Following from and building on his discussion of Genette's theories of transtextuality, Stam makes a series of "proposals for adaptation studies," models and practices for analyzing specific adaptations, based on narratology and "the

study of the mechanics of narrative" ("Introduction" 31-32). In this section, Stam looks again to Genette's work on narratology, and stresses the importance of exploring narrative order, duration, and frequency, and suggesting that some narrative concerns require a "comparative narratology" that takes into account what an adaptation adds to, eliminates from, or changes in its source

("Introduction" 32-34). Another narratological feature that Stam emphasizes is that of the narrator or narration, particularly the comparative function of and

46 presentation of narration in film and literature ("Introduction" 35-38). For

instance, Stam points out that while "in a novel, the narrator controls the only

track available - the verbal track" in film narration "the narrator can partially

control the verbal track - through voice over or character dialogue - but that

control is subject to innumerable constraints" ("Introduction" 38). Similarly,

Stam cites questions of "focal ization and point of view" as especially important to discussions of film adaptations because the terms can be presented literally and

figuratively in film and literature, but to different degrees, from "ideological

orientation" to "a character's point of view" or even the physical camera angle

("Introduction" 38-39). Stam recalls Francoise Jost's observation that, ironically, concerns of point of view and focalization that were first discussed by literary theorists in terms of the metaphoric "novelistic field of'vision'" are now applied to films ("Introduction" 39). Likewise, Stam says, "issues of point of view also intersect with style," particularly narrative style, whether direct, linear or

"multitemporal" ("Introduction" 40). Finally Stam wonders how theories of film narratology, such as Christian Metz's eight syntagmatic types, might be

considered in comparison to novelistic narrativity ("Introduction" 41).

While Stam pays a great deal of attention to concerns of narratology, the final section of his "Introduction" to Literature and Film points out the "limits" of this formalist approach. Besides consideration of "formal aspect of film adaptations," Stam stresses that "an important set of questions concerning adaptation have to do with context" ("Introduction" 41). These contextual concerns include issues of identity, race, gender, canonicity, censorship,

47 economics, and other "elements that go 'with' or 'alongside' the text"

("Introduction" 41-42). Stam warns against ignoring such contextual concerns, as

"adaptations engage the discursive energies of their time" and "each re-creation of

a novel for the cinema unmasks facets not only of the novel and its period and

culture, but also of the time and culture of the adaptation" ("Introduction" 45).

By addressing the limits of formalism and the importance of context, Stam is able

to further forestall any tendency to turn even a transtextual or narratological

approach towards fidelity discourse.

Beyond Stam: Adaptation Theory and Poetry

Stam's revision of adaptation theory and his proposals of new approaches

to studying both adaptation as a process and specific adaptations have reoriented the field of adaptation studies. Hutcheon, for instance, repeatedly returns to

Stam's work as a guiding source in her book A Theory of Adaptation. But despite

the immense importance of Stam's work, its focus on film adaptations of novels

leaves questions about the possibility of extending his theories to adaptations of

other literary modes unanswered. Although Stam does mention some other

literary sources besides the novel, such as plays and comic strips, Hutcheon notes that discussions of adaptation predominantly focus on novel to film

transformations (Stam "Introduction" 45; Hutcheon xiii). And while Hutcheon

attends to a variety of other kinds of adaptations, including adaptations of operas, plays, and even video games, both she and Stam generally avoid discussions of the adaptation of poetry to film. Hutcheon only devotes a few brief paragraphs to

adaptations of poetry, and focuses primarily on a machinima ("a form of

48 filmmaking that uses computer game technology to make films within the virtual reality of a game engine") adaptation of Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias"

(26). While Hutcheon does mention film adaptations of poetry elsewhere in A

Theory of Adaptation, her examples are limited to D.W. Griffith's Pippa Passes

(an adaptation of Robert Browning's poem), Sandra Lahire's "cinematic response" to Sylvia Plath's poetry in Lady Lazarus, and two adaptations of poems by Leonard Cohen (Poen and I'm Your Man) (44). Moreover, Hutcheon does

little by way of analysis of these examples beyond pointing out the connection between avant-garde film and poetry (44). In Stam's case, poetry is only mentioned in a brief, but telling passage:

"Summas by their very natures, both the novel and the fiction film have no

essence; they are open to all cultural forms. But still even here the cinema

has resources unavailable to the novel. The cinema can literally include

painting, poetry, and music or it can metaphorically evoke them by

imitating their procedures; it can show a Picasso painting, or emulate

cubist technique, cite a Bach cantata, or create montage equivalents of

fugue or counterpoint" ("Introduction" 24).

Surprisingly, Stam's rhetorical construction in this passage reveals the difficulty

in imagining a connection between film and poetry, let alone ways poetry could be adapted to film. Whereas Stam is capable of identifying ways in which film

can both include and evoke painting and music, he makes no attempt at doing the

same for poetry.

49 If Stam adds poetry to the list of "cultural forms" that cinema can include

or evoke, why does he not offer an example of cinema incorporating or emulating poetry as he does with painting and music? The difficulty, perhaps, lies on the

side of evocation. One the one hand, including poetry in a film is no more '

difficult than including a Picasso painting or a Bach cantata; Francis Ford

Coppola's Apocalypse Now, to offer a familiar example, includes long passages of

T. S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men" read aloud by the character Kurtz. Articulating how cinema might metaphorically evoke or emulate poetry, on the other hand, is

less readily apparent. One way to approach such an undertaking would be to look

at specific examples of films that adapt poetry. To do so, however, does not necessarily require inventing a method of analysis entirely different from Stam's

approach to film adaptations of novels. Although as a literary mode poetry is

certainly different than the prose novel, aspects of Stam's methods and theories

are equally applicable to adaptations of both literary modes. The following will

concentrate on how some of the structuralist and post-structuralist theories Stam puts forward might be used in considering film adaptations of poetry. Of particular interest will be theories of performativity, transtextuality, and (perhaps

counter-intuitively) narratology. These theories, in turn, will then be applied to

discussing specific film adaptations of poems.

Without a doubt, each of the structuralist and post-structuralist theories that Stam outlines as relevant to studies of adaptation could be useful to a discussion of poetry and film adaptation. Concerns of authorship, reception, the deconstruction of the concept of the 'original,' and theories of identity and

50 oppression, to name a few, could each be constructively applied to both theorizing the adaptation of poetry to film and to specific examples of film adaptations of poetry. For the purposes of this discussion, however, theories of performativity, narratology, and transtextuality offer ways of addressing concerns that are pertinent to film adaptations of poetry. A performative theory approach speaks to the notion of poetry as performance text and film adaptation as a potential performance of that text, including how elements such as acting and mise-en- scene influence adaptation. Furthermore, performative theory provides methods of analyzing film adaptations as performative in a deconstructive sense, concerning the function of citationality and iterability in determining the relationship between a film adaptation and the poem it adapts. A narratological approach takes up the double concern of narrative in poetry and film adaptations of non-narrative sources. Likewise, narratology, particularly as Stam presents it, can offer vocabulary and methods for comparing filmic and novelistic concepts such as narration and focalization to poetic elements such as voice and point of view.

Finally, a transtextual approach addresses relationships between film adaptations of poetry and their sources, particularly in terms of a hypertext-hypotext connection.

Performative theory involves a wide range of literary, philosophical and linguistic roots, each of which can benefit an understanding of the role of performance and performativity in film adaptations of poetry. Richard Schechner defines performative as both a noun that "indicates a word or sentence that does something" and an adjective that "inflects what it modifies with performance-like

51 qualities," whereas he describes performativity as "an even broader term,

covering a whole panoply of possibilities" in which "social, political, economic, personal, and artistic realities take on the qualities of performance" (110). In this

sense, performative theory can bring together linguistic and philosophical

theories, such as J. L. Austin's speech acts and Derrida's deconstruction of performative speech, alongside the performance theory of theatre.

On the side of theatrical performance and performance theory, film

adaptations of poetry involve the "staging" of poem texts as performances.

Considering a poem as performance text and a film adaptation as a performance

of that text can make use of the language and practices of theatre studies and performance analysis, which, as Patrice Pavis says, "are interested in performance

as a whole, in everything that surrounds and exceeds the text in an overall event"

(198). Doing so undermines the tendency of fidelity criticism to privilege the

source text both in terms of priority and logophilia, as theatrical studies of performance avoid recourse to faithful interpretation in favour of innovation and

originality in performance of a text. Pavis calls for a compromise between "texto-

centric" performance theory, which conceives of the text as "the depository of meaning" that performance "is to extract and express," and "stage-centered" performance theory, which views the text as "one of a number of performance materials" that "neither centralizes nor organizes" performance (204-206). For

Pavis, mixing both texto-centric and stage-centered theories allows for the

"bringing together of diverse stage practices ... without the possibility of establishing a hierarchy between them, and without the text assuming the role of

52 magnetic pole for the rest of the performance" (206). Pavis takes this idea further, saying, "it is the performing of a text that provides initial indications as to the text's meaning, and in particular the status one should accord it within the analyzed performance" (206).

Although Pavis primarily addresses theatrical practice, one could view specific film adaptations of poems as performances in this manner as a way to highlight elements of acting, lighting, mise-en-scene, sound and music. These aspects of the "performance text," therefore, would not be inferior to the

"dramatic text" of the poem-as-script. A film adaptation as a performance of a poem, then, would not simply involve the filming of a reading of a poem.

Instead, the performance could involve all the verbal, aural, and visual elements available to film in order to adapt not only the verbal text of the poem but also imagery, metaphor, sound and other poetic tropes. In this way, film adaptations of poetry could profit from the theatrical view of performance that promotes variety in interpretation and "the trying out, activating, and rejecting of avenues opened up by possible reading" (Pavis 199). As Schechener notes, "Understood performatively, texts are transformable and pliable .... Every text invites being remade into new texts .... especially with regard to texts used in or as performances" (193).

The other side of performative theory, besides theatrical performance theory, is the linguistic and deconstructive notion of performative speech acts.

Drawing from Derrida's reworking of Austin's concept of performative utterances, this deconstructive sense of the performative is useful in considering

53 the broader view of adaptation as a performative process. In his essay "Signature

Event Context," Derrida critically reexamines Austin's formulation of performative utterances, or speech acts. Austin defines performative utterances

(in opposition to constative utterances) as utterances that "do not 'describe' or

'report' ... are not 'true or false'" and in which "the uttering of the sentence is ... the doing of an action, which again would not normally be described as saying something" (5). Derrida elaborates on this concept: "Differing from ... the constative utterance, the performative's referent... is not outside itself... It does not describe something which exists outside and before language. It produces or transforms a situation, it operates" ("Signature" 321).9

Departing from Austin, Derrida proposes the "possibility that every performative utterance ... may be 'cited,'" despite the fact that "Austin excludes this eventuality ... [and] insists upon the fact that this possibility remains abnormal, parasiticaF ("Signature" 324). As Derrida explains, Austin excludes the reading of poetry and performance in theatre from the category of performative utterances, setting them outside "ordinary language" and calling them "parasitic," "non-serious," and "etiolations" ("Signature" 324-325). Derrida contends, however, that such utterances are actually "citation ... the determined modification of a general citationality - or rather general iterability - without which there would not even be a 'successful' performative" ("Signature" 325).

9 While Bass translates the final word of this phrase as "operates," Samuel Weber and Jeffery Mehlman, in their translation of "Signature Event Context" in Limited Inc. translate the same word as "effects." The difference (or differance?) is subtle, but the connotation of "effects" as "to produce" or "to bring about" is more useful to a discussion of adaptation than the connotation of "operate" as "to work."

54 Continuing, Derrida remarks: "Could a performative statement succeed if its formulation did not repeat a 'coded' or iterable statement, in other words if the expressions I use to open a meeting, launch a ship or a marriage were not identifiable as conforming to an iterable model and therefore if they were not identifiable in a way as 'citational'?" ("Signature" 326). Related to citationality is the significance of context, since "Every sign, linguistic or non-linguistic ... can be cited, put between quotation marks, thereby it can break with every given context and engender infinitely new contexts" (Derrida "Signature" 320).

Adaptation, therefore, can be thought of as a recontextualizing through citation, free of a hierarchy of 'proper' or 'natural' contexts or forms that would denigrate adaptation in comparison to a written poem or a public recitation of a poem.

Derrida's recasting of Austin's performative has a two-fold application to adaptation, particularly the adaptation of poetry. Firstly, Derrida's sense of the performative and his inclusion of iterable and citational practices within the category of performative erases the hierarchical distinction that privileges performative utterances within "ordinary language" over "non-serious" performative utterances such as recitations of poems or soliloquies in plays. One can, as an extension of Derrida's argument, think of adaptation as a citational practice, or iteration of a text within a particular context. If, as Derrida suggests, performatives are inherently citational, then adaptations as 'citations' of a source are also performative of a source. And while Derrida observes that the citationality of Austin's performative utterances is not "of the same type as a play, a philosophical reference, or the recitation of a poem," he recommends generating

55 a "typology of forms of iteration" rather than excluding such references or recitations from the category of performative ("Signature" 326). With such a view of citationality, Derrida says, "one then would be concerned with different types of marks or chains of iterable marks" ("Signature" 326). Adaptation, then, would be a form of citation or iteration, and not parasitical of its sources.

Secondly, accepting Derrida's reformulation of the performative allows one to consider adaptation as "doing something" or "making something happen" in a productive and generative way. In this sense, an adaptation of a poem, like the recitation of a poem, enacts the poem by (to paraphrase) producing and transforming the situation of the poem; it effects the poem. Commenting on the

connection between Derrida's reworking of Austin to theatrical practice, Andrew

Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick make a similar observation:

"it's the aptitude of the explicit performative for mobilizing and

epitomizing such transformative effects on interlocutory space that makes

it almost irresistible ... to associate it with theatrical performance ... it

challenges any definition of theater according to which the relation

between theatrical speakers and the words they speak would have to be

seen as fixed in advance, as definitely consistent." (13)

This also brings Derrida's argument closer to the idea of a text-realized-in- performance that Pavis suggests.

While performative theory allows one to consider the function of performance elements in adaptation and the status of adaptation as performative, narratological theory offers ways of attending to the role of narrative and its

56 presentation in film adaptations of poetry. Film is predominantly narrative, yet poetry is not. Some forms of poetry such as the epic are inherently narrative, while others such as the lyric are frequently non-narrative. In considering the film adaptation of poetry, it is necessary to explore both the narrative and non- narrative aspects of poetry. Narratological theory can provide tools with which one can analyze narrative aspects of film adaptations of poetry. But narratology can also be used as a way to examine non-narrative aspects as well, by drawing attention to the absence of narrative forms and through comparing narrative forms such as narration or point of view to similar forms in non-narrative poetry.

Furthermore, narratology can help explain the processes involved when film adaptations of poetry "narrativize" their sources.

The narratological approaches that Stam recommends for studies of film adaptations of novels can be valuable in assessing film adaptations of poetry.

Concerns of narrative order are useful in addressing questions of narrative linearity, particularly in non-linear sequences. For instance, in non-linear narrative poetry, how do forms like analepses (flashback) or prolepses (flash forward) function to create or disrupt narrative order? Does order come into play in non-narrative adaptations, and if so, how? What about the use of narrative features such as analepses in non-narrative sequences? Do such sequences remain non-narrative or do they temporarily borrow narrativity? Similar questions arise related to narrative frequency. Genette's variants of narrative frequency that Stam lists - singulative narration (a single event recounted once), repetitive narration

(an event recounted many times), iterative narration (a recurrent event is told

57 once), homologous narration (a recurrent event told many times), and cumulative narration (a single event is "fleshed out" through frequent flashback) - are each potentially important in considering poetry in adaptation, as rhythm and repetition are key features of poetry, whether narrative or non-narrative ("Introduction" 33).

Like narrative order, concerns of narrative frequency can be an important part in judging the relative "narrativity" of an adaptation.

These narratological concerns that Stam borrows from Genette are complicated by the shift from print media to film. David Bordwell's work on film narratology, particularly in his book Narration in the Fiction Film, underlines some of these complications. In Narration in the Fiction Film, Bordwell seeks to develop a "poetics of narration" to help account for narrative comprehension

(xiii). Following the narratology of the Russian Formalists, Bordwell divides narrative into two elements, the fabula and the syuzhet, which roughly align with

Genette's narrative elements of story and narrative discourse.10 The fabula, according to Bordwell, is "The imaginary construct we create .... [that] embodies the action as a chronological, cause-and-effect chain of events occurring within a given duration and a spatial field" (49). The syuzhet, on the other hand, "is the actual arrangement and presentation of the fabula of the film .... the patterning of the story as a blow-by-blow recounting of the film could render it" (50).n Along

The differences in terminology between Genette and Bordwell's narratological theories, as well as their consequences, will be taken up in more detail in the subsequent chapter. 11 Andre Gaudreault and Philippe Marion usefully critique Bordwell's account of fabula and syuzhet, noting that Bordwell's mistakenly presents syuzhet as independent of the medium in which it is manifest ("Transecriture" 63). For Gaudreault and Marion, by setting style outside of fabula-syuzhet relations,

58 with the fabula and syuzhet, Bordwell finds two other aspects of filmic narration, style or "the film's systematic use of cinematic devices," and excess, a term borrowed from Roland Barthes and Kristin Thompson, or the "materials which may stand out perceptually but which do not fit either narrative or stylistic patterns" (50; 53). Style and excess are significantly filmic in BordwelPs description, and thus stand out as notable areas for consideration when comparing film narratology to print narratologies. But such specification is also evident even at the level of fabula-syuzhet relations.

Two of Bordwell's three principles that relate syuzhet to the fabula result in unique cases in film narratology. The first, narrative time differs in film because the medium itself "absolutely controls the order, frequency, and duration of the presentation of events" (Bordwell 74). Film can make use of fabula- syuzhet relations such as simultaneously presenting events that occur at the same time through techniques such as split-screen presentation, to create a temporal order that would otherwise be impossible in print narratives (Bordwell 77). The second, narrative space is also a concern specific to film. As a visual medium that presents the illusion of three-dimensional space, film requires that "fabula events must be represented as occurring in a spatial frame .... [and the] syuzhet can facilitate construction of fabula space by informing us of the relevant surroundings and the positions and paths consumed by the story's agents"

Bordwell undercuts its importance; instead they propose a splitting of syuzhet into "syuzhet-stnicture and ... syuzhet-text," one directed to the fabula, the other to style ("Transecriture" 63-64). 12 Again, Bordwell's understanding of style and excess will be taken up in detail in the next chapter.

59 (Bordwell 51). Space plays an important role in film's presentation of the fabula through the syuzhet, as is evident in cases such as the "180° rule" and other

editing conventions that ensure the syuzhet coherently conveys the fabula's cause- and-effect structure, linearity and continuity (Bordwell 117-118). Thus,

Bordwell's filmic narratology can help point to specific instances where film's medium-specificity, such as its presentation of time and space, have a bearing on how narrative order, frequency and duration are adapted.

Other narratological issues such as the function of a narrator or narrational

style, and point of view or focalization are pertinent film adaptations of poetry because they address matters that apply to both narrative and non-narrative adaptations. Film adaptations complicate narrational style, Stam points out, by

"practicing two parallel and intersecting forms of narration: the verbal narration, whether through voice-over and/or speech ... and the film's capacity to show the world and its appearances apart from voice-over and character narration"

("Introduction" 35). The overlapping of "showing" and "telling" in film opens up the potential for adaptations of poetry to not only "tell" elements such as verbal imagery, but also to show them. The function or style of a narrator in narrative literature or film is likewise similar to that of voice in poetry, particularly narrative poetry, but also in the form of the "I" of lyric poetry. This similarity is in turn linked to the narrative elements of focalization and point of view.

According to Stam, Genette "distinguishes between narration (who speaks or tells) and focalization (who sees)" ("Introduction" 39). In terms of film adaptations of poetry, focalization might include the "point of view" of the lyric

60 "I" which might be said to reflect the omniscience of "zero focalization" or the

"filtering of events through a character" of "internal focalization" (Stam

"Introduction" 39). Or, a less lyric approach might resemble "external focalization" in which "the reader [or viewer] is denied access to point of view and motivations, and restricted instead to merely observing external behavior"

(Stam "Introduction" 40). Regardless of whether an adaptation is narrative or non-narrative, Stam maintains that examining both narration and focalization must also "take into account film's multitrack and multiform nature," including the role of the camera, soundtrack and mise-en-scene ("Introduction" 39).

Finally, theorizing adaptation in relation to poetry can make use of transtextuality as a means to deal with the relationship between poetry adaptation, hypertexts and their hypotext sources. Each of Genette's five transtextual types is applicable to adaptations of poetry. Investigating intertextuality in an adaptation can identify other textual sources, whether as quotations or allusions, that appear in adaptations of poetry. An adaptation of a poem might integrate paratextual elements, such as epigraphs, illustrations, or other "commentaries" into and alongside the poem it adapts. Metatextually, an adaptation of a poem could invoke critical writings on the poem or itself be a critical response to the source text. The architextuality of a film adaptation of poetry could call into question the relationship between the hypotext and its hypertext by altering or abandoning the source's title. Finally, the hypertextual relationship between hypertext and hypotext draws adaptation and source poem together in a hypertextual chain that could include other hypertextually linked texts suggested by the inclusion of

61 particular actors, other versions of the poem (whether filmed or otherwise), and

other such connections. These links would inevitably play into the meaning of the film adaptation of the poem.

Adapting Poetry: Six Film Adaptations

These approaches to film adaptations of poetry, performative, narratological and transtextual, however, remain only at the level of theory. For a fuller understanding of film adaptation of poetry, it is necessary to examine

specific instances of adaptation. Using these three theoretical approaches as a guide, the following will look at six examples of films that are adaptations of poetry: Poen; A Kite Is A Victim; Elimination Dance; At The Quinte Hotel; Trains of Winnipeg; Owls at Noon: A Prelude: The Hollow Men.13 These films are among the few readily available direct adaptations of poetry (as opposed to films such as Troy or Beowulf and Grendel, whose relationship to their poetic sources is more distant, or films that incorporate poetry in quotation or allusion, such as

Apocalypse Now). In each case, the adaptation draws extensively from its source, reinventing, rewriting, rereading and transforming it, warranting the term adaptation.

13 With the exception of Owls at Noon, all these films are adaptations by Canadian filmmakers of poems by contemporary Canadian poets. This connection is intended to make comparison more fluid by drawing from works that come from a common period and national literary tradition. While there is certainly a great deal of significance to the fact that Canadian filmmakers look to Canadian poetry for source material to adapt, the implications of this issue are beyond the scope of this dissertation. Furthermore, the exceptional case is aimed at the rest of this dissertation, in which Chris Marker's work will play an important role. The inclusion of Owls At Noon is intended to function not only as an important example of a film adaptation of poetry, but also as a bridge to subsequent chapters.

62 Josef Reeve's short film Poen adapts a prose poem section from Leonard

Cohen's novel Beautiful Losers, read by Cohen himself. Along with Cohen's reading of the poem, repeated twice in its entirety, the film incorporates a montage of predominantly still images, photographs and illustrations, and a few

short sequences of moving images. The images progress in synchronization with the reading of the poem, so that particular images correspond to or are juxtaposed to lines of the poem. Thus, the phrases "All the disparates of the world/ the different wings of the paradox/ coin faces of problem" are accompanied by three images: first, a drawing to two figures with large bellies pressed together; second, a drawing of a flying machine with large wings; and third, a shadowy figure pointing a double-barreled gun. These images largely play on the literal meaning of each phrase, making almost one to one connections between linguistic sign and image, with "disparates" as opposed figures, "wings of the paradox" as wings of a machine, and "coin faces of problem" as an image of violence. Elsewhere in the film this nearly direct connection between word and image joins two words of the phrase "a house and a toothache" into a single image, a surrealist drawing of a fist seemingly made of stone, with a door or a window on its thumb, rising out of a head, which could both function as a house or bestow a toothache. The film also creates dissonance between contradicting images and phrases, such as when the phrase "It sews skin onto the skeleton/ and lipstick on a lip" is juxtaposed with an illustration of a man being flayed alive and then a drawing of a featureless face.

But even when the images disagree with the spoken words, the interpretation

63 remains predominantly literal rather than developing a metaphorical relationship between word and image.

This literalness, however, breaks down during the second full reading of the poem, in which moving images are included along with still images.

Coinciding with the line "the hook unbends into a spear, the spear shears itself into a needle, and the needle sews the world together" are four shots including movement. The first shot is of a soldier firing a machine gun from a tank, along with the words "the hook unbends into a spear." With the words "the spear shears itself into a needle," the second and third shots are of two and then four men shooting rifles from the windows of buildings. And the fourth shot, matching with the words "and the needle sews the world together," shows people huddling together in fear. This montage of shots offers a reading of this line that associates the movement from hook to spear to needle with escalating violence and its effect on society by developing the metaphor across related images.

And yet, because of the repeated reading of the poem, the film suggests that such interpretation is neither stable nor singular. The moving images of violence are in stark contrast to the images that accompany the reading the first time: a crying eye, a ghostly reaper chasing a crowd, a pattern of gingerbread men with candy hearts. Interpretation, then, becomes subject to performance; that is, how the images perform alongside the reading. The repetition of Cohen's spoken performance, first as a 'botched take,' and then as two identical full readings, divides the film into two types of interpretation, one primarily literal, the other metaphorical. But while the two sets of images offer different performances, they

64 remain governed by Cohen's own performance. Cohen's reading largely dictates the progression of images, particularly their rhythm, as the editing of the images generally matches his pauses and emphases. In this way, the film at once adapts a performance while performing a text itself.

The transtextuality of Poen also greatly shapes the film as an adaptation, particularly as it transforms a poetic section of a narrative novel into a prose poem. The name of the film architextually separates it from its source. The

section of Beautiful Losers from which the poem comes has no mention of the word "Poen," nor any title besides the chapter number, nine. The name itself also

suggests the relationship between the recited prose poem and its source in the experimental novel; neither strictly poem, nor novel the title draws the words together. This imposition of another name also indicates the hypertextual connection between the film hypertext and novel hypotext. The name marks the poetry in the film as distinct from the prose in the novel, a fact further emphasized by the deletion of a phrase that contains details referencing characters in the novel. The removal of this phrase, "it sews Edith to her greasepaint, crouching

(for as long as I, this book, or an eternal eye remembers) in our lightless sub- basement," pulls the poem out of a narrative context, and distinguishes it from the novel (Cohen 17). In fact, Beautiful Losers is more distant from the film on its hypertextual chain than the original recorded readings from which the voice track is derived, (a similar recording occurs in Donald Brittain's documentary Ladies and Gentlemen... Mr. Leonard Cohen). The repeated readings of the poem that appears in the film are in fact different 'takes' from the recording session. This

65 hypertextual connection helps establish Poen as an adaptation of poetry, separate and distinct from its prose hypotext.

Another film adaptation of a Cohen poem is Elizabeth Lewis's animated short A Kite is a Victim. Adapted from the poem of the same name, Kite partakes of the same balancing act between the literal and metaphorical as Poen. The film, animated in hand-drawn style, takes the content of the poem, a series of images relating a kite to a victim, a falcon, a fish, a poem and a "contract of glory," and portrays the metaphorical links by transforming the kite into each element through flowing lines and colours. Thus, the image of the kite folding and shifting into a bird and a fish represent the lines "like a desparate trained falcon" or "A kite is a fish you have already caught" respectively (Cohen "Kite" 1). The film also presents other, more abstract, metaphors literally, such as the "contract of glory/ that must be made with the sun," which appears as a yellow sun rising over a field. The film avoids other metaphors that are not conducive to literal representation, as with the line "A kite is the last poem you've written." Here the film only shows the kite itself, rather than its metaphorical transformation.

But while much of the film represents the content of the poem literally, there are moments in which the flowing animation interprets the metaphorical connections. For instance, the master-slave relationship set up in the first stanza, in which "A kite is a victim," becomes reciprocal in the film. Throughout, the kite transforms to become its master, presented in the film as a female figure.

These changes in form, from kite to woman, resemble Stephen Scobie's reading of the last stanza of the poem, "where master becomes slave, submits himself to

66 the elements" (27). Furthermore, by representing the "you" of the poem with a female figure, the film recasts Scobie's and other critic's reading of the poem's extended metaphor. Scobie sees the extended metaphor as ultimately linking the kite to a poem, a lover, the ego or "the 'other' - anything which the ego feels to be separate enough from itself to demand that some kind of relationship be set up"

(27). Similarly, Michael Ondaatje reads the extended metaphor of "Kite" as "our ego and ambitions ... all that is original and free in us" (16). The film, however, through its central female figure, interprets the kite as an extended metaphor for creation, whether poetic, artistic, or natural. Both the kite and the woman shift and flow into each other, as well as into the elements that surround them, fish, field, and moon, incorporating and becoming 'otherness,' rather than being defined in opposition to it. The contrast between the male voice reciting the poem

(read by Paul Hecht) and the female figure further emphasizes this shift away from reading the poem as expressing the relationship between a masculine ego

(the self-reflexive, lyric "you" that is "I" of the poem) and its feminine others.

The film adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's long poem Elimination

Dance* offers a different means of adapting poetry to film from the two Cohen adaptations. The film version of Elimination Dance, directed by Bruce

MacDonald, adapts Ondaatje's non-narrative poem, a list of "calls" for a dance competition, by both dramatizing and narrativizing the poem. While Ondaatje's poem is strictly a long list of humorous phrases, "calls" intended to eliminate

14 There are two version of Ondaatje's Elimination Dance, the original 1978 chapbook, and the expanded and revised 1991 "Bilingual Traveler's Edition," featuring illustrations, maps and "Study Questions." The film primarily adapts the 1991 version.

67 individuals from a fictional dance, the film adds narrative elements - characters, conflict and narration - to shape a story around the poetry. Following a title card that introduces the origins of the elimination dance in an ancient manuscript, the film begins with a prologue, in which a woman (Tracey Wright) and a man (Don

McKellar) meet at an elimination dance. Then, a newsreel-like description of the elimination dance interrupts, "from Tierra del Fuego to Saskatoon, the elimination dance crosses social and political borders, seducing young and old in its often grueling competition of humiliation ... the authorities grow concerned, for wherever the elimination dance occurs it is followed by social unrest, mass marriages and political upheaval," with found-footage images (some authentic, some staged) of people dancing from various nations, riots, mass marriages, and politicians (including Nikita Khruschev) condemning the events. As the newsreel burns from its centre outward, the film returns to the site of the dance and the narrative, as the woman and man notice each other across the hall, the dance begins and they take each other as a dance partner. As the narrative unfolds, voice-over commentators describe the dance like a sporting event. The caller

(Michael Turner) begins reading cards and with a series of short tableaux, each depicting a call, dancers are eliminated, until the final call, "Anyone with pain," eliminates all remaining except the woman and man, who dance on to the caller's chagrin.

This narrative provides a structure in which the film dramatizes the content of the poem, the calls of elimination, through short tableaux. Each tableau portrays the call through a live-action scene that is then frozen with a flash

68 of a camera and transformed into a still image resembling a postage stamp, with colours layered over top giving them a painted effect. The first series of calls each produce a shift outside of the narrative to the dramatized tableau: a hand holding a test tube that becomes a 27 cent stamp represents the call "Anyone who has lost a urine sample in the mail"; a man in a suit, soaked by a hose, being photographed greeting his wife and children depicts the call "Literary critics who have swum the Hellespont"; a scene of a woman wrapped in a towel, reclining on a chaise lounge, with her knees bandaged, which becomes a 37 cent stamp accompanies the call "Anyone whose knees have been ruined as a result of performing sexual acts in an elevator." Yet even these tableaux involve narrative, as a man photographing the tableaux with an old-fashion camera links most of the scenes together. This linking becomes a mini-narrative when the photographer, while capturing a shot of a man in a bathing suit being pulled by bikini-clad women, recognizes himself in the tableau as the man representing the call "Those who are allergic to the sea." After the photographer screams in horror, however, the tableaux all but disappear, with the exception of a shot of a toy RCMP officer on horseback for the call "Anyone who has been penetrated by a mountie."

Instead, the film includes the poem as part of the larger narrative, with each call read by the caller prompting the departure of various dancing couples, in varying degrees of embarrassment, anger, or distress.

The film also makes use of other narrative devices to adapt the poem. A series of calls are overlapped through fades, accompanied by a shot of a rapidly advancing clock, creating a narrative ellipsis. This ellipsis becomes an occasion

69 to develop the character of the woman and man, when the woman proclaims she

cannot go on, to which the man replies: "It's fine. We'll be fine ... just imagine

I'm someone you care for." Similarly, the prologue of the film adapts a call from

the poem by reproducing it visually. The call "Those who (while visiting a

foreign country) have lost the end of a Q-tip in their ear and have been unable to

explain their problem" becomes the pretext for the couple's initial meeting: the woman bumping into the man and lodging the Q-tip he is using into his ear

(Ondaatje Elimination Dance/Le danse eliminatoire 12).

The narrativizing of Ondaatje's poem is in part a necessary means of

adapting an otherwise non-narrative text. As Ondaatje himself notes, the poem

Elimination Dance "was more like a joke than anything else" (qtd in Solecki

Raggas 192). As a poem, Elimination Dance has largely avoided critical

attention, since (perhaps in agreement with Ondaatje) critics have seen its humour

as making the poem unworthy of serious analysis. In two of the major studies of

Ondaatje's poetry, Douglas Barbour's Michael Ondaatje and Sam Solecki's

Raggas of Love, Elimination Dance receives scant or no mention. Leslie

Mundwiler, meanwhile, dismisses the long poem, saying: "Recalling Nietzsche perhaps ('Living - that is to continually eliminate from ourselves what is about to

die'), one might have attempted to make more of this chapbook than it deserved"

(17). By turning the poem into a sort of screwball romantic comedy, the film

adaptation finds a form and genre for the comic long poem, one more suited to

'serious' attention.

70 Besides its narrative aspects, the film also employs transtextual elements to aid in the adaptation of the poem. The film makes paratextual connections to its source throughout. The opening intertitle of the film, for instance, functions like an epigraph, quoting an ancient manuscript of the rules for the elimination dance. This appeal to a literary source inverts the function of the epigraphs of the

1978 version of Elimination Dance, which includes a quotation from Jean-Luc

Godard's film A Bout de souffle. Solecki points out that nearly all of Ondaatje's works include epigraphs, which "have similar thematic function in alerting us to some aspect of the poems they introduce" (Raggas 113-115). In this case, the filmic epigraph of the first version of the poem points to the recurring theme of cinema, with calls that mention the National Film Board, 8mm home movies, and drive-in theatres, and possibly even the manner in which the lines of the poem introduce a succession of images like disarming jump-cuts. Mundwiler even suggest that Elimination Dance resembles "a sort of literary home movie" (17).

Other paratextual elements further connect the film to the poem. The newsreel is reminiscent of the maps that follow the calls in the 1991 version of the poem, particularly the map detailing locations "where Elimination Dances occur" and

"Locations where dances have resulted in mass marriages or serious battles with the police" (Ondaatje Elimination Dance/Le danse eliminatoire 44). Likewise, the film incorporates one of the 1991 edition's "Study Questions" by including a subtitle that appears under a shot of the caller and reads "Diana Whitehouse, where are you?/1 knew you when I was 15. Please call (416) 325-1941," a paraphrase of "Study Question" "4." These paratextual connections allow the film

71 to adapt the postmodern play of the long poem through textual and paratextual elements available to film.

Hypertextually the film not only links itself to the two print version of

Elimination Dance, but also to other Canadian films. The film reveals its primary

affiliation with the 1991 version, as its narrative setting, a ballroom, matches the

illustrations of dancers that separate the calls in the 1991 text. Likewise, the tableaux resemble the larger black and white illustrations that appear throughout the 1991 version and provide visual representations of some of the calls. The

1978 text, however, contains only two illustrations, both depicting a whip, an image suggesting that the poem is a personal "list of things to be scourged from the writer" (Mundwiler 17). While this hypertextual connection suggests that the

second version of the poem is the preferred source of the film, the found footage clips inserted through the film connect it to the filmic references of the first version of the poem. Even the numerous familiar Canadian actors who appear in the film, both as leads and as extras, recall lines from the 1978 version such as

"Anyone involved with a Canadian movie about a teenager growing up"

(Ondaatje Elimination n.p.). And this hypertextual connection can be taken further, since not only are many of the actors regulars from MacDonald's films

(such as Valerie Buhagiar, McKellar and Wright), but the caller is portrayed by

Michael Turner, the poet whose long poem Hard Core Logo MacDonald also adapted into a narrative film. These hypertextual links thus establish the adaptation as aware of both its literary and filmic roots, from its hypotexts to other hypertextual connections concerning film and poetry.

72 Whereas the film adaptation of Elimination Dance adapts a poem by adding a narrative dimension, Douglas Bensadoun's adaptation of Al Purdy's poem "At the Quinte Hotel" transforms its narrative source by drawing out its lyricism. Bensadoun's At the Quinte Hotel makes use of layers of narrative and layers of performance to extend and adapt Purdy's narrative of a barstool poet's

(played by Gordon Downie15) violent encounter at a bar. The film has two distinct narrative sections, the first a playing out of the narrative content of the first half of the poem - the poet, drinking, witnesses a fight, confronts and knocks out one of the fighters, and sits on him. The second involves the poet's recitation of his poem to the bar patrons, with flashbacks to the events that have just occurred, as the narrative content of the first section overlaps and intertwines with the second. This narrative layering initially has a comic effect: the poet's 'on-the- spot' poem, the recounting of the recent past as if it were the product of poetic inspiration. But the layers of performance that deliver the narrative complicate and enhance this comic effect.

There are three levels of performance at work in ,4/ the Quinte Hotel, each of which not only present the poem's narrative, but also help bring its lyrical qualities to the adaptation. The first layer of performance occurs in the first narrative section and the flashbacks of the second narrative section, and is the enacting of the narrative itself without commentary and with only diegetic dialogue. The second layer of performance is the poet's reading of his poem

15 The casting of Downie as the poet in At the Quinte Hotel also provides a hypertextual link to Downie's own poetry (both his song lyrics and books of poetry) and his barroom philosopher persona as the lead singer of the rock band The Tragically Hip.

73 within the diegesis and takes place in the second narrative section. The third layer

of performance exists outside the diegesis and involves a voice-over reading of the poem by Purdy himself that occurs throughout the second narrative section.

In the second narrative section, Purdy's reading and the poet's reading overlap,

sometimes in synch, sometimes not, except during the flashback, in which only

Purdy's voice is audible. Through this layering, the film splits the speaker of the poem. One could see this split as an undermining of Solecki's characterization of

Purdy's poetry:

At its most dramatic and open, the typical Purdy poem creates the illusion

that the reader is participating in the imagined or real experience described

by the first person speaker who, in Richard Poirer's words, is 'a

performing self discovering himself as well as the limits of the self, in the

dramatic discovery that is the poem. {Last 98)

But rather than breaking down this "performing self and the discovery it produces, the film's layered performances emphasize the multiplicity of Purdy's

lyric voice.

According to Solecki, Purdy's "lyrics regularly show a poet stretching the thematic and formal limits of lyric towards a more open poetry that doesn't

simply present itself as 'the result of the creative process' but often mimics 'the

creative process itself" {Last 97). By weaving narrative and performance layers together, At the Quinte Hotel participates in this mimicking of creativity as it

chronicles the development of a lyric, from inspiration to expression.

Additionally, the film, with its interacting performances, realizes what Solecki

74 sees in "At the Quinte Hotel" as "the impulse towards dialogue and conversation underlying a significant number of the poems, ... attempts to involve the reader in the poet's experience and views" {Last 133). The first narrative layer is the inspirational experience of developing lyric, witnessing the fight. The film's portrayal of this experience focuses on the poet, and at times films from his point of view, or a vantage point close to his point of view, as in Genette's internal focalization. The opening shot of the film, for instance, is of the poet's view of his glass of beer. In the second narrative section the presence of Purdy's voice, like an omniscient narrative voice, pulls the point of view away from that of the poet, and instead watches his performance, as in external focalization. Yet the distance this creates between the poet's performance and Purdy's voice-over collapses in the flashbacks. Since only Purdy's voice is heard over the flashback shots, the images are linked to the external point of view, a lyrical voice recounting experience. This lyrical re-imagining of the narrative is further emphasized by the inclusion of shots that did not appear in the first narrative section. In particular, a shot of the drunk's first victim bleeding "ugly red flowers on the tile" of the bathroom suggests a lyrical imagination creating a poetic image to accompany its narrative (Purdy 106).

In this way, the film's lyrical point of view becomes representative of the poet's lyrical vision, the vision of a "sensitive man." Thus the final shot of the film, identical to the opening shot, looking down into a glass of beer, takes on the poetic image the poet uses to describe it, "all wonderful yellow flowers," as the golden liquid appears through frothing white foam like the centre of liquid daisies

75 (Purdy 106). Likewise, the slow motion effect that accompanies the lines "it was a heart-wanning moment for Literature/ and moved by the demonstrable effect/ of great Art and the brotherhood of people," with the poet surrounded in an angelic glow, signals the high point of the poet's experience of lyric time and vision that is only broken by the realization "that poems will not really buy beer or flowers/ or a goddam thing" (Purdy 107). By highlighting this lyric perspective through performative layers and imagery, At the Quinte Hotel places lyricism rather than narrative at the centre of its approach to adaptation.

While At the Quinte Hotel brings out the lyricism of its source by manipulating its narrative, the 14 "film poems" of Clive Holden's Trains of

Winnipeg project attempt to adapt lyricism more directly. Part of a broader multimedia endeavour including a CD of spoken word poetry, a book of poems, a film-cycle made up of 14 shorts, and a website that links all the elements of the project together alongside reviews and other information, Holden's films adapt his own writing, poems collected in the book Trains of Winnipeg: poems. The 14

"film poems" each adapt one Holden's lyric poems, bringing out and playing with aspects of poetic lyricism in especially filmic ways. Four of the 14 "film poems" in particular, though by no means exclusively, adapt the lyricism of Holden's poems by reshaping their performative, narrative and transtextual aspects: love in the white city; 18,000 dead in gordon head; active pass; and the short film trains of Winnipeg}

16 By way of clarification, I have chosen to indicate the difference between each part of Holden's project in the following manner: the project itself will be called the Trains of Winnipeg project; the collection of poems will be called Trains of

76 The first film of the cycle, love in the white city recasts its eponymous lyric source by emphasizing and enhancing sound and image patterns. Drawing from Northrop Frye's concepts of "melos" and "opsis," Jonathan Culler points to sound and visual patterns as elements that undermine the view of the lyric as speech overheard ("Changes in the Study of the Lyric" 38). Instead of considering sound patterns, including rhythm, rhyme, and alliteration as evidence of the attitude or character of a speaker, Culler suggests that such lyrical "melos" can reflexively stress the role of linguistic play over dramatic unity in understanding lyric poetry and recalling the lyric's roots in music and song

("Changes" 40). Similarly, Frye's "opsis," Culler says, acknowledges the importance of visual patterns in shaping one's understanding of lyric poetry, through forms and stanza patterns that connect the lyric to other non-narrative forms of poetry, such as concrete poetry ("Changes" 40). In love in the white city, sound and image patterns highlight the shifting tensions betweens the lyrical voice, the "I" of the poem spoken in voice-over, and the filming camera "eye" of the four-way, split-screen image-track. The various points of view in film, both auditory and visual, disrupt any sense of a single speaker or consciousness.

Throughout the film, the four-way, split image-track, showing four similar images, of feet walking or of a shadow-cast-figure moving over changing terrain, prevents identification of the filming "eye" seeing its own shadow with the speaking "I" reciting the poem. For instance, while the voice-over proclaims,

Winnipeg: poems; the final short film of the project will be called trains of Winnipeg. I base these typographical choices on the ways each different version of the title "Trains of Winnipeg" appears in their respective parts of the project.

77 "love in the white city .is blasphemous/ i will hunt you down/ and kill your new wife," the four split screens present different images that could be linked to this threatening statement. In the bottom-left corner, the image of feet walking rapidly

suggests "hunting down." The top-right frame shows a figure in shadow moving

in dramatic slow motion. In the bottom-right frame, with the line "and kill your new wife" the shadowy figure stops, standing still. And in the top-left frame, the

shadow moves at a pace similar to the bottom-left frame. Each image, recalling

conventional images of menace from film noir or horror films, is at once

connected to and separate from the speaking "i" and the other images. This

separation of points of view, and the multiplicity of "voices" it produces also reflects the content of the spoken poem itself; just as the poem invokes multiple perspectives of what constitutes the experience of "love" in Winnipeg, so too the

image-tracks present multiple perspectives of traveling through the "white city."

The sound and visual patterns of love in the white city also suggest the performative aspects of the film, that of creating lyrical connection through the

"musical" performance the image and sound tracks. The refrain-like repetition of the line "Love in the white city is..." and the repetitious ambient music and

sounds are akin to the rhythmic patterns in the four frames of the screen. In this

sense, Holden's images play off of and with the words of his vocal performance.

Thus, the film's performance of its source requires that the viewer negotiate between the various points of view, to choose whether to pay closer attention to the words or the images. This experience becomes most apparent when there are noticeable changes in one of the images. Such breaks in the patterns of images

78 produces further tensions between word and image, such as a shot of cat in one

frame that contradicts the spoken lines "love in the white city . is too brutal/ the

horses mount cows/ the chickens eat pig." The cat's presence draws the viewer's

attention to the top left frame, but also encourages the viewer to attempt to

connect the cat to the words being spoken, despite contradiction. It is only at the

end of the film, however, that there appears to be any unity to the lyric

expressions of image and sound, as all four frames display the same image,

seemingly reconciling with the lyrical voice that says "you've cost me everything

- / i have nothing but you." This dynamic, from dissonance to harmony, further

emphasizes sense of love in the white city as a performance that adapts its source poem through musical construction.

A far different example of shifting lyricism in the Trains of Winnipeg

project is 18,000 dead in gordon head: (a found film). Based on the most

narrative of Holden's Trains of Winnipeg poems, 18,000 dead contrasts narrative

voice-over with subjective imagery to create a lyrical meditation on experiences

of memory. The poem "18,000 dead in gordon head" tells the story of the poet's rediscovery of lost film footage, the tragic murder of a teenaged girl that inspired

the film, and the effect of the event on the poet's younger self. As the poem

describes, the images that make up the film itself come from a video recording of the projection of the film onto a wall. The narrative, however, makes scant reference to the images of the video. One stanza that describes the filming of the

footage relates to the projected images, in part describing the content of one portion of the video: "i filmed the split-levels, service stations & the air raid siren

79 over the/ old gordon head store - while my friend Andrew drew in oil pastel."

Another line, "i even lay on my side on the road where she died," prefigures a number of images filmed side ways from ground-level that appear throughout the

film. Besides these few instances, the images of the film are predominantly blurred or unidentifiable and edited into repetitive sequences and therefore

disconnected from the narrative. For example, in one sequence a series of figures

in ghostly superimposition walk into the Gordon Head store, their actions

repeated numerous times. And while these images do not relate to the lines read

over them,

for the rest of that day i'd suddenly remember what happened.

and feel guilty, i thought it was wrong to think about other things, but

i just couldn't keep my mind on it, it would move away., they suggest the ghostly and repetitious experience of memory that the stanza describes. In fact, the separation between the images and the narrative suggests that the narrative itself is a product of the poet's encounter with the found footage,

a narrative response to the memories conjured by the lyrical and subjective images of the film. In this way, the narrative acts as an attempt to make sense of the images; just as the poet aspires to "see the other person's side of the story," the narrative tries to "see" the story behind the lyric images produced by his other self.

The Trains of Winnipeg film cycle also functions transtextually in relation to the other parts of the Trains of Winnipeg project. The subtitle of the film cycle,

"14 film poems," architextually defines the films as separate from and related to

80 the other parts, particularly the print poems. Even individual film poems make use of this architextual distinction to signal the process of adaptation. The film active pass, for example, omits the bracketed subtitle from its source "active pass:

(radical poet on his fortieth birthday)," indicating the removal of the lyric "i" and most of the personal references from the film poem. Hypertextually, the film trains of Winnipeg, the final film of the cycle, links the films to the other parts of the project. As both the title of the project and the only title that appears in the spoken-word CD, the book of poems, and the film cycle, trains of Winnipeg is a consistent link throughout the project. Yet while the versions of "trains of

Winnipeg" found on the CD and in the book are directly related (the former a spoken recitation of the latter), the film trains of Winnipeg drastically departs from its hypertextual namesakes by eliminating words altogether.

The hypertextual links between the three versions of "trains of Winnipeg" helps adapt the lyricism of the verbal poems to the visual film poem. In the trains of Winnipeg film, the lyric "eye" of the camera and filmmaker replaces the lyric

"I" of the speaking subject.17 But instances such as the brief glimpse of the filmmaker's reflection in the train window are a tease to the viewer. The filmmaker's "eye" does not direct the viewer to make connections with other aspects of the film. The filmmaker's presence does little to explain or clarify the images on screen. In fact, the filmmaker's reflection disrupts the metonymical link the film establishes between the experience of viewing the world from a train

17 Holden presents similar images in active pass with a similar effect of connecting the lyric "I" and the "camera-eye" with clear reference to Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera, which will be discussed in chapter three.

81 and the experience of viewing film: the window of the train is like a film screen, the rhythmic sounds and movements of the train like the movement and sound of film passing through a projector. This instance of reflexivity works against lyricism, breaking the initial visual pattern of trains of Winnipeg. The reappearance of the filmmaker later in the film repeats this disruption. The cacophonous noises that accompany this second manifestation, in which the filmmaker's image is digitally distorted, interrupt the sound pattern of the film.

Here the filmmaker's presence signals another lyrical breakdown, the defeat of the film's "melos," replacing musicality with cacophony. Thus rather than being a unifying or productive presence, the filmmaker as subject becomes a disruptive figure.

And yet, while the filmmaker disrupts a sense of unified lyrical subjectivity, the hypertextual connection between the film and its sources imports the lyricism of the spoken and written poems into the film poem. For a viewer familiar with other parts of the project, the experience of viewing the film carries with it the words of the poem, whether as read in the book collection or heard on the CD. The frequent repetition of images in the film recalls the repetition of the line "i am a train of Winnipeg" in the other versions of the poem. Although the film may replace lyrical subjectivity and musicality with reflexivity and cacophony, it also retains these elements hypertextually. This connection evokes the concept of the lyric/anti-lyric proposed by Douglas Barbour. According to

Barbour, lyric/anti-lyric poetry challenges lyric conventions (16). For Barbour the lyric/anti-lyric does not completely break with the lyric, but rather plays with

82 elements of the lyric, at times parodically, but always pushing the limits of lyricism (15-16).

Unlike Poen, A Kite is a Victim, Elimination Dance, At the Quinte Hotel, and much of Holden's Trains of Winnipeg film cycle, the lyric/anti-lyric play of trains of Winnipeg adapts its sources with intentional infidelity. Similarly, Chris

Marker's video-installation Owls at Noon: Prelude: The Hollow Men adapts its source, T.S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men," without a concern for faithfulness.

Instead, Marker's Hollow Men creates a dialogue with Eliot's poem, one that highlights lyrical reinvention and hypertextuality. Marker's adaptation integrates performative, narrative, lyrical, and transtextual elements in a manner that not only adapts Eliot's poetry, but is poetic itself.

The installation, shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from

April 27 to June 13, 2005 and at the Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art in

Toronto from January 26 to March 4, 2006, features eight flat-screen monitors arranged horizontally on a wall. Across these monitors, words and images move, appear, and disappear, accompanied by the haunting piano music of Tom

Takemitsu's "Corona," performed by Roger Woodward (Murphy 34). The text at times moves "through" the monitors, from one to the next, while the images fade in and out, usually on alternating screens. Marker derives the text itself primarily from Eliot's poem, but presents it in fragments that only become recognizable after they have moved across the screens. At times the alternately and simultaneous right to left and left to right movement of words and phrases causes lines from Eliot's poem to collide in the spaces between the screens, creating new

83 words, phrases and associations. For example, Andrea Picard notes that, "in one

case, a word is so completely broken apart via sluggishness that the "S" from

"Sightless" ... gives way to S S S S and the implications could not be clearer: SS

SS SS SS" (60). In other instances, Marker introduces phrases such as "the

blazing trail...of battle-struck airplanes," which Robert A. Haller points out do not

"appear in Eliot's poem, though it seems to be quoted from it." Similarly, the

images in Marker's Hollow Men are estranged, often digitally altered to appear

blurred, over-exposed, cracked, or damaged, making them difficult to interpret or

recognize. So while some images are discernable and familiar (a picture of the

shroud of Turin, for instance) others require the viewer to reconstruct and make

sense of the transformed images. Occasionally the images and the text interact

with one another, interpreting Eliot's poem. For instance, Marker presents images

of trench warfare and barbed wire alongside his interpretation of Eliot's words:

"This is the Dead Land he wrote and the trenches oozed ... What is 'Cactus Land'

if not barbed wire."

This interplay of words and images in Marker's Hollow Men presents a

two-fold process of performance. On the one hand, Marker's moving text literally becomes a performer in the film installation: its movements and fragmentation

performing Eliot's words. On the other hand, The Hollow Men is performative in

a citational and iterative sense. In part a recitation of the poem, the installation performs Eliot's words in a new context, one that incorporates images and other

words. And as an adaptation of Eliot's poem, Marker's Hollow Men is also an

iteration of its source, both literally and figuratively citing Eliot's words.

84 Marker's iteration, however, is particularly "citational." It cites and re-iterates

Eliot's words in the aid of not only interpreting the poem (as in the "Cactus Land" imagery), but also, through the interaction with the installation's images, as a means to investigate, as Marker says in lines from the installation, "things, objects, images that don't belong, and yet are there ... raw material, the petty cash of history, [from which] I try to extract a subjective journey through the 20th century."

This "subjective journey" neatly defines Marker's approach to adapting

Eliot's poem, and to his approach to art making in general, which Jay Murphy describes as: "making aptypical non-narrative connections, creating worlds consisting solely of multi-leveled image-links, a new oceanic language of expression freed from its conventional responsibility to illustration and linearity"

(31). Marker's non-narrative approach is especially lyric, as it roots its dialogue with Eliot's poem in a personal reflection:

Eliot wrote it in 1925

The ashes of World War I were

Barely cold

And we 4 year old toddlers

Barely made out

A world of strange forms

Shaped by that war

The war to end all wars they said.

85 Born in 1921 (although such biographical details are speculative at best),

Marker's lyric "I" reads Eliot's poem with "Marker's knowledge of subsequent wars" (Picard 60). The images of the installation appear and disappear as if conjured by memory, familiar and yet unfamiliar like "the strange forms" unintelligible to a four year old Marker. Picard says that "Marker personalizes

Eliot's poem," but the term "lyricizes" might be more accurate (61). Marker transforms Eliot's poem into a "subjective journey," but it is a journey that those witnessing the installation participate in, a journey that Murphy says, "can only induce the viewer to create their own experiences" (34). Thus the lyric "I" of the installation becomes multiple, not only in dialogue with the poem it adapts,

Marker's "I" interrogating Eliot's "We," but also through the evocation of memories, both personal and cultural, and their effect on the viewer.

Marker generates this lyric multiplicity in part through the installation's transtextuality. The text and images of the installation produce seemingly infinite hypertextual connections, not only between Marker's Hollow Men and its hypotext, but also a range of other sources, from Marker's own corpus to "the petty cash of history" relating to the twentieth century. The personal hypertextual connections, those drawing from Marker's films and other work, insert lyricism into the work that exceeds the lyric "I." Through these hypertextual references,

Marker puts a personal stamp on the installation, a signature of sorts, but one that also extends beyond his own work, multiplying hypertextually. For instance,

Marker pairs Eliot's "Multifoliate rose," with an image of a woman's head, shot from behind, her hair tied into a tight bun. This image links The Hollow Men to

86 similar images in other Marker films, especially La Jetee and Sans Soleil, and still further to Kim Novak's hair in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, Marker's favourite film. The hypertextual link to these films also recalls Marker's interpretation of the spiral as a motif in Sans Soleil, as the spiral of time in a film that portrays

"impossible memory." The spiral of the hair is at once symbolic of the repetition of time and history, like war throughout the twentieth century, and the repetitions of memory and immemory, like Marker's "impossible" memories of WWI.

Further hypertextual connections to Marker's work are found interspersed throughout his images, such as Denise Bellon's pseudo-Surrealist photographs of mutilated faces of WWI veterans that also appear in Marker's film about Bellon

(co-directed by Bellon's daughter Yannick Bellon), Le Souvenir d'un avenir

(Picard 60). Other hypertextual references also appear in the moving text of the installation. As the words "Hollow" and "Men" move across the eight screens at the beginning of the film, there is an instant where the two join together over the space between the monitors to form the word "Meow." This playful inside-joke is almost more indicative of Marker's lyric presence than any personal reference or hypertextual citation, as it points to Marker's calling card and favourite animal, the cat, which appears in nearly every one of his films, at times acting as a surrogate for Marker himself.

Still other images and words lead to further hypertextual interpretations.

Picard points out the image of Camille Claudel as one of sacrifice that reinterprets

Eliot's line "pray to broken stone" (61). Murphy notes Marker's expressed interest in "contending with the 'Duchamp syndrome,' trying to catch that 1/50 of

87 a second of peripheral vision, of what we aren't noticing" that Murphy suggests recalls Brassai's photography and Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project (34). Other hypertextual connections of course lie hidden in the unrecognizability of some of

the images, connections the viewer is perhaps only able to speculate about given the digitally altered the images and the temporariness of the installation. Such hypertextual play, both personal and more broadly intercultural, highlights a

lyrical reflexivity in this and other works by Marker, one that simultaneously

acknowledges and undermines the lyric subject. More than simply adapting poetry, then, Marker's installation is poetic itself. The Hollow Men combines non- narrativity, reflexivity, and lyricism in a manner that suggests possible intersections for film and poetry.

Beyond Adaptation: Towards Poetry and/in Film

All of these adaptations, and especially Marker's Hollow Men, point to strategies and methods for understanding adaptations of poetry. Addressing concerns of narrative, performance, and transtextuality helps take into account elements that distinguish adaptations of poetry from adaptations of other literary

forms. These approaches also highlight important questions about what is particularly poetic in these adaptations. Issues of narrative, for instance, call into question how narrative functions in poetry and how narrative and non-narrative poems can be adapted to film. Transtextual concerns address a wide variety of intertextual and hypertextual relationships that alongside concerns of performance can be grouped together as questioning the role of reflexivity in adaptations of poetry. Finally, narrative, performance and transtextuality are all involved in

88 coming to a better understanding of the status of lyricism in adaptations of poetry,

each contributing to a sense of how lyricism can be adapted into a filmic context.

And while these are important areas of investigation for understanding poetry in

adaptation, they also bear on the relationship between poetry and film. The

following chapters will examine narrative, reflexivity, and lyricism as the central

concerns of poetic film. But this does not mean that adaptation must be relegated

to the sidelines of such a discussion. In fact, each of the following chapters will

be involved in a process of adaptation. Comparing film and poetry, or looking at

the relationship between poetry and film, requires an adaptation of "what is poetic" or conceptions of poetry into a filmic context. And just as Stam abandons

a desire for fidelity in favour of transtextuality and narratology, the subsequent

chapters will not look for "faithful" adaptations of the poetic to film, but for the

ways in which the poetic in film transforms poetry and film themselves.

89 Chapter Two

Poetic Frontiers, or the Zone Beyond Narrative:

Poetic Film and Narrativity from Narrativization to Narrative Poeticization

"Those who have noticed and then become obsessed with the fly crawling over Joan Fontaine's

blouse during a key emotional scene in September Affair" - Michael Ondaatje, Elimination

Dance/La danse eliminatoire (19)

The previous chapter raised questions concerning the relationship between narrative and poetry in film adaptation. In the case of the adaptation of

Ondaatje's Elimination Dance, the addition of narrative to the otherwise non- narrative poem is a means of joining together unrelated aphoristic lines into a coherent whole. The impression that Elimination Dance "works" better as a short narrative film than its "non-serious" and neglected poetic source is in keeping with the commonly held assumption that film itself is primarily, if not naturally, narrative. Even Christian Metz, in arguing against Pier Paolo Pasolini's "cinema of poetry," suggests that "since its birth, the cinema has practically never ceased to evolve in the direction of an ideal ... flexibility and freedom that are entirely novelesque" (206) and by extension narrative.18 Noel Burch, however, questions cinema's inherent narrativity, by drawing on Metz's own explanation of cinema's diegetic process. Although Metz sees narration as an intrinsic part of film diegesis, Burch traces the limits of narrative, concluding that film diegesis does

18 Metz, of course, does not deny that poetic films exists (he cites examples including Walter Ruttmann's Berlin and Vigo's Zero for Conduct), but claims that such poetic cinema is a thing of the past, part of "the old cinema," though he does acknowledge that "A film may be a poetic noveV (206).

90 not depend on narrative (or even qualities such as synch-sound or movement) to maintain a "diegetic presence" or '"representational integrity'"

("Narrative/Diegesis" 199; 210-211). If, then, film is predominantly narrative, where might poetic films fit in relation to narrative? Is it a matter of placing poetic film in opposition to narrative film? This would assume that poetic films are inherently non-narrative. If not, can there be poetic moments or situations in narrative films, or vice versa? This chapter argues that poetic films and narrative films are not in opposition or incompatible to each other; rather poetic tendencies in narrative films alter the relationship between the three cardinal features of narrative: story, discourse, and style. Therefore, this chapter puts forward a theory of poetic narrative films that accounts for the ways in which poetic elements disrupt, reinvent, and estrange narrative through a process of "narrative poeticization."

To generate a theory of narrative poeticization and poetic narrative film requires answering two questions: what is narrative poeticization and how does it function to create poetic narrative film? In order to answer the first question, the

"what" of narrative poeticization, this chapter will draw on theories of narratology and film narratology in combination with theories of narrative in poetry. As in the previous chapter, this chapter will use the narratological work of Gerard

Genette to explore the basic concepts and theories of narrative. Alongside

Genette's literary narratology, this chapter will employ Tom Gunning's rereading of Genette in relation to film narratology and his concept of "narrativization" as a way to enter into a discussion of filmic narrative, but also as inspiration for the

91 theorizing of narrative poeticization. To further develop the connection between poetry and narrative in poetic narrative film, this chapter will also look to theories of narrative in poetry, particularly lyric poetry, such as those suggested by

Marjorie Perloff and Emma Kafalenos. Taken together, these theories of narratology, film narratology and narrative poetry will help articulate what a theory of narrative poeticization entails and the changes to narrative it effects.

In order to answer the second question regarding poetic narrative film, the

"how" of narrative poeticization, this chapter will then explore three theoretical approaches to the limits of conventional film narrative. Drawing from these approaches will provide further evidence of how narrative poeticization operates in creating the conditions for poetic narrative film. The first of these approaches,

David Bordwell's concept of "parametric narration," suggests a "style-centred" system of narration that drastically departs from the other narrative systems

Bordwell outlines in his book Narration in the Fiction Film. The other two related approaches, Roland Barthes' "third meaning" and Kristin Thompson's elaboration of Barthes' concept as "cinematic excess," both examine ways in which aspects of film, particularly mise-en-scene, exceed any narrative function.

By connecting and elaborating on these theoretical approaches, this chapter will demonstrate how aspects of poetic narrative film might be identified and analyzed.

Finally, with the theoretical structure of poetic narrative film in place, the chapter will explore narrative poeticization in practice by discussing instances of poetic narrative in individual films. This exploration of specific examples of

92 poetic narrative films will move from instances in which there are moments of poetic narrative in an otherwise narrative film, to instances in which the entirety of a film's narrative can be called poetic, and eventually towards the limits of narrative in which narrative poeticization approaches non-narrativity. This section of the chapter will limit itself to discussing in detail a few exemplary cases of poetic narrative film, including films by Andrei Tarkovsky, Mikhail Kalatozov,

Guy Maddin, Stan Brakhage, and Chris Marker.

From Narrative to Narrativization

In developing his poetics of narrative in his book Narrative Discourse,

Genette divides narrative into three distinct but interrelated aspects: story, narrative, and narrating (27). Genette defines each in the following terms. Story refers to "the succession of events, real or fictitious, that are the subjects of this discourse ... a totality of actions and situations taken in themselves without regard to the medium, linguistic or other, through which knowledge of that totality comes to us," and is "the signified or narrative content" {Narrative 25; 27).

Narrative, meanwhile, refers to "the oral or written discourse that undertakes to tell of an event or series of events" and is the "signifier, statement, discourse or narrative text itself (Narrative 25; 27). Finally, narrating refers to "the event that consists of someone recounting something: the act of narrating taken in itself," the

"producing narrative action" {Narrative 27; 26). Thus, for Genette any analysis of narrative involves "a study of the relationships between narrative and story, between narrative and narrating, and (to the extent that they are inscribed in the narrative discourse) between story and narrating" (Narrative 29).

93 To facilitate this analysis of narrative Genette devises three basic categories or "classes of determination" - tense, mood, and voice - based on rules of grammar, specifically those governing verbs {Narrative 31). The previous chapter relied on Stam's summary of these concepts, but it is useful to define them in greater detail directly from Genette. The first of these categories, tense, concerns the "temporal relations" in the narrative and can be further divided into three sub-categories: order, duration and frequency {Narrative 31). The first temporal sub-category, order, involves the "connections between the temporal order of succession of the events in the story and the pseudo-temporal order of their arrangement in the narrative" (Genette Narrative 35). Of particular concern for Genette in regards to order is anachrony, the "discordance between the two orderings of story and narrative," particularly as manifested through figures such as analepsis (flashback) and prolepsis (flash-forward) {Narrative 36; 40).

The second temporal sub-category is duration, or the "speed of a narrative," the comparative relationship between temporal dimension of the story

(that is, the measured time of the story) and the spatial dimension of the narrative text (that is, the length of the narrative in lines or pages) {Narrative 87-88).

Genette identifies four distinct types of duration or variations of narrative speeds: descriptive pause, "where some section of narrative discourse corresponds to a nonexistent diegetic duration"; ellipsis, "where a nonexistent section of narrative corresponds to some duration of story"; scene, "the equality of time between narrative and story"; and summary, "a form with variable tempo ... which with

94 great flexibility of pace covers the entire range included between scene and ellipsis" {Narrative 93-94).

Finally, the third temporal sub-category is frequency, or "the relation of frequency (or, more simply, of repetition) between the narrative and the diegesis"

{Narrative 113). Genette outlines three types of narrative frequency: the singulative, "a singulative or singular scene" or the act of "Narrating once what happened once"; the iterative, "where a single narrative utterance takes upon itself several occurrences together of the same event"; and the pseudo-iterative, in which scenes are presented "as iterative, whereas their richness and precision of detail ensure that no reader can seriously believe they occur and reoccur in that manner, several times, without any variation" {Narrative 114; 116; 121).

Genette's second basic category is mood, which he defines as the

"regulation of narrative information'''' {Narrative 162). For Genette, mood is a matter of narrative point of view and thus concerns the modalities of "distance" and "perspective" {Narrative 161-162). On the one hand, with regards to distance

"narrative can furnish the reader with more or fewer details ... and can thus seem

... to keep a greater or lesser distance from what it tells"; on the other hand, with perspective "the narrative can also choose to regulate the information it delivers

... with the narrative adopting or seeming to adopt what we ordinarily call the participant's 'vision' or 'point of view'; the narrative seems in this case ... to take

... one or another perspective" (Genette Narrative 162). Genette brings distance and perspective together under the term "focalization," which addresses narrative point of view with a "focus on narration" {Narrative 189). As mentioned in the

95 previous chapter, Genette sets out three types of focalization: omniscient zero

focalization; internal focalization filtered through character, whether fixed

(through a single character), variable (shifting between two characters), or multiple (involving many characters); and external focalization "in which the hero performs in front of us without our ever being allowed to know his thoughts or

feelings" {Narrative 189-190). Changes in or between these types of focalization

are in turn labeled "alternations" and occur in two forms: paralipsis "giving less

information than is necessary in principle [than the code of focalization governing the whole]" and paralepsis "giving more [information] than is authorized in principle in the code of focalization governing the whole" (Genette Narrative

195).

The final basic category Genette labels is voice, which addresses the narrating activity and the narrating situation {Narrative 212-214). Genette notes that there are three dimensions to voice, "time of the narrating, narrative level,

and 'person"'' {Narrative 215). The first of these dimensions of the narrating

situation, the time of the narrating, involves the situating of the narrating act

within a temporal framework, literally the tense of the telling, whether past,

present, or future (Genette Narrative 215-217). The second dimension Genette proposes, narrative level, defines the relationship between the narrative and the

act of narrating {Narrative 227-228). Genette explains that there are three

narrative levels: extradiegetic, the level of narrating outside of the context of the

story; diegetic or intradiegetic, the level of the story itself; and metadiegetic, the

level of "narrative in the second degree," the diegesis within the diegesis, or the

96 narrative within the narrative {Narrative 228). Lastly, Genette's final dimension of voice is "person," or the "relations between the narrator - plus, should the occasion arise, his or their narratee[s] - and the story he tells" {Narrative 215).

Genette places the term "person" in what he calls "quotation marks of protest" because he believes that the act of narrating is less a grammatical matter of pronoun use (I, we, you) than the place of the narrator in relation to the story

{Narrative 243-244). Thus, under the term "person," Genette distinguishes between the heterodiegetic, in which "the narrator is absent from the story he tells," and the homodiegetic, which involves "the narrator present as a character in the story he tells" {Narrative 244-245).

The above extended summary of Genette's work on narrative provides the terms for a discussion of poetic narrative film, and also for the concept of narrative poeticization, as narrative poeticization will be itself derived from

Gunning's reworking of Genette's narratology into a filmic context through the concept of narrativization. In his essay "Narrative Discourse and the Narrator

System," reprinted and revised from his book D. W. Griffith and the Origins of

American Narrative Film, Gunning applies Genette's work to filmic narrative to explain how film narrative operates.19 Gunning reworks Genette's three aspects of narrative, rephrasing them as "the means of expression, the events conveyed by these means, and the act of enunciation that expresses them," or more simply

19 Although Gunning's analysis of film narrative focuses on silent film, his account of narrativization can be usefully applied to film narrative in general.

97 discourse, story, and the act of narrating ("Narrative" 471). To these aspects

•y i

Gunning adds a fourth aspect, or rather process, narrativization , which he defines as "less an aspect separate from the other three than a term for the bond

among them" ("Narrative" 474). According to Gunning, this notion of narrativization is particularly important for understanding film narrative, as

the process of narrativization binds narrative discourse to story and rules

the narrator's address to the spectator. It organizes discourse to tell a

story, binding its elements into this single process. In this process the

energies of a film are channeled toward the explication of a story, and

through this channeling create and define a situation for the spectator.

("Narrative" 474)

In this sense, narrativization harnesses the materials and techniques of film, what

Gunning calls the three levels of filmic discourse, as it "focuses the transformation of showing to telling, film's bending of its excessive realism to narrative purposes" ("Narrative" 474). These three levels of discourse, the profilmic ("everything placed in front of the camera to be filmed"), the enframed image (that is, the filmed image itself), and editing, Gunning says, "work in

For Gunning, the act of narrating is not simply narrative intertitles or voice-over in a film narrating the action, but rather all the techniques available to the medium that convey narrative, and which elsewhere I will refer to as style. 21 Gunning borrows the term narrativization from Stephen Heath's work, Questions of Cinema. In a footnote, Gunning notes that Heath's use of the term is based on Lacanian psychoanalytic theories and Althusserian theories of ideology. Gunning admits the importance of these approaches to film studies, but sees them as outside his own discussion ("Narrative" 474). Despite this departure, Gunning's description of narrativization is very close to Heath's basic definition of the term as "the process of the production of the film as narrative ... the operation of the balance, tying up multiple elements ... into a line of coherence" (Heath 157).

98 concert and represent the mediation between story and spectator in film"

("Narrative" 475-77). Through these three levels, which "taken together ...

constitute the filmic narrator," therefore, narrativization links the technology of

film to the process of narrative ("Narrative" 477). In this way, narrativization is

that which makes film narrative.

Narrative in Poetry, Poetry in Narrative

Where, then, does poetry, particularly lyric poetry, fit in the poetics of

narrative Genette and Gunning formulate? Neither addresses poetry directly, and

although Genette frequently uses an epic poem, Homer's Iliad, as an example to

demonstrate the workings of the theories he develops in Narrative Discourse, he

treats the poem as essentially equal in narrative form and function to novels and

short stories. Perhaps this omission or lack of attention is due in part to the

commonly held assumption that poetry is by-and-large non-narrative, especially

in its lyric form. As Roman Jakobson points out, textbook definitions of poetic

genres typically "draw a firm line between lyric and epic poetry" based on the narrativity of the latter in opposition to the non-narrativity of the former (304).

Yet some critics have challenged this assumption, this division, suggesting that

lyric poetry is not strictly non-narrative, but rather sometimes differently narrative.

Perloff, for instance, has written on the appearance of narrative in modern and postmodern lyric poetry. In her essay "From image to action: the return of

story in postmodern poetry," Perloff asks, in reference to the lyric, "What role, if

any, does narrative play in such poetry?" (157). According to Perloff, the

99 modernist lyric, particularly that of early modernists such as W.B. Yeats and

Wallace Stevens, is predominantly a mode involving meditation, rumination, and reflection rather than a narrative mode ("From image" 156-157). But while such lyric poetry does not involve narrative in an overt manner, Perloff suggests that in

"the poetry of high modernism odes incorporate autobiographical narrative ... [in] retrospective accounts in which the solitary T remembers or even relives a particular situation or set of events in the past so as to come to terms with, understand, have gnosis about the present" ("From image" 157). In these instances, however, Perloff notes that while modernist lyric poetry resembles the act of narrating, modernist poems "rarely tell stories" ("From image" 157). When modernist poetry does tell stories, as in Ezra Pound's The Cantos and T.S. Eliot

The Waste Land, Perloff points out that such narrative instances are "full of abortive stories, tales fragmented and never fully developed that weave in and out of the lyric fabric" ("From image" 156). But while story telling may be elusive in modernist poetry, Perloff sees a resurgence of narrative in postmodernist poetry.

Perloff sees story in postmodern poetry as reappearing, not as in traditional narrative poetry, such as the epic, but as "a point of reference, a way of alluding, a source ... of parody" ("From image" 161). For Perloff, narrative returns in postmodern poetry because "to tell a story is to find a way - sometimes the only way - of knowing one's world," yet she notes that it is a form of narrative that

"remains fragmentary" and "foreground[s] the narrative codes themselves and call[s] them into question" ("From image" 161).

100 To illustrate her point, Perloff employs John Ashberry's "They Dream

Only of America," a poem which sets out two fragmentary stories, "a tale of

murder ... and a tale of love that plays upon Hollywood movies," but neither of

which clearly develops into a full narrative ("From image" 162). Perloff

identifies definite narrative elements in the poem: a narrator; characters; narrative

duration ("we have the feeling of time passing"); a succession of events resembling a plot ("From image" 162-163). Yet despite these narrative elements,

for Perloff "it is impossible to say precisely what is going on" as "Ashberry is less interested in 'events' than in a 'way of happening'" ("From image" 163). As

Perloff describes them, postmodern narrative poems are "fragmented, dislocated,

and often quite literally non-sensical," which require that one "work [...] to puzzle out their latent meanings" ("From image" 169; 170).

Like Perloff, Kafalenos explores the relationship between narrative and lyric poetry in her book Narrative Causalities, labeling the lyric a "Narrative

Borderland" (157). But for Kafalenos, narrative can be found not only in explicitly narrative postmodern lyrics, but also in many, and perhaps most, lyric poems by reading and constructing the narrative behind the lyric (172).

Uncovering narrative within lyric poems is for Kafalenos primarily an act of readerly interpretation. As Kafalenos says, "in response to lyrics that refer even to just one event, readers may construct a fragmentary fabula [story] that includes the event and a situation that it has altered or could alter" (162). To demonstrate the way in which a story can be constructed from the fragmentary narrative information of a lyric poem, Kafalenos reads narratives behind poems by W.B.

101 Yeats, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Lord Byron (163-172).

Kafalenos reads Yeats's "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," for example, as suggesting possible stories to support and explain the lyric context of the poem, "the persona's decision to go to Innisfree" (164). According to Kafalenos, the poem requires that the reader make sense of the single event reported in the poem by

constructing a story or uncovering an implied narrative that provides information

and events regarding the persona's motivation, in this case for going to Innisfree,

and the outcome of the decision, that is, whether the journey to Innisfree is

successful, its outcome positive (165-166). By inventing or speculating on such

additional events and situations in relation to the situation or events of the lyric, the reader introduces the narrativity of the interplay between temporal sequences

or moments, guiding the reader outside of the specific context dictated by the lyric persona (Kafalenos 164). Story construction, then, is an interpretive tool for readers of lyric poetry - a way of making sense of specific lyric elements,

especially the lyric voice of the persona.

Kafalenos's approach suggests ways of reading narratives hidden within

or "behind" lyric poems. The fabula, or story construction Kafalenos proposes as

a tool for narrative interpretation is a potentially valuable tool for discovering narrative connections to lyric poetry. Yet, unlike Perloff, Kafalenos explicitly points out that her analysis avoids modernist and postmodernist poetry because of

the tendency of such poetry to be fragmentary and contain "gaps in information"

that makes story construction difficult (163). One could imagine the limitations that Kafalenos's strategy faces when approaching well-known modernist poetry

102 such as Pound's "In a Station of the Metro." One could certainly generate narrative readings of this poem, one that addresses a sequence of events, provides information about the speaker of the poem as a character. But such a narrative would fail to productively read the poems. A story constructed from the lines of this poem would rely on invented information and conjecture that does little to aid

in an understanding of the poem itself. Reading a narrative behind the lyric would drastically alter both the perspective and the event of Pound's poem. The detached, imaginative, mental space that transforms faces into petals, would become a definite narrative space focalized by a specific character. The frozen time of the poem would become part of a linear temporal sequence. The effect of

Pound's Imagism would be replaced with a linearity and proximity that would undermine the experience of the poem.

Theorizing Narrative Poeticization

The alternative to attempting to read narrative into or behind poetry is to follow Perloff s lead and look for ways in which narrative in poetry calls narrative itself into question. This in turn entails another approach, which is to look for ways in which poetry appears in narrative, and its effect on narrative, particularly

in poetic narrative film. Thus, the concept of narrative poeticization offers a means to explore the effect of poetry or the poetic in narrative film. If, as

Gunning suggests, narrativization is the process by which story, discourse, and the act of narrating are bound together in film, then narrative poeticization is the process by which the relationship between these three elements is reorganized, estranged, and re-imagined. Whereas narrativization binds, narrative

103 poeticization intervenes. Whereas narrativization creates a balance between the elements of narrative, narrative poeticization creates an imbalance, forcing one or more of the elements to the forefront and obscuring the other(s). If narrativization is the process that makes narrative film narrative, then poetic narrativization is the process that makes narrative film poetic.

What might the process of narrative poeticization involve?

Narrativization, as Gunning describes it, organizes story, discourse and narrating with the goal of presenting the story as effectively, and as completely as possible.

Despite the equality and balance between the three parts, each element is directed towards conveying the story, and thus the story is ultimately the guiding feature of narrativization. Narrative poeticization undermines or disrupts this story-focused orientation. The result is a different "channeling" of film's energies, one that emphasizes the other elements, discourse and narrating, over story. In turn, this process alters both the elements themselves and the relationships between the elements, particularly in terms of Genette's categories of determination: tense, mood, and voice.

As discourse and the act of narrating displace story as the objective of the process of narrative poeticization, each element takes on qualities and attributes different from their function in forming narrative. Discourse is no longer strictly in the service of narrative, no longer tied to the story, and ceases to be, first and foremost, narrative discourse. Instead, discourse can appear in non-narrative forms that complicate or in fact supplant narrative. These forms include (but are not limited to): description, argument, metaphor (or other figurative forms), and

104 expression. Similarly, the act of narrating becomes less narratively motivated, and operates on a different organizational principle based on the articulation of the non-narrative forms that emerge in discourse. The act of narrating becomes an act of enunciation other than narrating. Thus, the act of narrating freed of the need to narrate, becomes a matter of style or the use of filmic technique as a form of enunciation. Finally, story itself recedes, becomes obscured, and thus is increasingly more difficult to imaginatively construct and summarize. And as the elements of discourse and narrating move closer to non-narrative forms, story begins to disappear entirely.

The changes to these three elements in the process of narrative poeticization also alter the relationship between the elements. As discourse becomes less strictly narrative, its connection to story in terms of order, duration and frequency also shifts away from narrativity. Order diminishes in importance as the narrative sequence of events is less and less the focus of discourse.

Duration takes on new properties and significance, as it becomes less concerned with the length of time in which narrative events occur, and rather with the length of time of the development of descriptions, arguments, or figures such as metaphor. Frequency also changes in narrative poeticization, with repetition and iterative utterances occurring in non-narrative contexts, such as the repetition of statements, figures, or stylistic features instead of events. The changes to mood can be characterized by both an increase in distance and a shift in focalization away from "focus on narration" and towards a focus on other non-narrative discourses. Finally, the category of voice changes as the emphasis on the act of

105 narrating is replaced with an emphasis on other forms of enunciation, particularly argument, description and lyric expression.

Poetic Narrative in Film Theory: Bordwell, Barthes and Thompson

Narrative poeticization, then, is the process through which poetic narrative film comes into being. But how does this process manifest itself? How can one see the process of narrative poeticization in operation? Evidence of how narrative poeticization might work in generating poetic narrative film can be found in existing theories of film narrative. Three theoretical approaches in particular articulate concepts that are essential to understanding the "how" poeticization:

David Bordwell's concept of parametric narration; Roland Barthes's "third meaning;" and Kristin Thompson's elaboration of Barthes' concept, cinematic excess. Each of Bordwell, Barthes and Thompson's theories offer ways of thinking of aspects of narrative film in relation to poetry. In fact, all three describe their concepts in terms of poetry or the poetic. Bordwell notes that he could choose a number of alternative names for what he ultimately calls parametric narration, one such name being "'poetic' narration" (274). In defining third meaning, Barthes suggest that to understand the concept "compels an interrogative reading" which requires a "poetical grasp" ("Third Meaning" 53-

54). And, while drawing on Barthes' third meaning, Thompson also bases her concept of cinematic excess, in part, on Viktor Shklovsky's notion of the tendency towards excess in poetic language (516). Yet, none of the three theories develop these connections to poetry beyond their brief mention. Why Bordwell does not choose poetic over parametric, what Barthes means by "poetical grasp"

106 or how Thompson relates cinematic excess and the excess of poetic language are

issues that remain unexplored. But despite, or perhaps because of, these gaps in

their theories, the fact that Bordwell, Barthes, and Thompson all rely on

associations with poetry or the poetic to articulate their theories suggests the potential for these approaches to be useful to developing an understanding of how poetic narrative film and the process of narrative poeticization work.

In his book Narration in the Fiction Film, David Bordwell sets out to

develop a poetics of film narration and in doing so explores film narrative in

"specific historical contexts" (xiii). The four historical modes of narrative

Bordwell discusses are the "classical narration" of Hollywood cinema, the "art-

cinema narration" of European films of the 1950s and 1960s, "historical- materialist narration" of Soviet cinema in the 1920s and 1930s, and finally

"parametric narration."22 While parametric narration is a special case, there are definite connections between the first three narrative modes, as Bordwell describes them. Each of these three modes is tied to a particular historical period,

The terms Bordwell uses here are at time cumbersome, particularly his designation of European films of the 1950s and 1960s as "art-cinema." This term is especially vexing because it distinguishes films from a particular era and certain nations as "art" in opposition to all other films, which rhetorically receive "non- art" status. That some European films of the 1950s and 1960s are "art-cinema," while other movements such as the Dadaist films of Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Viking Eggeling and Fernand Leger are not "art-cinema' despite their obvious close ties to graphic, sculptural, photographic, and literary art, makes Bordwell's term particularly vague. A more useful term might be "Post-war European Modernist Narrative Cinema," though this phrase is perhaps cumbersome in its own way. That said, for the purposes of this dissertation, I will make use of Bordwell's terms, despite their limitations, in the interest of consistency and because of the suitability of his parametric narration to this study.

107 generally affiliated with a nation or region, and, most importantly, undeniably

aimed at narrativity.

Classical cinema, particularly the Hollywood cinema of the studio years from 1917 to 1960, is for Bordwell the baseline of narrativity, the narrative norm

of narrative cinema (156). Defined by its linearity, cause and effect structure, and

emphasis on narrative coherence, classical cinema "conforms most clearly to the

'canonic story,'" typified by "the well-made play, the popular romance, ... the late-nineteenth-century short story" and the novel (157). As he does with all four

of his modes of narration, Bordwell breaks down the classical cinema narration

into three elements, the fabula, the syuzhet, and style, which approximately correspond to Genette and Gunning's narrative divisions of story, discourse, and the act of narrating, respectively.

According to Bordwell, classical cinema narration deploys syuzhet and

style in order to convey the fabula in the most effective and coherent manner possible. On the syuzhet side of the equation, Bordwell notes that classical

cinema films present fabula information in a predominantly linear, causal

structure, which moves towards definite resolution of problems or achievement of goals (157-158). As such, the syuzhet tends to avoid "gaps," either by rarely withholding fabula information, or by making them temporary, and eventually

supplying missing information (Bordwell 160). Likewise, classical cinema

syuzhet tends towards redundancy in the repetitious reinforcing of fabula

In my discussion of Bordwell's theories of narrative, I will use his terms for consistency. Later in this chapter I will clarify which terms I ultimately will use to describe narrative poeticization.

108 information (Bordwell 205). The results of these syuzhet features are conditions that make "the fabula world an internally consistent construct into which narration seems to step from the outside (Bordwell 161). In terms of style, Bordwell characterizes classical cinema narration as using "film technique as a vehicle of the syuzhet's transmission of fabula information," and style is first and foremost a means of constructing narrative coherence within "consistent time and space for the fabula action" (162-163). Subordinating style to the demands of fabula transmission through the syuzhet, classical narration limits the variety of stylistic devices to make style "invisible" or less discernible (Bordwell 163). These syuzhet and stylistic tendencies in classical cinema narration amount to "a set of extrinsic norms which govern both syuzhet construction and stylistic patterning," producing a mode of narration that emphasizes clarity and efficiency in fabula transmission (Bordwell 164).

Bordwell's second mode, art-cinema narration, like classical narration, emphasizes the transmission of fabula information through syuzhet structure and stylistic patterning. But Bordwell distinguishes between art-cinema and classical cinema by noting that, whereas classical cinema resembles the "canonic story," art-cinema is more akin to the narrative forms of literary modernism (206). While it maintains a "coherent fabula world," art-cinema tends to exhibit more frequent and permanent syuzhet gaps, a decreased emphasis on causal relations displaced by an increased emphasis on relations of chance or randomness, and a disruption of linearity through a more fragmentary or episodic syuzhet structure (Bordwell

209; 205-207). Syuzhet structures in art-cinema also frequently include

109 "disjunctions in temporal order" such as flashbacks and flashforwards, evidence,

Bordwell suggests, of "self-conscious" syuzhet structure that "calls attention to processes of fabula construction" (210-212). Style too, becomes more apparent in art-cinema narration. Bordwell identifies art-cinema style as highlighting narrative "subjectivity" through stylistic portrayals of "Dreams, memories, hallucinations, daydreams, fantasies, and other mental activities" (208). Bordwell points to odd camera angles or movements, unrealistic shifts in lighting or setting, and the "breakdown of objective realism" portrayed through sound or editing as examples of the ways in which art-cinema style is subjective and self-conscious

(209).

Bordwell names his third mode of narration historical-materialist narration because of its connection to the historical-materialist philosophy and politics of its country of origin, Soviet-era Russia. As Bordwell defines it, historical-materialist cinema is distinguished from Hollywood cinema or art-cinema by its rhetorical emphasis, as "it uses narrational principles and devices ... for purposes that are frankly didactic and persuasive" (235). This rhetorical orientation leads to what

Bordwell calls a "rhetoricizing of the fabula," in which the fabula is at once a story and an argument (235). The result of this rhetoricizing of the fabula is doubling of the syuzhet's function; in historical-materialist narration, the syuzhet must simultaneously convey both fabula information and rhetorical information, thus becoming "both a narrative and an argument" (Bordwell 235). Concerns of rhetoric and argument, then, come to govern and subordinate narrative

110 characteristics such as cause and effect structure, linearity and syuzhet redundancy (Bordwell 235-236).

The combination of the rhetoricization of fabula and the dual function of the syuzhet also gives greater significance and prominence to style, since

"rhetorical demands provide generic and realistic motivation for an experimentation with the medium akin to that in Soviet avant-garde art generally"

(Bordwell 237). Freed from the need to realistically and coherently convey narrative information, this emphasis on style makes room for cinematic techniques, or what Bordwell calls "poetic procedures," to take on other discursive functions, especially didactic ones (238). The most obvious example of this stylistic prominence, and for Bordwell the most important, is Soviet montage (238). In montage, Bordwell says, "the didactic and the poetic aspects of

Soviet cinema meet in a technique which insists, both quantitatively and qualitatively, upon the constant and overt presence of narration" (238). In this sense, montage binds rhetoric and fabula together, as "the relentless presence of montage in [Soviet] films aims to keep the spectator from construing any action as simply an unmediated piece of the fabula world" (Bordwell 239). So, as

Bordwell's description of montage demonstrates, historical-materialist cinema is a mode of narration in which syuzhet and style have greater autonomy from the fabula, while style remains tied to syuzhet, as it becomes a vehicle for conveying the argument the syuzhet puts forth.

Parametric narration, the fourth and final mode Bordwell discusses, is an aberration in comparison to the other three modes. Unlike classical cinema, art-

111 cinema or historical materialist cinema, parametric narration does not belong to a

specific nation or region, nor is it tied to a clearly demarcated period; as Bordwell

says, "to some extent... this mode of narration applies to isolated filmmakers and

fugitive films" (274). What distinguishes these "fugitive films" and compels

Bordwell to group them together under the term parametric narration is their

shared characteristic of a shift in the role of style in relation to syuzhet. In parametric narration, Bordwell suggests, the "film's stylistic system creates patterns distinct from the demands of the syuzhet system" (275). Borrowing a term from Yuri Tynianov, Bordwell characterizes parametric narration as "style-

centred," but notes that its style-centric orientation does not mean that the syuzhet

and fabula disappear and the film ceases to be narrative (275). Instead, Bordwell proposes that in parametric narration, style and syuzhet "become equal in

importance," at times alternating in prominence or significance, other times interacting, either in harmony or with tension (275; 288). Unconnected to syuzhet

and fabula, stylistic patterns in parametric narration attain a greater "degree of

arbitrariness" than that which already exists in other narrational modes (Bordwell

282). The result is a mode of narration in which concerns of fabula transmission lose their primacy, or at the very least must share the spotlight with stylistic patterns operating in a register unmotivated by fabula information.

This readjustment of the interaction of narrative elements in parametric narration, the recasting of the narrative chain as 'fabula transmitted by syuzhet through and/or alongside style,' takes place through various stylistic procedures and strategies that Bordwell identifies as typical of parametric narration.

112 Bordwell offers two parametric strategies for developing "distinctive intrinsic

stylistic norms" (285). The first, what Bordwell calls the "'ascetic' or 'sparse

option," involves limiting the number and range of stylistic procedures than

would be normal in other modes of narration, producing a "powerful intrinsic

norm which 'processes' each syuzhet according to a recognizably 'performed'

style" (285). The second strategy, the "replete option," supplies a variety of

stylistic procedures as possibilities in a paradigmatic fashion, creating "parallels

among distinct portions of the syuzhet" and alternating "the material procedures

used to present them" (Bordwell 285). The replete option produces redundancy

by drawing attention to corresponding or divergent stylistic choices in their

interaction with the syuzhet (Bordwell 285). Both the sparse and replete parametric strategies require that patterns be developed consistently throughout a

film, particularly by establishing an independent logic of order, duration, and

frequency (Bordwell 286). A stylistic feature such as the graphic match (which

Bordwell sees as important to defining the operation of the parametric mode in

the films of filmmakers such as Yasujiro Ozu) gains its efficacy in setting up relationships of resemblance and difference through frequent and systematic recurrence (281).24 It is this systematic arrangement and deployment of stylistic

features that causes the breakdown of syuzhet-style connections or dependencies, producing syuzhet structures identifiable by their "deformities," such as

"abnormal ellipticallity," repetitiveness, disjoined cause and effect relationships,

For further discussion of parametric strategies, including graphic resemblances, in the works of Ozu, see Bordwell's Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, especially pages 121-142.

113 and conspicuous fabula gaps (Bordwell 288). Thus, with this estrangement of syuzhet and style, parametric films, while certainly narrative (at least based on

Bordwell's examples), tend to be described in "poetic" terms.

A partial explanation for this recourse to poetry in describing parametric films can be found in Bordwell's explanation of parametric narration. In his initial explanation of parametric narration, Bordwell suggests that understanding what might constitute the parametric requires looking to other literary forms:

Analogies with other arts may be helpful here. Most films resemble

novels or short stories .... But parametric narration is more like what goes

on in 'mixed' arts. In a narrative poem, the construction of a story is often

subordinated to the demands of verse. Poe's Raven croaks 'Nevermore,'

and the narrator loves someone named Lenore, partly because of the

requisites of rhyme. (275)

Similarly, Bordwell cites Jakobson's theory of the "poetic function of language" and the way in which "in poetry, a string of signs tends to embody in linear form the paradigmatic groups basic to its constitution" as related to the way parametric narration functions (277). Like Jakobson's poetic function, the patterning of style involved in parametric narration "could create an independent level of the text," a filmic equivalent to or approximation of the rhyme scheme in Poe's "The Raven"

(277). And while Bordwell also stresses connections between parametric narration and "total serialist" music, given the importance of poetry in describing and defining parametric narration, it is perhaps surprising that he does not name

114 this mode poetic narration, as he concedes could be apt (276; 274). Regardless

of its name, Bordwell's theory of parametric narration, especially in its recourse to poetry, presents a particular manifestation of narrative poeticization, one that repositions style and discourse in relation to story.26

Barthes's concept of "third meaning" and Kristin Thompson's reworking of that concept as "cinematic excess" offer other avenues by which to explore how narrative poeticization might function and manifest itself. In his essay, "The

Third Meaning," Barthes analyzes a series of still images, mostly taken from

Sergei Eisenstein's film/va« the Terrible, and in doing so identifies three levels of meaning in each image. The first level is the informational level of communication, the "setting, the costumes, the characters, their relation, their insertion in an anecdote" ("Third Meaning" 52). The second level is the symbolic

level of signification, which involves the interplay of symbols including diegetic symbolism, historical symbolism, and the symbolism germane to the

Eisensteinian corpus (Barthes "Third Meaning" 52-53). At the third level of meaning, Barthes encounters a descriptive conundrum, saying, "I do not know what its signified is, at least I am unable to give it a name" ("Third Meaning" 53).

Of course, Bordwell does explain exactly why he chooses the term "parametric" over "poetic," as he acknowledges his debt to Noel Burch's Theory of Film Practice and Burch's use of the term "parameters" in that book (Bordwell 274). 26 In my laying out of Bordwell's narratology, I have quite obviously and intentionally left out his analysis of the role of the spectator in each of his narrative modes. This omission is first and foremost because I agree with Gunning's critique of Bordwell's theory, that it "tends to occult the spectator's perception of a film as something produced ... as dealing with art works solely from the point of view of consumption, ignoring the process of production" (481). Secondly, I leave out this important aspect of Bordwell's work because I will take up issues of reception in the conclusion to this dissertation.

115 In what follows, Barthes attempts to come to a better understanding of what this

third meaning entails.

In contrast to the levels of communication and signification, Barthes

suggests that third meaning occupies the level of signifiance ("Third Meaning"

54). Signifiance, based on Julia Kristeva's use of the term, is, Barthes says, "a process in the course of which the 'subject' of the text... struggles with meaning

and is deconstructed ('lost')" (qtd. in Heath "Translator's Note" 10). As such,

whereas Barthes labels the signification of the second level "obvious meaning,"

the signifiance of the third meaning earns it the name "the obtuse meaning"

("Third Meaning 54). Barthes describes the third meaning in a number of

different but complimentary ways. It is at once a level of meaning that is "one

'too many,'" and a "supplement" that eludes intellectual absorption (Barthes

"Third Meaning" 54). This obtuse meaning exists outside the language system, a

"signifier without a signified" (Barthes "Third Meaning" 60-61). Barthes calls

the third meaning "the epitome of a counter-narrative" that "structures the film

differently without... subverting the story" ("Third Meaning 63; 64). And it is in

this counter-narrativity running alongside narrative that Barthes suggests that the

third meaning brings about the "filmic," the indescribable "representation which

cannot be represented" that occurs through "the passage from language to

signifiance''' ("Third Meaning" 64-65). In this way, third meaning can be

understood as a non-narrative element of film, separate from the narrative

elements of story, discourse and style.

116 Drawing on Barthes's account of third meaning, Kristin Thompson proposes a more complete account of this non-narrative level, which she calls

"cinematic excess." In her book Eisenstein 's Ivan the Terrible: A Neoformalist

Analysis, and her essay "The Concept of Cinematic Excess" reprinted and revised from that book, Thompson expands on and refines Barthes's third meaning, articulating the place of excess in film's narrative structures. For Thompson, cinematic excess includes all the aspects of a film that do not fit within any unifying structure, whether narrative or stylistic ("Excess" 513). Like Barthes's third meaning, excess involves all the perceptual elements that exceed meaning as

"the materiality of the image goes beyond the narrative structures of unity in a film" ("Excess" 514). Elsewhere, Thompson offers excess as a critical strategy:

"Excess exists as a potential way of viewing any film, since no amount of narrative or other types of motivation can completely contain the materiality of the image and sound tracks" {Breaking the Glass Armor 259). Thompson's account of excess differs from Barthes's third meaning, however, as she resists

Barthes's use of the word "meaning" in describing what she sees as an absence or subversion of meaning ("Excess" 514). Instead Thompson suggests that excessive elements "affect meaning," offering a level of "perceptual play" that exists outside and alongside narrative, since it "may serve at once to contribute to the narrative and to distract our perception from it" ("Excess" 515; 516).

Thompson borrows the term "excess" from Stephen Heath's use of the word in his essay "Film and System." But Thompson ultimately rejects Heath's psychoanalytic interpretation of excess as " the material which must be repressed by the film" ("Excess" 514). Thus, Thompson's sense of excess is closer to Barthes's third meaning than the concept from which the term is derived.

117 Thompson also distinguishes excess from style, noting that style is

repetitious, tending to patterns and tied to narrative, and therefore perceptually

conspicuous, while excess avoids such structure or motivation ("Excess" 515).

Thompson says,

"Excess does not equal style, but the two are closely linked because they

both involve the material aspects of the film. Excess forms no specific

patterns .... But the formal organization provided by style does not

exhaust the material of the filmic techniques, and a spectator's attention to

style might well lead to a noticing of excess as well." ("Excess" 515)

Part of excess' perceptual play beyond style is a product of its "incomprehensible

elements," which Thompson compares to Viktor Shklovksy's assertion that the

language of poetry is a semi-comprehensible language ("Excess" 516).

Shklovsky's attention to "materiality" in poetic language that exists beyond

"form" (and thus style) is, for Thompson, evidence of a Formalist recognition of

excess ("Excess" 516).

Thompson notes that "Excess is not only counternarrative; it is also

counterunity" ("Excess" 517). Excess, therefore, offers a means of destabilizing

narrative structures, and in doing so calls into question the underlying

assumptions of narrative itself, such as the arbitrariness behind cause-and-effect

structures, and thus opens up other avenues for understanding film ("Excess"

523). And while Thompson looks to "the genre of experimental films which

examines already-existing films" (for instance Ken Jacobs's Tom, Tom, the

Piper's Son), for examples of excess at work, one could also see excess as

118 contributing to an understanding of the poetic in film ("Excess" 523). On the one hand, Thompson's description of excess resembles poetic elements such as rhyme and rhythm, and, in that way, is similar to Bordwell's parametric narration. On the other hand, since Thompson emphasizes excess' lack of pattern or structure, perhaps excess is closer to stray rhymes or occasional alliteration in free verse poetry. In this case, excess would function as evidence of filmic play like the play of language. Or perhaps excess is similar to a metaphor that exceeds meaning, much like the line "A kite is a contract of glory/ that must be made with the sun" from Cohen's "A Kite is a Victim" (1). The "contract of glory" line at once extends the metaphorical arc of the poem, the various permutations of the relationship between creator and creation, but also exceeds any clear meaning.

The kite as contract of glory metaphor is more obtuse and less easily comprehensible than the other metaphoric connections in the poem.28

Narrative Poeticization, Revisited

Ultimately, it is most likely that excess functions in each of these ways in different contexts. What is important, however, is that excess (along with third meaning) and parametric narration offer strategies and vocabularies with which to approach understanding how narrative poeticization might function and be identified. And with these strategies and vocabularies in mind, it is worthwhile to revisit what narrative poeticization entails. First, a clarification of terminology: between Genette, Gunning, and Bordwell's narratological theories, there is an

'excess' of terms to describe the various aspects of narrative. To avoid confusion,

28 Perhaps this excess in metaphor is one reason for the difficulty in representing the line "contract of glory" found in Lewis's film adaptation of the poem.

119 it is therefore necessary to use the terms "story," "discourse," and "style," along with "excess," when describing the narrative elements at play in narrative poeticization. Narrative poeticization, then, is the process by which the relationships between story, discourse, and style are channeled away from narrativity and towards the poetic.

But this channeling takes a variety of forms, and produces different degrees of poeticization. If Gunning's narrativization roughly corresponds to the balance of narrative elements in Bordwell's classical cinema, then aspects of narrative poeticization are certainly apparent in both Bordwell's art-cinema and historical-materialist modes. In the art-cinema mode, for instance, the emphasis on the discursive structures that disrupt the formation of the story (through fragmentary narrative discourse, temporal distortions, etc.) suggest an estrangement of story from discourse. Style plays a role in this estrangement, by portraying instances of subjectivity (dreams, hallucinations) that contribute to the fragmenting of the narrative discourse. The historical-materialist mode also demonstrates aspects of narrative poeticization, particularly its splitting of discourse into rhetorical discourse and narrative discourse. The result of this split, as Bordwell notes, is a rhetoricization of story; but it can also be seen as creating an additional "imaginary construct," one that presents something other than story,

291 choose the terms "story" and "discourse" because they are in keeping with Gunning's formulation of narrativization, the inspiration for narrative poeticization. But, I retain Bordwell's term "style" over Gunning and Genette's "act of narrating" because it more clearly emphasizes the filmic techniques that make up narrative style, and prevents confusion with any extra-diegetic narration, such as voice-over narration. Likewise, I use Thompson's "excess" instead of Barthes's "third meaning" for the same reasons Thompson chooses the term, as mentioned above.

120 in this case rhetoric or argument (Bordwell 49). This interaction could be a model for other instances of narrative poeticization in which other forms of discourse supplant narrative discourse.

Similarly, the stylistic independence of historical-materialist cinema's

"poetic procedures" suggests a different relationship between discourse and style.

Here, style aids the discourse in communicating rhetorical information, but is estranged from the discourse in terms of conveying the story. In both art-cinema and historical-materialist cinema modes, then, the process of narrative poeticization dissociates all three elements of the narrative chain from each other, to varying degrees, though by no means breaking the links between them. In this way, both of these modes could be said to exhibit narrative poeticization to a limited degree.

Narrative poeticization, however, can be seen to a greater degree in the mode of parametric narration. The breakdown of the connection between style and discourse, and the ensuing creation of another textual level is a perfect example of the process of narrative poeticization. As style becomes further and further removed from discourse and thereby disconnected from story, this other textual level, which one could call a poetic level, moves away from narrative.

Other stylistic motivations displace style's narrative function. In parametric narration the splitting of style and discourse allows style to take on poetic functions, much like the poetic procedures in historical-materialist cinema, but with an even more tenuous connection to narrative discourse or any rhetorical discourse. Likewise, with parametric narration narrative elements such as order,

121 duration, frequency, and focalization, shift away from the domain of discourse and take on a stylistic foundation. In parametric narration, each of these narrative elements no longer serves the needs of communicating story information through narrative discourse, but rather plays a part in establishing stylistic patterns. And as such, these elements cease to be narrative in their function. In these ways, parametric narration might be said to offer an example of narrative poeticization par excellence.

Where then does excess fit into the concept of narrative poeticization? If, as Thompson claims, excess is present in all films, narrative or non-narrative, then it is not necessarily a key factor in narrativization. That said, Thompson's description of excess (and likewise Barthes's third meaning) and its functions seems tailor made to fit into the process of narrative poeticization. The place of excess in narrative poeticization, therefore, can be explained by three related hypotheses. First, excess may be a literal example of that which estranges or breaks connections in the process of narrative poeticization. Or perhaps more precisely, it is an awareness of excess that estranges relationships between style and discourse. Although excess is independent of style, as excess intrudes on stylistic procedures such as composition and mise-en-scene it draws attention to those very procedures. In instances when style becomes apparent, for instance in parametric narration, excess would work to highlight the break between style and discourse. Second, excess may appear as evidence of the poetic in isolated instances. While the patterning of style is a hallmark of parametric narration, excess, as Thompson says, does not occur in particular patterns. In this case,

122 excess might be said to gesture towards the poetic in limited situations, or be seen in the initial instances or parametric patterning, before a pattern is clearly developed. Finally, since excess occurs in some form or another in most (if not all) films, it could be seen as evidence of poetic play at work in all films, much like the play of poetic language is inevitable in all literature, poetic or not. For the purposes of this chapter, however, it is most useful to consider the first two explanations to account for excess in narrative poeticization.

Parametric narration (and to a certain degree, art-cinema and historical- materialist cinema narration as well) and cinematic excess, therefore, offer approaches to analyzing instances of how narrative poeticization functions in specific films. But, are all films that exhibit parametric narration and excess examples of narrative poeticization at work? In describing parametric narration and excess, both Bordwell and Thompson make reference to the work of a number of specific directors whose work they see as exemplifying these concepts.

Bordwell cites Ozu, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Robert Bresson as filmmakers whose works are consistently (if not always) parametric (289).

Thompson traces the role of excess in films such as Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible and Jacques Tati's Play Time ("Excess" 519-522; Breaking the Glass Armor 259-

262). It would seem logical, therefore, to focus on these filmmakers and films as examples of narrative poeticization. And yet, with Bordwell and Thompson's already comprehensive work on these filmmakers, it seems advisable to consider

123 other films that involve parametric and excessive approaches. Moreover, both

Bordwell and Thompson limit their analyses to narrative fiction films, leaving the possibility of parametric and excessive strategies in films that blur the lines between fiction and non-fiction and narrative and non-narrative, open to further consideration.

For these reasons, what follows will be an analysis of films that demonstrate narrative poeticization in operation, exploring the ways in which the process of poeticization, emerging through parametric narration and excess, tests the limits of narrative and suggests the possibility of the poetic in film. The remainder of this chapter will focus on six films that are exemplary cases of various manifestations of narrative poeticization, from works that demonstrate aspects of parametric narration and excess to films that challenge narrativity

altogether: Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker and Nostalghia; Mikhail Kalatozov's I Am

Cuba; Guy Maddin's Eye Like a Strange Balloon (Odilon Redon); Stan

Brakhage's Dog Star Man; and Chris Marker's Level Five.

The Zone Outside of Narrative: Poeticization in Tarkovsky's Nostalghia and

Stalker

When describing the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, critics frequently refer to his works as "poetic." Maya Turovskaya even titles her book length study of

Tarkovsky's films Tarkovsky, Cinema as Poetry. And while Tarkovsky's films are undoubtedly narrative, there is something resonant in this critical assessment.

See Bordwell's Narration in the Fiction Film, the aforementioned Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, and The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer, and Thompson's Eisenstein 's Ivan the Terrible: A Neoformalist Analysis.

124 Such references to Tarkovsky's films as poetic are certainly a result of the

director's own comments on cinema's connection to poetry in his book Sculpting

in Time. Speaking of relationship between poetry and film, Tarkovsky says, "I

find poetic links, the logic of poetry in cinema, extraordinarily pleasing. They

seem to me perfectly appropriate to the potential of cinema as the most truthful

and poetic of art forms" (18). For Turovskaya, the "poetic" is appreciable in

Tarkovsky's films in part because of the tendency to move "away from the narrative to the associative" and the general loosening of narrative links (97).

Echoing Turovskaya, Vlada Petric sees the "poetic" in Tarkovsky's films as product of his defiance of "the orthodox concept of narrative cinema as a linear progression of representational events" ("Dream Imagery" 34). Two of

Tarkovsky's later films, Stalker and Nostalghia, offer examples of how features

of art-cinema narration, parametric narration and excess contribute to the narrative poeticization that marks Tarkovsky's "cinema as poetry."

Of the two films, Nostalghia is the most strictly narrative, resembling

Bordwell's art-cinema mode. The structure of Nostalghia is predominantly linear, with the exception of a series of dream-sequences and flashbacks that serve to disrupt the narrative discourse, and provide both thematic associations and character history. The use of black and white film distinguishes each of the eleven dreams or flashbacks from the narrative present of the rest of the film. For

Vida Johnson and Graham Petrie these dreams and flashbacks are largely conventional, and they see their significance as evidence that Tarkovsky's films are part of Bordwell's art-cinema mode (167; 190-191). But Johnson and Petrie

125 also note instances in Nostalghia that blur the distinction between the narrative

present and these subjective sequences (167). One instance of this "ambiguous

state," the appearance of the dog in Andrei's hotel room, "is signaled not by

sound or a switch to black and white ... but by a change in light," effectively

breaking the dream-reality division that the difference between black and white

and colour establishes in the rest of the film (Johnson and Petrie 167). Another

instance of this ambiguity is the madman Domenico's first flashback, which, while initially in black and white, changes to colour film. This change occurs

with a shot of a car driving through a mountain road away from a town, and at

first appears to signal a return to the narrative present; but this shot is followed by

a shot of a child, still in colour, who asks, "Father? Is this the end of the world?"

While the child is most certainly Domenico's son, as Domenico had imprisoned

his family in their house to await the apocalypse, the switch to colour confuses the place of the shot within the narrative discourse. As a result, the shot confuses the

established pattern of narrative order that the use of black and white indicates throughout the rest of the film. These ambiguous shots contribute to a general

anachrony in Nostalghia, which comes between narrative discourse and story and undermines narrative coherence.

This breaking of the film's own conventions could be interpreted as an

instance of cinematic excess and is indicative of other instances of excess in

Nostalghia that disrupt narrative flow. A particularly conspicuous example of

excess in Nostalghia occurs throughout Domenico's speech in the Roman square

leading to his self-immolation. Throughout this scene much of the crowd that

126 gathers around Domenico stands as if frozen in statue-like poses. At first glance the crowd's immobility seems to have a logical place in the narrative - they are in awe of Domenico's strong words and then shocking actions. But when

Domenico's associate runs out of the adjacent building saying the music does not work, and then as Eugenia and the police rush toward the burning Domenico, the unmoving (perhaps unmoved?) people exceed any narrative function. In their almost complete lack of motion, the frozen people become part of a graphic opposition between stillness and movement that visually contributes to a disturbance of narrative duration, expanding the temporal experience of the horror of Domenico's suicide.

The role of duration as a poeticizing factor in Nostalghia takes on greater significance in one of the films most noted scenes: the nearly ten-minute long shot of Andrei crossing the emptied pool with a candle. In this long-take, in which

Andrei attempts to cross the pool with a lit candle, trying and failing and repeating his effort until he succeeds, the real-time duration of the action transcends its narrative significance and takes on a purely aesthetic basis. This single shot, in its abnormal length, pushes duration outside of narrative by foregrounding the experience of duration as part of style. Writing in Sculpting in

Time, Tarkovsky details the way in which shot duration contributes to a rhythmic experience of film separate from narrative:

The distinctive time running through the shots makes the rhythms of the

picture, and the rhythm is determined not by the length of the edited

pieces, but by the pressure of the time that runs through them .... How

127 does time make itself felt in a shot? It becomes tangible when you sense

something significant, truthful, going on beyond the events on the screen.

(117)

What is this time-pressure that Tarkovsky sees as essential to the rhythms of his

films? Donato Totaro connects Tarkovsky's interest in time and time-pressure to

Henri Bergson's concept of duration, the accumulating, indivisible experience of

time associated with the experience of consciousness (25). This experience of

duration differs from spatialized time, like clock time or even narrative time,

which is segmented and abstract (Totaro 25). Totaro suggests that the experience

of time in Tarkovsky's films, and Nostalghia in particular, resembles Bergson's

duration in that it merges the experiences of time of both "inner and outer reality"

(26). Although Totaro claims that time-pressure cannot be defined with precision,

he sees the rhythm of Tarkovsky's "time-thrust" manifested in "the spontaneous

rhythms of nature and its forces: water, rain, wind, fire, snow, vegetation" as they

appear in Tarkovsky's films (23). In the candle scene from Nostalghia, the

rhythm of the shot comes from, at least in part, the 'rhythm' of the flame, as it is

lit and goes out and is lit again.

But besides these natural rhythms, Tarkovsky's time-pressure can be

defined as the product of a parametric pattern. As Totaro notes, part of the

efficacy of Tarkovsky's use of time is a result of the editing of "the varying time- pressures" (24) to provide variations of rhythm. The slow, deliberate rhythm of the candle scene and the way it distends the experience of time, owes much of its

effect to the rhythm of the previous shot, of approximately 30 seconds, in which

128 Domenico succumbs to the flames: the combination of the dying man's

movements (mirrored by his associate's thrashing about), the flames themselves

dancing wildly, and the intensity of the soundtrack playing Bach's "Ode to Joy,"

as it crescendos and mechanically cuts out. This frenetic combination is in such

stark rhythmic contrast to the subsequent long-take that it highlights the candle

scene as exactly that: a long-take shot by a tracking camera. Drawing attention to the technique, the style of the shot, the scene pulls itself outside of narrative meaning and foregrounds its purely aesthetic grounds. As Petric says, speaking of the passage and pressure of time in Tarkovsky's films, "To experience all this,

one should search beyond the shot's narrative meaning, since it is beneath the

image's representational aspects where numerous layers of ineffable transcendental signification can be found" ("Dream Imagery" 30). The spectator

can consider the narrative significance of the shot (the fulfillment of Domenico's charge that to save the world, "You cross the water with the lighted candle") only briefly before being immersed in the experience of the time of the crossing and the associations such an experience produces. Duration shifts from being a

function of narrative discourse to being a function of style, a process that exemplifies narrative poeticization.

But while specific instances of poeticization are apparent in the play with

order and duration in Nostalghia, the film does not exhibit the widespread parametric patterning that Bordwell says distinguishes parametric narration from art-cinema narration. Tarkovsky's earlier film Stalker, however, deploys parametric patterns and excessive elements similar to those in Nostalghia in a

129 more recurrent and systematic manner, distinguishing it as a more purely parametric film in comparison to Nostalghia's sometimes parametric, predominantly art-cinema narration. The most obvious of these parametric

strategies involves Tarkovsky's use of colour throughout the film.

There is a distinct pattern in the way Tarkovsky alternates between rich, high contrast sepia, black and white, and vivid colour in Stalker's

cinematography. While this pattern initially appears to have a narrative function, with the sepia and black and white images belonging to the narrative sections that take place in the 'real' world, and the colour appearing as the three men enter the

fantastical Zone (not unlike the switch to colour in the transition from 'home' to

Oz in The Wizard of Oz3i), Tarkovsky breaks this seemingly narrative-based pattern. Johnson and Petrie see Tarkovsky's use of transitions between sepia and black and white and colour in Stalker as breaking with his usual deployment of this difference (190). In comparison to Nostalghia in particular, where black and white sequences indicate an "alternate reality," whether of dreams or memory, in

a fairly predictable fashion (with exceptions, as noted above), for Johnson and

Petrie, such alternations in colour in Stalker at times seems almost random, as they lack narrative or character-based justification (190). But when viewed as a parametric strategy, the use of colour in Stalker breaks away from narrative motivation and becomes part of the process of narrative poeticization.

31 Corey Vielma has suggested many additional connections between the two films in his article "On the Surface: Oz versus Stalker" though he overstates many of the similarities he finds.

130 Transitions from black and white to sepia to full colour in Stalker are not simply involved in establishing narrative order (setting the difference between scenes in the Zone and scenes in the 'real' world), but rather take part in establishing mood, especially mood separate from narrative. In a sense, colour patterning in Stalker works in a manner similar to Genette's focalization, but instead of referring to a focus on narration, this parametric focalization provides an aesthetic focus. Mieke Bal, in her reassessment of Genette's focalization, says,

"Focalization is the relationship between the 'vision,' the agent that sees, and that which is seen" {Narratology 146). The non-narrative function of colour and black and white cinematography in Stalker creates a similar relationship; but rather than placing emphasis on the 'vision' of an character or narrator at one end of the relationship, the colour alternations emphasizes the viewing experience of the spectator. Commenting on dream imagery in Stalker, Petric compares the experience of viewing Tarkovsky's films to the poetic estrangement championed by Russian Formalist and Constructivist poets ("Dream Imagery" 32). For Petric, such techniques contribute to "the cognitive ambiguity of Tarkovsky's shots," which "shift the viewer's attention from the representational to the transcendental meaning of the recorded event" and "trigger the viewer's sensorial response"

("Dream Imagery" 32-33).

An example of the poeticizing effect of the alternations of image colour in

Stalker occurs following the rediscovery of the Professor by the Stalker and the

Writer. As all three men try to sleep, there are a series of transitions between sepia and colour images. The first four transitions from colour to sepia, back to

131 colour, and then the same again, seem to present a flashback of the Stalker from a previous journey into the Zone and his encounter with a black dog. But a subsequent transition from colour to sepia undermines this narrative explanation.

After a shot of wind stirring up dust on the marsh, a woman or girl's voice begins reciting a passage from the Book of Revelations over a shot in colour of the

Stalker lying on the ground. As the recitation continues, there is a cut to vertical tracking shot in sepia, starting on the Stalker's face and then moving over various objects submerged underwater before stopping over a hand that impossibly appears to belong to the Stalker. The image then cuts to a colour shot of the dog and then again to a colour shot of the Stalker lying on the ground. Throughout the sequence it is unclear if the transitions from colour to black and white are meant to show transitions from a state of consciousness to other mental states such as dreams or memory.

As the distinction between which images belong to the narrative present and which belong to other narrative states blurs beyond narrative coherence, these alternations defamiliarize the narrative structure for the spectator. The changes in film stock heighten the spectator's aesthetic experience of the Zone as an unpredictable and inscrutable place, but also reinforce a level of stylistic meaning independent from the narrative. Even instances where these transitions seem to have narrative motivation, attempts at explanation are undercut. Thus, when the three men return to the black and white of the world outside the Zone, the narrative logic of the colour transitions seems to be restored, until the Stalker leaves the bar with his wife and child. The family's walk home appears in colour,

132 as does the film's final shot of the child's telekinetic playing. And while Johnson and Petrie propose that this "suggests some seepage of the powers of the Zone into the real world," perhaps connected to the child's powers, this narrative justification fails to explain why early shots of the child are in black and white

(190). Instead of looking for narrative excuses for these transitions, it is more productive to recognize them as parametric strategies that alter the mood of the film, distancing the spectator from the narrative and forcing changes in perspective. By pulling focalization away from narrative, these transitions contribute to an estrangement of style from narrative discourse typical of narrative poeticization.

A second parametric pattern found in Stalker involves tracking shots that disrupt narrative through their extended duration and excessive elements. Petrie notes that in Stalker lateral tracking shots and vertical tracking shots both generate a "level of audiovisual abstraction" ("Dream Imagery"29). In scenes such as the one accompanying the reading from Revelations discussed above and the one that occurs between the Stalker and the Writer's passage through the waterfall and their rediscovery of the Professor the tracking shots function as pauses that again supplant narrative motivation with aesthetic flourish. Following the Stalker and

Writer's entrance into the waterfall, a lateral tracking shot over seemingly unrelated objects stands in place of their journey. Although the Stalker's voice is audible, telling Writer about the Zone, there is no relation between the objects the shot tracks over and the narrative event of the passage. Instead, the camera slowly moves right to left over each object, first the embers of a fire, then,

133 immersed in water, a hypodermic needle on a tiled floor, a sub-machine gun, and paper or pages from a book as well as other unidentifiable detritus floating in the water. The meaning and significance of these items and their distribution initially seems to demand explanation. In fact, the subsequent shot offers a 'red herring' to provide the opportunity to form a narrative reason for the lateral tracking shot: the Professor sits beside a burning fire. But the high flames of the Professor's fire are unlike the dying embers in the tracking shot, defeating any narrative connection between the two.

Similarly, the collection of objects in the vertical tracking shot accompanied by the Revelations recitation lack connection to the narrative: the camera passes over objects submerged underwater - a needle (again), a basin, a framed painting of a tree, a bowl of goldfish, some coins, another needle, a religious icon with more coins on top of it, a gun, a broken clock, a spring, a page from a day calendar and various other unrecognizable things. Some items could be linked to the narrative; the guns, for instance, might be related to the broken down tanks the men encounter as they enter the Zone or even to the gun the

Writer carries with him. And one might be tempted to read certain objects as possessing specific symbolic significance, such as linking the clock and calendar page as symbolic of the breakdown of measurable time within the mystical Zone.

But such speculation does little to determine the place or function of these tracking shots in the film. Rather, it is the formal qualities of these shots that determine their significance as parametric and excessive intrusions into narrative.

134 Both tracking shots have similar parametric effects on narrative flow: emphasizing duration, interrupting order, and introducing pseudo-iterative

frequency. Like the candle scene in Nostalghia, these tracking shots pull away

from narrative duration and assert a style-based duration. Similar to an instance of narrative description, the shots last as long as it takes to pass over, to visually

'describe' the various objects, but are not tied to the time of narrative events, such

as the passage through the waterfall. By their independence from narrative

events, these shots also interrupt the order of the narrative, coming between or even replacing narrative moments like instances of achrony. During the tracking

shot that replaces the Stalker and Writer's journey through the waterfall, their brief off-screen conversation hints at a narrative event that is missing, some

incident produced by the Zone, but the tracking shot overshadows what this moment might entail. Finally, the similarities shared by the tracking shots - their linear trajectories, the common items, and the water - make them pseudo-

iterative, drawing attention to their repetition as an aesthetic choice rather than as

a narrative necessity.

While the camera movement of these shots and their interference of narrative flow mark them as parametric, they also contain elements of excess that go beyond stylistic patterns. In an initial viewing of the vertical tracking shot,

some of the objects are difficult to identify precisely or are obscured by detritus,

and therefore offer only abstract graphic information. Similarly, at the beginning

of the lateral tracking shot, besides the roar of the waterfall and the Stalker and

Writer's dialogue, there are mechanical sounds, like tape being played backwards,

135 that are excessively intrusive. In both cases, the excessive elements distract not

only from any narrative meaning, but also from the parametric patterns. In fact,

throughout the film various sounds (particularly of flowing or dripping water) and

visual information (the vast array of shapes, textures, and colours that pervade the

Zone) offer so much excess that a viewer could ignore narrative and style

completely. This does not mean that excess in Stalker undermines the poeticization of the parametric strategies, but rather excess adds additional levels

of intervention in the process of poeticization.

In addition to the narrative poeticization accomplished by the stylistic play

of parametric patterns and excess in Stalker, the introduction of other discursive

modes also interrupts narrativity. In each instance, these discursive diversions briefly supplant narrative discourse, thereby altering the connection between story

and discourse. The Stalker's wife's monologue delivered directly to the camera is

one example of this non-narrative discursivity impinging on narrative. While the wife's address has obvious connections to the story (explaining her relationship with the Stalker), the mode of its delivery is closer to that of a documentary

interview or a confession. Furthermore, the wife speaks to the camera as 'you,'

collapsing the narrative distance between spectator and screen. The scene is

striking not only because it breaks narrative convention, but also because it is as if

it belongs to an entirely different film and genre. The directness of the wife's

expression characterizes the kind of discursive shift that pushes poeticization

away from narrativity.

136 The Stalker's wife's monologue is an isolated example of a discursive

shift in Stalker, but another discursive mode interrupts the film's narrative more

frequently: poetry. Throughout the film, characters on and off screen recite or

read poetry in a manner that, while it may have some narrative motivation, also works to disrupt the narrative by introducing alternative forms of discursivity.

The recitation of verses from the Book of Revelations alongside the vertical tracking shot adds to the scene's interruption of narrative flow, as it brings with it

other narrative information (from an apocalyptic tale) foreign to the story of

Stalker. Other instances of poetic incursions into the film's narrativity function as narrative pauses, sidetracking the narrative flow by introducing intertextual material. In the Zone the Stalker recites from a poem written by fellow stalker

Porcupine's brother (in actual fact written by Tarkovsky's father, Arseny

Tarkovsky), and although its refrain "even that's not enough" relates to the sense

of loss and failure in the film, as Johnson and Petrie say, "its thematic or narrative role ... is insignificant" (260). Likewise, in the film's final scene in which the

Stalker's daughter's telekinetic powers are revealed, the child reads a poem by

Fyodor Tyuchev in voice-over before she moves the glasses on the table with her mind. The poem she recites, which Johnson and Petrie note is a nineteenth- century love poem, acts as a prelude to the magic of her powers (143). The poem

sets a tone different from the rest of the narrative, just as the child's 'miracle' sets her apart from the rest of the 'real' world.32 In each case, the reading of poetry in the film introduces another "voice" into the narrative. In terms of narrative level,

32 This tonal shift that the poem signals is not unlike the shifts in colour between the Zone and the world outside of it.

137 these other voices, whether intradiegetic, extradiegetic, or metadiegetic, are in fact counter-diegetic, or more precisely counter-narrative, by virtue of their intertextual imposition of other discursivity.

If Nostalghia's tendency towards aspects of Bordwell's art-cinema narration and parametric narration produce occasional moments of narrative poeticization, then the ubiquity of parametric strategies, excess, and other discursive forms in Stalker make it an entirely poeticized film. Narrative remains

Stalker's dominant mode, but it is narrative estranged from itself by the process of narrative poeticization. It is as if the film is always threatening to fall away from narrativity completely, to drift into a 'zone' of something-other-than narrative: a poeticized zone.

Rhetorical Poeticization and Poeticized Rhetoric: I Am Cuba

Tarkovsky's Nostalghia and Stalker offer two examples of how narrative poeticization operates in strictly narrative fiction films, but the process of poeticization can also make use of conventions from other non-fiction filmic modes, such as essay films and documentary films. By incorporating the techniques and discursive strategies of non-fiction modes alongside parametric strategies, such films alter narrativity through another form of narrative poeticization. One such film that draws on non-fiction discourse to poeticize narrative is Mikhail Kalatozov's I Am Cuba.

I Am Cuba is without a doubt a narrative fiction film. Yet despite having one foot firmly entrenched in narrative fiction, I Am Cuba borrows formal and discursive techniques from non-fiction genres, particularly the essay film. The

138 use of these non-fiction film techniques, along with other parametric strategies,

brings narrative poeticization to I Am Cuba. In defining the essay film, Phillip

Lopate argues for five criteria to distinguish the essay film from other

documentary genres. The essay film, according to Lopate, must involve: the presence of text (either written or spoken), a singularity of voice, an argument, a personal point of view, and an eloquence of language (245-247). While I Am

Cuba is certainly not entirely essayistic, beyond its episodic narrative structure it

shares many of the features Lopate outlines.

The off-screen "voice of Cuba" that links the narrative episodes together has an essayistic quality, as it presents an argument in favour of a free,

communist, revolutionary Cuba through a single point of view in poetic language.

Although this voice deviates from Lopate's criteria in some significant ways

(especially in that it is a doubled voice in both Spanish and Russian, and that its person is an abstraction), its essayistic qualities keep the film from being strictly narrative. The voice-over also blurs the distinction between narrative fiction and the essay film's documentary roots. It combines features of the voice-over of

what Bill Nichols calls the expository mode of documentary (in which the "text

addresses the viewer directly, with titles or voices that advance an argument about the historical world") with features of voice-over narration, as it at once

comments on the story of each episode and presents pro-revolutionary arguments

(34). Moreover, the aspects of the voice that depart from Lopate's criteria are precisely those that make it more poetic. Notably, the poetic quality of these lines

is in part a product of the lyricism of screenwriter Yevgeny Yevtushenko's script,

139 especially given Yevtushenko's fame as a poet. The tension between the rhetoric of the argument and the lyricism of its expression complicates the sense of the

film as presenting "an attempt to work out some reasoned line of discourse on a problem," but also serves to break up narrative so that there is not simply a

"5-1 rhetoricization of story, but also a competing poetic discourse (Lopate 246).

In this way, just as the roots of Nostalghia's poeticization extend from the art-cinema mode, the poeticization of I Am Cuba grows out of the historical- materialist mode. Gary Morris elaborates this association to the historical- materialist mode, noting that I Am Cuba owes a great debt to Eisenstein's

"aesthetic treatment of history" in his historical films (np). This connection extends beyond the rhetoricization of story in Eisenstein's films and I Am Cuba to include stylistic features. As Morris says: "Whereas Eisenstein used cutting and dynamic composition in films like Potemkin, Kalatozov and his visual collaborators use a moving camera" (np). But while stylistic procedures are tied to both rhetorical and story building concerns in both Eisenstein's films and

Bordwell's account of historical-materialist narration, ml Am Cuba there is frequent disconnection between style and rhetoric and story. This independent stylistic motivation brings the film closer to the parametric mode, with its

"virtuoso... kinetic camera" and seemingly impossible elaborate long-takes

This third criterion of Lopate's is also his most weakly argued, as he states, "I am not sure how to test this criterion, but I know when it's not there" (246). It may be difficult to delineate what modes of discourse might be said to be "reasoned," but Lopate's argument also leaves room to consider discursive forms associated with the poetic, such as the voice in I Am Cuba, as appropriate to the essay film.

140 (Iordanova 125-126). Examples of these long-takes make clear the parametric

dimensions of I Am Cuba.

The first complicated long-take comes at the beginning of the first narrative episode, and involves a continuous shot over three minutes long. The

shot begins on a terrace overlooking a rooftop swimming pool on a lavish hotel in pre-Revolution Havana. After lingering on a band playing and bikini models posing, the camera makes a slow vertical descent from the terrace down to the pool-level patio, at which point it moves horizontally and then weaves its way through the crowd of sunbathers. Following a brief pause to capture a woman

looking out at the Havana skyline, the camera continues to pass among people on the patio (including a man with a movie camera filming his friends) until it

follows a bikini-clad woman walking into the pool. Remarkably the camera

enters the water and rises out of it again before submerging once again to film people swimming underwater. For Iordanova, the shot demonstrates

extraordinary technical mastery, as it includes "panoramic long-shots and facial

close-ups, sweeping vertical and horizontal movements" all in one sequence

(126). While this shot may have a narrative dimension, as it shows the decadence

of Batista's Cuba and the influence of American culture that the revolution would

overthrow, it is overwhelmingly parametric in its foregrounding of the acrobatics

of the camera-work. And although the shot introduces the film's critique of

141 capitalist excess, the stylistic virtuosity displays an indulgence that seems to

counter the rhetoric of the film's first episode.34

A similarly stylistically focused shot in the third episode of the film,

which captures the funeral of a young martyr to the revolution, involves the

camera rising up from the funeral procession on the ground, through balconies

and into a cigar factory and then out a window and over the crowd as they carry the casket down the street. While in this instance the camera's complex movements work to emphasize the rhetorical point of the episode (that the revolution brings together people of all kinds, from students to cigar factory workers), a viewer is just as likely to focus on the ways in which the camera movements seem to defy physics as on the story or rhetoric. In these shots, style takes on a life of its own separate from either rhetoric or story, and therefore

contributes to the process of poeticization.

Between the parametric foregrounding of the film's style and the heavily rhetoricized narrative episodes, I Am Cuba presents very little that adds up to a

story. Because of the overwhelming dominance of film's parametric strategies

and the poetic rhetoric of the voice-over in the film as a whole, the narrative discourse of the episodes and the stories they tell fade into the background. The

significance of each episode has less to do with the stories they tell than they ways in which these stories serve rhetorical purposes or are a stage on which to present stylistic virtuosity. The blending of elements of narrative films and essay

34 Indeed, the formalism of this shot and others throughout the film contributed to its rejection by both Soviet authorities (who thought the stylistic overtures made the film a failure as propaganda) and Cuban audiences (who nicknamed it "I am NOT Cuba") (Iordanova 126; Morris n.p.).

142 films in I Am Cuba points to ways in which poeticization breaks down narrativity

by drawing on other discursive modes.

Narrative Limits: Non-narrativity and Poeticization

Besides these examples of narrative poeticization at work, in which the

process estranges narrativity, there are also extremes of poeticization - liminal

instances where narrativity gives way to non-narrativity. There are two possible versions of this extreme poeticization. In the first version story, discourse, and

style become so estranged that connections between them are no longer apparent; poeticization breaks the narrative chain and the resulting film is usually

completely style-centred (and not alternating in emphasis between discourse and

style as in parametric narration). In the second version, other non-narrative

discursive forms displace or replace narrative, eliminating story and altering

discourse, and effectively re-channeling poeticization away from narrative

altogether. What forms of discourse supplant narrative in these poeticized films?

Answers to this question require investigation into the limits of narrativity and the

discursive forms that reside at these limits.

Barthes proposes three broad categories of discourse that would constitute

"a typology of forms of discourse": metonymic or narrative discourse; metaphoric discourse (including lyric poetry and sapiential writing); and enthymematic or

intellectual discourse (including critical discourse, scientific discourse and the essayistic discourse) ("Structural Analysis" 84). But Barthes does not develop these categories in detail, leaving concerns over the relationships between them unconsidered. In his essay "Frontiers of Narrative," however, Genette explores

143 these liminal regions, the "negative limits of narrative", and suggests how other discursive forms interact with and are opposed to narrative (Figures of Literary

Discourse 128).

Genette begins by recalling Aristotle and Plato's competing definitions of diegesis and mimesis, concluding that the tendency to equate diegesis with narrative and mimesis with non-narrative is erroneous:

Literary representation, the mimesis of the ancients, is not... narrative

plus "speeches": it is narrative, and only narrative. Plato opposed mimesis

to diegesis as a perfect imitation to an imperfect imitation; but... perfect

imitation is no longer an imitation, it is the thing itself, and in the end, the

only imitation is an imperfect one. Mimesis is diegesis. (Figures 132-133)

If diegesis is at once narrative and non-narrative, Genette says, "We must now admit, within diegesis itself, a distinction that appears neither in Plato nor in

Aristotle, and which will draw a new frontier within the domain of representations" (Figures 133). This new frontier, according to Genette, is the difference between the narration of a narrative, comprised of the action and events that narrative recounts, and the description of objects and characters within a narrative (Figures 133). Description, in Genette's estimation, is an essential part of narrative, with narrative literally depending on description since "it is easier to describe without relating than it is to relate without describing" (Figures 134).

Yet while description could exist independently of narration, narration almost always plays the dominant role in narrative discourse (Figures 134). Ultimately,

Genette notes, "the study of the relations between the narrative and the

144 description amount ... to a consideration of the diegetic function of description ...

[and] the role played by the descriptive passages or aspects in the general economy of narrative" (Figures 134).

Genette identifies two distinct functions of description: the ornamental function, in which "description appears ... as recreational pause in the narrative carrying out a purely esthetic role," and the significant function, in which description "is both explanatory and symbolic" and "tend[s] ... to reveal and at the same time to justify the psychology of the characters, of which they are at once the sign, the cause and the effect" (Figures 134-135). But in both functions description retains its primary difference from narrative, a difference in content

(Genette Figures 136). Whereas narration "is concerned with actions or events" and emphasizes temporal concerns, description is concerned with "objects and beings considered in their simultaneity" and emphasizes spatial concerns (Figures

136).

But for all his discussion of description as a narrative limit, Genette ultimately concludes that description and narration are too inextricably connected to consider description as a separate, non-narrative discourse. Thus, Genette returns to Aristotle and Plato's unity of narrative and description, saying:

If description marks one of the frontiers of narrative, it is certainly an

internal frontier, and really a rather vague one: it will do no harm,

therefore, if we embrace within the notion of narrative all forms of literary

representation and consider description not as one of its modes ... but

more modestly, as one of its aspects. (Figures 137)

145 It is for this reason that Genette looks to external limits beyond description to find the "last frontier of narrative" (Figures 137).

Genette again looks to Aristotle and Plato to find another narrative limit, the "last frontier of narrative" that "concerns nothing less than lyric, satirical, and didactic poetry" (Figures 137). Given Aristotle and Plato's firm definitions of representative literature in which poiesis is equal to mimesis, and mimesis is itself diegesis, Genette suggests that this frontier may be found in the kinds of works excluded from the Republic and the Poetics, such as the work of "Pindar, Alaceus,

Sappho, Archilochos, and Hesiod" (Figures 137). As Genette says, what writers like Archilochos, Sappho, and Pindar have in common is the fact that "their work does not consist in the imitation, by narrative or theatrical representation, of an action, real or pretended, external to the person and the speech of the poet, but simply in a discourse spoken by him and in his own name" (Figures 137). Thus,

Genette names this other narrative frontier the division or "domain of direct expression," which includes not only lyric poetry, but also "everything that makes use of eloquence, moral and philosophical reflection, scientific or parascientific exposition, the essay, correspondence, the journal, etc." (Figures 138). Whatever the differences between these various modes that Genette groups together as direct expression, they share what Genette identifies as a "subjectivity of discourse" in opposition to the "objectivity of narrative" (Figures 138).

And yet, while narrative and direct expression may be opposed, Genette notes that both "are almost never to be found in their pure state in any text: there is almost always a certain proportion of narrative in discourse, a certain amount of

146 discourse in narrative" (Figures 140). This inevitable mixing of forms alters

either side, as "narrative inserted into discourse is transformed into an element of

discourse, discourse inserted into narrative remains discourse and forms a sort of

cyst that is very easy to recognize and to locate" (Figures 141). In fact, in

Genette's estimation, narrative always risks falling into discourse, since "narrative

exists nowhere ... in its strict form," and the "slightest general observation, the

slightest adjective that is little more than descriptive, the most discreet

comparison ... introduces into [narrative's] web a type of speech that is alien to

it," that of discourse (Figures 141-142). The limits of narrative, then, its last

frontiers, are ever-present, constantly threatening to shift narrative towards non- narrativity.

Genette's account of the frontiers of narrative and forms of discourse

alternative to narrative is useful for considering the limits of narrativity, but it also presents a significant stumbling block when considered outside Genette's literary context and in relation to film. When describing non-narrative discourse as

"direct expression," Genette declares that "no representation, no fiction is

involved here, simply speech that is invested directly in the discourse of the work" (Figures 138). Does this mean that these types of discourse cannot exist in the cinema, at least without some sort of narrative intervention? Burch's assessment of the limits of narrative in relation to diegesis in film, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, presents an answer to this question. In his

examination of the diegetic process in film history, from early silent cinema to classical cinema to experimental films such as the work of Michael Snow, Burch

147 asserts that "As certain limit instances show, the diegetic effect can be fully

achieved in total absence of narrative in any of its accepted forms"

("Narrative/Diegesis" 200). In the absence of narrative, Burch suggests that other

factors, including movement, sound, "the readability of the picture track," and techniques of "camera ubiquity" such as the shot-countershot, have a greater influence on maintaining film diegesis than narrative ("Narrative/Diegesis" 200).

Thus, in experimental films such as Snow's Wavelength and Margaret Tait's

Place of Work, Burch finds examples of non-narrativity in films that maximize the diegetic effect within discursive modes that resemble Genette's "direct expression." Place of Work, for example, is for Burch an almost entirely non- narrative "meditation" on place and space in which the only gesture towards narrative indicates its absence ("Narrative/Diegesis" 213). Burch's analysis reveals that the absence of narrative does not eliminate film's diegetic effect, and that, therefore, film is open to non-narrative modes. It is these non-narrative modes that mark extreme examples of poeticization, in which narrativity vanishes.

Story Derailed: Guy Maddin's Eye Like a Strange Balloon

Guy Maddin's short film Eye Like a Strange Balloon (Odilon Redon) is an example of the first form of extreme poeticization in which narrativity breaks down. Commissioned by the BBC and inspired by Odilon Redon's charcoal drawing The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Towards Infinity, Eye Like a

Strange Balloon began as a short narrative, as documented in Maddin's story treatment of the film found in his book From the Atelier Tovar: Selected Writings.

The three-page story tells of a tragic love triangle between a train engineer Kellor,

148 his son Caelum, and his adopted daughter Berenice. According to Maddin, the story is a "tribute to Abel Gance's La Roue" borrowing its basic plot, although before filming Maddin had not yet seen Gance's film ("Debris of Cine-Days"

103-104). Yet in the film itself, the story Maddin includes in From the Atelier

Tovar almost completely disappears. While the characters are present and identifiable, each wearing nametags, the narrative fades behind the surreal imagery and Maddin's stylistic flourishes.35

Shot in black and white and containing only one line of dialogue, the film reveals Maddin's desire to achieve a visual quality akin to Redon's charcoal drawings taking precedent over story and narrative discourse. As Maddin says in his audio commentary to the film, "[I] shot it using all the sort of black, smudgy qualities I knew I could get out of my camera that Redon got out of a piece of charcoal on a piece of paper." Thus, Eye Like a Strange Balloon displays all the stylistic eccentricities that characterize Maddin's films: grainy and degraded image quality; expressionistic sets; blurred framing produced by Vaseline coated lenses or light bleeding into the camera; distorting superimposition and filters; and silent-film-evoking techniques such as iris card framing. As Steven Shaviro comments, in Maddin's films such techniques "seem to exist for their own sakes," producing images that are "entirely non-functional" and "do nothing to advance

35 In his audio commentary to the film, Maddin claims that in his original five and a half minute cut of the film the narrative was perfectly clear. This narrative clarity was subsequently lost when Maddin cut the film down to four minutes to meet the contractual demands set out by the BBC. It is difficult to imagine how an extra one and a half minutes would make the film more clearly narrative, especially given Maddin's tendency toward narrative obfuscation in the interest of stylistic embellishment in films such as Tales from Gilmi Hospital, Archangel, and Careful.

149 the story" (216). The result, for Shaviro, are "images [that] belong to a cinema of spectacle ... rather than to any sort of narrative impulse (216). Will Straw echoes

Shaviro's assessment, characterizing Maddin's films as being "principally about style and sensibility" (313).

In Eye Like a Strange Balloon, Maddin's style produces images that recall both Redon's art and Gance's silent films. Aiming to achieve a "sub-aquatic decors setting" appropriate to Redon's work, Maddin superimposes rippling and bubbling water and shimmering paper over much of the film, as well as using fog filters and window screens to further obscure the images ("Debris of Cine-Days"

103). Other techniques serve to draw intertextual connections to other works by

Redon. In a number of shots Maddin employs superimposition to recreate the surrealism of Redon's drawings, such as a shot of Berenice superimposed overtop of a spinning wheel that references Redon's drawing La Roue. Most importantly, however, throughout the film the grainy picture quality, filmed (Maddin notes in his commentary) using a 16mm Bolex with a light leak, lends a charcoal-like texture and a quality reminiscent of decaying silent-era film stock to the images.

So while Maddin appropriates the story from Gance's La Roue for his failed narrative, the connection to Gance's film is more obvious in Maddin's homage to silent-era style.

The abundance of style in Eye Like a Strange Balloon shatters narrative coherence. Most of the film's images, for example a shot of Berenice's sprouting of spines followed by a shot of Caelum's head suspended from a giant flower stem, seem unconnected and lacking in narrative motivation. Likewise sound in

150 the film, a cacophonous assemblage of train whistles, flowing water, roaring wind, and chattering teeth, though related to the images, borders on excess and

offers little around which to build a story. One might be tempted to try to employ

Kafalenos's strategy of reading narrative into poetry so as to read the story behind the film's poeticization. But even with Maddin's story treatment, making sense of the plot of Eye Like a Strange Balloon requires numerous viewings and a great deal of imagination to construct the story in the absence of a clear narrative

discourse. Instead, a viewer is more likely to experience Eye Like a Strange

Balloon in the way Straw describes Maddin's films in general, as "both intensive revi sitings of genuine past styles and imagined version of such styles, seemingly

drawn from such ephemera as the illustrations of children's fairy-tale books or early sound-era operetta" (310). Thus, it is the emphasis on intertextual and hypertextual links (to Redon, Gance, and the silent era in general) in Eye Like a

Strange Balloon's style that serve to suppress narrativity and approach the entirely style-centred extreme of poeticization.

Poeticized Vision: Brakhage's Dog Star Man

Like Maddin's Eye Like a Strange Balloon, Stan Brakhage's five-part film series Dog Star Man exemplifies the extreme form of poeticization in which style overwhelms narrative discourse and story. And as with Eye Like a Strange

Balloon, this breakdown of the connections between story, narrative discourse, and style are traceable through narrative treatments and explanations that precede and follow the film. In his book Visionary Film, P. Adams Sitney creates a narrative sketch of Dog Star Man by combining two interviews with Brakhage in

151 which Brakhage explicates the story and structure of each part of the film. The first section of this sketch describes the basic "story" of Dog Star Man: "The man climbs the mountain out of winter and night into the dawn, up through spring and early morning to midsummer and high noon, to where he chops down the tree ...

There's a Fall - and the fall back to somewhere, midwinter" (190). The rest of the sketch delves into the "events" of each of Dog Star Man's five parts in greater detail, along with explanations of the series' seasonal structure and some of the visual motifs and symbols of the film. But unlike Maddin's treatment, which if read carefully can help one reconstruct the film's narrative on repeat viewings,

Brakhage's sketch provides no such clarification. As Sitney says: "Brakhage's paraphrase suggests at times a narrative consistency which is not apparent in the film" (192). Instead, Dog Star Man demonstrates the ways in which a shift towards the style-centred in poeticization can also produce a shift from narrative discourse to the discourse of direct expression.

Unlike Maddin's recreation of past artistic and cinematic styles,

Brakhage's stylistic motivation comes from a desire to reproduce the subjective visionary experiences of dream and the imagination. In the paraphrase of Dog

Star Man that Sitney assembles, Brakhage notes that the film's Prelude is "to be a created dream ... based on dream vision ... 'closed-eye vision'" {Visionary 190).

For Brakhage closed-eye vision allows one to return to the pre-conscious vision of infancy ("Metaphors" 12-13). Throughout Dog Star Man subjective visions and visionary subjectivity rendered through stylistic processes, such as super- imposition, rapid montage, images manipulated with an anamorphic camera lens,

152 manipulation of the material film by means of scratches or paint, displace

narrative. In this way, the story-narrative discourse-style chain is broken at the

link between discourse and style. In its place, Brakhage establishes a new chain,

one that links style to the discourse of the direct expression of subjective,

meditative experience.

In this movement from narrative discourse to direct expression,

Brakhage's Dog Star Man also demonstrates the second extreme of narrative

poeticization as narrativity gives way to non-narrativity. Part of shift toward non-

narrative discourse is a result of what Annette Michelson calls Brakhage's

"revision[ing] of filmic temporality in positing the sense of continuous time" by breaking down "the spatiotemporal coordinates in terms of which past and present

events define themselves as taking place in time" ("Camera Lucida" 53). For

Michelson, Brakhage's style amounts to an "inventory of personal strategies" that

in their deployment make for a "cinema of the hypnagogic consciousness, of the

image, ... projecting that 'continuous present'" ("Camera Lucida" 53; 54). Dog

Star Man: Part 1 illustrates Michelson's point, as Brakhage disrupts temporal and

spatial cues through stylistic abstraction, including the rapid cutting between

microscopic and macroscopic images (from blood vessels to astronomical images

of sun flares), and camera movements and superimposition that blur and distort

images. Identifiable forms - trees, a mountain, a dog, the moon and snow flakes

- are themselves pushed into abstraction by the way each image flows into and

over the next, becoming shapes, light, and colours rather than nameable things.

Even the single discernable narrative "event" of Part 1, the Dog Star Man's

153 ascent of the mountain, becomes cut off from linear time through repetition. By repeating Dog Star Man's struggles so frequently and from so many angles, and by displacing them from a linear sequence through the interruption of the flood of abstract images, the climb becomes a single moment, iterated in the continuous present of consciousness.

Sitney proposes that in Dog Star Man Brakhage extends what he calls the lyrical film into an epic form, the mythopoetic film. According to Sitney,

The lyric 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 know how

he is reacting to his vision ... As viewers we see this mediator's intense

experience of seeing. (Visionary 160)

Whereas Brakhage's earlier films (such as Anticipation of the Night, Window

Water Baby Moving, and Cat's Cradle) are examples of the lyrical film, Sitney suggests that Dog Star Man "elaborates in mythic, almost systematic terms the worldview of the lyrical film" (Visionary 190). In this mythopoetic extension of the lyrical film, the first-person point of view expands, passing through cosmic and microscopic (solar flares and snow flakes), internal and external (organs and flesh) dimensions that refocus the experience of seeing through the lens of various levels of consciousness.

The unfurling of Dog Star Man, then, is not a narrative progression, but a movement through the dream vision of the Prelude to the ecstatic visions of Part

1 to the pre-vision of Part 2 to the sexual fantasy of Part 3 to the revisiting of

154 each in Part 4. Bruce Elder, drawing on Brakhage's own comments , compares

this mythopoetic scope in Dog Star Man to Ezra Pound's Cantos, noting that they

share a "compendiousness" (146). For Elder, Dog Star Man "constellates

narrative ... myth ... personal statement... science, and religion" in a manner

similar to "Pound's integration of narrative, myth, economic theory, personal

monologue, and religious speculation" (146). Indeed, the connection to Pound's

Cantos that Elder explores and Brakhage acknowledges as primary influence on

his filmmaking suggests a great deal about the poeticization of narrative in Dog

Star Man.

Pound draws on Homer's Odyssey and Dante's Divine Comedy as well as

other epic poems throughout the Cantos, but these narrative sources are disrupted

by other discursive elements in a manner that scatters narrativity, leaving pieces

of it throughout the poems. As Reed Way Dasenbrock says, Pound does not use these epics to make narrative connections between them or to develop a single

narrative throughout the Cantos, but rather "When he takes over received

narratives and chronicles, his impulse is always to cut away excess detail to get to

the significant moment, the luminous detail" (86). Other individual cantos present brief and fragmented narratives. "Canto XIII," for example, with its

descriptive lines such as "Kung walked/ by the dynastic temple/ and into the cedar

grove" and dialogue, though fragmented, is not too far from the narrative prose of

36 Brakhage frequently cites Pound as having a profound influence on his work, even saying of the Cantos: it is "the single most important book in my life" ("Poetry and Film" 182). In his "Remarks" on Dog Star Man in interviews with Bruce Kawin and Colin Still presented as audio recordings on the Criterion Collection DVD by Brakhage, Brakhage further emphasizes the influence of Pound and the Cantos on the making of Dog Star Man.

155 Ernest Hemingway (Pound The Cantos 58). But in both instances, Pound's deployment of narrative utilizes the imagist method that he describes in Gaudier-

Brzeska as "a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another" (89) and its further elaboration as vorticism in which "The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster ... through which, and into which ideas are constantly rushing" (92). The connection to film here is quite clear in Pound's re- or mis-phrasing of super-imposition as "super-position."

Hugh Kenner also makes this link between Pound's poetry and film in describing the ideogrammic in the Cantos as he notes the way in which concrete images and details are correlated and juxtaposed: "The mind works upon them, relates them, draws from them real if not articulate knowledge. Hence the good poet or movie director knows exactly what glimpses to give us ... The knowledge resides in the particulars" (84). One gets the sense here that Kenner is making a comparison between Pound's method and film editing in the way in which blocks of poetry (lines or whole cantos) interact like film footage edited together. Here

Pound's interest in the Chinese ideogram and its potential as a model for poetry is particularly close to Sergei Eisenstein's conception of film editing as related to the ideogram:

the copulation ... of two hieroglyphs of the simplest series is to be

regarded not as their sum, but as their product... each separately

corresponds to an object... but their combination corresponds to a

156 concept. From separate hieroglyphs has been fused the ideogram ... But

-in

this is - montage. (Eisenstein 29-30)

Similarly, Pound's use of narratives becomes part of the larger "ideogrammic" programme of the Cantos, where narratives and narrative fragments are "charged particles," as Elder calls them, juxtaposed to "produce an impulse that would incite the reader's mind to an epiphany" (210).

Brakhage employs a similar method in Dog Star Man, but adds to it a greater degree of the personal and the subjective. For instance, even the central

"narrative" of Dog Star Man, the Dog Star Man's ascent of the mountain and his struggle with the tree, "super-positions" layers of myth over personal experience.

According to Brakhage, the tree the Dog Star Man cuts down is Ygdrassil, the world-tree of Norse poetry, but it also suggests the Biblical tree of knowledge

{"Dog Star Man: Remarks"). The allusions to Norse and Judeo-Christian creation stories provide additional interpretive frameworks for the Dog Star Man's lyric experience. Therefore, chopping down the world-tree or the tree of knowledge adds an eschatological dimension to the Dog Star Man's visionary experience. In his essay "Margin Alien," Brakhage multiplies the narrative threads linked to the tree and the Dog Star Man, adding to it a long list of intertextual connections including the Old English "The Dream of the Rood," Frank L. Baum's

Woodsman, J.R.R. Tolkein's Lordof the Rings, and Percy Bysshe Shelley's "To

Jane With A Guitar" (65-66). In this way, Brakhage's film, like Pound's poetry

Gilles Deleuze's description of Sergei Eisenstein's editing methods as a "spiral" seems a further connection to the "vortex" of Pound's Vorticism and the filmic qualities of Pound's poetry {Cinema 1 33).

157 but in a more personal fashion, makes use of narrative as a thread in the lyric fabric, to borrow Perloff s phrase.

To attempt to follow this narrative thread through any part of Dog Star

Man reveals how narrative gives way to the direct expression of lyricism in

Brakhage's epic. In the first minute of Part 4, for example, Brakhage weaves together various mythic, symbolic, and narrative images from the previous four parts. After a section of black leader, the image of the Dog Star Man, lying down in agony, tinted yellow and anamorphically distorted, meets with another, nearly identical image of the Dog Star Man, superimposed on the first. These two images briefly overlap and alternate in their foregrounding, as scratches and paint throw texture and colour over them. As Part 4 continues, trees, a dog, a cat, a stained glass window, and nude female figures, rapidly run over shots of the Dog

Star Man's struggle in cutting down a dead tree, with paint, scratches, and camera manipulations all the while blurring and obscuring the superimposed images. In one brief moment, the flow of multiple superimpositions bring together the angel in the stained glass window, the Dog Star Man struggling with the tree, increasingly complex tree-shaped-scratches, vertical lines of light and scratches, and a woman (Brakhage's wife Jane) shot from the shoulder up and gazing skyward mimicking the image in the window. Sitney notes that Brakhages uses up to four layers of superimposition allowing for "the transformation of associations we have acquired in the first seventy minutes of the film, through unanticipated juxtapositions and superimposition" (200-201). Just as Sitney reads the confluence of erotic and procreative images from Part 2 and Part 3 coming

158 together in Part 4 as recasting the narrative images of the Dog Star Man's struggle in terms of "a metaphor for lovemaking," the layers overlapping the stained glass window reimagine the narrative event as the attainment of the enhanced ecstatic "Vision of the saint" Brakhage privileges {Visionary 201;

"Metaphors" 12). The tree becomes Ygdrassil, the erotic female images become angelic, and the Dog Star Man's agonies become a saintly passion. Throughout

Part 4, and Dog Star Man in its entirety, then, the overabundance of images in superimposition destabilizes narrative meaning, producing a lyric flow of visual experience.

Leveling Narrative: Chris Marker's Level Five

Compared to Eye Like a Strange Balloon or Dog Star Man, Chris

Marker's Level Five would seem to be the most obviously and intelligibly narrative film of the three. And yet, despite its overt gestures to the discursive practices of narrative fiction, Level Five challenges the procedures and effects of narrative by juxtaposing it with other discursive forms. On the surface, Level

Five tells the story of Laura, a woman whose computer programmer lover has disappeared, or perhaps died, leaving her to attempt to make sense of her loss by playing the computer war-game he created, a recreation of the battle of Okinawa in the second World War. Through a series of epistolary monologues, Laura appeals to her online friend, Chris (a fictional stand-in for Marker himself), to help her solve the puzzle of the game, to change the outcome of the battle, and to help her make sense of her loss. Laura's quest to piece together fragments of history and her own story, however, are a narrative pretext for Marker to develop

159 an essayistic argument about the nature of images, their place in historical discourse, and their relation to memory. But even as the narrative of Level Five appears at first to be a ruse, it also plays a significant role in Marker's argument.

Narrative becomes a performance, Maureen Turim says, and in doing so becomes

"a level that by its nature does not turn it away from [the film's] other levels, its essayist mode, its clever montage, its collage of fragments" (367). The process of poeticization in Level Five, then, does not fully displace narrative, but rather multiplies discursive levels, joining and juxtaposing them and thereby reconstituting the relationship between the narrative and the non-narrative through the poetic.

In part an essay film, Level Five puts forward a complex argument that critiques both narrative fictions and documentary claims to truth.38 The film challenges the historical record of the mass suicides on Okinawa, the documents, the images and accounts that make up the Okinawa "story." In this way, Turim suggests, "Marker advocates questioning the veracity of the non-fiction image through an engaging analysis of documentary mise-en-scene and editing practices" (369). This critique takes two forms. First, Marker criticizes the way images are decontextualized and appropriated, as in the examples of the photograph of the flag raising at Iwo Jima and the footage of a man on fire, called

'Gustav,' following a bombing in Borneo. In the case of the Iwo Jima photograph, Marker reveals that the moment was restaged for the cameras, made

38 For Lopate, Marker is the prototypical film essayist, especially in films such as Letters from Siberia and Sans Soleil (249-252). That said, Level Five, with its multiple voices and discursive lines, might violate Lopate's criteria too thoroughly to qualify.

160 to look more dramatic than the initial event and used for propagandistic purposes.

The Gustave footage, on the other hand, is edited, with the final moments of the

original footage that show the man getting up after falling excised, again altering the meaning of the images to specific ends. Second, Marker proposes that the presence of documenting cameras themselves have an effect on events, such as in the footage of a woman throwing herself off a cliff in Saipan or of the 'Bat-Man'

leaping off the Eiffel Tower in 1900. In both instances, Marker highlights the way the individuals turn and see the camera, "aimed ... like a hunter" as Laura

says, and the influence of this presence in determining the outcome of the events, which might otherwise have not taken place.

These two poles of Marker's critique point to problems with the

fundamental assumptions of documentary images. These assumptions hold that

documentary is free of the 'fictionality' and 'illusionality' of narrative fiction cinema because it reproduces 'reality.' Comparing fiction films and documentary

film, Nichols says:

Documentaries, then, do not differ from fictions in their constructedness as

texts, but in the representations they make. At the heart of documentary is

less a story and its imaginary world than an argument about the historical

world. (Ill)

By pointing out the "constructedness" of documentary Nichols astutely finds a middle ground between claims of absolute 'truth' in documentary and the tendency to see documentary as "a fiction like any other" (107-108). But Marker takes the issue of the constructedness of documentary images further. In the

161 examples discussed above, the act of documenting images has a profound effect

on the 'story' the images eventually tell, and as such Marker illustrates how image making can be a narrative instrument. While Marker does not deny the value of

documentary and the importance of developing arguments about the historical world, as Turim says, in Level Five Marker "allows us to see that all discourses have imaginary functions, that our documents always need to be framed and reframed, and that writing history always means situating the investments we make in the factual" (380). Like the "future ethnologist" Laura imagines

"discovering" her, those who use such images risk misinterpreting or misrepresenting them. Marker's critique, therefore, "problematizes the relationship between historical events and their mediated representations," while proposing alternative methods of reading documentary images (Alter Chris

Marker 115).

In constructing his argument, Marker employs one such method, collaging images and discourses that interrupt the process of story making, but expands the possibilities of meaningful associations and collisions among them. This collage makes use of poetic connections, that is, metaphoric or paradigmatic links, using the virtual world of the Internet as its guide. For Turim, the cyber-world of computers and the Internet are an ideal model for Marker's collage:

Hypertextual expression weaves a thread through fragments. I open a

hypertext document, I find a link, I pursue this lead, I return to the menu

or pursue another link, then another. These paths are not predetermined

162 and linear, but neither are they random or entirely outside the

prearrangement of possibilities. (367)

Thus, Marker's approach links images of Okinawa, past and present, with interviews with Okinawa survivors and experts, with other images of war, with intertextual references to fiction films, with 'found footage' from other documentaries on Okinawa, and with references to Marker's past work.

Like the game Laura plays to tease her computer, in which she types commands with "a noun in place of a verb" with amusing or ironic results ("I don't know how to dog"), Marker's collage brings together images and texts in sometimes ironic, sometimes resonant, and sometimes contradictory ways. For example, Laura's reading of Rabbi Huna's admonition that "God sides with the persecuted," precedes footage of an Okinawa bullfight with two bulls fighting each other by butting heads, in a transition that at first appears like a move from the sublime to the ridiculous, but takes on deeper meaning through the shock of the juxtaposition. As Laura, in voice-over, compares the Spanish bullfights, in which one stares at death, to the Okinawa bullfight, "a time for playing," the implications of the collage of the Rabbi's words and the 'found' footage become apparent. Like the bulls driven at each other, the otherwise peaceful native

Okinawans, caught in the middle of the war in the Pacific, were persecuted, forced to do violence to their own people, compelled by the Japanese military values of honour and self-sacrifice.

Similarly, Marker juxtaposes footage of the Kyoto dancers brought from mainland Japan to Okinawa's Ginza district with footage of Okinawan children

163 being put on ships to the mainland in 1944. Chris observes the contradiction between the importing of traditional culture from "real Japan" in a commercial setting and the forced removal of the children of Okinawa, 1000 of whom died when the ship sank. The image of the Kyoto dancer, superimposed over the documentary footage, becomes a symbol of the Japanese Imperial exploitation and manipulation of Okinawa, as Chris remarks that survivors were told to send letters back home saying everything was all right. Following this superimposition, Marker 'quotes' from Nagisa Oshima's 1977 documentary on a memorial service for victims of the boat sinking, The Dead Remain Young, with footage of families mourning children lost thirty years earlier (Turim 378). Here

Marker even seems to contradict his own point about the way Japanese culture and tradition have framed and determined the fate of Okinawa, as he draws from the work of a Japanese director. But this quotation of Oshima, along with a brief interview with Oshima himself, serves to create further links outside of Level

Five, to the interviews with Okinawans and more traditional explanatory documentary voice-overs in The Dead Remain Young and Oshima's other documentary on Okinawa The Island of the Final Battle (Turim 379-380). Such hyperlinks connect Level Five's collage to other works that deal with the history of Okinawa, expanding the possibilities of discourse in understanding the island's tragedy.

Marker does not limit this intertextual approach to drawing from documentary films and images. Throughout Level Five, references to narrative fiction films help shape the connection between Laura's story and the history of

164 Okinawa. Laura's evocation of Alain Resnais's film Hiroshima, Mon Amour is particularly demonstrative of this, as she says:

I recognize myself in that island, because my most unique suffering, my

most intimate suffering is also the most banal, the easiest to name. So...

let's give it a name that sounds like a song, like a movie... Okinawa, Mon

Amour.

Just as Resnais's narrative is "a radical engagement with questions of history and memory," involving tragic events from World War II, Laura attempts to understand her own suffering in relation to the mass suicides of Okinawa (Lupton

Chris Marker 204). The link to Hiroshima, Mon Amour also emphasizes

Marker's contention that the mass suicides of Okinawa remain an unacknowledged horror of World War II, comparable to the bombings of

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and even the Holocaust, since as Chris says, in the

Okinawa massacre "some 150,000 civilians died, a third of the population. No other group suffered so, except in the Nazi camps."

Other intertextual references, for example to Otto Preminger's Laura

(Laura notes that her absent lover gave her the name after seeing the movie), speak to the ways in which the recontextualization of intertextual collages open up cited texts to new interpretation. Laura's story, read alongside Preminger's film about a missing woman, takes on some of the mystery of the classical

Hollywood story. To follow this intertextual thread requires an emphasis on the

'mystery' of Laura's missing lover, and later Laura's own disappearance that

Chris reveals in the closing moments of the film. Moments such as Laura's

165 ghostly reappearance in her room through a vertical screen wipe, invoke the way the other Laura haunts the first half of Preminger's film, only to reappear in the second half in what may or may not be a dream sequence.

A later reference to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo suggest further connections to Hollywood ghost-stories, but is also a self-reference on Marker's part to his engagement with Vertigo in his films La Jetee and Sans Soleil.40 In both films Marker explores Vertigo in relation to the workings of memory, and the inclusion of another reference to Vertigo in Level Five highlights Marker's abiding interest in memory, its association with film, and its role in culture and history. The reference to Vertigo, therefore, invokes a line from Sans Soleil that neatly sums up Level Five's engagement with Okinawa as an attempt to make sense of an "impossible memory, insane memory," like the account of how individuals murdered their own families in the mass suicides that Kinjo, a survivor who along with his brother killed his siblings and mother, offer in the film. These references to narrative fiction films, like the fiction of Laura's story, become a means of accessing and understanding such insane memories, as Marker sums up in an interview:

Laura knows that suffering confers no kinds of status. She places her own

suffering beside the suffering of the Okinawa victims, like one of those

bunches of flowers which the parents of the drowned children throw into

the waves. For my part, I expect it is easier for the audience to identify

39 See Thompson's analysis of Laura in her book Breaking the Glass Armor, which reads the second half of Preminger's film as a dream. 40 The connections between Vertigo, La Jetee, and Sans Soleil will be explored further in chapter three and chapter four.

166 with Laura's suffering than with the feeling of a man who massacred his

entire family. I am willing to bet on that. And so I help the audience

attain a level of compassion akin to hers as she plunges into the tragedy of

Okinawa. (Interview with Dolores Walfisch 145)

It is in this collaging of texts, the way, as Lupton says, Marker folds documentary into narrative, that Level Five articulates an extreme form of poeticization. Here poeticization does not just come between narrative discourse and story, or replace narrative discourse with another form of discourse, rather it multiplies levels of discourse, each "hypertextually" connected, fragmented but linked, like memory itself. Laura offers a description of the Kerama islands that perhaps best illustrates the process of poeticization in Level Five: "Fractal islands on Yves Klein blue." The image projects the puzzle in Yves Klein blue that

Laura earlier suggests would be an appropriate gift for the end of the century; a puzzle "about itself," perhaps impossible to complete, onto the infinite patterns and connections of fractals. If historical materialist films "rhetoricize narrative" and / Am Cuba "poeticizes rhetoric," Level Five "fractalizes" discourse as a poetic procedure of associations. Following Laura's game of five levels for rating other people (Level 1, bigotry; Level 2, wit; Level 5, death?), Turim proposes a "formal enumeration of five levels":

Level 1. Fragments of documents, stories, and events

Level 2. The Performance Narrative, including questions of address and

mode

Level 3. Hypertextual Links: montage connections, ideas to analysis

167 Level 4. Discourse

Level 5. Poetics (humour, irony beyond party lines). (368-369)

But as Turim leaves these levels largely unexplained, they are open to being rewritten in relation to poeticization. As narrative fiction becomes the basis on which Marker builds his collage of documents, the process of poeticization expands like fractals, creating a web of narratives and documents. The limits of this fractalized poeticization are the unrepresentable, memory and death, which the film can only gesture at. Another account of the five formal levels of Level

Five, then, might look like this:

Level 1. Narrative fiction

Level 2. Documentary - texts and images

Level 3. Collage - hypertextual links and intertextual references

Level 4. The Poetic - the fractalized intersections of narrative,

documentary and collage in poeticization

Level 5. Memory - the unrepresentable, the impossible, linked to death

And like the level five in Laura's game, this fifth level of Marker's film is also

"unreachable."

Beyond Narrative: Narrative Poeticization Towards Lyricism

The range of parametric strategies, excessive elements, and non-narrative discourses that participate in narrative poeticization is broader than the six examples explored above. Even at its limits, as in Eye Like a Strange Balloon,

Dog Star Man, and Level Five where stylistic or discursive strategies of poeticization may obscure story, poeticization does not eliminate narrative, but

168 rather submerges it. In the six films discussed in this chapter, the process of narrative poeticization resembles Perloff s account of the role of narrative in modernist and postmodernist poetry as questioning narrative itself. As they

approach non-narrativity, these films not only gesture to the possibilities of

narrative's absence, as in Burch's reading of Place of Work, but also gesture to

the way other discourses, particularly poetic discourses, enter into film diegesis.

While parametric strategies and excess significantly disrupt narrative in films

such as Tarkovsky's Stalker, the inclusion of discursive forms such as recited poetry add an additional discursive level that works alongside and against the

film's narrative. ] In this way, these films make clear that narrative is not in

opposition to the poetic in poetic film or that narrative is outside of or excluded

from the poetic in film. Rather, narrative takes on other forms and functions in poetic films through narrative poeticization. In the process, poeticization creates new possibilities for narrative, as a vehicle for stylistic experimentation, as a site

for transtextual reference, and as a counterpoint to other discursive modes,

especially lyricism. The chapter that follows will explore further possibilities that

contribute to shaping the lyric in poetic film, reflexivity and transtextuality. But

whether through disruption or submersion by stylistic patterns, other discourses,

or reflexivity, narrative poeticization renegotiates the role of narrative and thus becomes a key indicator of the poetic in film.

41 This use of poetry as a poeticizing discursive counterpoint to narrative is a strategy that Tarkovsky develops more fully in his film Mirror, which will be discussed in greater depth in relation to lyricism in chapter four.

169 Chapter Three

Seeing As, Looking Back, and the Reflexive Turn:

Metaphor, Transtexuality, and Reflexivity in Poetic Film

"The most powerful oblique effect of the epigraph is perhaps due simply to its presence, whatever

the epigraph itself may be..." - Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of interpretation (160)

"Sometimes a whole poem is needed for the mind to invent or find meaning; but always the mind

makes connections." - Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor (82)

Two famous and emblematic images of the avant-garde cinema from

1929: the first, from Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali's Un Chien Andalou, in which a man slices open a woman's eye with a razor; the second, from Dziga

Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera, in which a human eye is superimposed over the movie camera's lens.42 Both images present a reflexive and metaphorical account of cinema itself; one could say both images reflexively envision cinema.

The image from Un Chien Andalou, the violent surrealism of the cutting of the eye, embodies Bunuel's claim that his film "has no intention of attracting nor pleasing the spectator; indeed, on the contrary, it attacks him"(30). This shot reflects back at the spectator the experience of viewing, the consumption of the film. Similarly, the often analyzed image of the convergence of camera and eye from Man with a Movie Camera metaphorically recreates the act of filming as a new way of seeing - the "Kino-Eye" as the "decoding of both the visible world

42 See Fig. 1 and Fig. 2.

170 and that which is invisible to the naked eye" (Vertov 87). These images belong near the beginning of a long history of the "leitmotif of the eye," the metaphorical association of the human eye and the "camera-eye" of cinema, that has created the

"dialectic of eye and camera" in avant-garde cinema, as William Wees outlines in his book Light Moving In Time (13-14; 9).43 But these metaphorical associations also point to the poetic potential of reflexivity in film, as they combine the multiple senses of filmic reflexivity - the sense of "seeing as" and "looking back" that is involved in the reflexive turn.

In the previous two chapters, instances of self-referentiality, transtextuality, and metaphor were considered as contributing to the poetic in film, but only in reference to isolated examples as they pertain to concerns of adaptation and narrative. This chapter will focus on these three forms of reflexivity, grouping them together under the broader category of reflexivity. To speak of reflexivity is to speak of the ways in which art turns back on itself; it is art's way of looking back and seeing its reflection. Although reflexivity, in any of its manifestations, is not exclusive to poetry, in film it can be a strategy for shifting discourse towards the poetic. This chapter, then, will explore how reflexivity contributes to the poeticization of film by providing alternative organizational principles to narrative discourse.

The preceding chapter demonstrated how parametric patterns, excessive elements, and the intervention of non-narrative discourse poeticize narrative in the

43 Wees traces this "leitmotif of the eye" in avant-garde film history, from Leger's Ballet Mecanique (1924) and Man Ray's Emak Bakia (1926) through Jean Cocteau's Blood of a Poet (1930), Kenneth Anger's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), and Stan Brakhage's Song I (1964).

171 poetic film. In each instance, the poeticizing move away from narrative involved reflexivity to some degree. The parametric and excessive strategies in

Tarkovsky's Nostalghia and Stalker or Kalatazov's I Am Cuba, particularly in

their play of rhythm and duration, encourage viewers to become increasingly

aware of both the act of filming and the act of viewing. In doing so, these films

compel viewers to reflect on the very filmic-ness of the images they see.

Likewise, in Maddin's Eye Like a Strange Balloon, Brakhage's Dog Star Man and

Marker's Level Five, the layers of intertextual references and non-narrative

discourse that disrupt narrative in turn lead to further contemplation of these films

as works of art in relation to other works of art. As the elements that structure narrative such as cause and effect logic and the sequential trajectories of space

and time fall away in these poeticized films, reflexivity becomes that which

motivates, shapes, and gives coherence to poetic film.

In order to understand the role of reflexivity in poetic film, this chapter will consider three significant dimensions of reflexivity. The first, which will be referred to as reflexivity in general, concerns reflexive and self-referential

gestures within films that point to the production, consumption, and materiality of

filmic texts themselves. This inward turn at the heart of reflexivity, then, is a sign

of the poetic, another aspect of that which links poetry and film. This chapter will begin with theories of reflexivity in film, especially Robert Stam's work on

reflexivity in the fiction film and Bill Nichols's work on reflexivity in non-fiction

film. From there, using Roman Jakobson's theories on the "poetic function" in

language, this first dimension of reflexivity will allow one to examine the inherent

172 reflexivity of poetry and the poetic in formal terms. The reflexivity of poetry, the ways it draws attention to the workings and play of language, to its own construction, through rhyme, rhythm, and other poetic procedures, will be the basis for comparison of reflexivity in poetic film. This section will also include analyses of three specific examples of reflexive films into its discussion of reflexivity in poetic film: Ed Ackermann and Colin Morton's Primiti Too Taa,

Stan Brakhage's Mothlight, and Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera.

The other two dimensions of reflexivity are in fact broader reflexive procedures: transtextuality and metaphor. As already discussed in chapter one,

Gerard Gennette's theories of transtexuality involve a wide range of textual procedures, all of which can be considered as reflexive. In this chapter, however,

Genette's first form of transtextuality - intertextuality - will be of particular importance. By investigating intertextuality from its roots in Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogism, through Julia Kristeva's reworking of dialogism as intertextuality, and finally Genette's use of the term as part of his broader transtextuality including intertextuality and hypertextuality, this chapter will explore the ways in which intertextuality contributes to a poeticization of film. Previous chapters discussed intertextuality and hypertextuality either as a means of adaptation or as a factor in the estrangement of narrative in the process of poeticization. This chapter, however, will broaden the scope of transtextuality's function in asserting the poetic in film to include the ways in which looking back at or towards intertexts can provide structure or motivation to poetic film. Referring to Bakhtin's dialogism, Stam speaks to this expansion, noting: "The concept of dialogism

173 suggests that every text forms an intersection of textual surfaces where other texts may be read" (Subversive Pleasures 15). Thus, this discussion of transtextuality will elaborate on the discursive multiplicity of intertextuality and hypertextuality that was introduced in the analysis of Level Five in the previous chapter, this time by considering another of Marker's films, La Jetee and its intertextual connections to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.

The second broader reflexive category that this chapter will explore is that of metaphor. As a figure or trope commonly associated with poetry and the poetic, metaphor will offer a specific form with which to test the poetic aspects of reflexivity in film. By outlining arguments on the place and possibility of metaphor in film put forward by Christian Metz and Noel Carroll, this section will endeavour to reassess metaphor's function in film, particularly as a reflexive strategy in poetic film. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur's theories of metaphor from his book The Rule of Metaphor, emphasis will be placed on metaphor as a strategy for generating meaning and to alter perception by 'redescribing reality' (6).

Adapting Ricoeur's theories to a filmic context affords the opportunity to see metaphor in film as more than a figure with linguistic parallels (that is, the grounds of the debates among Metz and Carroll rooted in semiotics and rhetoric), but instead as a process and a site in which the poetic is developed in film. In fact, it is the way in which metaphor involves seeing one thing as another, as

Ricoeur stresses, that makes it so important to the poetic in film. With this in mind, this section will consider the role of metaphor in Bunuel and Dali's Un

Chien Andalou.

174 Finally, this chapter will test the role of reflexivity in signaling the poetic in film by examining the workings of reflexivity, transtextuality and metaphor together in three films: Maddin's The Heart of the World; and two films by

Marker, Sij'avais 4 dromedaires and the aforementioned La Jetee, revisited to consider its reflexivity beyond its use of intertextuality. These films will function as case studies, offering examples of ways in which reflexivity, transtextuality and metaphor take on a poetic function (following both Jakobson's and the

Russian Formalist sense of the term) in shaping the poetic film.

Reflexivity, Self-Reference, and the Poetic Function

There are many names for what will here be called reflexivity.44 Self- referentiality, self-reflexivity, self-consciousness, and metafictionality (and other uses of the prefix "meta-") are all terms that have been employed to describe art that acknowledges its own status as a work of art. In his book Reflexivity in Film and Literature, Stam contrasts reflexive art with illusionist art, or art that obscures its "status as representation" (1). For Stam, reflexivity "points to its own mask and invites the public to examine its design and texture" as "Reflexive works break with art as enchantment and call attention to their own factitiousness as textual constructs" {Reflexivity 1). The first three chapters of Stam's book break down the reflexive mode into the basic means of art's engagement with itself,

I choose the term reflexivity because the word suggests broader possibilities than other terms. Reflexivity evokes not only reflection, in both the senses of contemplation on and the mirror image of, but also the many definitions of the word reflex that include the ability to turn, fold, or bend back, a glance or sideways look, the reflection of light, and a return ("Reflex," Def. la, 2a, 2b, 3a, 3b, 4, 5, 7). All these various meanings seem particularly appropriate to keep in mind when considering reflexivity in poetic film.

175 which can be summarized as concerns of reception and consumption, concerns of

production, and transtextual concerns. Reflexive works can highlight concerns of

reception and consumption, drawing attention to the audience of the work,

whether as reader or spectator, imagined or real. In acknowledging its audience

as receivers or consumers, Stam says, "Anti-illusionistic art reminds us of our

necessary complicity in artistic illusion" {Reflexivity 35). Reflexive works also

"foreground ... the institutional practices involved in their own production

{Reflexivity 73). This sense of reflexive foregrounding resembles the Russian

Formalist notion of "baring the device." As Kristin Thompson (drawing on

Victor Shklovsky's work) explains, "baring the device" in film involves instances

in which "artistic motivation foregrounds the formal function of a given device or

structure in the work .... to help cue spectators as to how to adjust their viewing

skills to cope with the new and difficult devices in use" {Breaking the Glass

Armor 20).

Stam identifies three ways in which reflexivity in films can draw attention

to production: they can "explore the filmmaking milieu"; they can "expose the

actual processes of film production"; and they can "flaunt their artifice through

calling attention to filmic techniques" (77). To these one could add a fourth

means of reflexively emphasizing production - reflexive works can reveal their

own materiality, the physical materials involved in their production. With regards

to film this could be accomplished by revealing the celluloid on which images are printed or acknowledging that these images are in fact light projected on a screen.

176 Finally, Stam looks to Genette's theory of transtextuality to describe those reflexive practices that underscore the textuality of the works themselves.

Transtextuality, as Stam reminds, involves more than just intertextual connections; rather, it encompasses five other types of textual relations: paratextuality, metatextuality, architextuality, and hypertextuality, as explained in chapter one of this dissertation {Reflexivity 23-26). As reflexive strategies, each form of transtextuality offers different approaches to accentuating the work as text. In the third chapter of Reflexivity in Film and Literature, Stam explores a few of these transtexual possibilities, such as the intertextuality and hypertextuality of parody and adaptation, the paratextual use of titles and intertitles, and the metatextual incorporation of criticism.

Stam also notes that considering reflexive films requires paying attention to "the specifically cinematic dimensions of reflexivity" {Reflexivity 255). This involves addressing the reflexive potential of perspective, colour, movement, editing, and sound {Reflexivity 255-266). To this list, one could add other reflexive elements specific to cinema: the environment and conditions in which spectators view films, in a movie theatre with light projected on a screen; the materiality of film itself, as mentioned above; and the various contexts of production, whether of the Hollywood-studio variety, or independent or amateur filmmaking.

Whereas Stam speaks of reflexivity in film broadly, Bill Nichols, in his book Representing Reality, focuses on reflexivity in documentary films.

According to Nichols, the reflexive documentary is a particular mode of

177 documentary filmmaking, distinguishable from other documentary modes such as the expository, observational and interactive modes. Reflexive documentaries,

Nichols notes, are identifiable from other modes because, "Whereas the great preponderance of documentary production concerns itself with talking about the historical world, the reflexive mode addresses the question of how we talk about the historical world" (56). Unlike the illusionism that Stam places in opposition to reflexive films (though certainly related to it) Nichols contrasts the reflexive mode of documentary with the realism involved in other documentary modes:

Realism provides unproblematic access to the world through traditional

physical representation and the untroubled transference of psychological

states from character to viewer (by means of acting style, narrative

structure, and cinematic techniques such as point-of-view shots).

Reflexive documentaries will employ such techniques only to interrupt

and expose them. (57)

Nichols further divides this reflexive mode into two forms: political reflexivity and formal reflexivity. Political reflexivity, Nichols suggests, is a product of the content of the documentary, and its ability to alter or increase the viewer's awareness and understanding of political issues (69). The reflexivity of this form of documentary, therefore, is a result of rhetoric and argument. Formal reflexivity, on the other hand, comes from the reflexive manipulation of form and style.

Nichols breaks down the category of formal reflexivity into five sub­ categories, but for this discussion the most useful of these categories is stylistic

178 reflexivity. For Nichols, stylistic reflexivity appears in documentaries that

"introduce gaps, reversals, and unexpected turns that draw attention to the work of style as such and place the obsession with illusionism in brackets" (Nichols 70).

Nichols further divides stylistic reflexivity into two extreme forms. First, poetic or essayistic documentaries, which " draw attention to their own patterns so consistently ... loosening the linkage to a historical referent in favor of more internally generated foci such as color, tonality, composition, depth of focus, rhythm, or the personalized sensibilities and perceptions of the author"; and second the more purely stylistically reflexive documentaries, "those works that provide a metacommentary on method and procedure while remaining within a realist, as opposed to poetic sensibility" (Nichols 70). While the lines between categories in Nichols taxonomy of formal reflexivities at times seem to blur, they all share a quality of prompting the viewer "to a heightened consciousness of his or her relation to the text and of the text's problematic relationship to that which it represents" (Nichols 60).

Nichols's account of reflexive documentary is not only useful for its taxonomical descriptions; it is also interesting in the way it contrasts reflexivity with the poetic. On the one hand, Nichols notes the similarities between reflexivity and what he calls poetic exposition, as in both forms "the focus of the text slides from the realm of historical reference to the properties of the text itself

(57). Further, Nichols attributes a productive and disruptive quality, linked to

Brechtian alienation, to both poetic and reflexive texts, saying, "Like poetry, reflexive strategies remove the encrustations of habit" (67). Yet, on the other

179 hand, Nichols claims very different functions for these two forms, saying, "Poetic exposition draws attention to the pleasures of form, reflexivity to its problems"

(57). Nichols denies the possibility of a critical valence to poetic texts, suggesting

"Reflexive texts are self-conscious not only about form and style, as poetic ones are, but also about strategy, structure, conventions, expectations, and effects"

(57). If this distinction seems severe, especially given Nichols's inclusion of poetic documentary as an extreme form of stylistic reflexivity, it is perhaps a product of Nichols's desire to defend documentary from accusations that it is simply another form of fiction, constructed like any other, as mentioned in the previous chapter (107-108).

By placing emphasis on the critical capacity of the reflexive mode against the formal play of poetic texts in an attempt to distance reflexive documentary from the realm of fiction, Nichols deemphasizes the potential of reflexive critique inherent in poetic play. Indeed, while Stam proposes that there are three dominant modes of reflexivity - the ludic, or "playful self-referentiality," the aggressive, typical of "modernist dehumanization," and the didactic, as in

Brechtian materialism - he makes clear that these modes generally mix and intersect in reflexive texts {Reflexivity xii). In fact, rather than being an extreme form of reflexivity that lacks critical force, the poetic could be seen as the mode in which these three features of reflexivity blend most readily.

Another approach to discerning the place of reflexivity in the poetic mode is to recall Roman Jakobson's poetic function. One of six functions of language

(the others being the referential, emotive, conative, phatic, and metalingual

180 functions) that negotiate the communicative interactions between addresser, addressee, and message, Jakobson's poetic function speaks to the reflexivity of the poetic. According to Jakobson, the poetic function is the "focus on the message for its own sake" ("Closing Statement" 356). This focus amounts to a foregrounding of the utterance, which, as Jonathan Culler says, "may be accomplished in various ways, including the use of deviant or ungrammatical constructions" and "the use of highly patterned language" {Structuralist Poetics

65-66). It is this tendency towards patterning, such as that of rhyme, alliteration, and other poetic figures, that leads Jakobson to say, "The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination" ("Closing Statement" 358). The reflexivity of the poetic function, then, is inherent in its emphasis on message itself through the paradigmatic shift that results from poetic patterning.

Nevertheless, Jakobson stresses that the poetic function is not exclusive to poetry, nor should poetry be considered simply in terms of the poetic function

("Closing Statement" 357). On the one hand, the poetic function is as pertinent to poetry as it is to common speech, especially in phrases such as "I like Ike"

(Jakobson "Closing Statement" 357). On the other hand, Jakobson notes that the

"particularities of diverse poetic genres imply a differently ranked participation of the other verbal functions, along with the dominant poetic function," ("Closing

Statement" 357) with, for example, epic poetry tending towards the referential function and lyric poetry making use of the emotive function. But ultimately, the poetic function serves as a means to analyze poetry, since, as Culler says,

181 "Patterns formed by the repetition of similar items will be both more common and more noticeable in poetry than in other kinds of language" {Structuralist 66).

How might the poetic function be used to analyze poetry? As Culler points out, Jakobson's use of the poetic function as a tool of analysis relies on discovering linguistic patterns of grammatical or phonological symmetries

{Structuralist 67-69). Culler takes issue with this approach, noting,

Jakobson's assertion of the relevance of various patterns is undermined

first of all by the fact that the presence or absence of a given pattern seems

often to depend upon factors ... which bear little relation to the effect of

the poem and, second, by the fact that linguistic categories are so

numerous and flexible that one can use them to find evidence for

practically any form of organization. {Structuralist 72)

But Culler does not rule out the potential of the poetic function as an analytical tool, suggesting that freeing Jakobson's approach from a slavish focus on linguistics allows one to understand that "one has an instance of the poetic function only when one can point to effects which might be explained as the result of particular projections of the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination" {Structuralist 11). While grammatical and phonological structures may play a part in this analysis, for Culler the central question of the poetic function concerns the effects of patterning, whether linguistically based or otherwise {Structuralist 83-84). Culler's reassessment of

Jakobson's theory thus permits one to extend the poetic function beyond the

182 language-based confines of print literature to include other poetic forms, such as poetic film.

As it concerns reflexivity, especially in poetic film, the poetic function is useful in two related ways. First, it proposes the 'poeticalness' of the reflexive turn, the focus on the message itself and for its own sake. If for Jakobson one can see the poetic function's focus on the message in the grammatical and phonological elements of a poem, then one can also see the poetic function in reflexive gestures toward the materiality, reception, and processes of production of film. Second, the paradigmatic patterning that results from the poetic function recalls the stylistic patterning of parametric narration and narrative poeticization discussed in the previous chapter. Yet, one must remember that Jakobson's approach to poetic language, rooted in Saussurean linguistics, can best be thought of as a metaphor for thinking of a poetic function in poetic film. The leap from spoken and written language to filmic discourse requires an intellectual jump, one based on a metaphoric understanding of the relation between these two iterations of 'poetic' Rather than looking for grammatical or phonological patterns, exploring the poetic function in film involves looking at stylistic patterning that reflexively calls attention to editing, mise-en-scene, or other filmic techniques, as well as reflexive discursive strategies, whether narrative or non-narrative. But, following Culler, an analysis of the poetic function in film cannot simply trace such patterns, but must consider the effect of such reflexivity. As Jakobson says, with the poetic function "poeticalness is not a supplementation of discourse with rhetorical adornment but a total re-evaluation of the discourse and of all its

183 components whatsoever" ("Closing Statement" 377). And it is in this sense that

the poeticalness of reflexivity, with its re-organizing and re-structuring and

motivating potential, helps define poetic discourse in film.

To consider the poetic function another way, one could look back to the

Russian Formalist roots of Jakobson's theories and forward to Kristin

Thompson's reworking of formalist theory in her neoformalist film analyses.

Doing so involves thinking of reflexivity as a series of devices. Devices in film,

as Thompson defines them based on formalist definitions, are "any single element

or structure that plays a role in the artwork - a camera movement, a frame story, a repeated word, a costume, a theme, and so on" {Breaking 15). Devices perform

functions, or "the purpose[s] served by the presence of any given device"

(Thompson Breaking 15).

Reflexive devices can be applied to various functions, and thus the poetic can be considered one such function. In turn, each device has a motivation or

"cue given by the work that prompts us to decide what could justify the inclusion

of the device" and all motivations "operate as an interaction between the work's

structure and the spectator's activity" (Thompson Breaking 16). Thompson identifies four basic types of motivation: compositional, realistic, transtextual, and

artistic {Breaking 16). Compositional motivation, as Thompson describes it, might be better termed narrative motivation, as it "justifies the inclusion of any device that is necessary for the construction of narrative causality, space, or time"

{Breaking 16). Realistic motivation simultaneously works to "appeal to notions of the real world to justify the presence of the device" and to "appeal to ideas

184 about reality," namely conventions of realism in a particular period (Thompson

Breaking 16-17). Transtextual motivation, Thompson says, "involves any appeal to conventions of other artworks" and "depends on our recognition of the device from past experience" {Breaking 18). Finally, artistic motivation involves emphasis on the strictly or predominantly formal or aesthetic qualities of an artwork, which Thompson sees in the foregrounding of stylistic devices in parametric films {Breaking 19). Moreover, Thompson identifies the formalist notion of "baring the device" with artistic motivation, as in "the baring of the device .... artistic motivation foregrounds the formal function of a given device or structure in the work" {Breaking 20). Based on Thompson's account of devices and their motivations, one can see how reflexive devices can be said to perform poetic functions in their emphasis on transtextual and most importantly artistic motivations.

The poetic function of reflexive devices, then, entails deemphasizing or eliminating either or both narrative compositional and realistic motivations in favour of transtextual and artistic motivations. Although Thompson suggests that all artworks have artistic motivations in addition to compositional, realistic, and/or transtextual motivations {Breaking 20), as in the previous chapter those works such as parametric films or films that engage in poetic narrativization foreground artistic motivation at the expense of other motivating factors.

Moreover, transtextual motivation can work alongside artistic motivation. In displacing narrative and realistic motivations, transtextually and artistically

185 motivated devices perform a defamiliarizing function that can be associated with the poetic.

Drawing on Shklovsky's theories, Thompson describes the Formalist notion of defamiliarization as the process through which art "makes strange"

everyday or "habitual" perception by altering, transforming, and/or recontextualizing it (Breaking 10-11). As Shklovsky says, "The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar,' to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty

and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in

itself and must be prolonged" (12). Defamiliarization, according to Thompson, is

a facet of all art, but "its means and degree will vary considerably and the

defamiliarizing powers of a single work will change over history" (Breaking 11).

And Shklovsky suggests poetry is an art form that tends to defamiliarize most readily and effectively (22). The section that follows will consider how reflexivity in three films defamiliarizes these works and serves a poetic function that organizes and structures the films, creating and exploring poetic associations.

Three Reflexivities: Primiti Too Taa, Mothlight and Man with a Movie Camera

Three examples will help clarify how one can identify reflexivity as

contributing to the poeticization of a film. The first two films, Ed Ackerman and

Colin Morton's animated short Primiti Too Taa and Stan Brakhage's Mothlight

offer evidence of the poetic function as a reflexive 'focus on the message' in film.

The third example returns to Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera to show the

reflexivity of stylistic patterning and the defamiliarizing potential of the poetic

film.

186 Primiti Too Taa offers an appropriate starting point for considering the reflexivity of the poetic film in light of Stam, Nichols, and Jakobson, and the

Russian Formalists's arguments because it is an adaptation of an already highly reflexive poem, German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters's sound poem "Ursonate." In

Primiti Too Taa, word-fragments, what Schwitters called "Merz," and letters typed on a typewriter are animated along with a vocal performance of

Schwitters's poetry, read by poet Colin Morton (Ackerman 36). The animation of the Merz acts in concert with the vocal performance, reflecting the intonation, inflection or sounds of the spoken Merz in their movements. This combination of both aural and visual Merz creates a sort of onomatopoeia of images. For instance, Merz such as "Juu-Kaa?" arc across the screen with a tail of'a's, finally settling with a question mark in a way that visually mimics the inquisitive inflection with which the Merz sounds. Similarly, the Merz "bee bo" begins as an animated, insect-like "bee" that multiplies into a swarming field of'e's, filling the screen only to be interrupted by a short, explosive "bo."

The reflexivity of Primiti Too Taa comes from this interplay of sound and image. While Schwitters draws on the materiality of language in crafting his

Merz sound poems, Primiti Too Taa adds the filmic elements of moving images along with synchronized sound to Schwitters's existing linguistic reflexivity. The first element, the movement of the animated word-fragments, presents two of the reflexive possibilities of film. First, the film emphasizes the Merz as a product of animation, with its sometimes 'jumpy' transitions from one frame to the next.

Second, the film foregrounds the materials of this animation, namely typed pages,

187 with the grain of the paper and the indentations made by the typewriter clearly

visible. The second reflexive element of Primiti Too Taa involves the interaction

of sound and image. The humour of the film, its driving force, is a product of the

interplay of the animated Merz and their spoken counterparts. There is a

correspondence between the images and the sounds such that the animated word-

fragments seem to move in certain ways because of the sounds they make. The

"kwiiiee" ripples like a wave because the intonation of the "iiiee" raises each

letter up as the Merz is spoken. The 'r's of "Dedesnn nn rrrrr" shake as they

growl. In this way, Primiti Too Taa reflexively plays on both the arbitrariness of

language, as written language here becomes motivated by spoken language, and

the connection between sound and image in film, as the film inverts the sense that

sound comes from the image.45

Whereas the reflexivity of Primiti Too Taa plays off of the poetic function

of language within a filmic context, Brakhage's Mothlight highlights a

specifically filmic reflexivity, emphasizing the very celluloid on which films

exist. Made by affixing moth wings, grass, flower petals, and other organic material onto perforated tape that was then printed onto 16mm film (Camper

"About the films" n.p.), the collage effect of Mothlight draws attention to the physical materiality of the film strip itself.46 Fred Camper notes that one of the effects of this process is to make the divisions of the film frames more noticeable

John Belton, in his essay "Technology and Aesthetics of Film Sound," argues that at the heart of Hollywood sound mixing is an attempt to create the impression that sound in film comes from the images themselves (393). 46 See also Brakhage's own account of making Mothlight in a letter to Robert Kelly from "Respond Dance" in Film Culture Reader.

188 to the naked eye: "Because film projection divides the strip into individual still frames, the viewer of Mothlight sees actual moth wings while also perceiving how film projection works" ("About the films" n.p.). This effect is quite literally a matter of baring the device. Similarly, the flicker effect of film also becomes conspicuous in Mothlight, making the viewer more aware of the ways in which the film image is simultaneously projected and interrupted. Mothlight encourages its viewers to see the viewing of film differently. Brakhage's own description of the film furthers this observation, as he describes Mothlight as "What a moth might see from birth to death if black were white and white were black"

("Selected Film Annotations" 221). In this way, Mothlight provokes the very

'seeing as' of reflexivity.

Yet Mothlight takes this material reflexivity one step further. P. Adams

Sitney observes that the method Brakhage employs in Mothlight involves "The passing of light through, rather than reflecting off, the plants and moth wings"

{Visionary Film 174). In this way Mothlight is the perfect marriage of form and content; the moth wings and other debris are not only the subject or 'content' of the film, but they become the film itself, its very form. This organic matter stands in place of the photographic images developed on celluloid film through which light passes. The debris is at once the physical material of the film and the images the film projects in a way that may be true of other films (the images on the

189 screen of course are the images on the film strip), but which a viewer rarely

experiences as completely as with Mothlight.47

While the reflexivity of Primiti Too Taa and Mothlight reveals their

filmic materiality and points to aspects of their production, few films present as

total a reflexive strategy as Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera, which engages

with the production, reception and materiality of film. Accounts of Vertov's

reflexive practice in Man with a Movie Camera are numerous and rigorous.

Vlada Petric, for instance, offers a short but thorough list of reflexive elements in

Vertov's film:

the motion picture as perceived by the viewer; the motion picture

projected on the screen and simultaneously recorded by the camera ... the

'freeze-frame'; the film frame as part of the material (footage) handled by

the Editor; the actual film moving through the editing table; and the film

posters recorded by the movie camera and subsequently projected on the

screen. {Constructivism in Film 84)

While a film such as Man Ray's Le retour a la raison is similar in the reflexive attention it pays to the materiality of film, in this regard it does not go as far as Mothlight. Brakhage's method of gluing material onto editing tape is similar to Man Ray's method of placing objects onto film stock and exposing it to light, but the difference lies in the fact that Man Ray's film is ultimately made up of photographic images, while Brakhage's film is literally made up of the matter he attached to the tape. This distinction is undercut somewhat, however, by the fact that tape was then printed onto 16mm film, a photographic process, but I believe that difference remains apparent and significant. 48 Most notable among these studies is Vlada Petric's book Constructivism in Film, which includes a shot-by-shot account of Man with a Movie Camera. Other works that deal extensively with reflexivity in Vertov's film include Annette Michelson's essay "From Magician to Epistemologist" and Seth Feldman's essay '"Peace between Man and Machine': Dziga Vertov's The Man with a Movie Camera''' and Jeremy Hicks's book Dziga Vertov: Defining Documentary Film.

190 Annette Michelson provides a further list of Vertov's reflexive strategies,

including emphasis on the screen as surface, the use of animation techniques, the use of slow-motion and reverse-motion, super-imposition, split screens and other

distortions and abstractions of the image ("From Magician to Epistemologist"

108-110). For the purposes of this chapter, however, it is useful to explore a few

specific instances of reflexivity in the film in detail. The first and most recurrent reflexive strategy Vertov employs involves the act of filming itself. As its title

suggests, the film focuses on a cameraman, a man with a movie camera, traveling

around city streets filming the urban environment. The cameraman's exploits, as the central character in the film (if he can be called a character)49, become the

structuring device of the film, as the images of the film are presented as 'that which the cameraman has filmed.' In this regard the first degree of this reflexivity of production calls attention to the film as a film because it shows the

filmmaker filming. This sense of the film as documenting film production, however, also suggests a second degree of reflexivity, as each shot of the

cameraman filming also points to the fact that someone is filming the cameraman.

Taking this reflexive figuring of the act of filming further, there are shots throughout the film that seem to correspond to what the cameraman has been

filmed filming. One definite example, in which there is near proof that shots of both the cameraman and what he has filmed appear in close succession occur

during the parallel editing sequence of the motorcyclists and the people on the

Of course, one might also consider the city that the cameraman films to be equally central as a 'character,' in keeping with the city film genre.

191 merry-go-round. This example begins with a shot of a woman sitting on a carousel horse, wearing a patterned dress and eating a carnival snack.51

Following this shot is a very brief, blurred shot of the crowd gathered around the merry-go-round taken from on the ride. There is a cut back to the woman, this time leaning on an adjacent horse. Then there are two more cuts between the blurred crowd and the woman on the horse. After more shots of motorcyclists and the carousel, there is a shot taken from ground level looking up at the merry- go-round and showing the cameraman filming the woman eating, followed by a shot of another woman doing the high jump, and then another shot of the cameraman filming the woman on the ride. This example is a rare instance in the film that can almost positively be said to show both the cameraman filming and the exact footage he has filmed,54 since during the second shot of the woman on the horse one can make out the camera on the ground level in the background which is in the act of filming the cameraman as he appears in the later shot. This series of shots adds another level to this reflexivity of production, as it shows not only the cameraman filming, but allows the viewer to retrospectively recognize earlier shots as the footage the cameraman has been filmed filming. Here the image of the cameraman filming and the footage he shoots appear in relative

Other examples of footage that can be said to correspond to shots of the cameraman filming include images shot from under a train and shots of traffic signals and a police officer. These shots, however, cannot be as precisely matched as the merry-go-round example. 51 See Fig. 3. 52 See Fig. 4. 53 See Fig. 5. 54 See Fig. 6. Notice the blurred figure with what is most certainly a movie camera that I have circled in the bottom right-hand side of the frame.

192 proximity, but notably the film presents the viewer with the footage first and then

the cameraman himself.

A more obvious but also more significant instance of the reflexive

association of the cameraman and the images he films involves a literal reflection.

In a shot that elides both filming and filmed, the cameraman films his reflection in

a shop window. In this moment, the cameraman not only draws attention to himself as the 'man with a movie camera,' but also addresses the cameraman as a

subject of his own filming. This reflexive gesture also has a lyrical valence, as it

inserts the cameraman's subjectivity as an "I" who films, one which, as will be

discussed below, is also an "eye" that films.

Along with the physical presence of the cameraman, the acknowledgement

of the act of filming by subjects being filmed offers a further example of reflexivity at the level of production. Throughout the film there are instances of individuals interacting with the camera. The young man in the park who awakens to being filmed and smiles and laughs at the camera, or the woman who covers her face at the divorce office are two examples of the presence of the camera producing specific reactions. But one of the more stunning examples of this kind of reflexive awareness occurs during the sequence where the cameraman films

families driving in cars and carriages. In one shot, a woman playfully pantomimes the hand-crank motion of operating the movie camera. In mimicking the cameraman this woman not only calls attention to the act of filming but also the physical actions required to make filming possible. While Petric acknowledge that these returned-looks break with the Kino-Eye principles of capturing "Life-

193 As-It-Is" and "Life-Caught Unawares," he notes that these reflexive turns also serve to make the audience "'aware' of both the 'life-fact' as it occurs in reality and of how such a 'fact' is modified when the 'subjects' become aware of the rolling camera" {Constructivism 82).55 But most importantly, the interactions between the camera and filmed subjects in the film also literally show instances of the subject looking back and reflecting the camera's gaze.

Another sequence in Man with a Movie Camera reflexively works to highlight both film's production and materiality. As the sequence with the cameraman riding on a car filming passing cars and carriages progresses, the image of a galloping horse is frozen suddenly, halting its motion. This still image is followed by a series of still images, some recognizable as frames from shots previously in motion. Then there is a shot of a piece of film, showing successive frames of a little girl, with the sprockets of the film clearly visible. The sequence continues, showing more images of film stock before proceeding to show a film editor (Vertov's wife Elizaveta Svilova) examining, sorting, and editing footage.

The film reflexively demonstrates how the editor's actions culminate in the still images achieving movement. For example, a shot of the editor at work is followed by a shot of film with frames of a young boy laughing, which is in turn follow by the same image 'come to life.' This pattern is repeated, each time

55 Feldman also comments that moments such as these subvert the sense of "Life caught unawares" that is central to Vertov's "commitment to the observational activities of cinema" (47). But as Feldman notes, "Life caught unawares" is less about voyeuristic observation than it is about "an agreement between the director and his subject that the camera has a right to be anywhere" (47). It also suggests the evolution of Vertov's theories between the making of Kino-Eye (also known as Life Caught Unawares) and Man with a Movie Camera, especially in the emphasis on reflexivity.

194 emphasizing not only the work of the editor but also the materiality of the film stock and the fact that the appearance of movement in film is based on a succession of still images. Furthermore, as Feldman says, this sequence reminds the viewer that images of the film "are not only taken from real life but that they are identified as images, the building blocks of montage" (48-49). In this sense, the materiality of the sequence is two-fold: on the one hand the materiality of the physical filmstrip, and on the other the image as the material through which the film takes its form. The editing sequence thus reflexively ties production and materiality together.

The third dimension of reflexivity in Man with a Movie Camera concerns reception. The film is framed by two sequences that situate the rest of the film within the context of the cinema-going experience. The first section of this frame occurs near the beginning of the film as the cameraman walks behind a curtain.

Subsequent shots reveal the movie-theatre environment, with its seats, lodges, lights, and finally the projector. As this sequence progresses, a projectionist readies a film in the projector, the seats magically lower themselves, the audience arrives, and the orchestra begins to play as light emerges from the projector. The second section of the frame, which closes the film, returns to the movie theatre setting, in which an audience watches a film. This sequence begins by alternating between images of a movie camera and tripod come to life through animation and images of the spectators in the audience reacting to what they see on screen.

Throughout this sequence the film alternates between full-screen images germane to or repeating the film's earlier content, shots of the audience watching and

195 reacting to these images, and shots of the screen in the movie-theatre displaying

images that were previously presented full-screen. The first instance of this

shows abstract lines vacillating and taking up the entire image. In the next shot these lines are shown to be onscreen within the diegetic world of the film. Such

shifts between the viewing experiences within the film and those outside of the

film create a mise-en-abyme that aligns the viewer with her onscreen

counterparts. In shots that feature the audience looking at the screen, the onscreen viewers look back at the viewer in the 'real-world.'

The reception frame also accords with the reflexive responses of individuals being filmed and other sequences that offer images of spectatorship, notably the children who watch the street-magician. The act of viewing then becomes a reflexive activity, one that encourages the viewer to consider critically their position as spectators and, more importantly, the correspondences and divergences between human perception and the cinematic apparatus. This in turn ties the reflexive focus on production and materiality to concerns of reception and

spectatorship. It is in the image of the human eye superimposed over the movie

camera lens - the images of the Kino-Eye - that this tension of exchange and disparity points to the theoretical basis for Vertov's reflexive strategies and their poetic implications.

The Kino-Eye is both a metaphoric image that proposes a new form of perception, and a reflexive strategy that produces poetic connections. Throughout his critical writings, Vertov describes the Kino-Eye in various ways, but a brief selection of them can illustrate the theories at the heart of the eye-camera image:

196 Kino-eye means the conquest of space, the visual linkage of people

throughout the entire world based on the continuous exchange of visible

fact.... Kino-eye means the conquest of time (the visual linkage of

phenomena separated in time). Kino-eye is the possibility of seeing life

processes in any temporal order or at any speed inaccessible to the human

eye .... Kino-eye uses every possible means in montage, comparing and

linking all points of the universe in any temporal order .... to organize the

film pieces wrested from life into a meaningful rhythmic visual order, a

meaningful visual phrase, an essence of 'I see.' (87-88)

Vertov's comments suggest that the Kino-Eye implies more than a merging of

human and camera perception, but entails a range of poetic procedures -

exchanges, linkages, and comparisons - accomplished through cinematic means

deployed reflexively. But whether one considers the Kino-Eye as an image of radical perception or as a non-narrative organizational strategy, it underscores the poetic motivation of the reflexivity in Man with a Movie Camera.

One can begin by considering the Kino-Eye as an image of improved and transformed perception. The Kino-Eye transcends the limitations of human perception and, as Vertov says, "lives and moves in time and space; it gathers and records impressions in a manner wholly different from that of the human eye"

(15). The Kino-Eye allows for visual experiences such as those of slow motion photography or the extreme close-up that would otherwise be unattainable with conventional sight. As Annette Michelson suggests, the Kino-Eye and Man with a Movie Camera in general, proposes an epistemological shift, one that involves

197 seeing not only the world, but also cinema itself differently ("From Magician to

Epistemologist" 108). But as Gilles Deleuze makes clear, the Kino-Eye is not simply an improvement on the human with the aid of the camera, nor is it only the mechanically enhanced vision offered by the camera; rather, "it is montage. And if from the point of view of the human eye, montage is undoubtedly a construction, from the point of view of another eye ... it is the pure vision of a non-human eye, of an eye which would be in things" (Cinema 7 81). Not only does Deleuze imply that the Kino-Eye encompasses more than a metaphor of cinematic perception, but it also incorporates the cinematic organization involved in montage. The 'thing-ness' of the Kino-Eye perception that Deleuze hints at involves the dialectical interaction of images. According to Deleuze, in Vertov's theory of montage the cut, the interval "no longer marks a gap which is carved out, a distancing between two consecutive images but, on the contrary, a correlation of two images which are distant (and incommensurable from the viewpoint of our human perception)" (Cinema 1 82). Montage, then, becomes a part of the Kino-Eye's reinvention of perception, along with the other 'ways of seeing,' from slow and reverse motion to superimposition, afforded by the camera.

At the roots of Vertov's theories of the Kino-Eye and his reflexive approach in Man with a Movie Camera is a desire to engage in a poetic filmmaking practice. In fact, Vertov's methods are aligned closely to both the reflexive poetic practices of Russian Futurist and Constructivist poets and the poetic theories of reflexivity and defamiliarization of Russian Formalist critics.

198 Petric carefully traces the influence of futurism, constructivism and formalism on

Vertov's theories and filmmaking, placing particular emphasis on Vertov's connection to and affinity with the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. In addition to their friendship, Petric details the influence of Mayakovsky's poetry, with its foregrounding of rhythmic structure and its reflexive fracturing of words, on

Vertov's practice {Constructivism 25-29). Both Mayakovsky and Vertov, Petric observes, "used innovative 'communicative structures,' whether in words or images, to transpose the 'life-facts' into a new vision of external reality that corresponds to their subjective perception" {Constructivism 29). In his notebooks,

Vertov makes this connection even clearer, calling his own work "poetic documentary" and "film poetry" in relation to Mayakovsky's poetry (183).

Similarly, Petric also points to the "self-referential" constructivist photomontage and the reflexive theories of formalists like Shklovsky as further influences on the poetic underpinnings of Vertov's films (10-11). In each case, these influences offered Vertov inspiration for his theories and practices - ways of approaching filmmaking founded on poetic rather than narrative principles.

The ubiquitous reflexivity of Man with a Movie Camera, then, makes the film poetic. Given Vertov's resistance to narrative film, which he professes in his

"We" manifesto {Kino-Eye 5-7), it is no wonder that the poetic linkages of the reflexive Kino-Eye drive the film. Man with a Movie Camera frequently

Man with a Movie Camera even defies its 'genre,' the city symphony in the vein of Walter Ruttmann's Berlin, at once playing with and undermining the 'day in the life of a city' narrative structure the genre relies on. The patterning of shots that reintroduce visual themes from early in the film into later sequences disrupt the linearity of the city film genre.

199 engages in what Petric calls a "negation of narrative" {Constructivism 91), as the

film introduces and then unravels proto-narratives by way of poetic connections.

The Kino-Eye, encompassing all the film's reflexive procedures, becomes a

strategy of poetic organization and motivation. Kino-Eye montage does not

simply link or compare one shot to the next; rather, Vertov says:

The documents have been joined with one another so that, on the one

hand, the film would consist only of those linkages between signifying

pieces that coincide with the visual linkages and so that, on the other hand,

these linkages would not require intertitles; the final sum of all these

linkages represents, therefore an organic whole. (84)

Petric usefully labels Vertov's montage as "disruptive-associative montage," which he describes as an editing procedure in which

a sequence establishes its initial topic and develops its full potential

through an appropriate editing pace until a seemingly incongruous shot

(announcing a new topic) is intercut, foreshadowing another theme that,

although disconcerting at first glance, serves as a dialectical commentary

on the previously recorded event. The metaphorical linkage between two

disparate topics occurs through an associative process that take place in

the viewer's mind. {Constructivism 95)

Furthermore, Petric elaborates, the disruptive inserts "function retroactively"

{Constructivism 96); they comment not only on the sequences they interrupt but also on preceding and subsequent series. This approach builds broader, more

200 complex linkages that create poetic connections between large series of images, often not in direct succession but stretched throughout the film.

An example of this poetic strategy is the following sequence of shots: the opening of window shutters; the movie camera lens; an image of flowers coming into focus; window shutters closing and opening; rapid alternation between a woman's blinking eyes and the shutters opening and closing; the iris of the camera closing. Here the sequence suggests another instance of comparison between camera eye and human eye, as well as the mechanism of the window shutters, but the sequence also points to earlier and later connections. The flicker of both the woman's blinking eyes and the shutters resemble the flicker of the shot of the train passing overtop of the cameraman and the flicker of the shot from the train that is broken up by the insertion of black frames. Not only does this early sequence imply the interrupted perception of the blinking eyes and

'blinking' windows, foregrounding the flicker-effect of motion pictures, but there is also a graphic similarity between the horizontal tracks and the slats of the shutters. Along with later shots of airplanes emerging from hangers and trolleys coming out of garages adding a further sense of 'opening,' the linking of trains and vision tie human and mechanical perception to work, communication, and industry. Together, these disruptive-associative chains articulate what Feldman sees as one of Vertov's goals for the film, making "peace between man and machine" (42). Thus, these connections express an ideological position that involves not only a Futurist celebration of mechanization, but also a reconciling mechanical and human activity through labour and art, with the cinema uniting

201 the two (Feldman 42-43). Moreover, this sequence shatters the nascent

"mininarrative" (Petric Constructivism 91) of the waking woman, recasting the city-symphony convention of the 'waking city' as an awakening to new perception, one that unites man and machine, and labour and art.

This awakening of perception suggests the broader poetic strategy of

Vertov's disruptive-associate montage. One can think of Man with a Movie

Camera as a poetic meditation on the cinema, not only in terms of its documentary potential but its very essence. As a poetic meditation, the film brings together all the various implications of the 'seeing differently' implied by the

Kino-Eye, which, as Vertov says, "gathers and records impressions in a manner wholly different from that of the human eye" (15). Reflexivity, then, is the vehicle by which Vertov builds and rebuilds these linkages, at once drawing them back to the cinematic apparatus and extending them beyond it. The Kino-Eye not only 'speaks' of what it sees but also reminds the viewer how it sees and demands that the viewer look back, and consider what she sees and how she comes to see it.

Looking Back At Other Texts: Inter- and Hypertextuality in the Poetic Film

Chapters one and two of this dissertation have dealt with intertexruality and hypertextuality, united under Genette's term transtextuality, as contributing to the development of the poetic in poetic film. In chapter one, hypertextuality was offered as a means by which film adaptations of poetry could look back to and extend beyond their sources. Chapter two considered the potential for intertextual and hypertextual connections to disrupt narrative in the process of narrative

202 poeticization. Rather than revisit these possibilities for transtexruality, this chapter will consider how intertextuality and hypertextuality operate reflexively as further evidence of the poetic in poetic film. Like the reflexive strategies of

Primiti Too Taa, Mothlight and Man with a Movie Camera, transtexruality in poetic film involves a sense of 'looking back.' In the case of intertextuality and hypertextuality, however, this 'looking back' implies they ways in which poetic films 'look' to other texts to create, maintain, and elaborate poetic associations.

As mentioned in earlier chapters, intertextuality and hypertextuality are concepts that have largely emerged from the work of Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Julia

Kristeva, and Genette. While this chapter will not explore the complex and nuanced differences between these three theorists' conception of intertextual and hypertextual relationships, it is necessary to distinguish what might be particularly poetic about the deployment of such relationships in some films. To do so will require briefly comparing Bakhtin's dialogism, Kristeva's intertextuality and

Genette's transtexruality and (re)negotiating not only the distinctions between these theories but also how they may be applied.

One of the major stumbling blocks to considering intertextual and hypertextual connections as poetic can be found at the origins of these concepts in

Bakhtin's theories of dialogism. Bakhtin's description of dialogism is complex and involves a wide range of linguistic and metalinguistic contexts and interactions, but might be simply summarized as the interactions and relationships between utterances (including words, speech, and texts) within the context of discourse {Problems ofDostoevsky's Poetics 182-185; Holquist 426). Dialogism

203 functions by way of juxtapositions, counterpoint and interrelations between and within texts and utterances (Problems 182). Contributing to this notion of dialogism are the related phenomena of polyphony, or multi-voicedness, and heteroglossia, the condition in which meaning in a text or utterance is influenced by social, historical or other contextual forces (Holquist 428). For Bakhtin, dialogism is an attribute of the novel and novelistic prose that he defines in near opposition to poetry and poetic language. In his essay "Discourse in the Novel,"

Bakhtin describes poetry as lacking dialogic potential because "The world of poetry, no matter how many contradictions and insoluble conflicts the poet develops within in it, is always illumined by one unitary and indisputable discourse" (286). Whereas the novel is dialogic, poetry is ultimately monologic

(Miller 183).

Yet other critics have re-examined and recast Bakhtin's dialogism to include poetry and poetic language, not at the exclusion or devaluation of

Bakhtin's understanding of the dialogic in the novel, but as an extension of his theories. Paul Allen Miller, for instance, sees potential for viewing poetry as dialogic in the distinction between "primary dialogism''' and "secondary dialogism. According to Miller, primary dialogism is the "set of relations which governs the exchange of complete 'utterances' between individuals, social groups, and/or their fictional representatives" (184), which can be thought of as dialogue within a text or context, is generally excluded by poetry, whereas secondary dialogism, the "simultaneous response to past and anticipation of future utterances" (184), or the dialogue between texts, is most evident in written poetry

204 (195). Notably, Bakhtin himself does not entirely deny poetry and poetic language dialogic possibilities, acknowledging, "a certain latitude for heteroglossia exists only in the 'low' poetic genres - in the satiric and comic genres and others" ("Discourse in the Novel" 287).57 It is this potential for dialogism in poetry that Kristeva identifies in her adaptation of Bakhtin's theory into intertextuality and that has bearing on the intertextual reflexivity in the poetic film.

Kristeva's adaptation of dialogism into intertextuality both reframes and narrows Bakhtin's theory in a manner that is useful to this discussion of intertextuality in poetic film. In her essay "Word, Dialogue, and Novel," Kristeva defines intertextuality (based on Bakhtin's concepts dialogue and ambivalence) saying, "any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another" ("Word" 37).58 For Kristeva, intertextuality brings together the dynamics of "subject-addressee" in dialogue and "text-context" in ambivalence such that one can recognize that "each word

(text) is an intersection of words (texts) where at least one other word (text) can be read" ("Word" 37). Elsewhere Kristeva comments that intertextuality is not a

Matthew Roberts further emphasizes that Bakhtin's exclusion of poetry and poetic language from the dialogic is neither absolute nor consistent. In his response to Paul de Man's critique of "Discourse in the Novel" that deconstructs Bakhtin's rejection of poetry and tropes from the realm of the dialogic ("Dialogue and Dialogism" 110-112), Roberts claims that "Discourse in the Novel" presents a 'novel-centric' version of dialogism uncharacteristic of Bakhtin's other work on dialogism. 58 In her recent works Kristeva has elaborated on the concept of intertextuality, moving away from intertextuality as a "formal phenomenon" ("Nous" 8) towards a psychoanalytic understanding of the term. See her essay '"Nous Deux': or a (Hi)Story of Intertextuality" for a more recent summary of intertextuality and its origins.

205 'study of sources' but rather a matter of the "transposition of one (or several) sign-system(s) into another" ("Revolution" 111).

As Kristeva conceives of it, intertextuality is also characteristic of poetic language. Intertextuality reveals how poetic language is "read as at least double"

("Word" 37). Kristeva speaks of this double-ness of poetic language as a "0-2" sequence transcending the "0-1" sequence in which "one" stands for 'definition,'

'truth' and the monological limits of discourse ("Word" 40-41). The "0-2" sequence is already double, and can be thought of "in terms of one and other'''

("Word" 40) and suggests an "infinity of pairings and combinations" ("Word" 40) within "a continuity where 0 denotes and 1 is implicitly transgressed" ("Word"

41). With this "0-2" sequencing, then, one can think of poetic language as fundamentally based on one or more connections beyond referential meaning.

Furthermore, as Michael Riffaterre asserts (drawing from Kristeva), poetry is inherently intertextual because it plays off a double sense of a poem's meaning and "a detour or circuitous path around what it means" that comes from the fact that "the poem is made up of texts, of fragments of texts, integrated with or without conversion into a new system" (164). The intertextuality of poetry and poetic language, then, suggests the way in which association, linkage, and combination are not only inherent in poetic discourse but that their extensions and expansions are the basis for poetic discourse.

As a 'descendent' of Bakhtin's dialogism and Kristeva's intertextuality,

Genette's theories of transtextuality offer a taxonomical breakdown of dialogic and intertextual processes and relationships that align such textual procedures

206 with reflexivity. Transtextuality, as defined by Genette, refers to "the textual transcendence of the text... all that which puts one text in relation, whether manifest or secret, with other texts" {Palimpsests 1). The five types of transtextuality - intertextuality, paratextuality, metatextuality, architextuality, and hypertextuality59 - can be thought of as reflexive gestures. Not only do these procedures put texts into relation with one another, but by their very presence they also highlight their own textuality and, by extension, transtextuality. In this regard transtexrual procedures also convey a sense of reflexive 'double-ness' akin to that of poetic discourse. What distinguishes transtexrual procedures as particularly poetic in poetic films, therefore, are the ways in which transtextuality in such films becomes a motivating and structuring factor in discourse. While

Genette makes clear that all texts are transtexrual, in poetic films transtextuality

(especially intertextuality and hypertextuality) foreground this textual reflexivity as a dominant strategy for engaging in discourse.

Time-travelers and Text-travelers: Intertextuality in La Jetee

A prime example of this poetic deployment of transtextuality is Marker's

La Jetee. Although La Jetee is a strongly narrative film, its use of intertextual reference generates a poetic discourse that runs alongside its narrative discourse.

This poetic undercurrent challenges the film's story, and in this way La Jetee's intertextuality offers an entry point for a counter-reading of the film based on

59 See the discussion of these five transtexrual types in the first chapter of this dissertation for definitions of each type. It is perhaps most useful to think of Genette's separation of intertextuality and hypertextuality into two distinct categories as less a matter of departing from Kristeva's theory than of distinguishing between two types of transtexrual reference, one direct (intertextuality) and one indirect (hypertextuality) for taxonomical purposes.

207 reflexive connections rather than narrative progression. The opening titles and voice-over of La Jetee announce the film as "the story of a man marked by an image from his childhood," a phrase that at once sets up the film's narrative and suggests the film's concern with time, memory and their relation to images and cinema itself. But it is La Jetee's intertextual reference to Hitchcock's Vertigo that acts as a poetic nodal point, focusing the film's meditative undercurrent concerned with the relationship between cinema and memory. Just over mid-way through the film, the time-traveler protagonist and the woman he encounters in the past come upon a cross-section of a giant sequoia tree in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris; the voice-over narrates:

They look at the trunk of a sequoia tree covered with historical dates. She

pronounces an English name he doesn't understand. As in a dream, he

shows her a point beyond the tree, hears himself say, 'This is where I

come from.'

The intertextual re-enactment of Madeleine and Scotty's visit to Muir Woods is the catalyst for the film's poetic meditation. Elsewhere, when the time-traveler first encounters the woman of the past, she appears in an image of her profile that

Luc Lagier, in his program on La Jetee from the French television show Court-

Circuit, notes almost exactly matches the profile of Madeleine that first ensnares

Scotty {On Vertigo). By invoking Vertigo, La Jetee encourages the viewer to read Hitchcock's story of doomed love into and against Marker's own apocalyptic romance.

208 But in doing so, this intertextual reference also functions simultaneously as counter-narrative and anti-narrative. As a counter-narrative, the Vertigo intertext runs against the grain of La Jetee, with Madeleine's two deaths in

Vertigo contrasting the man's double presence at his own death in La Jetee.

Whereas in Vertigo Scotty witnesses the object of his desire fall to her death twice over, in La Jetee the protagonist both witnesses and experiences his own murder in a loop of time. As an anti-narrative, however, Vertigo's intertextual presence suggests a hypertextual rereading of La Jetee's time-travel narrative, one that involves poetic contemplation of the nature of cinematic representation and its manipulation of time. This hypertextual rereading of La Jetee through Vertigo at once looks back at Hitchcock's film and looks forward to Marker's later film Sans

Soleil and his article "A free replay (notes on Vertigo)." In La Jetee one can already see the interpretation of Vertigo that Marker crafts and perfects in Sans

Soleil and "A free replay." In Sans Soleil, Marker's surrogate Sandor Krasna speaks of Vertigo as the only film "capable of portraying impossible memory, insane memory." Similarly, Krasna characterizes the spiral that emerges from the eye in Vertigo's title sequence as the "spiral of time," itself echoed by the spiral of

Madeleine's hair and that in the portrait of Carlotta Valdez. This spiral, which

Marker says "cannot stop swallowing up the present and enlarging the contours of the past" ("A free replay" 129), when read into La Jetee becomes an image of memory. Vertigo, like the act of remembrance itself, is "about reliving a moment lost in the past, about bringing it back to life only to lose it again" (Marker "A

209 free replay" 129), an assessment that can be applied equally to La Jetee and its conceptualization of time-travel and/as memory.

La Jetee's meditation on the processes of memory makes up the poetic undercurrent that runs against the film's narrative flow. One line in the film betrays this undercurrent: "nothing tells memories from ordinary moments. Only afterwards do things claim remembrance on account of their scars." And yet, in this poetic reading of the film there appears to be a clear demarcation between memories and 'ordinary moments.' The still images that make up majority of the film carry with them the sense of 'past-ness' that Catherine Lupton suggests recalls Roland Barthes's distinction between the "having been there" of photographic images and the "being there" of cinematic images (Chris Marker

93). The stillness of the images frequently resonates with the ancient statues and stuffed museum animals that appear throughout the film, all equally fixed in time like the scars of memory. In this sense of 'already-past-ness,' the still images undermine the narrative present of the film's story, such that the images resemble fragments of memory. In fact, the only moment of the film that seems to exist in the 'present tense' is the brief flash of movement in which the woman opens her eyes at 24 frames per second. This moment, which according to the narrator is a moment in the past to which the protagonist travels back, exposes the present tense telling of narrative, revealing, as Eli Friedlander proposes, that the narrator

"covers the fragmentary nature of the images with continuity and order" (84) to suppress 'impossibility' and 'insanity' of this flow of memory. Time-travel, then, becomes less a narrative conceit than a meditation on memory.

210 The single moving image in La Jetee also re-inscribes Vertigo into the film, by aligning the film's poetic meditation on memory with a reflexive consideration of the cinematic apparatus. The contrast between the brief appearance of motion and the otherwise still images highlights the way in which cinematic movement is produced by the rapid succession of still images. This contrast further emphasizes the connection between the still images and memory, but also extending this connection along cinematic lines. As Lupton says, La

Jetee's still images "are like memories of a film, which in our mind seem to be motionless and quantifiable, but if we search through the print never exactly correspond to one individual frame, or to the frozen drama of production stills"

{Chris Marker 91). One can certainly read in this remark an affinity between memory and film itself - the fixed images that can be recalled or replayed but only approximate the moments they capture. Thus, Vertigo appears in the film not only as a narrative intertext, but as a 'memory of a film,' as the possibility of film as memory or the impossible memory of film that intertextually and hypertextually speaks to La Jetee's concern with time, memory and the cinema.

Further on, this chapter will consider the reflexive connections La Jetee sets up that take cinema as a metaphor for time and memory. But such a discussion requires that one first consider the role of metaphor in poetic film.

Seeing One As Another: Metaphor and the Poetic Film

Throughout this chapter, reflexive and transtextual relationships have been described as poetic by using words such as 'association,' 'linkage,' 'connection,' and 'correspondence.' If these terms have been used vaguely or interchangeably

211 at times, it is because they have been a temporary substitute for metaphor and its implications for understanding the poetic film. This section will consider metaphor not only as a figure or trope to be deployed in film, but rather as the means by which one can understand the structuring and organization of poetic film, and ultimately its mode of discourse. To begin with, this section will consider theories of filmic metaphor to illustrate how the concept of metaphor as trope has been applied to film. The figures in films that Christian Metz and Noel

Carroll identify as metaphoric will be the starting points for this discussion. Both

Metz and Caroll aim to identify specifically filmic figures that can be said to function metaphorically. Besides these semiotic and rhetorical views of metaphor as isolated filmic figures, however, one can consider metaphor in film semantically and hermeneutically as Paul Ricoeur does. Ricoeur's reappraisal of metaphor extends the form and function of metaphor beyond its strictly rhetorical and semiotic understandings, locating metaphor at the heart of poetic discourse as that which defines poetic discourse in distinction to other discursive modes.

Following Ricoeur, this section will consider how metaphor generates meaning, not just in single instances or moments, but through entire films, as in the example of Bunuel and Dali's Un Chien Andalou.

In his book The Imaginary Signifier, Metz considers the possible forms in which metaphor can appear in film, proposing what he calls "four main types of textual concatenation" (189). Metz bases his analysis of filmic metaphor on

Jakobson's comparison of the figures of metaphor and metonymy with the discursive divisions of paradigm and syntagm in discourse. Jakobson's

212 comparison parallels the principle of contiguity of the syntagmatic with the contiguity of metonymy and the principle of similarity of the paradigmatic with similarity involved in metaphor (Metz Imaginary Signifier 183-184). The difference between the two pairs, Metz notes, is a matter of the difference between the positional axis of the discursive chain, involving the paradigmatic and syntagmatic, and the semantic axis of the referent, involving metaphor and metonymy {Imaginary 184). Metz contends that while one should not confuse the comparison involved in metaphor with a paradigmatic comparison or the contiguity of metonymy with syntagmatic contiguity, there is often a relation between the two as they function in different aspects of discourse {Imaginary 184-

185). As Metz says, "What distinguishes paradigm-syntagm from metaphor- metonymy is the opposition between the internal laws of discourse and its real or imaginary effect of reference to something outside discourse, rather than between the order of position and that of meaning" {Imaginary 188). In the interest of clarity, Metz departs from Jakobson in his account of metaphor and metonymy in film, choosing the term "comparability" for the paradigmatic and metaphor and

"contiguity" for the syntagmatic and metonymy {Imaginary 188). Metz's four types of textual concatenation, then, concern the ways in which metaphor and metonymy are deployed along the discursive axes of the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic.

Metz defines his four types of textual concatenation in terms of combinations of comparability and contiguity under the categories of the referential and the discursive. The first type of concatenation is "Referential

213 comparability and discursive contiguity, that is, a metaphor presented

syntagmatically," in which there is an association made between two (usually

successive) elements or images in the discursive chain, as in, Metz suggests, the juxtaposition of images of sheep and a crowd at the beginning of Charlie

Chaplin's Modern Times {Imaginary 189). The second type of concatenation

concerns "Referential comparability and discursive comparability''' or the

paradigmatic presentation of metaphor, which Metz defines with the familiar

example of "images of flames in the place of a love scene" in which one image

replaces or acts as an alternative for and also evokes another {Imaginary 189).

Metz's third type, "Referential contiguity and discursive comparability''' in which

metonymy is presented paradigmatically, is similar in terms of one element

replacing another, but the basis for this replacement is one of "diegetic" rather

than referential continuity {Imaginary 190). As an example of this third type,

Metz offers the image of the Elsie's balloon caught in the telegraph lines from

Fritz Lang's M, since the balloon replaces the murdered child to whom it

belonged {Imaginary 190). ° Finally, Metz's fourth type, "Referential contiguity

and discursive contiguity''' or the syntagmatic presentation of metonymy,

associates two elements that appear together on screen with one another. For this

fourth type, Metz again uses the example of Elsie's balloon, this time referring to

images in which both Elsie and the balloon appear on screen at the same time.

While, in his terms, Metz's four types of textual concatenation do not all concern

60 Metz also points out that this image partakes of the second type of concatenation because the balloon itself, with its hand, feet and face, resembles Elsie: "there is something pathetic about it, as there is about her" {Imaginary 190).

214 metaphor directly or exclusively, they do suggest possible metaphoric figures in

film.61

Whereas Metz appeals to semiotics in crafting his four categories of film

metaphor, Carroll takes a more rhetorically influenced approach. In his essay "A

Note on Film Metaphor" from his book Theorizing the Moving Image, Carroll

offers another filmic figure, which he takes to be the "most straightforward type

of film metaphor," what he calls "composite figures" involving the

"homospatiality" of "non-compossible" elements (212-213). Carroll discusses

three examples of homospatial and non-compossible figures in depth, two of

ft"?

which employ superimposition while the third involves animation. For his first

example, Carroll cites the transformation of the underground machine into the

monster Moloch in Lang's Metropolis. In this image in which superimposition

brings together both elements, Carroll suggests, "The monster elements and the

machine elements are co-present - or homospatial - in the same figure.... the co-

present monster elements and machine elements interanimate in such a way that

we grasp the point of the image to be that the machine is Moloch, or, more broadly, that such modern factory machines are man-eating monsters" (212). The

second example, the camera-eye from Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera, is a

61 One could suggest that all four types are instances of metaphor, if one understands metonymy as a sub-category of metaphor, as in many theories of figuration. Trevor Whittock, in his book Metaphor and Film, for instance, classifies metonymy as a variant of metaphor (59-61). Besides these three examples, Carroll also offers the comparison of spies with foxes and monkeys through superimposition and dissolves in Eisenstein's Strike and the image of the body as video cassette player from David Cronenberg's Videodrome as further instances homospatial noncompossible film metaphors (212-213).

215 further instance of this co-presence through superimposition. In this figure,

Carroll says, Vertov presents a metaphor in which "the eye is a camera" and

"what we know ... of the camera (or cinema) - that it is the microscope and telescope of time - serves as the source domain through which we filter our understanding of what the human eye (or consciousness) either is now or ... is to be ... that which is temporally transcendent" (212-213). Carroll's third example is the homospatial and non-compossible image of the cartoon Popeye whose bicep or hand, after eating spinach, becomes an anvil or a hammer, a metaphoric figure in which "the source domain suggests that we selectively reconceive Popeye's muscle and his fist to be incredibly hard" (213). Carroll defends his account of film metaphor by affirming not only that the film metaphor presents a visual image of homospatial noncompossibility, but that the image makes clear the intent of the filmmaker to present this image as physically noncompossible and that the spectator understands and recognizes this noncompossibility; furthermore, the image makes clear that the filmmaker intends and the spectator recognize the heuristic value of the image "in terms of potential mapping of the referents of the elements and/or their related categories onto each other" (218). For Carroll, this type of filmic metaphor is the best case for visual metaphor in film because of its affinities to linguistic metaphor (218).

While he acknowledges that his homospatial noncompossible film metaphor may not be the only kind of film metaphor, Carroll dismisses other types of film metaphor, such as the juxtaposition of successive shots, because they

"carry no suggestion of identity relation, where as linguistic metaphors and ...

216 homospatially fused film metaphors do" (218). Carroll's resistance to other possible types of film metaphors, such as the metaphor from Modern Times that

Metz points out, is based on his assumption of necessary intentionality on the part of the filmmaker and the spectator's recognition of this intentionality. Yet it is difficult to believe that a spectator would not recognize the metaphoric intent of

Chaplin's juxtaposition of a flock of sheep and a crowd of people, even though these images are neither homospatial nor noncompossible. Furthermore, while the camera-eye metaphor of Man with a Movie Camera does suggest the identity relation 'the eye is a camera' and 'the camera is an eye,' the full metaphoric identity relation of the image develops throughout the film through editing as well as other filmic techniques. In other words, although the camera-eye

superimposition presents Vertov's Kino-Eye metaphor in its most straightforward manner, one's understanding of the metaphor, the temporal transcendence of the

Kino-Eye that Carroll identifies, depends on the film's entire strategy of editing, as discussed above. In fact, the camera-eye superimposition is but one facet of the Kino-Eye metaphor that Vertov develops. The limitations of Carroll's theory,

its reduction of metaphor to a single image or figure, derive from an understanding of metaphor that Ricoeur's theories will challenge below.

Nonetheless, Carroll's homospatial noncompossible film metaphor is a useful example of how one kind of film metaphor functions in a particular context.

Two significant problems limit the scope and usefulness of Metz and

Carroll's accounts of film metaphor for this discussion. First, in both their theories, Metz and Carroll tend to equate metaphor with single, discrete figures

217 either in terms of single images or of short series of images (two or three). Even

though Metz and Carroll acknowledge that metaphor takes its shape in semantic

arrangement, their approaches tend to isolate metaphor as a figure that can be

added or substituted in a semiotic sense. Second, the majority of Metz and

Carroll's examples of film metaphors (with the exception of the example from

Man with a Movie Camera) come from narrative films. Neither theorist explores the weight of narrative context in understanding the film metaphors they propose.

This is not to say that film metaphor cannot exist in narrative film, nor that metaphor in narrative film always or inevitably depends on narrative, but rather

that the spectator's understanding of metaphor in this instance depends on

considering an image or series of images within the context of the entire

discourse, whether narrative or otherwise. The discussion of Ricoeur's theory of metaphor that follows will, on the one hand, move away from a semiotic and even

semantic understanding of metaphor, and, on the other hand, propose that metaphor must be understood as operating at the level of discourse, especially poetic discourse.

From Figure to Poiesis: Ricoeur's The Rule of Metaphor

In The Rule of Metaphor, Ricoeur traces metaphor from its semiotic and

semantic roots in classical and contemporary rhetoric towards a hermeneutic view

of metaphor. In doing so, Ricoeur shifts the understanding of metaphor away

from concerns of "the form of metaphor as a word-focused figure of speech" or

"the sense of metaphor as a founding of a new semantic pertinence," to "the reference of the metaphorical statement as the power to 'redescribe' reality" (6).

218 For Ricoeur, the hermeneutical turn in the theory of metaphor reveals new significance in the reflexivity of metaphor, beyond the assumed non-referential view of poetic discourse to consider that "the suspension of literal reference is the condition for the release of a power of second-degree reference, which is properly poetic reference" (6). The Rule of Metaphor is a thorough and complex engagement with the concept of metaphor, one that begins with Aristotle's writings on metaphor and traces numerous theories of metaphor from classical rhetoric, to contemporary accounts by the likes of LA. Richards, Max Black, and

Jakobson. Rather than summarizing the entirety of Ricoeur's detailed study, this section will look to Ricoeur's conclusions as well as his important insights along the way, with the aim of using Ricoeur's theory to illuminate the role of metaphor in poetic film.

Of particular importance is Ricoeur's challenge of theories of metaphor based on substitution and resemblance in favour of a tensional theory of metaphor that emphasizes the power of metaphor to create meaning. As Ricoeur describes it, the substitution theory of metaphor that dominates classical rhetoric takes metaphor as a word-based figure. For substitution theory, a metaphor is simply a figurative or ornamental term that resembles (in terms of meaning) and replaces

"an absent but available ordinary word" (20). Ricoeur identifies two main problems with this approach. First, as Ricoeur says, "if the metaphorical term is really a substituted term, it carries no new information since the absent term ... can be brought back" (20). Second, in supposing metaphor to be a word-based figure, Ricoeur suggests that substitution theory treats metaphor as an ornament or

219 decoration lacking significant and specific meaning and discursive value (45-46).

This critique of theories of 'metaphor as substitution' forms the basis of Ricoeur's

critique of Jakobson's semiotic theory of metaphor.

Although Jakobson's poetic function interests Ricoeur in terms of its sense

of split reference (144-145), he also criticizes Jakobson's semotic theory of metaphor and the emphasis Jakobson places on the metaphor-metonymy binary.

For Ricoeur, the primary problem with a semiotic understanding of metaphor is that it considers metaphor outside of discourse, whereas he continually asserts that metaphors "exist only in discourse" (97). Jakobson's comparison of metaphor- metonymy with paradigm-syntagm in terms of similarity-contiguity fails according to Ricoeur because it ties metaphor to simple paradigmatic substitution

(178-179). Moreover, the binary Jakobson sets up between metaphor and metonymy overstates the equivalence of metaphor and metonymy in terms of the creation of meaning:

Metaphor prevails over metonymy not because contiguity is less fruitful a

relationship than resemblance, or again because metonymic relationships

are external and given in reality whereas metaphorical equivalences are

created by the imagination, but because metaphorical equivalences set

predicative operations in motion that metonymy ignores. (132-133)

Ricoeur opposes the reduction of metaphor to a semiotic operation that this binary depends on because it pulls metaphor outside of semantics and reduces its predicative ability to affirm or to make meaning (198). It is this potential to make

220 meaning, to "redescribe reality" that leads Ricoeur to consider the semantic and hermeneutic dimensions of metaphor through a tensional theory of metaphor.

This tensional theory that Ricoeur sketches draws first and foremost from a semantic understanding of metaphor. The semantic pertinence of metaphor, what Ricoeur calls "semantic innovation" can be found in the fact that

"metaphorical attribution is essentially the construction of the network of interactions that causes a certain context to be one that is real and unique ... metaphor is a semantic event that takes place at the point where several semantic fields intersect" (Ricoeur 98). Ricoeur's theory of metaphor as tension draws from the work of critics such as Richards, Black, and Monroe Beardsley. The tensional relationship that Ricoeur sees metaphor as articulating comes from opposition within a predicative structure between what Richards calls the

'vehicle' and 'tenor,' what Black calls the 'focus' and the 'frame,' and what

Beardsley calls the 'subject' and the 'modifier' (99). Regardless of terminology, in each formulation what is significant is that "an entire statement constitutes metaphor, yet attention focuses on a particular word, the presence of which constitutes the grounds for considering the statement metaphorical" (Ricoeur 84).

More simply, metaphoric tension at the semantic level involves the strangeness or unsuitability of the vehicle/focus within the context of the tenor/frame in terms of semantic meaning. At the semantic level, then, this tension between the vehicle and tenor or focus and frame creates the conditions for metaphorical meaning.

But as Ricoeur points out, metaphorical meaning depends upon more than semantic tension, what he calls "unusual attribution" (198), and indeed must be

221 considered in terms of its hermeneutical dimensions. It is within this hermeneutical context that Ricoeur returns to Aristotle. Working from Aristotle's statement that metaphor "sets the scene before our eyes" (qtd. in Ricoeur 34),

Ricoeur proposes that one think of the hermeneutical dimensions of metaphor as a matter of "seeing as" (212). 'Seeing as' does not simply require the recognition of resemblance, but rather '"seeing as' is the positive link between vehicle and tenor

... To explicate a metaphor is to enumerate all the appropriate senses in which the vehicle is 'seen as' the tenor" (212). 'Seeing as,' then, is an act of redescription that leads to resemblance. In other words, the hermeneutic tension here is a matter of the difference "between a literal interpretation that perishes at the hands of semantic impertinence and a metaphorical interpretation whose sense emerges from non-sense" (247). By thinking in terms of 'seeing as,' Ricoeur suggests that metaphor becomes a matter of creating resemblances rather than identifying them

(236). But along with this interpretive 'seeing as' comes both a sense of similarity and dissimilarity, the referential tension between 'is' and 'is not' (248).

The resemblance created by metaphoric 'seeing as' is inevitably a paradoxical one; to see one thing as another is also to acknowledge at the same time that one thing is not another. Returning briefly to Vertov's Kino-Eye, the camera is an eye, and yet the camera is not an eye. As Vertov affirms, the Kino-Eye is at once "the aided eye of the movie camera" improving on the "imperfect human eye" (84-85), yet also a machine that reveals '"that which the eye does not see'" through slow, fast, or reverse motion (131) but also through the "correlations" of montage (90).

But one's understanding of this metaphor depends on the tension between 'is' and

222 'is not' because this tension transforms both camera and eye in the act of creating resemblance, such that the Kino-Eye can be understood. And it is this referential

tension, this notion of "metaphorical truth" (255) inherent in the 'is-is not' paradox that Ricoeur identifies as the heart of poetic discourse.

According to Ricoeur, poetic discourse necessarily relies on the tension

inherent in metaphor. The tension of metaphor, Ricoeur suggests, also involves a

"fusion of sense and the imaginary" in that the meaning generated by metaphor

"is not the enigma itself, the semantic clash pure and simple, but the solution of the enigma" (214). Ricoeur suggest that under other discursive circumstances this tension and fusion of metaphorical meaning is the 'frontier' of semantics, but it is poetic discourse and the poetic image that extends this semantic frontier (214-

215). One aspect of this semantic expansion proffered by poetic discourse can be

found in Jakobson's poetic function. Looking back to Jakobson, Ricoeur notes the way in which the poetic function is present in the tension of metaphorical meaning: "it is precisely this interplay of sense that ensures the accentuation of the message for its own sake ... and thus the obliteration of reference" (223-224).

But in poetic discourse, Ricoeur suggests, this elimination of reference amounts to more of what Jakobson refers to as "split reference" (Ricoeur 224), which produces in poetry "not the suppression of the referential function, but its profound alteration by the workings of ambiguity," (224). Ricoeur argues further that the splitting of the reference between the literal and metaphorical

interpretation results in a simultaneous creation and destruction of meaning:

223 The entire strategy of poetic discourse plays on this point: it seeks the

abolition of the reference by means of self-destruction of the meaning of

metaphorical statements, the self-destruction being made manifest by an

impossible literal interpretation. But this is only the first phase of a

positive strategy [where] ... the self-destruction of meaning is merely the

other side of an innovation in meaning at the level of the entire statement,

an innovation obtained through the 'twist' of the literal meaning of the

words. (230)

Thus for Ricoeur poetic discourse is always metaphorical because it depends on this destruction-creation dynamic: "In the metaphorical discourse of poetry referential power is linked to the eclipse of ordinary reference; the creation of heuristic fiction is the road to redescription; and reality brought to language unites manifestation and creation" (239). This recognition of the 'metaphoricity' of poetic discourse leads Ricoeur to consider the role of metaphor in understanding poetic discourse as a distinct mode of expression, as a mode of thought.

Ricoeur turns to both Aristotle and Northrop Frye to reorient poetic

discourse in light of this emphasis on metaphor as the basis for poetic discourse.

Ricoeur first gestures back to Aristotle's formulation that poiesis entails the linking of muthos and mimesis, or fable/story and imitation (244). But Ricoeur

clarifies both the connection between muthos and mimesis and the definition of the terms themselves. Muthos, Ricoeur emphasizes, is not simply the element of

story common to the tragic poetry that concerns Aristotle (244-245). Rather,

Ricoeur rearticulates muthos as possessing a particularly metaphoric dimension

224 that "consists in describing a less known domain - human reality - in light of relationships within a fictitious but better known domain - the tragic tale - utilizing all the strengths of'systematic deployability' contained in that tale"

(244). Likewise, Ricoeur redefines mimesis as "redescription" in opposition to other definitions such as copy and imitation, which Ricoeur believes have negative connotations (245). The muihos and mimesis of tragic poetry work together as "tragedy achieves its effect only through the invention of the muthos" while "muthos is at the service of mimesis and its fundamentally denotative character" (245). In other words, the "metaphoric reference" of mimesis is deployed and structured by muthos, as "Tragedy teaches us to 'see' human life

'as' that which the muthos displays" (245).

Importantly, however, Ricoeur stresses that the interaction of muthos and mimesis is not exclusive to tragic poetry, but rather is characteristic of all poetic discourse. In tragic poetry the muthos-mimesis can be recognized more readily,

Ricoeur reminds, because "the muthos takes the form of a 'story' and the metaphoricity is attached to the plot of the tale" (245). But by looking to Frye,

Ricoeur shows how the conjunction between muthos and mimesis plays an important role in lyric poetry. Ricoeur links muthos to Frye's theory of the hypothetical in poetry, the inward turn of poetic language, and its role in constructing the mood exclusive to the lyric poem. For Ricoeur, Frye's 'mood' is comparable to muthos: "the mood is the hypothetical created by the poem and ... as such, it occupies the place in lyric poetry that muthos occupies in tragic poetry"

(245). Furthermore, the mood as lyric muthos "is joined by a lyric mimesis, in the

225 sense that the mood created in this fashion is a sort of model for 'seeing as' and

'feeling as'" (Ricoeur 246). Ricoeur's aligning of mood with lyric muthos ultimately comes together as a fictional context, as a structure or schemata of

"inner life" through which the redescriptive power of mimesis becomes manifest

(246). As Ricoeur says, "as the conjunction of fiction and redescription suggests, poetic feeling itself also develops an experience of reality in which invention and discovery cease being opposed and where creation and revelation coincide" (246).

In this way, Ricoeur's theory of metaphor points to the ways in which metaphor is an essential element of poetic film.

To begin with, Ricoeur's theory of metaphor expands and improves the understanding of metaphor in film outlined by Metz and Carroll. First and foremost, Ricoeur's tensional theory exposes the limitations of Metz and Carroll's figure-based film metaphors. Metz in particular relies on a semiotic view of metaphor that sees film metaphor as a matter of substitution; the balloon is a substitute for Elsie, or flames replace the sex act. Metz gets close to the redescriptive potential of Ricoeur's theory when he acknowledges that the balloon actually takes part in the second, third and fourth types of concatenation, but his strict semiotic categories do not allow him to reconcile the tension in this convergence. Meanwhile, Carroll's homospatial noncompossible film metaphor seems to reject the role of the entire discourse in producing metaphor. Likewise,

Carroll's emphasis on the intent behind the metaphor undermines the hermeneutic innovation that Ricoeur celebrates. The result is that Carroll's version of film metaphor seems very much like a figure or ornament a filmmaker deploys, rather

226 than a discursive strategy by which spectators come to create meaning. It is important to note, however, that Ricoeur's theory of metaphor does not discount or invalidate Metz and Carroll's accounts of film metaphor; rather it helps one understand them better and broadens the scope of what film metaphor can be and can do. Thinking of metaphor as a discursive maneuver, one tied to poetic discourse, has great significance for understanding poetic film. Metz and Carroll's theories of metaphor are perhaps limited because with the exception of the Vertov example they address metaphors in narrative films. With poetic film, however, one can, following Ricoeur, explore metaphor as a hermeneutic focus, one that has bearing on the entire discourse of the poetic film.63

Seeing and Not Seeing: Metaphor and Un Chien Andalou

To return to an image mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, one can consider the role of metaphor in directing interpretations of Bunuel and Dali's Un

Chien Andalou. As mentioned above, the slicing of the eye metaphorically communicates the notion that surrealist cinema is an assault on the spectator. But the metaphorical consequences of this assault are not only confined to this image of the man passing over the woman's eye with a razor. In fact, other images in

One other instance of attempting to apply Ricoeur's theory of metaphor can be found in Whittock's Metaphor and Film. Whittock briefly engages with Ricoeur's tensional theory, commending Ricoeur's hermeneutical approach, but then ignores Ricoeur's emphasis on the 'metaphoricity' of poetic discourse (118- 121). Whittock takes Ricoeur's articulation of muthos simply to mean story and thus attempts to use Ricoeur to read Vittorio DeSica's The Bicycle Thieves as a 'metaphoric' discourse. Whittock takes Maria's pawning of her bed sheets as a metaphor for poverty, and Antonio's search as a metaphor for 'alienation' (123- 124). But how this relates to Ricoeur's tensional theory of metaphor and his interpretation of the metaphoric conjunction of muthos and mimesis is unclear, especially since Whittock goes on to call The Bicycle Thieves "more of an allegory than it is an anecdote" (124).

227 this opening scene contribute to the full sense of this metaphor that reflexively evokes not only the viewing of cinema, but also its production and exhibition.64

The shot of the man passing the razor over the woman's eye certainly suggests that "cinema is an assault on the spectator." But together with the two shots that follow it, first of the cloud passing over the moon, and then the shot of a razor slicing into a cow's eye, this image reflexively reveals the editing process. Not only does the razor cutting the eye resemble the 'cutting' involved in film editing, but the violence of this act reflects the violence of the cinematic cut that brings together the human eye, the moon, and the cow eye in sequence. Ignacio Javier

Lopez takes the reflexivity of this metaphorical association further to include the film's exhibition, noting that in the image of the clouds intersecting the full moon, the moon is a metaphor for the projection of film (39). This reading can be taken further still to consider the man's emergence from behind the curtained window, and his upward gaze at the moon to be additional metaphoric positioning of the opening scene in the context of the viewing experience.

The metaphoric implications of the eye-slicing scene also extend to interpretations of Un Chien Andalou in its entirety. In his "Notes on the Making of Un Chien Andalou," Bunuel compares the film to poetry and dream, insisting,

"the cinema maker takes his place ... on a purely POETICAL-MORAL plane.

(Take MORAL in the sense of what governs dreams or parasympathetic

64 This is by no means the only possible metaphoric reading of Un Chien Andalou. Linda Williams, for instance, offers a well-argued psychoanalytic reading of the same sequence, drawing on Metz's theories of film metaphor and Freudian psychoanalysis. For Williams the eye-razor/moon-cloud association is a metaphor for castration (82).

228 compulsion.) .... the plot is the result of a CONSCIOUS psychic automatism, and, to that extent, it does not attempt to recount a dream, although it profits by a mechanism analogous to that of dreams" (29). It is possible to read the film's opening scene and the rest of the film alongside this statement as suggesting a metaphorical relationship between cinema and dream, where cinema is the very dream-like mechanism to which Bufiuel refers. In such a reading, the series of shots that culminate in the slicing of the eye, not only metaphorically evoke the production, exhibition, and viewing experience involved in cinema, but the fluid that spills out of the slashed eye extends this metaphor along interpretive lines, suggesting the releasing of interiority, the 'inner vision' of the unconscious

'matter' that makes up dreams.65 The rest of the film unfolds with what Sitney calls the "abrupt dislocations and discontinuities" made possible by film that

"provide us with a vivid metaphor for the dream experience" {Visionary Film 5).

If the film is a metaphor for dream, it is also an especially filmic dream, not only its editing, its dissolves and superimpositions, but also its invocation of film genres - the gangster film or western inspired gun shots, the romantic embrace at the end - and (anti-)narrative intertitles. With its converging metaphors, Un

Chien Andalou becomes almost a dream of cinema, or an intensely reflexive metaphor in which cinema is a dream about cinema.

The Poetic Turn: Reflexivity, Transtextuality and Metaphor in Heart of the

World, La Jetee and SI j'avals 4 dromedalres

65 See Ken Kelman's essay "The Other Side of Realism" for another Freudian interpretation of Un Chien Andalou as dream. Interestingly, Kelman points out that at the moment that the woman's eye is slashed open "we see as she does, the screen blacks out" (113).

229 In light of Ricoeur's theory of metaphor, one can rethink the role of reflexivity and transtextuality in the poetic film. In the discussions above, strategies of reflexivity and transtextuality in poetic films produce linkages, associations, connections - all terms that recall metaphoric procedures and relationships. It would not be a stretch, therefore, to argue that reflexive and transtextual strategies are inherently metaphoric, as they involve specific versions of the metaphoric 'seeing as.' If metaphor is central to poetic discourse, as

Ricoeur contends, then one of the reasons that reflexivity and transtextuality are so germane to poetic film is because they develop, explore and foster metaphor.

The section that follows will consider the reflexive and transtextual interactions in three films - Maddin's Heart of the World, and Marker's Lajetee and Sij 'avals 4 dromedalres - and how they develop metaphoric discourses and how this

'metaphoricity' contributes to the 'poeticalness ' of these three films.

Maddin has called his short film Heart of the World "a soapbox for my tireless campaign to redeem melodrama" ("Maddin on The Heart of the World'' n.p.), but behind its narrative and melodramatic surfaces the film can be read as a complex metaphor developed through reflexive and intertextual strategies that eclipses the film's ostensible story and offers a poetic celebration of cinema. The intertextuality of Heart of the World is the most apparent part of the film's metaphoric discourse, as references to Soviet silent cinema suffuse the film. One could go to considerable lengths cataloging all these references, but a few of the more obvious and telling intertextual gestures should suffice to confirm Maddin's strategy and then suggest its implications. The mise-en-scene of Heart of the

230 World is teeming with elements inspired by silent-era Soviet cinema: its

Constructivist-invoking sets; its Soviet-era score, "Time, Forward!" by Georgi

Sviridov; its Agitprop intertitles66; its extras costumed as peasants and sailors seemingly pulled out of The Battleship Potemkin. Individual shots in Heart of the

World pose as 'found footage' borrowed from Soviet film. For example, the woman 'gunned down' by Nikolai's coin-shooting phallus-coffin (an effect achieved by Maddin's Soviet-inspired montage) could well have been a shot from the 'Odessa steps' sequence in Potemkin or perhaps from the climax of Vsevolod

Pudovkin's Mother. And more emphatically, Anna's eye peering into her telescope cites the camera-eye of Man with a Movie Camera. Even the main characters of Heart of the World resemble notable Soviet film characters. Anna the scientist with her cowl bears a striking resemblance to the title character from

Yakov Protazanov's Aelita, while Osip's Passion-play beard seems modeled after that of Nikoli Cherkasov's Ivan in Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible. More importantly than these intertextual mise-en-scene elements, however, Maddin's editing of Heart of the World forms a strong and poetic link to the Soviet silent- era.

Maddin and co-editor Deco Dawson's approach to editing Heart of the

World recalls Soviet montage (not only its practice, but also its theory as

For a discussion of Heart of the World's intertitles and their playful recreation of Futurist and Agitprop fonts, see Joe Clark's commentary on the titles of Heart of the World on his website http://joeclark.org/design/typecasting/. In his screenplay for Heart of the World, Maddin takes care to emphasize the importance of the intertitles to "evoke the fervidity of the great Soviet silents" and cites Vertov's Three Songs of Lenin as an example of the effect he aims to achieve ("Script for The Heart of the World' 154).

231 expounded by Soviet filmmakers), borrowing its rapid cuts and associative shot

combinations. Maddin confesses to wanting to emulate the montage styles of

Eisenstein (Interview 4), Pudovkin and Vertov ("Script" 146), but his invocation

of Soviet montage is less a direct replication of any director's style than it is at

once a loving (but perhaps ironic) homage to their theories and practices. To put

it another way, Maddin and Dawson's "micro-montage" (Interview 4; "Script"

151) does not follow Eisenstein's associational montage with its non-diegetic

inserts and dialectic conflict (Film Form 45-63) nor does it resemble Vertov's

interval-based montage of correlations (Kino-Eye 90-91). Instead, this micro-

montage technique gives the impression of replicating Soviet montage because of

its extreme rapidity and the relative narrative and spatial discontinuity it creates.

This impression of Soviet montage serves two purposes - it reinforces the film's

intertextuality and it plays a role in the film's reflexive strategy, both of which

contribute to the overarching metaphor of Heart of the World.

The micro-montage ofHeart of the World, with its flickering rapidity not

only makes the intertextual connection to Soviet cinema, but it also has a reflexive

effect, as its speed and discontinuity make editing conspicuous to the viewer.

Vatnsdal speaks of the editing of Heart of the World as producing a

"mental/emotional persistence-of-vision ... to be enjoyed on an altogether more

primal level" (8), but it is hard not to imagine a viewer being consciously aware

67 One could make the case that Maddin and Dawson's editing ofHeart of the World most resembles Pudovkin's theories and practices of 'constructive' editing ("[On Editing]" 8-12) certainly in its speed and relative narrative clarity compared to Eisenstein and Vertov. But such an argument seems unnecessary. What seems more important is that this micro-montage 'feels' like Soviet montage, even if it is just a nostalgic approximation.

232 of this micro-montage as evidence of the editing process. Other reflexive elements foreground the very 'filmic-ness' of Heart of the World. As with Eye

Like a Strange Balloon, scratches and other damage marks and prominent film grain (a result of blowing Super-8 and 16mm stock to 35mm) lend Heart of the

World the, visual quality of a degraded silent-era print and reflexively suggest the very material of film. The exhibition of film is also put forward reflexively, especially as it concerns film's projection. Maddin portrays "The World's Fatal

Heart Attack!" as a projector malfunction. First, as Anna embraces Akmatov the industrialist, the image-track slows and brightens in a flash, as if the filmstrip has become stuck in the projector. Then, when the 'heart attack' occurs, the image of the world's heart crackles and melts as if the projector bulb has burned the

filmstrip. Similarly, the sound of a running projector that accompanies Anna's transformation into the 'Heart of the World' and the projection of images onto men's chests and onto flags provide a strongly reflexive dimension to the celebration of 'KINO' that closes the film. A brief shot even figures Anna as a

star lighting the telescope that has become the projector of the heart of the world, with obvious reference to the 'star-system' that emerged from the silent-era. It is this ecstatic evocation and invocation of 'KINO' that provides the key to understanding the metaphor of Heart of the World.

In an interview with Maddin, William Beard questions the narrative logic of Heart of the World, asking, "How does Anna heal the heart of the world, and how does it lead to Kino?" to which Maddin replies, "I don't know. I don't remember. It is a propaganda movie; don't forget, so it requires specious leaps of

233 logic" (Interview 5). In this narrative blind spot requiring "leaps of logic" lies the metaphor of Heart of the World. Anna as the heart of the world is and creates

'KINO' - cinema. The metaphoric implications of this association are manifold.

Like cinema, that which began as science (Anna the state scientist) becomes art for the masses, as represented in the dancers and musicians that the glowing Anna projects. Maddin's celebration of cinema68 posits 'KINO' as the heart of the world and in doing so calls to mind early idyllic theories of silent cinema as a global art form, transcending language and national borders (the kind Andre

Bazin alludes to at the beginning of his essay "The Evolution of the Language of

Cinema") (23). The intertextual connections to Soviet silent cinema further underscore this point, first by appealing to an exemplary and influential period of this 'golden age' ideal, and especially if one remembers Vladimir Lenin's declaration that "cinema is the most important of all the arts" (qtd. in Eisenstein

63). Reading this metaphor back into the narrative, Maddin positions Anna as

Kino in opposition to Osip's empty religious pageantry, Nikolai's worship of death, and Akmatov's cruel capitalism - chaotic forces that cinema overcomes in unifying the world. If Maddin's metaphor seems ahistorical and nostalgic, it also reasserts the importance of cinema history, of remembering cinema as the heart of the world. Ultimately, it is the 'cinema is the heart of the world' metaphor, furnished by intertextuality and reflexivity, that allows Heart of the World to exceed its sketchy, melodramatic narrative and reveals its poetic pleasures. And

Heart of the World, of course, was commissioned to celebrate cinema, specifically the 25th anniversary of the Toronto International Film Festival.

234 if Heart of World is propaganda by which Maddin aspires to redeem melodrama,

it does so by emphasizing its melos, the lyrical potential of poetic film.

Earlier this chapter explored the intertextual resonances of Marker's La

Jetee and the ways in which reference to Vertigo calls up concerns of time and

memory as a counter-narrative within the film. Together, this intertextual strategy

and La Jetee''?, reflexive unveiling of filmic movement work to put forward

another cinematically driven metaphor that sees cinema as memory. As

mentioned above, the still-images and the epiphanic moment of movement

reflexively interrogate the illusion that makes film possible. But the reflexivity of

La Jetee does not end there, as other reflexive elements contribute to this sense of

cinema as memory. On the one hand, La Jetee gestures to the way in which film

can record and preserve and thereby function as a kind of cultural memory. This

function is underscored by Marker's setting of the underground camp of the future

in the basement of the Palais de Chaillot, which Henri Langois used as a storage

space for the Cinematheque Francaise (and later the site of the Cinematheque

itself), a place where films were archived and preserved (Lupton Chris Marker

94). Similarly, Jacques Ledoux, the head of the Cinematheque royale de Belgique

(Lupton Chris Marker 95) plays the part of the lead experimenter, a casting

choice that places another film archivist in the role of the architect of La Jetee's

time-travel. In light of this concern with film preservation, one can think of the

intertextual reference to Vertigo as Lagier does: Marker's traveler does not pass

through time, but through film history. On the other hand, La Jetee also portrays

film as the enacting of memory. Bruce Kawin points out that the film's title has

235 multiple significances besides its literal translation as 'The Pier.' La Jetee

suggests time-travel in the sense of "being thrown," but also recalls to the French verb 'projeter,' which implies "our ability to be ahead of ourselves, as well as the

screening or projection of a film" (Kawin 16). In this way, film projection becomes a form of time travel, 'throwing' the viewer back into time, into memory.

The sudden appearance of movement in La Jetee also functions to reveal the metaphoric dimension to this illusion. The cinematic apparatus allows one to see still images as moving images. Is this not another kind of "impossible memory"? By intertextually and reflexively referring to the history {Vertigo), preservation (Ledoux and the Cinematheque), and apparatus of cinema in terms of memory, Marker creates a metaphoric link between cinema and memory. And yet to see cinema as memory is to see cinema not as memory, as Ricoeur would have it; and this is the very metaphoric understanding that Marker delves into in La

Jetee. Contemplating the relationship between time and cinema, Kawin observes:

Time travel depends on the notion that all events are somehow present,

that from some viewpoint exterior to what we think of as temporal

continuity ... all instants are simultaneous. One of the simplest and most

convincing images for this concept of time is the reel of film. On the reel,

thousands of frames maintain their images of potential instants, all

together and retrievable. As the film moves through the projector, the

images become present. (16)

236 This description of film moving through the projector sets the grounds for understanding Marker's metaphoric relation of cinema and memory. The

'present-ness' with which the cinematic apparatus imbues the filmic image of the

past is comparable to the way in which memory functions. Whether conscious or

involuntary, the act of remembrance involves the making present, the recalling of past events; remembering always occurs in the present. To see cinema as

memory, then, is to recognize in memory its (re)constructedness, its ephemerality

and its appeal to images, and at the same time to recognize in cinema its basis in

time, its 'involuntary' immediacy, and its ability to reproduce and recall. When

Marker coins the term 'immemory' for his CD-ROM project, he does so with an

eye to naming the metaphoric relationship that his films (along with his other

multimedia projects) share. In his liner notes for the CD-ROM, Marker suggests

that his concept of 'immemory' images structuring or mapping memory, ordering

it in a way that presents "the 'guided tour' of a memory, while at the same time

offering the visitor a chance for haphazard navigation" (n.p.). One can think of

the cinema-memory metaphor in similar terms, as cinema is something of a

'guided tour,' an impossibly structured and ordered form of memory. La Jetee, as

does Level Five and Owls at Noon, looks to cinema to understand how memory

works, how it connects one to history and the images of the past, and the critical

insight with which one should view it.

Something of a companion film to La Jetee and also employing still

images, Marker's Si j'avals 4 dromedaires offers another version of this cinema

as memory metaphor. In this case, however, Marker considers the relationship

237 between cinema and memory through the lens of nonfiction film. With a title drawn from a poem in Guillaume Appolinaire's Le Bestiaire ou Le Cortege d'Orphee, Si j'avals 4 dromedaires is comprised of photographs taken by Marker all over the world (in China, Cuba, France, Iceland, Israel, North Korea, the

Soviet Union, and Sweden among others). Accompanying these images are the conversations and commentaries of three friends, Pierre (a photographer),

Catherine, and Nicholas, who alternate between engaging in conversation with each other and individual monologues, all the time reflecting and remarking on the images. Whereas in La Jetee the intertextual and reflexive strategies undermine the narration, in Sij 'avais 4 dromedaires the multi-voiced commentary works in concert and against the images to reflexively critique its own 'documentary' presentation.

The competing image- and voice- tracks of Sij'avais 4 dromedaires become a means of reflexively critiquing how documentary films present images and commentary as factual and authoritative. In one section, Pierre discusses his love of Russia and the reactions of Moscovites to the 1959 American exhibition in romantic and celebratory terms, over images of the event. Shortly thereafter, in his own monologue, Nicholas, a Russian immigrant, repudiates Pierre's attitude, pointing out that he "thinks like an European," and ignores the injustices present in the Soviet society he observes. Nicholas's criticism of Pierre's enthographic view also calls into question other images of Russia that precede and follow his comments, demanding the viewer question what he or she both sees and hears.

69 All quotations from Si j'avais 4 dromedaires are my translations.

238 This multivoiced strategy is similar to that which Marker presents in Lettre de

Siberie, where three different voice-overs play over the same footage of the

Siberian city of Yakutsk, one celebrating the city as a zenith of Soviet ingenuity,

one an anti-Communist condemnation, and the third aiming for journalistic

'objectivity.' As Lupton notes this sequence from Lettre de Siberie "demonstrates how truth is a by-product of ideological interpretation and representation" (Chris

Marker 57). But it is not just the conversation between the three friends that questions the 'objectivity' of the images, as even the images themselves pose questions of veracity and authenticity. Nicholas's criticism of Pierre not only

applies to what Pierre says, but also to how and what he photographs. If Pierre thinks like an European, then he also photographs like an European - his choice

of subjects, his presence as a foreigner, all influence the objectivity of his photographs.

Other times, the commentary serves to contextualize images. After a series

of photographs of residents of the Paris slum of Nanterre celebrating Algerian

independence, Catherine says, "They were happy. An instant of happiness paid

for by seven years of war and one million dead." In other instances the images

are misrepresented. During a series of images of death over which Pierre remarks about immortality and the after-life, there is an image of a man lying on road beside a jeep, with another man standing over top of him. Because of the man's position - sprawled on the ground, his head obscured - and the context in which the photograph appears - alongside images of death - this photograph appears to be of a dead man. But in Immemory, Marker acknowledges that while the image

239 was presented in this way, the actual event that was photographed was of an

Israeli man with heatstroke, resting beside the jeep while his companion berates him for not being prepared for the heat. Here the film exploits the perceived

objectivity of photographic images, and, at least in retrospect, Marker exposes the potential for the perception of documentary truth to be abused.

While the multiple perspectives provided by the interaction between the three voices and the images generate this critique of documentary truth, they also

add to it a personal dimension. Though one knows little about Pierre, Catherine

or Nicholas, their personal reflections - their subjective positions - challenge the

objectivity of the images. Frequently the film deploys images in a manner that

associates them with an individual speaker. Even though the film claims that the photographs are Pierre's, the flow of images that follows Catherine's meditative monologue on "those who live with death" and women's connection to death and desire seem to come as much from her memory or imagination as from Pierre's

camera. The way this series of images, of paintings, statues and faces of women

are brought together as if by Catherine's consciousness echoes the title card

quoting Jean Cocteau that appears earlier in the film: "Since these things are beyond me, let us pretend to be the organizer of them." It is as if Catherine organizes Pierre's photographs, and in doing so stamps them with her own point

of view. In this way, Si j 'avals 4 dromedaires comments on the objectivity of documentary images that recalls Marker's assertion that he does not make cinema verite, but rather his documentaries are a matter of "cine, ma verite" (qtd. in

Lupton Chris Marker 84), a personal truth, a subjective truth. In this regard, Si

240 j 'avals 4 dromedaires closely resembles the personalized perception that Nichols

attributes to the poetic documentary.

Sij 'avais 4 dromedaires also draws on intertextual references in its

critique of documentary truth. This critique seems almost directed at Marker himself, since many of the images from Cuba, China, and Israel refer back to

Marker's earlier films Cuba si!, Dimanche a Pekin, and Description of a Struggle

(and the images from Iceland look forward to Sans Soleil). If the competing voices of Si j'avais 4 dromedaires reveal assumptions about documentary authority, then the film also turns this suspicion back on Marker's own earlier documentaries. Further intertextual references also directly comment on the tension between fiction films and documentary films. A telling image and its accompanying comment speak to the historical roots of this tension. One photograph shows a contemporary scene in which "A train approaches the station at Ciotat," an obvious reference to the Lumiere film L 'Arrivee un train, one of the films often said to have give birth to cinema in general and documentary in particular. On the one hand, in intertextually citing this moment of origin in film history, Marker playfully freezes the motion that marked that beginning of cinema. But on the other hand, this reference also critically serves as a reminder of the difference between the scientific and objective intentions of this birth and cinema's (perhaps especially documentary cinema's) 'lost innocence' 70 years later. As the rest of the film suggests, organizing images can never be truly objective, and as a result documentary film shares a degree of 'constructed-ness' with fiction film. Given the critical interaction between voice and image that

241 Marker sets up, one cannot view the images of Si j'avais 4 dromedaires as possessing the same objectivity one might see in L 'Arrivee un train.

Another intertextual reference of great significance in Sij 'avais 4 dromedaires occurs at the end of the sequence of images of women mentioned above. Here, as in La Jetee, a series of photographs of a young woman appear in

succession, accelerating until they achieve the illusion of motion and the woman's mouth turns up into a smile. This moment resembles the shock of movement in

La Jetee, as it carries with it a temporary 'present-ness' in opposition to the photographic images of the past. In doing so, the film returns one to the concerns of memory and time and their metaphoric relation to cinema, this time in terms of documentary cinema. At the beginning of Sij 'avais 4 dromedaires, Pierre proclaims, "Photography - it's the hunt, it's the instinct to hunt without the desire to kill.... You track, you aim, you shoot - click! In lieu of death you create eternity." Pierre's assertion again recalls the 'past-ness' Barthes associates with still images, as well as, Lupton suggests, Susan Sontag's '"soft murder' of photography" (Chris Marker 106). And yet, the brief moment of movement recontextualizes this sense of the inherent 'past-ness' of photographic images by imbuing them with the 'present-ness' of cinema. The images in Si j'avais 4 dromedaires, as they are organized and commented upon, 'come to life,' both in the sense of returning to the present, much as the act of remembering returns the past to the present, but also in the sense of returning to movement through cinematic illusion. If one sees the metaphor of cinema as memory in Sij 'avais 4 dromedaires, then the documentary film becomes not so much a historical record,

242 but a subjective record or at least a subjective reflection on historical record. In

this view, documentary cinema like memory serves a vital function of

remembering, of bringing the past into the present, but one allowing for recognition of subjectivity that tempers problems of truth and authority.

Making Connections: Towards Lyricism and Poetic Discourse in Film

The importance of the act of organizing images and its relation to a

subjective point of view in Sij'avais 4 dromedaires speaks to a broader concern

of this chapter: the particularly poetic structure and organization of poetic film. In

the absence or at least resistance to narrative as an organizing principle, the

metaphoric discourse that Ricoeur links to poetic discourse can be seen as that which organizes and structures poetic film. Whether through reflexive or trans-

/intertextual strategies, the metaphoric discourse of poetic film makes connections

and creates associations. The seeing as of metaphoric discourse takes the place of the showing and telling of narrative as that which motivates and shapes poetic

film. Rather than showing a day in the life of a city, the profusion of reflexivity in

Man with a Movie Camera sets before the eyes of the viewer a new perception.

The metaphoric readings of Un Chien Andalou, Heart of the World and La Jetee

are not a matter of telling the stories that run through these films, but rather

involve making the viewer see cinema as dream, cinema as 'the heart of the

world,' or cinema as memory. Likewise, Sij'avais 4 dromedaires suggests the personal vision involved in organizing and engaging with documentary images,

the way in which 'seeing as' operates. Ricoeur's theories also reorient one's understanding of both Jakobson's poetic function and Shklovsky's

243 defamiliarization. To think of poetic discourse in Ricoeur's terms aligns the re­

structuring and potential of the poetic function with the 'seeing differently' of

defamiliarization. The poetic function and defamiliarization draw together as the poetic operation of 'seeing as' - a process that challenges and reorganizes perception. This seeing as also returns to Genette's direct expression discussed in the previous chapter. The mediation involved in the showing and telling of narrative are replaced in poetic discourse by the metaphoric connections that require the viewer's direct engagement, a hermeneutic engagement. And in turn, the directness of expression of metaphoric discourse points to the lyrical mode.

The chapter that follows will explore Ricoeur's metaphoric poetic discourse in terms of lyricism, endeavouring to see film's poetic mode as lyrical expression.

244 245 246 247 Chapter Four

'Kino-I': Lyrical Possibilities in Poetic Film

"... perhaps the 'poetic,' in our time, is to be found not in the conventionally isolated lyric poem

but in texts not immediately recognizable as poetry."

- Marjorie Perloff, "Can(n)on to the Right of Us, Can(n)on to the Left of Us," Poetic License (18)

"... to perceive is to know, is to imagine, is to recall, but in the sense that reading is a function of the eye, a perception of perception, a perception which does not grasp perception without grasping

its reverse, imagination, memory, or knowledge." - Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image

(245)

The previous chapter affirmed that metaphoric connections and associations make up the structure and organization of poetic film. Paul

Ricoeur's definition of poetic discourse as the interaction of muthos and mimesis offers a guide for considering how poetic film's mode of discourse presents its

'poeticalness.' On the one hand, as the last chapter spelled out, the metaphoric discourse involved in the muthos-mimesis combination sketches the referential and representational dimensions of poetic discourse in film. In poetic discourse, mimesis operates via the split-reference of metaphor; its mode of representation functions on the basis of the "seeing as" and the "is/is not" tension. On the other hand, muthos takes its shape in reference to the lyrical context, the fictional situation or the poetic hypothetical as defined by Northrop Frye. But what might this lyric muthos, this lyrical context mean for poetic film? Or better yet, what

248 does it mean to describe the muthos of poetic film as lyric? To begin to answer these questions, this chapter will first look back to accounts of the literary lyric already in play in this dissertation with the aim of clarifying and expanding on the definitions of lyricism provided by Ricoeur, Frye, Jonathan Culler, Marjorie

Perloff, Douglas Barbour and Gerard Genette. The different versions of lyricism these critics provide will help refine the understanding of the literary lyric that will be the basis for the discussion of lyricism in poetic film.

But simply considering definitions of the literary lyric and applying them to a discussion of poetic film is clearly insufficient. The obvious differences between the linguistic basis of the literary lyric and the audio/visual basis of the poetic film demand that one address the particularly filmic dimensions that the lyric may take in the poetic film. For this reason, this chapter will also turn to theories of film lyricism and other theories that concern subjectivity in film. As such, this chapter will revisit Noel Burch's understanding of non-narrative film diegesis and P. Adams Sitney's "lyric film" mentioned in chapters two and one respectively, as well as considering other theories suggestive of film lyricism, including the "free indirect discourse" of Pier Paolo Pasolini's "cinema of poetry," and Gilles Deleuze's "time-image." Alongside these theories this chapter will also consider possible lyrical revisions to Edward Branigan's work on narrative point of view and subjectivity in film. In turn, this chapter will return to the zone of poeticized narrative and the metaphoric dimensions of reflexivity and transtextuality discussed in previous chapters to further sketch the possibilities of lyricism in poetic film. Following this discussion of the theoretical possibilities

249 of lyricism in poetic film, this chapter will test these possibilities by examining

four films that can be said to exhibit especially lyrical qualities: Jean Vigo's Zero for Conduct; Stan Brakhage's Window Water Baby Moving; Guy Maddin's Brand

Upon the Brain!; and Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror. Each of these films possesses

attributes that could make up the grounds for establishing a variety of definitions

for the lyrical film.

Finally, this chapter will compare the lyricism of the poetic film to another

lyric genre not directly associated with the lyric poem, the Denkbild or "thought-

image." A form of lyrical essay, the Denkbild as described by Gerhard Richter in his book Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers' Reflections from Damaged

Life is the mode of personal philosophical writing explored by members of the

Frankfurt School such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Siegfried

Kracauer. Comparing the poetic film and the Denkbild offers avenues for

considering lyricism outside of the conventional understanding of lyricism as

embodied in lyric poetry. Moreover, since the Denkbild is a mode of philosophical discourse, comparing it to poetic film also introduces another

dimension of the muthos-mimesis connection, specifically the sense of mimesis in the lyric as an imitation or representation of thought. Translating Denkbild as

"thought-image," as Richter does, suggests potentially productive ways of

considering the significance of the interaction of image and sound (and/or text) in the poetic film. The very term "thought-image" invites consideration of the

contemplative qualities of lyricism in conjunction with the visual aspects of the

film medium; one could even go so far as to think of the poetic film as

250 representing thought audio-visually. Since the Denkbild is a lyrical and essayistic form of writing, the films of Chris Marker, frequently referred to as both lyrical and essayistic, present appropriate examples by which to compare the lyricisms of the Denkbild and poetic film. In films such as Le Tombeau d'Alexander, Une

Journee d'Andrei Arsenevitch, and most importantly Sans Soleil, Marker blurs the distinction between essayistic analysis and elegiac or lyric contemplation.

Marker's films, then, establish a kind of essayistic-lyric film, something like a specific genre of poetic film in the same way the Denkbild could be called a genre of lyrical-essayistic prose.

If the previous chapter took as its metaphoric guide the figure of the eye, then this chapter elaborates on that metaphor, extending it to include the lyric 'I.'

Caught up together, the 'eye/I' metaphor that moves through this chapter involves locating or identifying or accounting for the source of metaphoric 'seeing as' in one or more subjects. Or to put it another way, this chapter asks that one see in poetic film the centrality of subjectivity, of questions and problems of the T of the lyric subject, that can be found in lyric poetry. To consider the lyricism of poetic film is very much a metaphoric operation, seeing poetic film as possessing qualities of lyric poetry, but one that offers possibilities for exploring not only attributes of poetic film, but how one comes to understand and engage with it.

Lyric Possibilities

Of the poetic genres, lyric poetry is perhaps the most difficult to define, or at least when defined it is done so broadly and contentiously. Culler laments that the lyric is both maligned and under-theorized and questions the general lack of

251 poetics of the lyric ("Comparing Poetry" vii). But there are compelling accounts of what lyricism might entail, and before discussing lyricism in poetic film, this chapter will explore a few crucial lyric possibilities that might move this discussion closer to, if not a definition, at least an understanding of the possibilities of the lyric. Theories of the lyric developed by Frye, Culler, Perloff, and Barbour only provide a sketch of the literary lyric, but they do offer insight into lyricism that will be instructive for considering lyricism in film.

Furthermore, these lyric possibilities will be considered in conjunction with

Ricoeur's theory of metaphor and lyricism, with its concerns of muthos and mimesis as well as Genette's discourses of direct expression and Burch's investigation of the ties and limits of narrative and diegesis.

One of the standard definitions of the lyric poem comes from Frye's

Anatomy of Criticism, in which he calls the lyric (borrowing the phrase from John

Stuart Mill) "the utterance that is overheard" (249). Frye extends his simple definition, noting that "the radical of presentation in the lyric is the hypothetical form" in which "The poet, so to speak, turns his back on his listeners" (250). One can elaborate on this to suggest that this version of lyricism sees the lyric poem as the expression of thought or emotion of a single speaker, a meditative and contemplative form. In these respects, Frye's version of the lyric resembles what

Perloff calls the "Romantic theory of the lyric" espoused by critics such as

Christopher Clausen and especially Harold Bloom ("Postmodernism and the impasse of lyric" 172-176). Perloff sums up this view of the lyric as "a short verse utterance (or sequence of such utterances) in which a single speaker

252 expresses in figurative language, his subjective vision ... culminating in a 'unique insight' or epiphany that unites poet and reader" ("Postmodernism" 173-174).

Similarly, Culler sees another model of lyricism inherited from New Criticism that considers the lyric as the "dramatized experience of a consciousness" ("Lyric

Continuities" 118). For Culler, the result of this model is the tendency to interpret lyrics in a limited manner that relies on identifying a speaking consciousness, a persona that unifies and organizes the lyric ("Lyric" 120). While he acknowledges that there is some value in this approach, Culler points out four major critical blind spots of the model: first, that rhetorical flourishes must be ascribed to a single speaker in ways that "prevent one from imagining any speaker

... except that of a poet constructing the artifact"; second, that the necessity of interpreting a speaker and a context for the expression requires the narrativization of the poem and "assimilates the lyric to prose fiction"; third, this model ignores what Frye calls melos and opsis, the sound and image patterns that reflexively draw attention to language; fourth, the model does not account for intertextuality as a significant element of lyricism ("Lyric" 121-122). But even with Perloff s criticism (which will be discussed below) and Culler's questioning, the emphasis on experience, consciousness, and "subjective vision" is important for any consideration of the lyric, since both Frye's "utterance overheard" and the terms short, subjective, and verse remain commonly associated with the lyric.

Frye's understanding of the lyric, however, is not limited to this 'radical of presentation' of subjective expression, and it suggests ways of extending this conception of the lyric beyond the context of the single speaker and towards the

253 other possibilities Culler prescribes. The lyric, Frye says, is "an internal mimesis of sound and imagery" (250), and alongside its subjective radical of presentation

are other radicals that contribute to lyricism: the elements of melos and opsis or

sound and image patterning (274-275). Frye derives the terms melos and opsis from Aristotle's list of the six aspects of tragic poetry: muthos (plot or fable), ethos (character or setting), lexis (language or diction), melos (melody or sound),

70 opsis (spectacle or image), and dianoia (thought or idea) (52). As mentioned briefly in chapter one, melos, or "babble," includes all the various linguistic operations - such as rhyme, rhythm, assonance, alliteration, and puns - that create

"sound associations" in lyric poetry (Frye 275). Opsis, or "doodle," on the other hand, involves the visual qualities and operations of the lyric poem, from the

"typographical appearance of a lyric on the printed page" (274) to the shapes and patterns that come with conventional forms such as the sonnet and sestina or the violation of such conventions (278). According to Frye, these sound and image patterns serve to "indicate how far removed the lyric initiative really is from whatever a cri de cceur is supposed to be" (278). Based on Frye's description,

one can see how melos and opsis function to disrupt or at least distance the situation and context of the "utterance overheard." These sound and image

Aristotle's list of the six component parts of tragic poetry can be found in the fourth part of the Poetics, "Tragedy: Definition and Analysis" (10-11). The translations of the various parts and their meanings is a matter of considerable debate, but in keeping with my sources for this discussion I follow both Frye (52- 53) and Ricoeur's (35-43) use of the terms. I prefer Ricouer's spelling of muthos because it distances the term from the word 'myth,' whereas I use Frye's spelling of melos and ethos because of their common use in Culler's work.

254 patterns create connections and associations separate from the muthos (plot) and

ethos (character and setting) of the "radical of presentation."

In fact, Frye argues that melos and opsis have other important functions.

The sound patterning of melos, with its rhythmic qualities, "appeals to involuntary

response" (278), while the image patterns of opsis encourage "a fusion of

sensation and reflection, the use of an object of sense experience to stimulate a

mental activity in connection with it" (280). These functions in turn connect

melos and opsis to other aspects of lyric poetry, especially dianoia. Sound and

image patterns help shape and 'colour' how dianoia is received; they form the basis of the "fusion of the concrete and the abstract, the spatial and the

conceptual" that links dianoia to the poetic image (280). Frye reminds that

dianoia is a "secondary imitation of thought, a mimesis logon concerned with

typical thought, with images, metaphors, diagrams, and verbal ambiguities out of

which specific ideas develop" (83). The combination of imagery and metaphor

that Frye suggests makes up the dianoia of the lyric, "where the associative

process is strongest and the ready-made descriptive phrases of ordinary prose

furthest away" (281), comes in part from the patterning involved in melos and

opsis. The associative character of melos and opsis reflects the metaphorical

dimensions of lyric dianoia.

Following Frye's line of reasoning, one could also suggest that melos and

opsis, alongside dianoia, reorient muthos and ethos, and push the lyric away from

narrativity. Most importantly, muthos becomes less a matter of strict narrative plot, a succession of events, and more a matter of what might be called fictive

255 circumstances or organizing context. The connection between muthos and dianoia is one of a dynamic that determines what Frye calls "the shaping principle" or the "containing principle" of a poem (83). As such, muthos and dianoia unite the sense of narrative as temporal organization and "meaning" or idea as structure or arrangement (83). Thus muthos is not only plot, but rather relates to the form of all other aspects of the lyric, as Ricoeur says: "The fundamental trait of muthos is its character of order, of organization, of arranging or grouping. This characteristic of order, in turn, enters into all other factors: the arrangement of spectacle, coherence of character, sequence of thoughts, and finally the ordering of the verses" (36). One might think of muthos as both the organization and the deployment of these factors, especially melos, opsis, and dianoia, in the lyric.

But if the muthos of the lyric is not simply the narrative event of the speaking consciousness (the overhearing of the utterance, so to speak), then what else might be involved in this arrangement, this context? On the one hand, Frye's account of the lyric suggests that the lyric muthos is in some ways the very poem or the act of making the poem itself- the poetic construction that arranges and deploys thought through sound and image patterns, ultimately received and interpreted by the reader. On the other hand, this account is just one possibility for lyric muthos. Perloff s redefinition of the lyric in light of postmodernism offers further possibilities that take into account other aspects of Culler's recommendations.

256 Perloff hesitates to use the term lyric in reference to postmodern poetry because of the associations she sees with Romantic theories of lyricism. For

Perloff, postmodern poetry resists the Romantic view of the lyric by expanding its horizons. To begin with, postmodern poetry allows for the return of "the material so rigidly excluded - political, ethical, historical, philosophical - to the domain of poetry" (Perloff "Postmodernism" 180). The introduction of other discursive procedures disrupts the coherence of lyric rnuthos, as postmodern poetry tends towards collage, "the setting side by side or juxtaposition of disparate materials"

(Perloff "Postmodernism" 183). The collage of postmodern poetry has two effects on lyricism. First, Perloff suggests that "the lyric voice gives way to multiple voices or voice fragments," as the range of discursive forms holds off the sense of a single speaker. Second, Perloff suggests (following Michael A.

Bernstein's work on Pound's Cantos) that the lyric subject becomes a marginal presence - less a unifying force than a shaping 'voice' that must be found within the poem through the experience of it ("Postmodernism" 186). The meaning of the poem, therefore, does not depend on one locating or fixing the lyric voice or lyric subject, but rather involves negotiating and exploring a multiplicity of voices.

But Perloff s account of postmodern poetry is not so drastically different from Frye's that the two are incompatible. Perloff, too, emphasizes the importance of formal and linguistic play in postmodern poetry in a manner related to and elaborating on Frye's emphasis on melos and opsis. Whereas Frye sees melos and opsis as shaping dianoia and subsequently muthos, Perloff takes this

257 movement further. For Perloff, the play with and pleasure in language, whether in terms of rhyme and rhythm or even typography, becomes the substance and meaning of the poem, as "the cry of the heart, as Yeats called it, is increasingly subjected to the play of the mind - a play that wants to take account of the

'process which is the world we live in'" ("Postmodernism" 197). The last part of this statement offers the key distinction between Frye and Perloff s version of the lyric and lyric muthos. While Fye's lyric muthos, its very lyricism, comes from and its contained by the poetic construction itself, Perloff s postmodern poetry finds its muthos in dialogue within and outside of itself.

Frye, Perloff, and Culler's theoretical explorations of lyricism, therefore, offer different possibilities for understanding what lyric poetry is, but they do share common ground that will be valuable for the discussion of lyricism in poetic film. The shared sense of the importance of linguistic play, whether in terms of sound and image patterns or the collage of discursive forms, is one such point of intersection. A second point of intersection involves Perloff and Culler's stress on the role of transtextuality, whether as intertextual references or the introduction of other discursive forms, as another means of fragmenting or holding off the sense of a single speaker. Likewise, between Culler's concerns regarding the narrativization of the lyric and Perloff s interest in allowing narrative (or at least narrative fragments) into lyricism there is a return to the poeticized narrativity discussed in chapter two. Taken together, Culler and Perloff s views on narrativity in the lyric suggest a resistance to the reduction of lyricism to narrative matched with a resistance to the total exclusion of narrative from the lyric.

258 Narrative, therefore, can be a factor in lyric muthos (along with melos and opsis), but muthos is not necessarily narrative nor need it be read narratively.

The most important aspect of all three theorists' consideration of the lyric, however, is their attention to the role of subjectivity in lyricism. Again, one can find intersections between these different positions. Though Frye tends towards the view of the lyric as coming from a single consciousness, his emphasis on melos and opsis complicates this view, at the very least adding another layer of meaning to "the utterance overheard." Similarly, while he questions the notion of reading the lyric as emanating from a single consciousness, Culler remains interested in the role of experience, both in terms of lyric content as a reflection of experience and the reader's own experience of that reflection ("Lyric" 113-114).

Perloff s own critique of the Romantic subject in lyric poetry seems less of a rejection of the notion of lyric subjectivity than a desire to open up the lyric to consideration of multiple, fragmentary, and marginal voices and other understandings of what lyricism entails. In this way, Perloff s description of postmodern poetry resembles Barbour's theory of the lyric/anti-lyric, already mentioned in chapter one.

Barbour contends that poems that do not fit within conventional definitions of the lyric are not necessarily non-lyrics, but rather engage in the revision of the lyric form in a manner he calls lyric/anti-lyric. According to

Barbour, lyric/anti-lyric poems, such as those by poets as diverse as Walt

Whitman, Ezra Pound, Phyllis Webb, and Sappho, challenge lyric conventions.

The lyric/anti-lyric alters the sense of the speaking "I", either in favour of a choral

259 "we," the obscuring or splitting of the subject's voice, or the parodic reappraisal of the lyric voice (Lyric/Anti-lyric 10-18). Barbour also sees the lyric/anti-lyric in the contemporary long poem, which while it rejects the lyric's short form, also refuses to engage in the narrativity of the epic (Lyric/Anti-lyric 7). What, then, can one glean from these lyric (and even anti-lyric) possibilities? Perhaps accounting for lyricism requires that one attend to sound and image patterns, explore transtextual connections, and negotiate the role of subjectivities. And perhaps, by extension, one can think of lyric muthos as the organization, the context in which these three factors are at play.

These possibilities for accounting for lyric muthos return this discussion to the interaction between muthos and mimesis that Ricoeur says defines poetic discourse. If muthos is not simply reducible to plot and thereby narrative, then this interaction brings up the concerns addressed in chapter two regarding the limits of narrativity and their relation to diegesis and mimesis as discussed by

Genette and Burch. The general distinction between diegesis and mimesis as the opposition between "telling" and "showing" has particular significance to a discussion of poetic film. But as Genette points out, since Aristotle at least, diegesis has been conceived of as a sub-category of mimesis, that is, the narrative mode of poetic imitation (Figures 128). Genette argues that literary representation ultimately tends towards narrative, that in fact, "Mimesis is diegesis'" (Figures 132-133). For Genette, one of the marks of the narrative frontier of direct expression is that it is not mimetic; it is neither imitation nor representation because it is non-narrative and therefore not diegetic. The very

260 direct-ness of this mode of discourse, which Genette associates with subjectivity, precludes representation, both "showing" and "telling," in favour of "speaking"

{Figures 138; 140).

Yet, Genette's domain of direct expression seems at first glance incompatible with the kind of poetic discourse described by Frye, Culler, Perloff, and especially Ricoeur. The discourse of direct expression excludes muthos

(except perhaps for the context of speaking) and mimesis entirely, and thus seems more appropriately applied to scientific discourse, correspondence, or philosophical essays than lyric poetry, despite Genette's inclusion of all these forms under the banner of direct expression. It is useful to remember, therefore, that Genette insists that discourses of direct expression "almost never" exist in a

"pure state" {Figures 140). To clarify this further, one might say that lyric mimesis represents instances of direct expression or that lyric muthos organizes or presents its context as an instance of direct expression. Derrida's reformulation of performative utterances as citational practices within particular contexts

(mentioned in chapter one) is applicable here. Derrida's understanding of performative utterances points to philosophical references and lyric poetry as specific contexts in which citational practices occur, and one might think of this as analogous to the context of muthos in which direct expression is represented

(or even iterated) mimetically. This is not to say that Genette is in error, since his interest lies in testing the limits of narrative discourse in literature by way of comparison with the discourse of direct expression; rather what is at stake is how

261 one reconciles the connection between muthos and mimesis, especially as they appear in poetic film.

At this point it is worthwhile to return to Burch's sense of film diegesis as not-necessarily-narrative. The diegesis that Burch describes as exclusive of film narrative involves, among other factors, synchronous sound, profilmic and camera movement, editing patterns such as shot/countershot, and the readability of the image track in establishing and maintaining a sense of diegetic space and time

("Narrative/Diegesis" 200). The diegetic-effect is most evident, Burch argues, when it is weakened, as in Yasujiro Ozu's so-called "pillow shots," which often banish movement, characters, and synch-sound, or the still images of Marker's La

Jetee ("Narrative/Diegesis" 209). Burch variously refers to this diegetic-effect as

'"I-but-not-I,"' '"there-but-not-there,'" and a "sense of being there" that comes from the viewer's relation to the camera and what it films ("Narrative/Diegesis"

210; 212). Moreover, Burch implies that the diegetic-effect requires a reflexive recognition of the process of production kept in tension with "illusionistic diegesis" that is related to the tension between diegesis and narrative

("Narrative/Diegesis" 213).

Burch's description of the diegetic-effect encompasses a number of the ideas relating to muthos and mimesis under discussion here. To begin with, freed from narrative Burch's notion of film diegesis suggests a "showing" that recalls mimesis. But in its construction and maintenance of a Active space-time, the diegetic-effect also resembles muthos. Moreover, the "I-but-not-I" and "there- but-not-there" experience that the diegetic-effect produces resonates with the

262 metaphoric "seeing as" and "is/is not." In many ways Burch is speaking about the very connection between muthos and mimesis. Still Burch's conception of diegesis is a particularly filmic one. Burch notes that literary diegesis (that of the novel, for example), which he locates in non-narrative description, "is more closely intertwined with the narrative process" ("Narrative/Diegesis" 202). In this way, Burch distinguishes film diegesis from Genette's literary narrative/description divide. But Burch also offers points of continuity between film diegesis at its limits and Genette's discourse of direct expression. Burch stresses, "the diegetic effect in literature is always mediated in a way which it is not in cinema," a condition he attributes to "spectatorial identification with the ... camera" ("Narrative/Diegesis" 203). The similarities between this claim for the unmediated film diegesis (especially evident in limit cases of non-narrative films like those of Michael Snow) and Genette's direct expression point to ways in which Genette's theory can be folded back into a discussion of muthos, mimesis, and diegesis in relation to poetic film.

The diegetic space-time that Burch describes as remaining in non- narrative or poeticized-narrative films suggests a blending of the various connotations of muthos, mimesis, and diegesis. Burch's theory, alongside

Genette's, proposes a fusion of showing, telling, and speaking that is central to poetic film and tied to Ricoeur's metaphoric interaction of muthos and mimesis.

Following Burch, it is reasonable to suggest that in films at the limits of narrative such as poetic films there is an inextricable connection between diegesis and mimesis. The photographic image, at base, can be said to be almost always

263 mimetic; yet, film as organized, structured and constructed, whether through

framing, editing or other means, is also almost always diegetic. If one aligns

Burch's sense of diegesis with muthos in terms of structuring and arranging on the

one hand, and with mimesis in terms of the representation and maintenance of a

fictional space-time on the other, then one can see how the metaphoric 'seeing as'

fuses both showing and telling. 'Seeing as' in poetic film thereby incorporates

(somewhat paradoxically) both unmediated mimetic directness, and guided diegetic contextualization.

Defining the muthos of poetic film as an organizing and structuring that

carries with it the diegetic-effect that Burch proposes brings one closer to

describing possibilities for lyricism in poetic film. As previous chapters have

dealt with concerns of sound and image patterns and trans-/intertextual operations in poetic film, the next step in this process requires looking to theories of

subjectivity in film to negotiate this aspect of filmic lyricism. The first (and most obvious) theory to consider is Sitney's lyrical film, already mentioned in chapter two.71 The lyrical film, which "postulates the film-maker behind the camera as the first-person protagonist of the film" and allows the viewer to "see this mediator's intense experience of seeing" (Visionary Film 160), shares the view of lyricism as the expression of subjective experience that Perloff and Culler associate with Romanticism and New Criticism. But Sitney also attributes specific visual patterns to the lyrical film, such as a flattening of the image and the

71 Examples of the lyric film include Marie Menken's Visual Variations on Noguchi and Arabesque for Kenneth Anger as well as Brakhage's films of the period from 1958 to 1964, beginning with Anticipation of the Night and ending in the mythopoetic Dog Star Man (Sitney Visionary 160-168).

264 use of superimposition, extending this lyricism beyond that of 'dramatized

consciousness' towards visual abstraction and multiple perspectives (Visionary

160). Moreover, one can see the elaboration of the lyrical film in the mythopoetic

film as following along the same lines as Perloff s postmodern expansion of lyric poetry.

Sitney's lyrical film presents one possible theory of film lyricism, notably

one drawn from a familiar model of lyric poetry. Pasolini's "cinema of poetry"

offers another possibility for describing film lyricism. Pasolini's controversial72

essay "The Cinema of Poetry" proposes a theory of film poetry that emphasizes

filmic specificity over analogy to literary poetry. Pasolini begins by describing

the basic unit of what he calls "film language" as the "im-sign" or image-sign

(544). For Pasolini, the primary archetypes of the im-sign are memory and

dreams, what he calls "images of communication with oneself that are inherently

subjective and suggest a lyrical basis for cinematic language (548). That said,

Pasolini also notes that im-signs also have objective archetypes, those of "visually

observed reality" that lack this lyrical connection. The im-sign, and in fact

cinematic language itself, is therefore "double natured," simultaneously

"extremely subjective and extremely objective" (Pasolini 548). These extremes,

Pasolini's belief in a language of cinema and his theories of film semiotics sparked a great deal of debate (from Christian Metz's critique in Film Language to Stephen Heath's negative reading in "Film/Cinetext/Text" and Teresa De Laurentis's positive critical appraisal in Alice Doesn 7), but the semiotic complexities of these debates do not override the use of Pasolini's conception of a "cinema of poetry" as a mode of presentation of cinematic subjectivity when considering film lyricism. As Geoffrey Nowell-Smith says, Pasolini's essays on film semiotics are "always interesting and often brilliant, but what they do not come with is a semiotic theory of cinema" (206).

265 Pasolini says are inextricably linked, but in the cinema of poetry there is an emphasis on subjectivity that exists not at the expense of cinematic objectivity, but by a manipulation or a reorientation of it to subjective and poetic ends (548).

The first and most apparent feature of this joining of the subjective and objective in the cinema of poetry is what Pasolini calls "free indirect discourse"

(549). Pasolini sees the cinematic free indirect discourse as closely related to the literary technique of free indirect discursive narration typical of writers such as

Dante (and commonly associated with the likes of Jane Austen in English literature), which Pasolini defines by saying: "the author penetrates entirely into the spirit of his character, of whom he thus adopts not only the psychology but also the language" (549). Free indirect discourse in film, Pasolini contends, is analogous to the literary technique, however the former is not tied to language like the latter, but manifests itself in what Pasolini terms "free indirect subjectivity" (551). Instead of a linguistic connection between author and character, the free indirect subjectivity of the cinema of poetry is an interaction of

"looks" that operates stylistically (Pasolini 551-552). Identification with and immersion in the 'mind' of the character in this free indirect subjectivity occurs first and foremost through the "direct discourse" of the "'subjective' shot," which

Pasolini compares to the direct discourse of speech contained in quotation marks in literature (550). But Pasolini looks to other stylistic procedures that generate the same immersion indirectly, procedures that drop these 'quotation marks,' so to speak. Pasolini takes as his examples of free indirect subjectivity the work of

Michelangelo Antonioni, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Jean-Luc Godard. According

266 to Pasolini, each of these directors engage in "obsessive" stylistic practices:

"obsessive framing" and "obsessive montage-rhythms" evident in Antonioni's use of colour, Bertolucci's still shots, and Godard's discontinuity editing (553-555).

To return to more familiar terminology, one can think of Pasolini's stylistic

'obsessions' as comparable to the stylistic patterns involved in poetic narrativization or the sound and image patterns of Frye's lyric poetry.

For Pasolini, these examples reveal the full character of the cinema of poetry's free indirect subjectivity, its "double nature" that combines connection with a character's subjectivity with stylistic patterns. Pasolini says,

The 'cinema of poetry' ... characteristically produces films of a double

nature. The film which one sees and receives normally is a 'free indirect

subjectivity' which is sometimes irregular and approximate ... This comes

from the fact that the author uses the 'dominant state of mind in the film,'

which is that of a sick character, to make a continual mimesis of it ...

Behind such a film unwinds the other film - the one the author would have

made even without the pretext of visual mimesis with the protagonist; a

totally and freely expressive, even expressionist, film. (555)

In this statement, one again finds the intersection and interaction of muthos and mimesis at work. On the one hand, the structuring and organizing of 'obsessive' stylistic patterns, and on the other hand the representation of experience via free indirect subjectivity. And while Pasolini's argument and examples remain tied to narrative fiction films (though Antonioni and Godard's films of the time of

Pasolini's writing of the article, 1965, certainly test narrative limits), he also

267 suggest that "the use of free indirect subjectivity' in the cinema of poetry is only a pretext enabling the author to speak indirectly - through some narrative alibi - in the first person" (557). Narrative in this case, not unlike in Perloff s postmodern poetry, becomes a vehicle for subjective expression. Moreover, this indirect first person parallels Genette's direct expression, suggesting a sense in which expression in the first person is always already indirect whether it comes through a character or the figure of a voice.

Pasolini's free indirect subjectivity also significantly informs aspects of

Deleuze's theories of the movement-image and the time-image in cinema, which accordingly can themselves offer further insight into film lyricism. Deleuze responds to Pasolini's free indirect subjectivity in both his books on cinema, locating in the 'cinema of poetry' continuities with his own theory of the transition from a cinema of the movement-image to a cinema of the time-image.

For Deleuze, Pasolini's theory intersects with a number of his own concepts, notably the perception-image and the hyalosign, or 'crystal-image.' The first of these, the perception-image, concerns the presentation of perception in the cinema of the movement-image, typical of the pre-World War II cinema.

The perception-image, according to Deleuze, is double in that it can be objective or subjective. The perception-image is sometimes that of a character's point of view, and therefore subjective, but it can also be external to a character as in an objective long-shot that presents the point of view of the camera-as-narrator

(Cinema 1 70-72). Deleuze calls the perception-image "semi-subjective" because it "constantly passes from the subjective to the objective, and vice versa" (Cinema

268 / 72). With Pasolini's free indirect subjectivity, Deleuze finds a model that helps explain this movement between subjective and objective, as "the camera does not simply give us the vision of the character and of his world; it imposes another vision in which the first is transformed and reflected" (Cinema 1 74). The result of this doubled-vision is "a correlation between a perception-image and a camera consciousness" (Deleuze Cinema 1 74). In Cinema 2 Deleuze returns to his discussion of Pasolini's cinema of poetry in reference to the tension between the real and the imaginary in the time-image typical of post-War cinema, specifically that of the "crystal-image." Pasolini's cinema of poetry is one manifestation of this indiscernibility between the "actual image and its virtual image" (127).

Deleuze says,

In the cinema of poetry, the distinction between what the character saw

subjectively and what the camera saw objectively vanished, not in favour

of one or the other, but because the camera assumed a subjective presence,

acquired an internal vision, which entered into a relation of simulation

('mimesis') with the character's way of seeing. (Cinema 2 148)

One can think of this collapsing of the distinction between objective and subjective, camera and character, and actual and virtual as related to the lyric muthos-mimesis interaction. The absence of these distinctions, or their undecidability characterize the "seeing as" of lyricism in poetic film. But this lyric "seeing as" has further connection to Deleuze's theories, particularly the time-image's appearance as pure optical situations (opsigns), the related pure auditory situations (sonsigns), and images of thought (noosigns).

269 Without delving too deeply in Deleuze's complex and sometimes inchoate conception of cinema and its roots in Bergsonian philosophy73, one can consider how Deleuze's concepts of the opsign and the noosign address aspects of film lyricism. The opsign, to begin with, is Deleuze's name for a "pure optical situation" {Cinema 2 2). These pure optical situations constitute a weakening or exceeding of the "sensory-motor schema" {Cinema 2 9; 18).74 Along with the corresponding sonsign, or pure sound situation, opsigns generate situations in which "the distinction between subjective and objective ... tends to lose its importance, to the extent that the optical situation or visual description replaces the motor action" (Deleuze Cinema 2 7). Moreover, opsigns and sonsigns are the first steps towards and a central feature of the indiscernability of the crystal- image, since "pure optical and sound situations have can have two poles - objective and subjective, real and imaginary, physical and mental .... they give rise to opsigns and sonsigns, which bring the poles into continual contact ... tending toward a point of indiscernability (and not confusion)" (Deleuze Cinema

Indeed, to adequately address the entirety of Deleuze's views on cinema is outside of the scope of this dissertation. That said, because of his emphasis on cinema as a not-strictly-narrative {Cinema 2 26-27), not-strictly-semiotic system {Cinema 1 12), and because of the resonances that his concerns of image, perception, and thought have with this discussion, Deleuze's theories offer valuable material for consideration in relation to lyricism in film. 74 Ronald Bogue describes the "sensory-motor schema" in this way: "Our pragmatic world is structured by our needs, desires, purposes, and projects, and the practical application of our perceptions and actions to meet those ends depends on a coordinated interconnection of our sensory and motor faculties" (66). Additionally, one might think of the sensory-motor schema as the interaction between perception and action and reaction. The sensory-motor gives coherence to one's experience of the world by tying it to a chain of cause-effect- cause-effect; it organizes and orients the individual within space and time based on sensory and motor information.

270 2 9). Furthermore, pure optical situations create new connections besides

sensory-motor ones, and "bring the emancipated senses into direct relation with

time and thought" (Deleuze Cinema 2 17). One of Deleuze's clearest examples of

the pure optical situation of the opsign is his reference to the 'pillow-shots' in

Ozu's films - shots of spaces emptied of characters and movement. These pillow

shots, Deleuze says, "reach the absolute, as instances of pure contemplation, and

immediately bring about the identity of the mental and the physical, the real and

the imaginary, the subject and the object, the world and the I" {Cinema 2 16).

The connection between these pure optical situations and Burch's weakened

diegetic-effect is clear, even beyond their shared reference to Ozu, and suggests

the common ground of Burch's non-narrative diegesis and the opsign.

But Deleuze's pure optical situations also have a connection to Sitney's

lyrical film, as they most often appear in the form of mnemosigns and onirosigns,

or memory-images and dream-images. Pure optical situations tend towards

memory and dream because these forms of consciousness typically blur the

distinction between actual and virtual. Deleuze's interest in memory-images in particular comes from the influence of Henri Bergson's philosophy; as Bogue

notes, "Bergson says that in recognition, actual perception-images and virtual

memory-images 'run one after another' and in fact occur simultaneously in any

instant of action-perception" (114). For Deleuze, memory-images and dream-

images become models of pure optical situations because they are actual images

that become virtual, or virtual images that become actual, forming "circuits" of

relations as in flashbacks or hallucinations {Cinema 2 47). Again, in the shifts

271 between actual and virtual that define the memory-image and the dream-image,

Deleuze locates the undecidability of the opsign, one that can be rephrased as a matter of seeing the actual as virtual and seeing the virtual as actual. The memory-image becomes a matter of seeing the past in the present and by extension the present in the past; the dream-image becomes a matter of seeing the real in the imaginary or the imaginary in the real.

Finally, building on the foundation of free indirect subjectivity and the pure optical situations of the crystal-image, the memory-image, and the dream- image, Deleuze explores the relationship between thought and cinema. Thought appears in cinema in the form of the noosign, an image of thought or, as the glossary of Cinema 2 defines it, "an image which goes beyond itself towards something which can only be thought" (334). D.N. Rodowick further summarizes the noosign saying, "Noosigns are defined by the logic of intervals and the relation between intervals and wholes" (178). In Deleuze's formulation, there are two appearances of the noosign, first in the movement-image and second in the time-image, the basis of which hinges on the distinction between how images are connected and the intervals that make up these connections.

With the movement-image the noosign concerns the rational links between images, governed by the sensory-motor schema; as Deleuze says, "between two images or two sequences of images, the limit as interval is included as the end of the one or as the beginning of the other, as the last image of the first sequence or the first of the second" {Cinema 2 277). One of the preeminent forms of the noosign in the cinema of the movement-image, Deleuze suggests, can be found in

272 the metaphoric connections between images in Eisenstein's dialect montage.

Metaphor in Eisenstein's films, Deleuze contends, is a means of connecting images based on what he calls the "harmonics" shared between two images, that is, the visual and rational resonances between images (Cinema 2 160-161).

Metaphor in this sense is the perfect noosign of the movement-image because it

"does not simply express the way in which the character experiences himself, but also expresses the way in which the author and the viewer judge him, it integrates thought into the image" (Deleuze Cinema 2 161). With the time-image, the noosign emerges in "the irrational cut between non-linked (but always relinked) images" (Deleuze Cinema 2 278). The noosign of the time-image is based on the interstitial gaps generated by irrational cuts, which produce "not an operation of . association, but of differentiation" (Deleuze Cinema 2 179). Because of this gap, this "fissure," the noosign requires "relinkage" via thought "external to the image" (Deleuze Cinema 2 211-21%). This need for relinkage is the basis of

Deleuze's denial of metaphor in noosign of the time-image (Cinema 2 182-183).

Deleuze claims that in the time-image thought no longer appears in the form of metaphor - a circuit linking the 'inside and outside' of the image as in

Eisenstein's films - because the irrational cut undermines the associative and the harmonic relation of images (Cinema 2 182). Rodowick, in summing up

Deleuze's account of thought in the time-image, says, "we cannot say that thought

is either the object or the subject of the time-image" since "The relation between

image and thought is one of neither representation nor visibility," but rather that

273 the image engages thought (191). Thought, therefore, is not to be found in the time-image, but is the activity of engaging with the time-image.

How do Deleuze's theories help clarify the lyricism of poetic film? And if there are such similarities between Deleuze's account of cinema, especially that of the time-image, and poetic film, what distinguishes one from the other? If one takes the time-image as a period, a break from the dominant of the movement- image, then most of the films under discussion here fall within time-image.

Moreover, Deleuze's emphasis on tensions between subjective and objective or real and imaginary, and the qualities of opsigns, mnemo-signs, onirosigns, and noosigns all speak to elements of lyricism. Yet there are aspects of poetic film already described that Deleuze downplays, notably metaphor, transtextuality and non-narrativity. Metaphor, for example, while possible in the movement-image is largely banished from the time-image. But as Ricoeur shows, metaphor does not depend on similarity to facilitate seeing as; Ricoeur's tension theory allows for metaphoric connections based on difference as well as similarity. Deleuze's resistance to metaphor in the time-image, then, can be thought of as a desire to distinguish between metaphor as an "is" relationship in favour of an "is not" relationship. Similarly, one could think of the introduction of transtextual elements into poetic films as creating the kind of interstices or fissures Deleuze sees in the time-image.

Regardless of the similarities or differences between the time-image and poetic film, Deleuze's theories offer a catalogue of ideas and approaches to problems of perception, subjectivity, and knowledge in cinema that can be useful

274 to discussions of the lyricism of poetic film. Furthermore, Deleuze raises cinema to a philosophical level as a "new practice of images and signs, whose theory philosophy must produce as conceptual practice" (Cinema 2 280). This aligning of cinema and philosophy recalls Ricoeur's aligning of poetic discourse and the speculative thought of philosophical discourse through metaphor (313).

Since Sitney, Pasolini, and even Deleuze all attach particular significance to subjectivity in their theories, it is useful to consider how poetic film might present subjectivity. In his book Point of View in the Cinema, Edward Branigan puts forward a theory of how subjectivity is presented in narrative fiction film

(primarily that of Classical Hollywood). Subjective narration in film, Branigan says, "may be conceived as a specific instance or level of narration where the telling is attributed to a character in the narrative and received by us as //we were in the situation of a character" (29). While Branigan does not address poetic film directly (although his reading of Nagisa Oshima The Story of a Man Who Left His

Will on Film (144-164) considers a film that might be described as poetic), his theories of film subjectivity and narration can be adapted to take lyricism into account.

A central point in Branigan's argument about subjectivity in classical film involves the classification of six elements of representation in all visual arts (56-

57). These six elements are: origin, the "source of the space from which representation derives"; vision, the "instance or cause (the gaze) which brings representation into being from an origin"; time, "which links units of representation into a whole"; frame, "a perceptual limit or boundary which

275 divides what is represented from what is not represented"; object, "that which is represented ... the object of vision"; and mind, "that condition of consciousness

... which is represented as ... the principle of coherence of the representation"

(Branigan 57). Subjective narration in film, Branigan says, depends on the variability of three of these elements - time, frame, and mind - while the other three elements remain invariant (76-77). Thus, in subjective narration, the "time of a character's vision may be represented as present, past, future, or undefined," the frame is "defined with respect to an origin ... a character," and mind concerns the "mental condition of the character" (77-78). Branigan identifies five major forms of subjective narration in film - reflection, point of view, perception, flashback, and mental process - as the product of the various combinations of time, frame, and mind (79).75 If only three of the six elements of representation come into play in subjective narration, it is useful to consider how poetic film might deploy all or any of these elements in shaping lyricism in film.

Given the theories of lyricism in film already under discussion, one can hypothesize how film lyricism might engage all six elements of representation.

To begin with, following Pasolini's discussion of the double nature of the cinema of poetry, the element of origin comes into question because of the competition between the subjective point of view of the free indirect subjectivity and sound and image patterns. Representation cannot be said to come from the point of view of this free indirect subjectivity exclusively because the sound and image patterns

75 Branigan sketches and defines each of these forms of subjectivity in detail and provides a useful chart of how these subjectivities relate to time, frame and mind (Point 98). For the purposes of this discussion, however, it is unnecessary to go into great detail outlining each of these forms.

276 suggest an additional point of origin for representation. By extension, the element

of vision becomes a site of contention. On the one hand, as Sitney says, poetic

film raises the experience of vision to its primary concern, but on the other hand,

the double-ness of its origin complicates circumstances and conditions by which

this experience can be understood. The fusion of subjective positions in free

indirect subjectivity simultaneously asks 'who is seeing?' and 'how is one

seeing?' while sound and image patterns add the factors of 'why?' to this

equation. This complication of vision in turn has an impact on the object of

representation, particularly in abstract or experimental films (such as Mothlighf),

where the question of 'what is being seen?' comes into play. Cut off or at least

estranged from narrative continuities, the elements of time and frame must adjust

to these shifts and complications of origin and vision, and as such concerns of

time and frame become more ambiguous and open. Finally, following Deleuze,

as regards the element of mind, not only do the lines between memory, dream,

hallucination and other states of consciousness and unconsciousness blur and lose

rational differentiation, but the metaphorical structuring of poetic films displaces the question of the mental condition of a character, of thought, on to the viewer who must negotiate and make sense of metaphoric connections.

From Frye to Culler to Burch to Deleuze, from Perloff to Barbour to

Genette to Pasolini, these various theories together present a collection of lyric possibilities for poetic film. The common threads that run through these possibilities form the basis for considering lyricism in films. Four threads are of particular importance because they intersect and intertwine: the thread of the

277 deployment of sound and image patterns; the thread of the negotiation of

subjectivity and subject positioning and the (in)directness of the expression; the

thread of transtextual connections and interruptions; and the thread of narrative

limits and thresholds. These threads also revive the concerns of the previous two

chapters. Narrative poeticization ties together the threads of sound and image patterns, transtextual interruptions, and narrative thresholds. The tensional

innovation of metaphor ties together the threads of subjective negotiations, and transtextual connection. To return to the questions with which this chapter began, these threads do not just point towards lyric muthos, they describe it and confirm the muthos-mimesis interaction of poetic film as a matter of seeing as, both metaphorically and literally. The lyric T becomes a matter of the lyric 'eye/T as

one traces the paths of these threads. Sound and image patterns posit subjective positions, moving from the 'eye' to the 'I,' while transtextual interruptions push narrative limits, moving from the T to the 'eye.'

In what follows, these lyric possibilities will be tested by exploring how

specific films weave these threads together into lyric texts, lyric films. The four

films that this section will discuss - Vigo's Zero for Conduct, Brakhage's

Window Water Baby Moving, Maddin's Brand Upon the Brain!, and Tarkovsky's

Mirror - can be thought of as different manifestations of lyricism in film. Each of

these films will present different points of intersection and interaction for the

various lyric theories and the threads they generate. As such, what the section

below offers is not a selection of films that demonstrate the lyric in poetic film, but rather a range of film lyricisms, a range of possible lyricisms as they appear in

278 film. Following this section will be a consideration of another lyricism, this time not directly related to the lyric poetry described above, but a lyricism by way of the modernist Denkbild. This alternative lyricism, yet another possibility, will be explored in relation to three films by Chris Marker: Le Tombeau d'Alexandre,

UneJournee d'Andrei Arsenevitch, and Sans Soleil.

Film Lyricisms - Four Possibilities:

I. Zero for Conduct: a lyricism of remembered experience

As with his other films7 , Jean Vigo's Zero for Conduct is generally considered to be poetic. But what this entails and whether or how this poetical- ness is lyrical remains to be examined. P.E. Salles Gomes' critical assessment of

Vigo's Zero for Conduct holds that, while the film has a flawed and fragmented narrative, this deficiency is made up for by the film's poetic dimensions (134-35).

But John Smith questions what the poetic qualities of Zero for Conduct actually entail (70). Similarly, William G. Simon also notes that what is poetic in Vigo's films has been under-defined, saying "qualities like 'poetic' do not arise mystically from a work but instead are firmly grounded in the form and style of that work" (3). Yet despite their attention to the need for greater critical attention to these poetic dimensions, Smith and Simon's attempts at identifying what is poetic in Zero for Conduct remain hesitant. Smith, for instance, dismisses

Pasolini's emphasis on technique and free indirect discourse. Instead, quoting

Giberto Perez Guillermo's account of a 'tradition of poetry' in France, Smith

76 One could certainly consider Vigo's A Propos de Nice and L Atalante as poetic and lyrical, but I have chosen Zero for Conduct because of its place between A Propos's surrealism and L 'Atalante's poetic realism and because of its resonances with the poetic theories described in this chapter.

279 proposes that the poetry of Zero for Conduct comes from "vividly particularised"

images that avoid abstract patterning in a manner that "is always an interpretation

of reality and never a denial of it" (70; 72). For Smith, even a scene such as that of the slow-motion dormitory procession is only poetic because of its realism and its presentation of physicality, which he attributes to the boys' awareness of themselves (74). Simon offers another account of the poetic qualities Zero for

Conduct, focusing on the narrative discontinuity of the film. According to Simon,

Zero for Conduct departs from conventional cause and effect narration in favour of elliptically and ambiguously connected scenes (90-95). This narrative ellipicality, Simon says, produces "several varying individual and imaginative points of view for projecting the material and several entirely different, even magical, modes for presenting it, are absorbed into a single structure that seems like a factual objective representation of life" (53). Here Simon approaches the kind of lyricism that Pasolini's cinema of poetry gestures towards.

To read Zero for Conduct as lyrical, then, one can follow Simon's impressions and elaborate on them based on lyrical possibilities outlined above.

One approach to reading lyricism in Zero for Conduct would be to consider the film as a lyrical vision that reflects on childhood memories, organizing and interpreting them. One might consider the lyric muthos of the film as the recollection and reconstruction of memories from childhood that aims to reflect the experience of a child and the world as seen by a child. Such a reading shares something of the subjective expression of a single 'speaker' in Frye's account of the lyric, but it also helps account for the narrative discontinuity of the film and

280 the 'particularised' scenes of stylistic flourish in a manner that recalls the lyricism

of Pasolini's theory.

The narrative structure of Zero for Conduct, as Simon demonstrates, is

fragmentary, elliptical, and episodic. For Simon, the plot lacks clear transitions

from scene to scene and frequently holds off the possibility of explaining 'why' or

'how' events or actions take place (90-92). A scene such as the one involving

Caussat and the young girl typifies this narrative uncertainty. While Caussat sits blindfolded, the young girl hangs a glass vessel filled with water from a wire

attached to a window at two places, exposing her knickers in the process. Once the action is complete, she removes the blindfold and Caussat smiles. What is one to make of this scene? On the one hand, it does follow the narrative information that Caussat is one of the children who leave the school on the weekend to stay with his guardian, but otherwise the scene is enigmatic. While Salles Gomes notes that the scenario for Zero for Conduct included a subsequent scene in which

Caussat mimed the scene for his friends, elaborating it as a more intimate

encounter (120), as it appears in the film this narrative significance disappears.

But reading the scene as a moment of lyrical remembrance mixed with imaginative fantasy allows one to overcome the necessity of a narrative explanation.

For example, one could interpret the scene as the recollection of a child's

early erotic experience, in which the scene is an imagined recreation of an event the child never witnessed as it is presented in the film. Caussat may not actually witness the girl hanging the vessel or see her underwear, but in the moment or

281 years afterwards he may have imagined it as this scene. The fixed camera of the scene adds to this sense of voyeuristic imagination and pre-pubescent eroticism.

This reading finds support in the fact that the Vigo based the scene on his own near-identical childhood experience (Salles Gomes 98), but it also sets out the pattern of shifting point of view that is the basis of this lyric reading. The scene enacts the collision of objectivity and subjectivity Pasolini describes, as the objectivity of the still, long shot contrasts with the subjective intimacy of the remembered fantasy. The free indirect subjectivity of this shot suggests the distance of an adult mind recalling a childhood fantasy and yet also the proximity that the initial erotic envisioning imagines.

This dynamic, this tension between the remembered experience and the original experience runs throughout Zero for Conduct. The presentation of the teachers, for instance, as gross caricatures or the dummies that make up the crowd at the Commemoration Day suggests both a disdainful childlike view of the adult world and a recollection that dramatizes the childhood observations. The principal is a midget because he is a 'small' or petty man; the alumni are a bunch of dummies in both senses of the word. Other magical and fantastical elements of the film - the disappearing, reappearing ball and the cartoon that comes to life - are further examples of this point of view infused with both childhood vision and remembered revision. From the child's point of view, things are magical, and from the remembering adult's point of view, childhood seemed magical. The most complete and celebrated example of this, however, is the dormitory scene.

The children's revolt and pillow fight, at first presented in predominantly high-

282 angle and bird's-eye-view long shots, cuts to a series of eye-level medium-long and medium shots in slow motion, with the pillow feathers raining down over the children parading as if part of a religious procession, with paper lanterns on sticks. The introduction of slow motion to the scene coincides with a radical change in the soundtrack as the diegetic sound drops out and the music shifts from up-tempo, trumpet driven music to slower, operatic music with almost atonal woodwinds beneath a haunting aria. This shift, from normal speed to slow motion, from militaristic music to dissonant aria, from distant shots observing the action to closer shots caught up in the action, suggests another shift in the presentation of memory and experience. The initial shots of the revolt appear as they would to an adult, as the chaotic misbehaviour of children. The slow motion shots, however, with their religious gravity suggest the significance and momentousness of the event to a child. Here again, the movement from distance to proximity plays with the nature of memory. The free indirect subjectivity of

Zero for Conduct moves between voluntary and involuntary memories, each differently tinged with the experiences of childhood, their presentation shaped by sound and image patterns. In this way, Zero for Conduct explores lyrical possibilities in a manner that recalls Frye's reflecting subject presented via melos and opsis and Pasolini's free indirect subjectivity and obsessive stylistic patterning.

II. Window Water Baby Moving', a lyricism of metaphoric chains and moving experience

283 In Brakhage's Window Water Baby Moving one encounters another manifestation of lyricism in film, one most immediately connected to Sitney's lyrical film, but also demonstrating aspects of the lyrical possibilities posed by

Frye, Pasolini, and Deleuze. Window Water Baby Moving is one of the films that

Sitney cites as an example of lyrical film, one in a series of films "in which the film-maker could compress his thoughts and feelings while recording his direct confrontation with intense experiences" (Visionary 168). In this instance, the birth process becomes the visionary experience documented by the lyrical film, with Brakhage as the first-person protagonist behind the camera envisioning the birth. For Sitney, one of the decisive features that define Window Water Baby

Moving as a lyrical film is its play with time, as the film exists "outside sequential time in a realm of simultaneity or of disconnected time spans of an isolated event"

(Visionary 169). But Window Water Baby Moving also extends and complicates

Sitney's definition of the lyrical film along lines following Pasolini, and

Deleuze's theories.

Brakhage is certainly the 'seer' of much of the film, but not in an objective sense, as along with his filming of the birth process he also edits and manipulates the footage. In this way, the film presents Brakhage's subjective experience as the way he 'saw things,' the way he experienced them emotionally and/or psychologically, and also his subsequent 'reflections' on the events, all of which come together as the 'revelation' of the birth. But this view of Brakhage as the

'seer' is complicated by other points of view that disrupt the association of the film with a single consciousness. Towards the end of the film, following the

284 birth, a series of shots of Brakhage himself come from his wife Jane's point of

view, transforming the film into a shared visionary experience. One might even

go so far as to interpret some shots in the film as the imagined recreation of the

vision of the un- and newly born child. Throughout the film, sections of black

leader frequently follow shots of Jane's pregnant belly, and while these black

frames, as Sitney contends, serve to breakup the "dramatic tension" of the event

(Visionary 169), they also stand in for the 'un-vision' of the yet-to-be born child.

Even the images of the belly with its belly button graphically imply an unseeing

eye. Similarly, after the birth has occurred, another series of shots of Jane's belly

are cut along with shots of the cutting of child's umbilical cord and sections of white leader. One could read these white frames as a representation of the child's

first experience of sight and light. A shot of Jane's partially opened eye towards the end of this series and again followed by white leader reinforces this reading.

Taken together, these three points of view suggest a fluid subjectivity that recalls

Pasolini's free indirect subjectivity and Deleuze's pure optical situations,

especially opsigns and mnemosigns.

Considering Window Water Baby Moving in light of Deleuze's pure optical situations helps expand on Sitney point regarding the lyrical play with time in the film. The undecidability of the pure optical situation and its fusion of objective and subjective as well as actual and virtual speak to the treatment of time in the film as not-strictly-narrative. While the film generally proceeds along

a narrative teleology that coincides with the movement from pregnancy to birth to the moments after birth, it also breaks up the drama of this narrative. While the

285 pregnancy-birth narrative plays out in a largely linear fashion, the film tempers this narrative with a parallel anti- or non-narrative structure furnished by the undecidability of the pure optical situation. As Sitney claims, this anti-narrative dimension of the film functions in part due to the "reorganization of chronological time" through various patterns of flashbacks and flash-forwards (Visionary 169).

But these disruptions of narrative linearity also unfold according to patterns unassociated with narrative. These narrative disruptions establish and test the intense experience of seeing that makes up this pure optical situation. Like a series of mnemosigns, the alternation of shots from early in the pregnancy with shots of the birth event challenge the recognition of certain images as memories and others as direct perception. Shots of a placid Jane cut into the birth event ask one to question whether these images remember a pre-labour moment, look forward to a post-labour moment or imagine another subjective or emotional state.

These shots, following Deleuze, see the past in the present and in turn the present in the past. Similarly, some shots of the birth event have a 'medical' quality, as if scientifically objective, yet others are more subjective. The interaction between the objective and subjective here also blurs the distinction between the two, folding a medical gaze into the lyrical gaze Sitney proposes. One could say that while at times Brakhage's camera sees in a manner that would otherwise be medical or objective, his presence behind the camera and his presentation of the footage pulls the two poles together.

The undecidability of the pure optical situations in Window Water Baby

Moving thereby proposes an alternative metaphoric organization for the film that

286 departs from a narrative trajectory. The cutting between shots of Jane during and before labour, for example, certainly contrasts the two moments, but also moves along metaphoric lines that involve graphic and thematic similarity and juxtaposition that enact a metaphoric 'seeing as.' This metaphoric procedure pervades the film, connecting images by comparison in a manner that supplants narrative connections. Thus, the graphic rhymes between the window as an

'opening to the outside world' and the vagina as a 'passage way into the world' and further still the eye as 'the window to the soul' demand to be read along metaphoric lines. Brakhage's montage, with its straight cuts between images, builds these metaphoric chains. In one series of shots of Jane during labour,

Brakhage alternates first between shots of Jane's open mouth and her vagina, then between shots of Jane's closed eyes and her vagina, and finally again between

Jane's mouth and her vagina as the baby's head emerges. The graphic similarities between mouth, vagina, and eye, made all the more apparent by their similar positions in the frame, carry with them a host of thematic associations, from an implication of the vagina dentata to further elaboration of the earlier

'passage/window' metaphor.

These comparisons explore the limits of the metaphoric 'is-is not' tension involved in 'seeing one thing as another,' one that reflects Brakhage's interest in other forms and modes of perception. Window Water Baby Moving asks one to contemplate the implications of seeing a vagina as an eye, for example, or to perceive the relation and non-relation of window and mouth. The image of

Brakhage holding up and filming through the placenta is itself a visual metaphor

287 for new or different perception which in turn links (or as Deleuze would have it,

relinks) back to the 'window/eye' metaphor. Even the title itself plays off this

sense of altered perception, as the word 'moving' spins a web of connections to

'window' (moving through), 'water' (movement of) and 'baby,' (movement as

life). 'Moving' also connects to perception in the film as a whole, as in moving as

'emotionally affecting' in the sense of the intensity of the birth experience for

Stan, for Jane, and for the child, before the birth, during the birth, after the birth

and in the construction of the film. To take this further, the perception altered by the emotionally moving experience that the film documents is also made possible by the film images moving at 24 frames per second. This reflexive turn extends the metaphoric chain, adding filmic materials, techniques and technologies - lens,

aperture, celluloid, framing - to the constellation of the window-eye-vagina-

mouth-belly metaphors. Window Water Baby Moving, therefore, is lyrical not

only in its documentation of the filmmaker's experience, but also in the

experience it affords the viewer by way of its metaphoric chains.

III. Brand Upon the Brain!: a lyricism of neurological nostalgia

Whereas the lyricism of Window Water Baby Moving emerges from its metaphoric chains of undecidable pure optical situations representing experience, the lyricism of Guy Maddin's Brand Upon the Brain! takes as it central concern the possibilities of remembrance. Through play with narration, voice,

intertextuality, and editing Brand Upon the Brain! recalls the lyrical possibilities

suggested by Culler, Perloff, and especially Deleuze's mnemosign and noosign.

Although Brand Upon the Brain! is arguably the most coherently narrative of the

288 four films under discussion here, Maddin also describes the film as "Very lyrical"

("Guy Maddin's Brand Upon the Brain''' 62). One aspect of this lyricism comes from the tension between the voiceover provided by the interlocutor77 who narrates the film, and the intertitles, which provide a combination of narrative information, commentary and lyrical interjection. The voiceover and the intertitles generally act in concert, providing narrative information, description, and commentary, with the intertitles reinforcing or even repeating what the narration has stated. But at other times these voices diverge, and call for the negotiation of lyrical multiplicities that Perloff sees in postmodern poetry.

An example of this lyrical tension between voices occurs when the intertitles displace the voiceover narration with text-based exclamations. Brand

Upon the Brain! features a number of sequences that could be called lyrical because they suspend or pause narrative and dwell on memory in a meditative and poeticized manner. One such sequence in which the young Guy Maddin explores the island and his memories begins with the interlocutor's narration saying, "Out gush the torrents of memory." The narration then drops out until the end of this sequence while the film's frequent intertitles take over. Beginning with a card reading "Oh! The past! The past!," the intertitles of this sequence express something other than narrative information. This intertitle could be read as a

Brand Upon the Brain! was initially screened in a series of live performances in which the film's images were accompanied by live musicians playing the film's score, foley artist providing sound-effects, and an interlocutor reading the film's narration. For the subsequent theatrical release, Isabella Rosselini provided this narration in voice-over, and this reading is one of six that appear on the Criterion Collection DVD of the film, including readings by Louis Negin, Laurie Anderson, Crispin Glover, poet John Ashbery, and Maddin himself.

289 narrative commentary, or it could be read as expression coming from the character Guy. But separated from the interlocutor's dominant narrative presence, this intertitle moves towards a lyrical voice. Culler associates this kind of apostrophe with the lyric's insistence on the figure of voice ("Reading Lyric" 99), and the 'Oh!' of this intertitle foregrounds its voice as lyrical reflection.

As the sequence proceeds, the intertitles reflect on the act of remembrance while the images cut between shots of young Guy wandering the island and shots of his flashes of memory. These images of memory appear in three types distinct from the full-frame black and white shots of young Guy on the island. The first type of memory images include brief, blurry close-ups of objects; the second type of memory images is presented with an iris matte, and the third type of images are grainy Super8mm colour shots. While the different visual qualities of these memory images distinguish them from the images of young Guy in the narrative

'present' (itself the past remembered by the older Guy), they suggest different experiences of memory and the ways recollections form "Chains of memories!," a phrase repeated in two intertitles in the sequence. Since, as one card says, "One memory leads to the next...," the connection between the first and second types of memory images follows from close-ups of domestic items such as a clothes iron and a chair to iris-framed images of Guy's Mother feeding him butter tarts and brushing his teeth that recall Mother's gaze through her telescope. The chain of association moves from domestic items to domestic relationships and spaces. The colour images, however, disrupt this progression.

290 The shots in colour of flowers and other foliage are cut into the sequence very rapidly, and their suddenness and striking visual contrast from the rest of the images in the sequence sets them off as images of involuntary memory. Between the penultimate and final titles of this sequence, "Finding the right combination" and "From this the poem springs!," there are three shots - a close-up of a pine tree that swish pans away, a shot of young Guy lifting a rock, and a colour shot of white flowers on a tree. This chain, this combination, places the colour images at the heart of the lyricism, as they become part of the 'right combination' that produces 'poetry.' Following this sequence, the colour images increase their lyrical significance as they become associated with Guy's love of and longing for the teen detective Wendy Hale. Other lyrical sequences focus on Guy's pining for

Wendy and his attempts to find her through recollections, and in each of these sequences there are reoccurrences of colour shots, usually of Wendy's face or of flowers. By fixing the colour shots first to involuntary memory and then to Guy's desires, Maddin creates a visual pattern that functions narratively by emphasizing the intensity of Guy's love for Wendy and reflexively by interrupting the flow of black and white images and highlighting both the editing process and the film stock.

There is certainly a degree of irony behind this sequence's earnest presentation of memory, and indeed behind much of Brand Upon the Brain!''s narrative. Between butter tarts (uniquely Canadian) and the enthusiastic exclamation points of the intertitles, this irony might seem to undercut the film's lyricism by acknowledging a winking authorial presence. Yet, this ironic layer

291 also produces tension in the film's voices. In the apostrophe of the card "Oh! The past! The past!" one can read both a parody of the anachronistic poetic device and

a sincere attempt to resuscitate a lyric convention in order to express the very

earnest emotion that the "Oh!" indicates. A similar tension between parody and

homage can be seen in Maddin's intertextual references. In this case, however,

the references lean closer to homage, as they speak to Maddin's abiding interest in

early cinematic styles, and serve a more overtly lyrical purpose.

In interviews Maddin associates lyricism with two aspects of Brand Upon

the Brain!: its homage to silent film and its portrayal of "childhood recollection"

(Interview with Brian Brooks; "An Interview with Guy Maddin"). As with Eye

Like a Strange Balloon and Heart of the World, Brand Upon the Brain! abounds with intertextual references to and stylistic citations of silent and early sound

cinema. The most obvious intertextual references include: Chance's 'formal wear

for dangerous missions' that recalls Louis Feuillade's Fantomas; Guy's father's mirror-reflected eye that recalls Vertov's 'Kino-eye'; the frequent references to

Vigo's Zero for Conduct via the children of the island orphanage with their white night-shirts and their rebellion.78 Stylistically Brand Upon the Brain! continues

Maddin's use of silent-era techniques such as iris-masking, ghostly

superimpositions, and Soviet silent-era inspired montage, and even includes a

'goat-glanded' musical number purportedly featuring a castrato (Interview with

Andy Battaglia). And as in Eye Like a Strange Balloon and Heart of the World,

Maddin acknowledges the influence of Feuillade and Vigo's Zero for Conduct on Brand Upon the Brain!, as well as that of Luis Buiiuel, Martin Arnold and Matthias Muller ("Guy Maddin's" 60; Interview with Brian Brooks).

292 these intertextual and stylistic citations serve to poeticize narrative and to

reflexively underscore Brand Upon the Brain's filmic-ness, two elements that,

following Culler and Perloff, contribute to the film's lyricism. These references

also contribute lyricism in their interaction with the film's narrative and thematic

focus on remembrance.

Brand Upon the Brain/'s concern with childhood memories and processes

of recollection is evident not only in its basic plot - adult Guy returns to his

former island home, conjuring up repressed memories of his childhood - or story

details - such as the 'aerophone-echoes' that resurrect fragments of past

conversations communicated over the portable device invented by Guy's father.

More importantly, the film roots this emphasis on memory in its editing style,

which Maddin calls "neurological editing" (qtd. in Forsberg). According to

Maddin, he and editor John Gurdebeke discovered this editing style while working on Maddin's Cowards Bend the Knee:

He [Gurdebeke] would fast-forward with his mouse through the rushes in

what's called 'scrolling.' The computer will skip over a bunch of images,

much like a stone skipping across water, and just touch down on

sequences for a few frames, then skip ahead again. It sort-of reminded me

of a video equivalent of how a DJ scratches vinyl - going backwards and

forwards, then settling into the rhythm, into an image you really liked and

repeating really nice juicy moments, (qtd. in Forsberg)

In Brand Upon the Brain! Maddin and Gurdebeke exploit this digital 'scolling' to

lyrical ends.

293 Maddin says that he employed his neurological theory of editing in Brand

Upon the Brain! to produce "a new filmic facsimile for memory" (Interview with

Brian Brooks). But Maddin also acknowledges that this neurological editing does not attempt to "duplicate the way we remember exactly" ("An Interview").

Instead Maddin implies that this neurological editing aims at a lyrical recreation

of memory. For Maddin, "anyone who recollects his or her own childhood is a poet for the duration of those nostalgic musings" (Interview with Brian Brooks).

It is this poetic character of memory that his silent film-evoking, neurological memory-facsimile reproduces.

Another example from Brand Upon the Brain! points to further tensions between the actual and the virtual in Maddin's neurological montage and their lyrical implications. The sequence in which Guy's entranced sister murders their father suggests that the event is shown from Guy's point of view, but makes it difficult to determine what kind of point of view this is. Beginning with the intertitle "Enough!" there are a series of shots that proceed as follows: young

Guy's eye in extreme close-up; an irised close-up of Sis's hand holding the knife;

Sis holding the knife turning forwards counterclockwise and then back clockwise; the empty room; Sis facing forwards; Sis turning forwards; Guy's eye; Guy's eye again; Sis facing forward with the knife; Sis half-way through the turn; Sis turning with her back to the camera; two shots of Sis facing forward; a close-up of the knife; a close-up of Sis's arm; Sis's face in irised close-up; the knife; Sis's arm; Sis's face; the knife; Sis's face; Guy's eye; the knife; Guy's eye; the knife;

Guy's eye; the knife; Guy's eye; the knife; Guy's eye; the knife; Guy's eye; Sis

294 turning until her back is to the camera; Guy's face in close-up surrounded by smoke; the intertitle "Chimney fumes."

The rapidity and vacillation of these memory-images certainly suggests a subjective experience of involuntary memory. But they also suggest direct perception-images, as they capture young Guy's witnessing of the murder, a connection made especially clear in the rapid alternation between his eye and the knife so that the images are almost superimposed on each other. Like Deleuze's mnemosign, these images are undecidable. As Sis turns forward and backward, one gets the impression of time being wound and rewound, but it is difficult to identify the 'correct' direction in which time flows. Furthermore, the shots of Sis set against a black backdrop and the iris enclosed close-ups of the knife pull the murder act out of the space of the story and subjectivize the sequence. Yet the brief flash of a shot of the empty room is a reminder of the narrative setting of these images. The speed and fluctuation of the images increase this undecidability, making it difficult to verify the details and temporal and spatial position of the images, leaving the viewer to ask 'what was that?' and 'how (and in what order) did that happen?' Moreover, these images appear as adult Guy's memories, but they are also young Guy's immediate experience of the event. In part the question for the viewer becomes, 'is this what young Guy saw, or is this how adult Guy remembers it, or somehow both?'

The knife sequence also reaches towards Deleuze's noosign. The sequence unfolds in a manner that recalls two of Deleuze's relationships between thought and the movement image: "the relationship with a whole which can only

295 be thought in a higher awareness, the relationship with a thought which can only be shaped in the subconscious unfolding of images''' {Cinema 2 163). As the sequence plays out an association between knife and eye, seeing and murder with

Hitchcockian proportions, this metaphoric trajectory is matched with the kind of

"sensory shock" that Deleuze suggests "raises us from the images to conscious thought" {Cinema 2 161). In effect the sequence compels the viewer to think of the broader connections that these associations conjure, from Oedipal anxieties to the murderous potential of the cinematic gaze. Given both the film's content and

Maddin's description of the editing style, one might characterize this 'thought' along similar neurologically frenzied lines, but as with the noosign of the movement-image, thought here is integrated by association.

The sequence also indicates the wider strategy of the neurologically inflected noosigns in Brand Upon the Brain! In another sequence of intense neurological editing, young Guy "revisits his youth" through a range of sensory encounters that elicit "The memories." Following an extreme close-up of young

Guy's opening eye and the intertitle reading "The sights!," the neurological editing rapidly cuts between Guy's eye and his hand holding a shell, so that the two almost blend together as if superimposed. Then there is a shot of young Guy putting two drinking glasses up to his eyes, but as he brings the glasses up, the action is rapidly reversed and then run forward again creating a stutter effect.

Similarly the intertitle "The touch!" flashes briefly on the screen before cutting to

Deleuze's third relationship, "the sensory-motor relationship between world and man, nature and thoughf {Cinema 2 163), is held-off here, as Maddin's rapid and repetitive editing overloads sensory-motor connections.

296 an image of Guy stroking wallpaper followed by the reappearance of the intertitle

"The touch!" As with the knife sequence, here the film asks that the viewer consider the character of a form or mode of thought, particularly memory, but memory tinted with imagination, fantasy, and nostalgia. Brand Upon the Brain! not only presents images of memory, but proposes to imagine the processes of memory, and it is this double nature of memory in the film that it aims to recreate.

The film asks the viewer to think of the memory images reflexively and metaphorically, as a cinematic approximation of memory in which one sees the processes of memory in the film's poetic use of editing that gives shape to its narrative of childhood recollection, and, to paraphrase, 'from which the poem springs.'

IV. Mirror: a lyricism of personal-historical reflection

Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror offers another range of lyric possibilities, this time resonating with Deleuze, Perloff, and Branigan's theories. Mirror presents a series of subjective moments - memories, dreams, and experiences of the imaginary - which while ostensibly held together by a narrative thread, are better described as lyrical than narrative. More so than Stalker or Nostalghia, Mirror holds off the possibility of constructing a story from narrative discourse.

Attempts at summarizing Mirror's story inevitably frustrate viewers and critics alike, as in the case of Vida Johnson and Graham Petrie's decision not to include a synopsis of the film along with the plot summaries of Tarkovsky's other films in the appendix to their book (xiv). To say that Mirror is the story of a dying man,

Alexei, looking back at his life through a series of dreams and memories involves

297 a great deal of speculation and 'filling-in' of narrative blanks. Reading Mirror as lyric, however, does not require reconciling discontinuous and contradictory moments into a narrative whole, or definitively identifying some sequences as memories and others as dreams, or coming from one character or another - the film makes such efforts futile. Instead, a lyric approach to Mirror requires that one explore the very indeterminacies and tensions between such incongruities to consider how the film represents subjectivity as multiple.

The lyrical multiplicities of Mirror recall Perloff s desire to broaden the lyric's horizons by including discursive forms such as historical, philosophical, and/or narrative discourses alongside or in juxtaposition to the subjective expression of lyrical discourse. In Mirror, Tarkovsky deploys multiple discursive modes, including the historical discourse of documentary and newsreel footage, lyric poetry read in voice-over, and various tenors of narrative discourse. What is striking about Tarkovsky's layering of discourse in Mirror, however, is not the array of discourses he uses. Rather, it is that he arranges these layers in a manner that portrays consciousness as at once personal and subjective and multiple and collective. Robert Bird characterizes Mirror as "The intersections between the personal imaginary and that of society" (136). In this way Mirror offers a lyricism built on the interplay between different subjective experiences as fissures of memory, dream, and other imaginative procedures connecting the layers of discursive material.

One could begin an excavation of Mirror's discursivity at the stratum of narrative. Like Stalker, Mirror is an exemplary case of narrative poeticization.

298 Even the most 'straight forward' narrative sequences in the film undermine their own narrativity. The sequence in which Alexei's mother returns to the printing house concerned about a possible misprint, for example, withholds important narrative information central to understanding the sequence and its place in the film. The misprint itself, on which the events of the sequence hang, is never revealed80 and the source of the narrative fragment (is it a dream or a memory, and if so, whose?) is unverifiable. Other elements of the narrative undermine it as well, particularly the fact that the same actress plays both Alexei's mother Masha in her youth and Alexei's ex-wife Natalia and that young Alexei and Alexei's son

Ignat are also played by the same actor. This double casting has a poetic foundation involving making connections within Alexei's subjective experience, but it also serves to confuse narrative, acting as a "substitute for a narrative thread in the film" (Turovskaya 66). As a result, it is difficult to pin down where certain events take place in the chronology of the story and who is in fact involved in them.

In breaking the story-discourse-style chain of film narrative, Mirror also employs parametric strategies similar to those evident in Stalker. The changes in film stock and colour, the use of slow motion, and complex camera movements in

Mirror serve to emphasize style at the expense of narrative clarity, much like they do in Stalker. The dream in which Alexei's mother washes her hair, for example, uses slow motion and black and white stock to set off the scene as a subjective

Mark Le Fanu speculates that the sequence alludes to the misspelling of Stalin's name as "Sralin" meaning "to shit" (86), a suggestion reinforced by the poster of Stalin on the printing shop wall.

299 experience. As Vlada Petric says, the use of slow motion in Mirror is "the emotional core of Tarkovsky's dream imagery ... making the viewer aware of the passage of time ... [and] contributing] to a subliminal experience of the dream world" (30). This dream is also something of an abstracted narrative in miniature

- the absent father, the Oedipal longing for the distant mother - communicated parametrically. But this lyrical episode strips narrative discourse from the story, replacing it with surreal images (the falling plaster, the slow-motion, the mother's unsettling movements), noticeable separation between the sound and image tracks, and symbolism (water, the mirror images) that convey something of the story without telling it. Bird emphasizes the confusion of space in the sequence and its impact on the confusion of time in the subsequent scenes. As the mother rises from the bowl of water with her strange gestures, the camera follows her movement and then tracks back, revealing that the bowl has disappeared and the mother stands alone in the corner of the room. With a cut the mother, too, disappears from the room, and the next shot shows the plaster ceiling of that corner falling in. In the shot that follows, the camera tracks, following the mother as she passes by a mirror, and then seems to appear somewhat abruptly at the other end of the room. Another cut introduces the mother as an older woman in what at first looks like a superimposition over a picture of a tree, but is revealed to be a reflection in the picture's glass as her hand wipes the glass. Finally, there is another cut to an image of a hand held in front of a flame, once again in colour, an image that reoccurs later in the film when its origin as one of Alexei's childhood memories is revealed.

300 All these elements of the dream provide impressions of an incoherence of space and time produced by the editing and the camera's movement. While such undecidability is appropriate to a dream sequence, significantly the sequence that follows where Alexei speaks to his mother on the phone carries this undecidability outside of the dream space. Alexei's inability to remember the temporal order of past events in his conversation with his mother suggests that this aspect of the lyrical dream episode is a model for the narrative undecidability of the rest of the film. Narrative is held at a distance, caught between the collision of memory and dream. One key to this narrative disruption lies in the original title of the film, "White, White Day," which Bird notes is taken from a poem by

Arseny Tarkovsky (104). Bird quotes the following lines as illustrative of

Mirror's debt to Arseny Tarkovsky's poem:

It's impossible to return there

And impossible to narrate

How overfilled with bliss

Was this heavenly garden, (qtd. in Bird 104)

This impossibility of narrating encapsulates the treatment of narrative throughout

Mirror, where narrative is 'overfilled' with parametric patterns and lyrical significance.

These parametric patterns, as in Stalker, are instrumental to the narrative disruption in Mirror, but perhaps more significant to the poeticization and the lyricism of the film is the intrusion of other discursive modes. The most prominent and most immediately lyrical of these other discourses in Mirror is

301 Arseny Tarkovsky's poetry, read by the author himself. Whereas in Stalker the recitation of poetry occurs within the diegesis, Mirror presents all of the poetry through voiceover. When the Stalker speaks Porcupine's poem onscreen, there is at least a possibility that the poem conveys narrative information. While it disrupts the flow of the narrative, acting as something of a pause in the narrative discourse, a brief foray into another discursive mode, it does serve narrative purposes. The poem itself, as noted in chapter two, provides some commentary on the situation of the protagonists and on the broader themes of the film; and its recitation also establishes some other narrative information, specifically regarding

Porcupine, his insights as a result of his excursions into the Zone, and his influence on the Stalker. In Mirror, the connection between the off-screen recitation of Arseny Tarkovsky's poetry and any narrative function is more tenuous.

Of the four poems included in Mirror, only the first, "First Meetings," could be said to have any direct connection to the film's 'narrative.' Since it follows a scene in which the young Masha encounters the doctor who questions her about her absent husband, the content of the poem, a lyric recounting a love affair, perhaps speaks to the narrative situation that this scene presents. The poem begins with an exultation of a romantic relationship, "Every moment that we were together/ Was a celebration, like Epiphany," but ends with "When fate was following in our tracks/ Like a madman with a razor in his hand81" (Arseny

81 I have chosen to quote from Kitty Hunter-Blair's translations of Arseny Tarkovsky's poems in Mirror published in Sculpting in Time because they seem

302 Tarkovsky 101). On the one hand, one could certainly read the poem's inclusion as a commentary on Masha's failed marriage, inspired by her 'first meeting' with the doctor, and thus motivated by the narrative, as Johnson and Petrie do in their interpretation of the poem (117-118). Taking this literal interpretation further,

Alexandra Smith goes so far as to suggest that in this and other instances in the film, "a woman in a time of distress appears to speak in a male voice" (58), and implies that the poems come from the consciousness of the mother herself. But these readings rely on retrospective knowledge of Alexei's mother and father's relationship, and seem intent on salvaging a narrative explanation for the poem's presence. As Bird notes, while the poem seems to comment on the images, there remains a gap between the two (143).

On the other hand, the poem, in its lament for lost love, is also a lyrical meditation on loss, and in this regard does more to suggest the film's concern with memory and past-ness than to present narrative information. While there is certainly resonance between lines such as "Ordinary objects were at once transfigured,/ Everything - the jug, the basin" (Arseny Tarkovsky 101) and the images of a table with a jug on it, the poem's function is less about commenting on the images or supplementing narrative information, than establishing the mood of the film in Genette's sense of the term as "perspective" (Narrative Discourse

162). The lyrical remembrances of "First Meetings" set a past personal experience against a fantastical world imbued with nature and eroticism, in which

to me more precise and artful translations than the subtitled translations that appear on the Kino DVD of the film.

303 the speaker describes how "the lilac stretched out from the table/ To touch your

eyelids with a universe of blue" (Arseny Tarkovsky 101). With lines such as this,

the poem introduces the viewer to a subjective experience, one that is not founded

on realism or narrativity, but rather the transformations involved in memory and

dream. The poems thus introduce a conventionally lyric voice into the film, one

that Bird says creates a "juxtaposition of images with words that resonate at

multiple levels of the author's imaginary" (142). One could also say that the

inclusion of the poems juxtaposes lyrical expression against narrative progression,

and a voice of direct expression against the diegetic 'voices' of the characters and

the camera.

In addition to Arseny Tarkovsky's poetry, other non-narrative discursive

interruptions have a similar function. The film's use of newsreel and documentary

footage weaves historical and political threads into the film's fictional fabric.

Tarkovsky includes newsreel and documentary footage of the Spanish Civil War,

World War II, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the dropping of the atomic bomb, adding historical and documentary discourse to Mirror*2 While at times providing historical background information to narrative events (as in the relation

of Natalia's Spanish-Russian friends to the footage of child refugees of the

Spanish Civil War, for example), this footage is also poetic in its presentation. To begin with, it adds additional voices, additional layers of discourse to the film,

Bird identifies some of the sources of this footage; the Spanish Civil War footage comes from Roman Karmen's newsreels while the shots of Chinese youths at the Soviet border come are taken from two of Alexander Medvedkine's documentaries A Letter to a Chinese Friend and Night Over China (137; 139- 140).

304 which help shape what Jerry White calls the film's "complex personal-historical dialectic" (80). This personal-historical dialectic is a major component of the lyricism in Mirror, a lyricism that reflects on individual subjectivity as it collides, interacts with, and incorporates other subjectivities and external 'objective' experiences.

Between the poles of this personal-historical dialectic is Tarkovsky's theory of time-pressure, which draws the subjective and objective together.

Tarkovsky characterizes time-pressure as the intensity of the flow of time through a shot (117). According to Donato Totaro, by incorporating newsreel footage into the fictional footage Tarkovsky matches their different time-pressures and

"combines historical and personal time" (24), thus rhythmically linking the objective and the subjective. The newsreel footage of Soviet balloonists seems as unreal and dream-like as Alexei's mother's levitation, in part because of the strangeness and beauty of the images, but also because in their strangeness they present a similar quality of time-pressure. As Tarkovsky describes:

[Time] becomes tangible when you sense something significant, truthful

going on beyond the events on the screen; when you realize, quite

consciously, that what you see in the frame is not limited to its visual

depiction, but is a pointer to something stretching out beyond the frame

and to infinity; a pointer to life. (117-118)

Here, the footage of the balloonists points towards the pressures of history and memory that flow through and shape the film's subjective mood. The images of the balloonists suggest a lyric experience produced by the encounter with the

305 time-pressures that the newsreel footage introduces. Just as the dream with the

mother's hairwashing abstracts narrative by simultaneously presenting an

impression of story and denying its coherence, the balloonist footage pushes the

images of history towards abstraction. The initial sense that the balloonist footage

is almost imaginary or almost surreal holds off an immediate recognition of the

footage as a historical document. It asks the viewer to reassess the status of the

footage as document, and in turn that of other images, whether fiction or non-

fiction. The very subject matter of the footage - the balloonist - also

intertextually looks back to Tarkovsky's second feature Andrei Rublev and the

sequence with Efim the peasant's balloon flight. For Bird the balloon sequence of

Andrei Rublev enacts a "drama of vision" in the film that concerns "the challenge

of attaining transcendent vision on the earth" (75-76). While in Andrei Rublev

this "drama of vision" speaks directly to the narrative content of the film

(especially Andrei's own spiritual and artistic struggles), when this visionary

drama returns in the Mirror balloon sequence it foregrounds the personal-

historical dialectic outside of narrative. In addition to their documentary content

as records of historical moments, the newsreel footage evokes a sense of the

personal connection to history involved in the 'visionary' experience of

encountering such documents. Indeed for the viewer this footage demands a

reconciling of the dialectic encounter of subjective and objective, personal and

historical, fiction and non-fiction, and narrative and non-narrative. Commenting

on thethe effect of the newsreel footage, Turovskaya says, "History enters the

microcosm of remembered events, without being reduced to part of the plot" (67).

306 Memories, both personal and historical, inhabit the film like dreams, and it is the correspondences between memory, document, and dream, between personal vision and the historical documentary image, that guide Mirror's lyrical unfolding.

A further facet of this effect of time-pressures produced by the combination of fiction and non-fiction footage is its connection to Deleuze's noosign of the time-image. The movement from fiction images to non-fiction images (and vice versa) in Mirror produces irrational cuts like those that define the noosign of the time-image. And like this noosign, the cuts from fiction images to non-fiction images, and even from newsreel footage to documentary footage are not based on metaphoric connection or association as in the noosign of the movement-image, but rather on differentiation that requires the images to be

'relinked.' Thus, the gap between personal memory and historical document, between dream image and dream-like newsreel footage, or between one's own subjective experience and that of another or others must be relinked through thought, but as Deleuze insists, thought external to the image. How does this relinkage happen? In part through the film's lyrical strategies that require the viewer to engage with the dialectic collision of fiction and non-fiction, narrative and non-narrative, personal and historical.

An instance of this process of relinkage occurs in the combination of documentary footage and recited poetry as the two discourses overlap when

Arseny Tarkovsky reads his poem "Life, Life" over newsreel footage of Soviet soldiers crossing Lake Sivash during WWII and then of the young boy whose

307 father died climbing a snowy hill. To begin with there is the irrational cut from the Lake Sivash footage to the child climbing the hill. The non-fiction and fiction

images are united by their time-pressures as the slow trudge of the soldiers

through the muddy lake rhymes with the boy's slow, stumbling ascent. But

Arseny Tarkovsky's poem demands further relinkage.

On the one hand, the poem bridges the non-fiction and fiction footage; on the other hand, it adds a further degree of differentiation to the sequence, with its

lyric tone contrasting the time-pressures of the images. In one effort at relinkage,

Johnson and Petrie note that there is an ironic echo of lines in the poem such as

"... On earth there is no death./ All are immortal. All is immortal" (Arseny

Tarkovsky 143) with the war time "images of 'suffering'" (125). And the lines "I

will call upon any century,/ Go into it and build myself a house" (Arseny

Tarkovsky 143) are for Johnson and Petrie exemplary of "the important themes

connected with immortality in this conjunction of poem and image: the meaning

of time itself, and the role of the poet/filmmaker as a unifier of past and present,

of personal/subjective and historical/objective time" (125). To take this

interpretation further, one can read into these lines the lyric principles behind

Mirror itself. To "call upon any century" and build a house within it and "Live in the house" (Arseny Tarkovsky 143) recalls the way Tarkovsky organizes the various dreams, memories, and newsreel footage in the film. Tarkovsky's

approach calls upon historical moments and personal visions, mixing fiction and

document, and builds them into a representation of subjectivity, of subjective

experiences - a 'house' to live in. Tarkovsky holds this 'house' together not with

308 the narrative logic of cause and effect, but with correspondences and relinkages, whether between characters such as Masha and Natalia, or between past and present, or between nonfiction and fiction images, such as the balloonists and the levitating Masha. And in this sense, the film can be understood as placing the same demands on the viewers, who must likewise "build a house" by negotiating the film's multiplicity of discourses, by relinking images, to create their own understanding, their own lyric experience.

A sense of how this lyric experience might work begins with the film's prologue, in which Ignat turns on a television featuring a program with a young man being cured of his stutter through hypnosis. As he comes out of hypnosis the young man declares clearly and without a stutter "I can speak." This pronouncement suggests a great deal about the film's lyricism, reinforcing the notion of the lyric as an T speaking, but also entrenching the film in Genette's domain of direct expression. But this direct expression is complicated and expanded by the film's discursive multiplicity and the demands it makes on the viewer. One option for negotiating one's way through Mirror is of course to make narrative sense of the film. Yet, the film denies and frustrates narrative coherence. Johnson and Petrie come close to an analysis of the film freed from a recourse to narrative as they adopt a view of the film as "a dialogue between past and present in which the narrator uses the memories and experiences of others, as well as his own, to enlarge his personal consciousness and free himself from his stifling egoism and self-centeredness" (135-136). But Johnson and Petrie still rely on elements of narrative to hold together their interpretation, referring to a

309 narrator, the older Alexei, who organizes and connects each part of the film, and to a sense of a narrative arc, in which the narrator achieves a goal or outcome as a product of the string of memories and dreams. One need not ascribe every image in the film to Alexei nor imagine some reconciliation for him in the end. One can instead interpret the film as a flow of subjective experiences, not emanating from a single protagonist, but rather streaming through different individuals, through different times and states of consciousness, layering them rather than setting them out in a narrative order.

An interpretation of Mirror as lyric expression rather than narrative progression helps to account for sequences in the film that exceed narrative explanation. The printing press sequence, for instance, does not come from

Alexei's memories, but rather are likely those of his mother, or even imagined, as

Bird suggests noting that "it was based on a widespread anecdote of the time"

(136). And even within this sequence the voiceover reading of the poem "From

Morning On" adds an additional layer, another voice working with and against the remembered images. This shifting through consciousnesses finds resonance in the line "And I dream of a different soul" (157) from Arseny Tarkovsky's poem

"Eurydice," which also appears in the film. One can think of the film as a lyrical meditation that allows the viewer to "dream of a different soul," to encounter and move through the dreams and memories of others.

And in this way, Mirror offers a particularly cinematic reinvention of the literary sense of the lyric. The layers of discourse, from narrative fiction to historical document to lyric poetry, layers of sounds and images, expand and

310 disperse the traditional lyric subject. The experience of the film is not one of locating and explaining a lyric voice, an T speaking, but one of exploring correspondences between subjectivities. The stuttering man's "I can speak" becomes a statement of a capacity within the film to communicate directly, one that organizes the various discourses that the film layers. Thus, the connecting of story events, the sense of narrative progression is replaced in Mirror by the very

"poetic links" (and one could add 'relinkages') that Tarkovsky aspires to in

Sculpting in Time.

V. 'Thought-Images' and Other Lyricisms: The Denkbild and Chris

Marker's poetic-essay films Le Tombeau d'Alexandre, Une Journee dyAndrei

Arsenevitch, and Sans Solei?3

The lyrical possibilities offered by Zero for Conduct, Window Water Baby

Moving, Brand Upon the Brain!, and Mirror are all closely tied to the lyric poem as theorized by Frye, Culler, Perloff, and Barbour. Yet lyricism is not exclusive to poetry, but is also present in other, related literary genres. One such genre is the Denkbild or "thought-image," a mode of discourse that combines the poetic and the essayistic. As Gerhard Richter defines it in his book Thought-Images:

Frankfurt School Writers' Reflections from Damaged Life, the Denkbild as practiced by Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Siegfried Kracauer brings together the philosophical essay and the lyrical poem in a way that is both critically rigorous and personally engaged. As an alternative lyrical genre, related

This section owes a great deal to the responses and questions of the participants of the "Alternative Non-Fiction" Graduate Conference at the University of Chicago in April 2008 where I presented an earlier version of what follows on Le Tombeau d'Alexandre and Une Journee d'Andrei Arsenevitch.

311 to but distinct from lyric poetry, the Denkbild offers a model by which to consider

other forms of lyricism, such as the lyricism of Chris Marker's poetic-essayistic

films.

Richter suggests that writers like Benjamin and Adorno transformed the

Denkbild, a neglected genre of short aphoristic prose pieces, into "conceptual

engagements with the aesthetic" and "aesthetic engagements with the conceptual, hovering between philosophical critique and aesthetic production" (2). The

Denkbild, Richter says,

encodes a poetic form of condensed epigrammatic writing in textual

snapshots, flashing up as poignant meditations that typically fasten upon a

seemingly peripheral detail or marginal topic, usually without a developed

plot or a prescribed narrative agenda, yet charged with theoretical insight.

(2)

This modernist Denkbild tends towards formal reflexivity and a recognition of metaphor as both a poetic and philosophical figure; Richter says, "As with

Nietzche's moveable army of tropes, the tropes of the Denkbild insist that any truth, even the truth of the existence of untruth, can be arrived at only by

attending to the metaphor of the metaphor, the figure of the figure" (2-3).

Richter puts forward two examples to help illustrate the reflexive and metaphoric dimensions of the Denkbild: first, Benjamin's envisioning of Paul

Klee's "Angelus Novus" as the angel of history in "On the Concept of History," and second, his recognition of the inseparability of form and content in "The

Sock" from Berlin Childhood Around 1900 (8-10). In both of these Denkbilder,

312 Benjamin charges his philosophical arguments with personal and experiential

valences. Benjamin's reading of "Angelus Novus," as Richter notes,

philosophically "reconceptualize[s] history," by rejecting a linear and teleological

view of it (9). But this philosophical reorientation of history comes from a personal perspective, literally the viewing of Klee's painting and Benjamin's

experience of it. Similarly, "The Sock" intertwines personal remembrance and

revelation with a critical observation. "The Sock" illustrates the necessity of

considering form as inseparable from content, a lesson that Richter reminds

applies to the Denkbild itself, where critical and philosophical content and

subjective and personal form are inextricable (10). To take this further, not only

is Benjamin's critical revelation impossible without his childhood experience, the

very Denkbild form of "The Sock" in a sense recreates this experience by

requiring its reader to "unwrap 'the present'" of the lesson in criticism from the

'"pocket"' of Benjamin's reminiscence, which ultimately are one and the same

("Berlin Childhood Around 1900" 374). The prose-poetry of the Denkbild thus

blurs the distinctions between lyric reflection and philosophical meditation,

between cultural critique and aesthetic expression.

But the lyrical qualities of the Denkbild are more than a matter of

identifying a subjective voice. Michel de Montaigne's essays certainly have a

personal voice, but they do not share the lyricism found in Frankfurt School

Denkbilder. One of the central lyrical features of the Denkbild that Richter

identifies in Benjamin's work is the negotiation of the rechten Abstand or the

"right distance" and the richtigen Bickwinkel or the "proper perspective" (55-61).

313 Drawing from Benjamin's presentation of these concepts in One-way Street, a collection of Denkbilder, and his essay "The Storyteller," Richter identifies them as the abiding concerns and criteria of Benjamin's approach to the Denkbild. In

One-way Street Benjamin states "Criticism is a matter of correct distancing"

(476). According to Richter, this "correct distancing" becomes the basis of

Benjamin's critical project, which requires "ascertaining den rechten Abstand, the right distance from the phenomenal world which, in its ideological configurations, variously works to dissimulate the concept of distance either as false proximity or as radical absence" (56). As Richter notes, Benjamin revisits this concept in "The

Storyteller," where he adds the "proper perspective" to the "right distance" in his

"problematization of the stance that the reflecting subject must assume as it gives experience and reflection over to language" (57). Benjamin says,

Viewed from a certain distance, the great, simple outlines which define the

storyteller stand out in him - or rather, they become visible in him, just as

a human head or an animal's body may appear in a rock when it is viewed

by an observer from the proper distance and angle. This distance and this

angle of vision are prescribed for us by an experience which we may have

almost every day. ("Storyteller" 143)

Here the "proper distance" and the proper "angle of vision" or perspective provide one with the correct point of view with which to engage in criticism. But finding this critical position is difficult, as Richter says,

This procedure asks that we remain close to the presented object or idea

by departing from it.... But one runs the risk of entirely losing sight of

314 what is to be presented. If it is too close, then at the moment one wishes

to trace its outline ... one inadvertently topples it... and understands

nothing. If one is too far removed from the object or idea in the moment

of its presentation ... the contours that one's outline assumes will be too

coarse and too inexact. (58)

One can only engage in criticism effectively if one can see the object of criticism as it is, yet still retain the personal experience of that object. This critical perspective becomes a matter of seeing the right tree in the forest while, as the saying goes, still being able to see the forest apart from the trees.

Richter also points out that Benjamin implies that finding the right distance and proper perspective is an endeavour that ultimately fails. Richter summarizes the contradictions involved in this endeavour:

In the first case would one not already have had to assume the rechte

Abstand in order to extract from the object or idea the coordinates of the

position one should assume in relation to it? In the second case, would the

act of administering an external system of criteria not already constitute an

act of hermeneutic violence that could not possibly do justice to the

presentational singularity that a certain object or idea demands? .... The

idea that neither option relents in its opposition to the writer's efforts is a

central premise of Benjamin's thinking. (59)

Yet, Richter says, finding the correct distance and perspective is an effort that

"succeeds in the moment of its failure" (60). It is the attempt at finding the right distance and perspective that matters in the critical act. For Richter, the Denkbild

315 is Benjamin's way of attempting to negotiate the dialectic tension between distance and proximity, experience and reflection, critical success and failure - a way of finding the right perspective, the correct angle of vision that requires constant reappraisal and reframing on the part of the critic.

Adorno echoes this concern in his dedication of Minima Moralia, another collection of Denkbilder, to Max Horkheimer:

The specific approach of Minima Moralia, the attempt to present aspects

of our shared philosophy from the standpoint of subjective experience

necessitates that the parts do not altogether satisfy the demands of the

philosophy of which they are nevertheless a part. The disconnected and

non-binding character of the form, the renunciation of explicit theoretical

cohesion, are meant as one expression of this. (18)

Adorno's caveat regarding the Denkbild also points to the form's 'successful failure.' While the distance, or rather proximity afforded by the presentation of subjective experience may not be as critically rigorous as other philosophical discourses, it does allow for this shared perspective that forms the basis of

Minima Moralia'% philosophy. Its very failure is its success, one that Adorno attributes to the specific character of the Denkbild.

Benjamin's concern with rooting his critical position in the right distance and proper perspective in the Denkbild has useful connections to lyric poetry, particularly as it relates to poetic voice and lyrical subjectivity. In fact, in his

Structuralist Poetics Culler emphasizes the importance of distance in reading voice and subject in the lyric poem (192-193). For Culler, lyric poetry necessarily

316 involves a distance between the speaking T and the reader, one that differs from

the distance involved in other discourses, such as that of a letter {Structuralist

192). Culler characterizes the lyric poem as "impersonal," suggesting a greater

distance between the speaking subject and the receiver {Structuralist 193).

Elsewhere Culler, also drawing from Benjamin, discusses the depersonalization

and alienation of the T in Charles Baudelaire's Fleurs de Mai ("Lyric" 108).

Culler emphasizes that the distance and impersonality of the lyric requires the

efforts of the reader to make sense of the speaking subject, yet underlines that

such efforts are often frustrated in modern and postmodern poetry {Structuralist

198-199). Culler's remarks suggest a necessity of finding the right distance and

the proper perspective in lyric poetry similar to that of Benjamin's Denkbild.

Though Culler stresses the readerly act of interpretation, one can also see

that in lyrical expression the matter of distance and perspective are central as well.

Certainly the flaneur of Baudelaire's poetry, who so interests Benjamin,

distinguishes himself by virtue of his distance and perspective, at once separate

and alienated yet "abandoned in the crowd" {Writer of Modern Life 88; 85). The flaneur''?, perspective - part of the crowd, yet isolated from it - is a matter of his

experience in his promenades, as one among those traversing the city, and yet

separated by his class, his leisurely stroll, and his observing gaze. As Benjamin

says, the gaze of the flaneur, "the gaze of the alienated man" is not only one that

Baudelaire describes in his poetry, but also one that he frequently adopts {Writer

40; 125). One might say that the flaneur provides Baudelaire the right distance

and proper perspective. Other lyric poetry also requires other negotiations of

317 distance and perspective, but the significance of the concepts remains the constant.

Indeed, Frye, Culler, Perloff, and Barbour are all concerned with the distance and 'perspective' of the speaking subject in lyric poetry. Frye's

'utterance overheard' implies a certain distance and perspective, either between the speaking subject and the reader or the poet and the reader. Likewise, Perloff s rejection of the Romantic lyric calls for a lyricism that allows for greater proximity and a multiplicity of perspectives, traits that Barbour echoes in his lyric/anti-lyric. Along these lines, Pasolini's free indirect subjectivity is very much engaged with finding the right distance and proper perspectives that move through its interaction of'looks' that constitutes the cinema of poetry. Further, one might rearticulate the muthos of poetic film as a negotiation of distance and perspective, as finding and occupying the correct distance and perspective for the specific context. In the Denkbild and ultimately Marker's work, one finds a particular expression of this muthos.

Why might the Denkbild be useful as a comparative form with and against which to consider Marker's poetic essay-films? First and foremost, the word

Denkbild - thought-image - speaks to Marker's prevailing concern with how images are used and read. Richter's comments on the image in reference to the

Denkbildresonate with Marker's own concerns: "The image records an historical moment at the same time that it interrupts history perpetuating the very thinkability of history even as it breaks with the logic of historical unfolding"

(107). On the essayistic end of the spectrum, Marker's films engage in a

318 questioning of images and the thoughts that accompany them. And yet, on the poetic end, Marker is an image-maker but also an image-thinker, conveying his critiques through very personal interactions of images and sound. Le Tombeau d'Alexandre and UneJournee d'Andrei Arsenevitch are both "thought-images" in that they not only deploy images to hold them up to critical inquiry, but also to read through them metaphorically as a subjective investigation.

Secondly, as illustrated above, the Denkbild brings together the critical and philosophical mode of essayistic writing with the personal and experiential mode of lyric poetry in dialectic tension. Since Andre Bazin first applied the two terms to Marker's Lettre de Siberie, calling the film an "essay ... written by a poet," it has become common practice to refer to Marker's films as poetic essay- films without much discussion of what it means to marry these modes together

(44). The Denkbild provides one possible model for reconciling these two modes in Marker's work, as Marker's films bring together the essay-film mode with that of poetic film.

The essay-film has been variously and productively theorized. Nora Alter cites Hans Richter's "Der Filmessay" in which he theorizes the essay-film as making problems, thoughts, and ideas visible and the "filmed philosophy" of

Alexandre Astruc's "Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera-stylo" as two important early conceptions of the essay-film ("Translating the Essay into Film and Installations" 50-51). Alter also associates the essay-film with Benjamin and

Adorno's work, though not the Denkbild specifically ("Translating" 47-48). For

Alter the essay-film is a hybrid form, blending elements of documentary, avant-

319 garde, and narrative feature films ("Translating" 44). The essay-film, as Alter describes it, also tends towards anti- or non-narrativity and reflexivity

("Translating" 44). The essay-film is distinct from documentary film, Alter

suggests, because instead of presenting documentary's claim to truth and fact, the

essay-film tends towards contradiction, self-reflexive play, and fragmentation

("Translating" 52; 54). Alter's description of the essay-film resonates with Philip

Lopate's five criteria for the essay-film, already mentioned in chapter two. To reiterate, the essay film, according to Lopate, must involve: the presence of text

(either written or spoken), a singularity of voice, an argument, a personal point of view, and an eloquence of language (245-247). The first three points of Lopate's criteria stress familiar aspects of the literary essay, especially its argument. From these points one might elaborate other essayistic elements, such as evidence, analysis, and critical objectivity. But Lopate's final two points involve more subjective elements that one might just as well associate with poetry. And if according to Lopate, Marker's work, especially Sans Soleil, exemplifies the essay-film, it is as much because of Marker's personal voice and poetic tendencies as it is his arguments and critiques.

Le Tombeau d'Alexandre and Une Journee d'Andrei Arsenevitch are two poetic and essayistic films in which Marker explores the life and work of fellow filmmakers, Alexander Medvedkine and Andrei Tarkovsky respectively.84 In both films, part of Marker's negotiation between the essayistic and the poetic

Marker's A.K. is another portrait of a filmmaker about Akira Kurosawa and the making of his film Ran, while Le Train en marche is an earlier portrait of Medvedkine on which Le Tombeau d'Alexandre draws and elaborates.

320 involves finding the right distance and the correct perspective from which to view

Medvedkine and Tarkovsky. To begin with, the collision of poetic and essayistic can be identified in the relationship between the title Le Tombeau d'Alexandre and the film it names, a connection lost in the English translation The Last

Bolshevik. 'Le tombeau' is a French poetic genre which, by analogy with the tomb as monument, is defined as: un texte ou un recueil ecrits a la memoire d'un defunt par un ou plusieurs amis ou admirateurs {a text or a collection of writing to the memory of a deceased individual by one or several friends or admirers}

(Charpentreau 1045). Examples of tombeaux include Stephane Mallarme's Le

Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire and Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe, and Le Tombeau de Marguerite de Valois, reine de Navarre (Belanger 56), a collection dedicated to the deceased queen featuring poems by Pierre de Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay, and others of their circle. Like the elegy, the tombeau is an intensely personal lyrical form, particularly as Mallarme practiced the genre. But when it appears as a collection of lyrical reflections, the tombeau also coordinates a multiplicity of voices in dialogue. Joel Castonguay Belanger emphasizes the architectural metaphor at the heart of the tombeau as collection:

Produit d'un montage et d'un assemblage de textes effectues en vue

d'atteindre une certaine beaute formelle, le Tombeau se presente de fait

bel et bien comme une architecture, une composition au sens plastique.

(Belanger 65).

{Produced by a montage or an assemblage of texts performed with the aim

of attaining a certain formal beauty, the Tombeau presents itself as

321 beautifully and well made as a structure, a composition in the plastic

sense}

Belanger's use of the terms montage here is certainly pertinent to Marker's

Tombeau d'Alexandre, as it resonates with the importance of the editing of

images and sound in the film and Marker's use of personal reflection, intertextual

citation, and interview footage.

Marker's tombeau of Medvedkine is made up of a series of six letters,

presented as short essayistic commentaries punctuated by interviews with

Medvedkine's friends and contemporaries. This correspondence between Marker

and the late Medvedkine takes the tombeau's elegiac dimensions and adds to it a

critical reappraisal of Medvedkine's work and life. The term correspondence here

also takes on another meaning, as rather than follow a narrative trajectory through

Medvedkine's life, this tombeau becomes a means of making connections between Medvedkine, Soviet cinema, and ultimately Russian history.

The guiding metaphor of Le Tombeau d'Alexandre comes from Maxim

Gorky's well-known assessment of cinema, which Marker quotes. Gorky

described the cinema as "The Kingdom of the Shadows," and this metaphor

becomes Marker's own metaphor of a metaphor through which to view

Medvedkine, and Soviet cinema and history. Marker divides Le Tombeau

d'Alexandre into two parts, part one, "A Kingdom of Shadows" which focuses on

Medvedkine's life and films, and part two, "Shadows of a Kingdom" which

focuses on the Soviet censorship, the fall of communism, and Medvedkine's

sometimes troubled and often troubling relationship to the Soviet authorities.

322 Through Medvedkine, Marker asks us to see the Soviet cinema - a kingdom of shadows - as running parallel to and reflecting Soviet history, as the shadows of a kingdom. Thus, Medvedkine's cine-train documentaries, recording daily life for teaching workers and farmers, become a model for the exercising of state power through propaganda. The censorship of films by Medvedkine and Vertov likewise looks forwards to the show trials. And Medvedkine's ecological film Anxious

Chronicles, with its celebration of the state's protection of natural resources, becomes an ironic harbinger of Chernobyl. This metaphor that speaks to both the illusion of cinema and the illusions that maintained and exercised Soviet power also illustrates a shift in perspective. On the one hand, Marker must examine

Medvedkine closely, drawing on their personal connection and friendship, to understand Medvedkine's own 'Kingdom of Shadows." On the other hand,

Marker must also place distance between himself and Medvedkine, step back from his friend, in order to see Medvedkine's place in Soviet history, his relation to other Soviet filmmakers such as Eisenstein and Vertov, and his association with the Soviet regime.

The right distance and proper perspective here are problematic, and negotiating them is Marker's challenge. The movement from part one to part two, then, involves a critical reframing, an adjustment and negotiation of distance and perspective. Marker is not simply interested in showing how Soviet cinema reflects Soviet history; his metaphor reminds us that much of what we understand of Soviet history, particularly that of the 1920s and 1930s comes to us through film. For instance, Marker points out the cinematic elements of the show trials of

323 '30s. The scripting and cinematic lighting evident in the footage of these trials suggests to Marker that "life itself has become a fiction film." Perhaps the most telling reading Marker provides is of footage from the Romanov's tri-centennial parade in which a dignitary gestures to the crowd to remove their hats before royalty. Marker reads this footage closely, and offers it as a way to contextualize his critique of Medvedkine: " I would like everyone to remember - before Stalin, before Lenin - this fat man who ordered the poor to bow to the rich." Marker's point here underscores the importance of the right distance and proper perspective. Marker reminds the viewer that to immediately dismiss Medvedkine because of his association with the Soviet regime, its leaders, and their atrocities ignores the history that preceded this period, and that one must find a distance and perspective from which to view the Russian history that takes this into account.

For all its critique of Soviet cinema and history, however, Le Tombeau d'Alexandre is also a deeply personal film, and it is in this personal investment that one can see how Marker poetically shapes his criticism. Marker is certainly present in the film as the pronoun "I" that runs through the letters, beginning the film's commentary with the line "Dear Alexandre Ivanovich, now I can write to you." But as Catherine Lupton suggests, this voice of address is not limited to the singular personal pronoun, as Marker 'speaks' through his own commentary and images, but also the images and voices of others that he organizes along metaphoric threads ("Imagine Another" 77-78). Lupton argues that Marker's

"approach is ... to situate his own address and response at some remove from [his subjects]" ("Imagine" 77). Marker does not respond directly to Medvedkine, but

324 rather to the broader history of Soviet cinema via his late friend, drawing on

(again from a distance) the images of Eisenstein, Vertov, and Dovzhenko, and the words of Isaac Babel and the Russian film experts and archivists Marker interviews. Here then we have the kind of fluidity of point of view or subjectivity that Pasolini places at the heart of the 'cinema of poetry.'

Yet while Marker generally maintains a critical distance in his use of other voices, his perspective is also intimately personal. Beyond his overt commentary from his position as critic, Marker also subtly inserts himself into his discussion.

When Marker discusses Medvedkine and Vertov, for instance, he remarks, "You would be endlessly compared to each other and sometimes opposed. Isn't that so,

Mr. Godard." This aside summons the comparison between Godard's Groupe

Dziga Vertov and Marker's Groupes Medvedkine, demanding that one even see a touch of self-criticism in Marker's analysis, however oblique.

This self-criticism reflexively reminds the viewer of Marker's mediating presence behind and even in the images of the film. Early in the film, Marker declares "My work is to question images," but his reflexive presence also underscores that this work is not Marker's alone, but also that required of the viewer. For example, Maker includes a shot of Yakov Tolchan, formerly a cameraman for both Medvedkine and Vertov, filming himself in a mirror with

Marker's handycam. As Marker jokes that Tolchan's "last act of propaganda will be for Sony," the shot acknowledges that even Marker's films cannot escape propaganda while it briefly turns the camera back on Marker himself, reminding the viewer that he too is an image-maker. Throughout the film, Marker

325 manipulates images, often highlighting detail or even applying computer- generated effects to alter footage. In a particularly reflexive moment, Marker questions his own images as he proposes two imagined endings for the film itself: one of galloping horses superimposed over a graveyard, treated with special effects and music by Alfred Schnittke; the other of Medvedkine's grave again treated with special effects followed by two slow-motion shots of a Red Army cavalry rider with Russian choral music. Marker calls these possible endings

"lyrical" but then notes "that lyricism was dead," and the film continues with the fall of communism in Russia. But if lyricism is dead, it is a lyricism associated with the beautiful or the ineffable; it is a lyricism that fails to find the right distance and proper perspective, settling instead for a false proximity.

In its place, however, Marker offers another kind of lyricism, one that, given the essayistic and poetic qualities of Marker's films, might be called a critical-lyricism. That is, Marker puts forward a lyrical subjectivity that brings together a "critical eye" and a "lyrical I": the lyricism of the Denkbild, with its right distance a critical distance, its proper perspective a lyrical perspective. In Le

Tombeau d'Alexandre Marker speaks of the experience of encountering

Medvedkine's once-lost cine-train films for the first time as a "pinch in the heart."

But his experience also becomes the grounds on which to critically engage with the films, first by showing the connection between the cine-train films and

Medvedkine's silent film Happiness, and then by contemplating the ways in which the films were ultimately complicit in state oppression. In "The Sock,"

Benjamin's childhood game of turning socks inside out taught him to "draw truth

326 from works of literature as warily as the child's hand retrieved the sock from 'the pocket'" ("Berlin Childhood" 374). So too does Marker's reflexivity ask that one approach his film with the same critical eye/I, the same questioning of images that he puts at the heart of his filmmaking.

Whereas Le Tombeau d'Alexandre is largely critical in its argument, Une

Journee d'Andrei Arsenevitch is more analytical. Here Marker reads various motifs and themes through Tarkovsky's films - the appearance of the four elements in each film, the filmic contemplation of works of art- alongside moments from late in Tarkovsky's life. As an essay, Une Journee d'Andrei

Arsenevitch is straightforward, offering readings and analyses of Tarkovsky's films, and yet it too develops metaphors. Like Benjamin's constantly receding angel faced towards the past, Marker takes the house in The Sacrifice as a metaphoric image of Tarkovsky's corpus. Marker imagines all of Tarkovsky's works as a giant house, with each film as a room connected to another room and another film. At the end of Tarkovsky's life, Marker suggests, this imaginary house stands in place of the home from which Tarkovsky is exiled. This imaginary house metaphor organizes the film as a whole, as Marker moves through its corridors, opening the doors from film to film.

To explore this metaphor further, it is Marker's presence as both friend and critic in Tarkovsky's house that gives Une Journee d'Andrei Arsenevitch its poetic character. Marker's voice appears here in a more distant form than in Le

Tombeau d'Alexandre. With the exception of an off-screen voice responding to

Tarkovsky's question, "Chris, you've got it all?" during Tarkovsky's reunion with

327 his son, Marker does not assert himself as the pronoun "I." Yet while he remains distant, Marker's subjective presence nonetheless runs throughout the film, this time through images that resonate with Marker's own work. The opening shots of Une Journee d'Andrei Arsenevitch, first of the mother from The

Mirror and then of Tarkovsky's wife Larissa, their hair in matching buns, intertextually cite the same hair style that Madeleine wears in Hitchcock's

Vertigo, which Marker scrutinizes in Sans Soleil as representing the spiral of time.

Similarly, Marker's analysis of the Zone from Stalker recalls his use of the term in Sans Soleil, where the Zone becomes a way of pulling images out of history, and manipulating them so they can be reevaluated.

By quietly tracing these connections between his own filmmaking and that of Tarkovsky, Marker's subjective presence also suggests that while they approach filmmaking from opposite sides - documentary non-fiction and narrative fiction - they share a desire to probe and provoke with their images. For instance, Marker reads the ending of Andrei Rublev as a 'poem' on Rublev's icons that shows the origins of twentieth-century art, and specifically Kazimir

Malevich's Constructivism, in Rublev's paintings. In this way, Marker makes the

And yet, during the sequence that shows a number of photographs taken at Tarkovsky's funeral, there is one in which an elderly, bald man descends the stairs of the St. Alexander Nevsky church. While photographs of Marker are rare, this could be the filmmaker again subtly inserting his image into his film. Neither Lupton nor Alter comment on this point, and it is perhaps difficult to say definitively that the photograph is of Marker. Comparing the image from the film with the Lars-Olof Lothwall's photograph of Marker on the set of The Sacrifice (perhaps the clearest photograph of Marker available) featured on the Tarkovsky- homage website Nostalgia.com seems to suggest that the two images are of the same person. If so, then Marker does in fact appear in Une Journee d Andrei Arsenevitch in a manner similar to that of his accidental 'cameo' in Le Tombeau d'Alexandre.

328 case that there is a clear line from his "questioning of images" to the questions that Tarkovsky's images elicit, one that follows the poetic threads of both these filmmakers. To put it another way, Marker and Tarkovsky contemplate and engage with similar subjects but from different perspectives, different distances, but each 'right' and 'proper' from the positions - fiction/non-fiction, narrative/non-narrative - at which they stand.

Marker places particular emphasis on a particular distance and perspective that he sees as dominating Tarkovsky's films. In contrast to the low-angle shots that Marker claims are characteristic of classical Hollywood cinema, in

Tarkovsky's films "the camera is slightly above the figures, who are rooted in the landscape" allowing Tarkovsky the perspective of one who "settles in the sky and contemplates the Earth." But Marker warns against "admiring the formal perfection of such a shot" since "this vision has a meaning." Using the example of the high-angle moving camera that captures the casting of the bell in Andrei

Rublev, Marker suggests that Tarkovsky captures the perspective of "Christ

Pantocrator, who contemplates us from the heights of the domes, and judges us."

Marker finds this distant, critical gaze returning at "key moments" in Tarkovsky's films. This attention to a particular gaze reveals Marker's own concern with determining the right distance and proper perspective. Marker even identifies the critical gaze of "Christ Pantocrator" as one he relates to personally, calling it a

"gaze we Orthodox Christians know well." While rumours of Marker's Russian

329 heritage are an unsubstantiated part of Marker's mythological biography, whether or not he is actually Russian Orthodox Marker does associate himself, though a multiple self as 'we,' with this perspective. In doing so, Marker reflexively acknowledges that he is directing a critical gaze, distant and analytical, onto Tarkovsky.

As in Le Tombeau d'Alexandre, however, Marker does not allow this critical gaze to remain fixed like the "Christ Pantocrator," and frequently reframes it in order to maintain its right distance and perspective. Thus Marker moves among various critical positions: the analytical distance that discusses the presentation of the four elements in Tarkovsky's films; a personal connection in the footage of Tarkovsky's reunion with his son and the filming of The Sacrifice and ultimately his death and funeral; the metaphor of Tarkovsky's house of films; and a historical criticism that looks at the censorship Tarkovsky's films faced and their connection to Soviet history. With this last perspective, Marker revisits the critical approach of Le Tombeau d'Alexandre, a move underscored by the inclusion of footage of Medvedkine commenting on Tarkovsky.

Following Medvedkine's comment that he disagreed with the treatment of

Tarkovsky's films in Russia, Marker enumerates the censorship applied to each film which leads him to Tarkovsky's direction of Modest Mussorgsky's Boris

Godunov and the performance of the Yurodivi'y, or Holy Fool who criticizes the

In the "Memory" section of Immemory, Marker includes two 'family albums' of pictures from his Uncle Anton and Aunt Edith Krasna, purportedly of Hungarian and Russian origin. Both Alter {Chris Marker 3-4) and Lupton (Chris Marker 11-12) address the difficulties of sorting through details of Marker's life accurately and both ultimately note that doing so is unnecessary and futile.

330 Czar but escapes punishment. Marker then points out that in order to explain the

Yurodivi'y, Tarkovsky included the story of Stalin's appreciation of Maria

Yudina's performance of Mozart. Like the Yurodivi'y, Yudina responded to

Stalin's praise and monetary prize by offering her prayers for the crimes he committed. Marker uses this story to suggest a similar capacity in Tarkovsky's work, though he acknowledges that Tarkovsky was not a dissident, and although his films were censored, they were still released; and unlike Medvedkine,

Tarkovsky's changes were minor and never ethically or artistically compromising.

As Bird observes, besides Andrei Rublev, which Tarkovsky edited heavily, the revisions Mosfilm and Goskino demanded of Tarkovsky were not always carried out, especially in the case of Mirror, and yet the films were still released (42-47).

Marker's inclusion of Medvedkine also intertextually signals a further difference between the two directors. Whereas Medvedkine's Anxious Chronicles ultimately celebrates the party's environmental policy, the Zone in Stalker seems an ironic harbinger of Chernobyl.87 Tarkovsky's films, therefore, share with Marker's an appropriate critical perspective, not unlike that of Yudina and the Yurodivi'y.

Finally, it is Marker himself- as a distant voice, as a person behind a camera, as critical gaze, and as an organizing force - that holds together these various positions, these competing perspectives. It is Marker behind the camera interacting with Tarkovsky; it is Marker who leads the viewer through the

Stas Tykrin makes interesting claims about Stalker as prophesying the Chernobyl disaster in his article "In Stalker Tarkovsky foretold Chernobyl" including the uncanny coincidence between the Writer's explanations for the Zone, the breakdown at the fourth bunker, and the actual explosion at Chernobyl's fourth energy block.

331 metaphorical house; and it is Marker who examines Tarkovsky's gaze and in turn his own critical gaze. Even in the Yudina-Stalin sequence, it is Marker's own humour that folds the story back into the rest of the film, as he wonders: "But isn't the most extraordinary part of the story that Stalin should wish to listen to

Mozart's twenty-third concerto?" It is this personal presence that lends Une

Journee d'Andrei Arsenevitch its lyricism, making the film at once a critical essay and an elegy for Tarkovsky.

As the above discussion suggests, Le Tombeau d'Alexandre and Une

Journee d Andrei Arsenevitch tend towards an emphasis of the critical over the lyrical, the essayistic over the poetic. Marker's Sans Soleil, however, blends the two modes more thoroughly, and one might even say stresses its lyricism. Indeed,

Sans Soleil exhibits all the qualities of poetic film that this dissertation has put into play: poeticization of narrative; reflexivity; inter-/transtextuality; metaphor; and lyricism. Moreover, Sans Soleil takes as its central conceit a negotiation of distance and perspective as in the Denkbild. A fruitful comparison can be made between Sans Soleil as a poetic-essay film and Benjamin's One-Way Street. Like

Benjamin's collection of Denkbilder, Marker constructs Sans Soleil from fragments in a variety of discursive modes and media.88 In One-Way Street,

Benjamin's Denkbilder range from the brief aphorisms of "For Men" and

"Loggia," to the narrative fragments of "Mexican Embassy," to the economic and political history of "Imperial Panorama: A Tour Through the German Inflation" to

In her article "Aesthetic Political Thought: Benjamin and Marker Revisited," Kia Lindroos develops a fruitful comparison of Benjamin's theories and Marker's approach to filmmaking, especially emphasizing Benjamin's Arcades Project.

332 the critical reflections of "Attested Auditor of Books" and "This Space for Rent," and the lyrical recounting of experience of "Ordnance." In Sans Soleil, Marker collages filmed images, still images, digital and televisual images, music, text, and voice. Similarly, Sans Soleil shares structural qualities with One Way Street.

Richter says of Benjamin's Denkbilder: "In One-Way Street, the Denkbilder are not positioned in accordance with an overarching narrative principle, but rather are arranged according to a systematic non-system, as if situated along a city street in which individual Denkbilder become the figurative shops, signs, buildings, and urban sites with which readers may interrupt their strolls like leisurely flaneurs on a promenade" (45-46). Sans Soleil is organized around another type of "wandering," as Burlin Barr (following Raymond Bellour) calls it

(173), this time a transnational fldnerie facilitated by airplanes, trains, and even cinema and television, and communicated through travelogue-like letters that accompany the film's images.

Distance and perspective are central concerns of Sans Soleil, particularly those of the filming subject in relation to the subject being filmed and the image itself. In his essay "The Double Helix," Bellour suggests that there are three kinds of images in the film that come from three 'characters' (190). The first form the image takes is that of the "cinema-picture," which appears in Sans Soleil primarily as documentary images associated with the fictional filmmaker Sandor

Krasna (190). The second form of image is the frozen image, the freeze frame that arrests an instant and is associated with other images - sculptures, cartoons, and photographs - and which Bellour aligns with the "film director" and

333 implicitly Marker (191). The third form of image is the distorted image, like

those created by Hayao Yamaneko via his image-synthesizer that transforms and

supplements the image (191). Each of these three relationships describes a

different negotiation of distance and perspective, and Bellour suggests that

together they demand questions regarding how one reconciles memory, time and

space (191). One might recast these negotiations as: first, the relationship between documentary images and their source, both the fictional Krasna and

Marker himself; second, the manipulations of images and sound either through

editing and through other means that include Hayao's Zone and Marker's own

manipulations through other filmic means. Both these relationships involve

adjustments of distance and perspective as critical and lyrical qualities.

Throughout Sans Soleil, Krasna meditates on his relationship to the

subjects he films and the images he thereby creates. The most striking example of

this critical reflection comes in the sequence concerning the women of Guinea-

Bissau and Cape Verde. Though Krasna encounters difficulties with women who

refuse to be filmed, in the Cape Verdean market he exchanges glances with a

young woman: "I see her, she saw me. She knows that I see her. She drops me her glance, but just at an angle where it is still possible as though it was not

addressed to me. And at the end, the real glance, straight forward that lasted a

twenty-fourth of a second the length of a film frame." Krasna, the documentary

observer, says that in the market he can "stare at [the women] with equality" and

the returned gaze of the woman disrupts the ethnographic objectivity of similar

documentary images. Barr notes that while images such as this tend to exoticize

334 in an ethnographic manner, "the film references cultural specificity in order to ponder cultural contact" (178). Instead of presenting images ethnographically,

Sans Soleil invokes ethnographic discourse, particularly ethnographic documentary in order to deconstruct ethnography itself. Ethnographic documentary becomes one discursive approach among many, and by setting it against other discourses of the film, especially Krasna's highly subjective lyrical meditations, Marker "troubles the cultural logic of this tactic of appropriation"

(Barr 178). The Cape Verdean women's playful yet evasive returning of Krasna's filmic gaze perhaps suggests three possibilities for undermining ethnography.

First, that the objective observation of ethnography is reversible. Second that the subject of this ethnographic gaze is both aware of and resistant to its intent. And third, as Barr suggests, behind or alongside this supposed documentary objectivity is a subjectivity that Marker presents throughout the film as fascination and desire

(181-182). In fact, as Barr says, Sans Soleil "explores the contact of lyrical and documentary modes as they are deployed to describe a cultural encounter" (178).

Moreover, Barr characterizes the pseudo-ethnographic way the film presents rituals such as the Carnival in Bissau and the Japanese ceremonies and rites as contemplating "different negotiations of a proper distance between the living and the dead" (180). To present these events ethnographically in contrast with other more personal lyrical reflections exemplifies one aspect of Marker's strategy in

Sans Soleil and its resonance with the Denkbild. The movement from ethnographic documentary to lyrical reflection involves a reframing that entails a critical reappraisal of both modes.

335 A further negotiation of distance and perspective in Sans Soleil comes from its 'fiction.' Ostensibly, the film presents an unknown woman reading letters and viewing images from her filmmaker friend, Krasna. Both the woman and Krasna act as surrogates for Marker: the former a stand-in editor, the latter a proxy cameraman, and both as substitute commentators. These surrogates obscure Marker's own presence and perspective, effectively keeping him at a distance from the words and images of the film. Furthermore, this 'fiction' provides a narrative pretense for Sans Soleil. But this pseudo-narrative lacks coherence, denying the viewer sufficient fabula information about the woman,

Krasna, or the context of their epistolary relationship. Even the stories Krasna tells through his letters break off suddenly or appear as fragmentary digressions.

For example, Krasna relates the story of a man who committed suicide a year after his lover's death because he could not bear to hear the word 'spring.' This telling conveys more about the comments that precede the story, on Sei

ShSnagon's things that "quicken the heart" and how "Japanese poetry never modifies," than about the story itself. Here the story illustrates a poetic point and serves to return the film to the poignancy of Shonagon's lists that Sans Soleil attributes not to words, but to images.

Similarly, the woman's refrain "He wrote me...," in its various iterations, is not a narrative marker, but a poetic device that links one sequence to another.

In fact, narrative throughout Sans Soleil functions largely as a way to connect other discourses, as a conduit. The connections and associations Marker creates in

Sans Soleil proceed, as Lupton says, as the film "enacts a process of sorting things

336 out and linking them together, while continually addressing itself to the nature and function of this process" (Chris Marker 154). As in Level Five, layers of discourses suffuse Sans Soleil, disrupting and poeticizing narrative. For instance, an aphoristic comment on television as a "memory box" leads to the memory of a photograph of a heron that conjures a haiku by Basho, which then returns to television with a reflection on how "the commercial becomes a kind of haiku to the eye" and a broader critical discussion on Japanese television. This brief section demonstrates how Sans Soleil deploys images and words through a constellation of discursive modes, from photographic and filmic images, to haiku poetry and philosophical critique. But whereas in Level Five this narrative poeticization is 'fractalized' - expanding and proliferating connections - the geometric figure of the spiral governs the metaphoric connections of Sans Soleil.

As discussed in the preceding chapter, Kransna uses the figure of the spiral from Vertigo to characterize time and its relation to memory. On the one hand, this spiral of time is an image of the vertigo of memory - the virtual state or experience that resurrects the 'real' past and the sometimes-inexorable tension between them. Krasna outlines this tension between the virtual and the actual in one of his letters that precedes the intertextual Vertigo sequence: "I am writing you all of this from another world, a world of appearances. In a way, the two worlds communicate to each other. Memory is to one what history is to the other: an impossibility." Memory lies at the heart of Krasna's virtual world, much as it dictates the unfolding of Sans Soleil. Like memory, the organization of images and words in Sans Soleil propels the film forward while simultaneously turning it

337 back on itself. Images appear and then reappear like resurfacing involuntary memories; stories return to haunt other stories and other moments of reflection in the film. Indeed, this spiral of time and vertigo of memory invoke Bergson's diagram of the cone of memory from Matter and Memory that Deleuze reproduces in his notes in Cinema 2 (294) and uses to help understand the time- image (80). Like the "virtual circuits" of Bergson's cone that Deleuze describes,

Sans SoleiPs montage involves "leaps" to and from memory, actualizing the virtual (Cinema 2 294). Further still, one might see hints of the vortex of Pound's

Vorticism in this spiral produced by images. But Sans Soleil also exhibits the fractal qualities of Level Five, and in this sense the film's spiral is also a fractal, or rather, like the Mandelbrot set, the fractal forms a spiral.

As the memories, images, words, moments emerge and reemerge through the film they connect with other memories, with other images. For example, towards the end of the film Krasna returns to a scene of a couple offering prayers to a lost pet at a cat shrine he presented earlier in the film. In its recurrence, sparked by images of a cat in Iceland during the 1966 volcanic eruption, this scene takes on a different tone. Whereas in its first appearance the scene speaks to Krasna's fascination with Japanese culture and ritual, its return is a product of the images that come before it and the elegiac tone of the film's consideration of loss and death. What was at first an aside or random musing speaking of cultural difference becomes a matter of "cultural relation," which Barr notes allows the film to invoke "cultural difference not in order to explore it or attempt to understand it; rather the film invokes it as a variety of lyric consolation" (180).

338 The recurrent meditations on rituals surrounding death are another way for

Marker to overcome the ethnographic distance of portraying cultural difference and instead, as Barr says, "Death becomes a site or mise-en-scene for staging cultural contact" (181). The doubled scene at the cat shrine is in fact a node through which Krasna places cultures in contact, one framed by a negotiation of the spiral of time.

In its first iteration this scene follows comments on the difference between

European time, African time, and Asian time and the statement that "the great question of the twentieth [century] was the coexistence of different concepts of time" spoken over an image of a heron on water, and then images of an emu on the lie de France, and a young woman from the Bijago islands. With the scene at the shrine that comes next, this brief chain of images sets out the problem of negotiating different times, different places, and different cultures. When the shrine appears again, it bridges the images of a buried Iceland to the digitally altered images of "The Zone." The spiral of memory turns back on itself, but rather than the "insane memory" of Vertigo, it acts like the woman praying for her cat "to perform the rite to repair the web of time where it had been broken." As the metaphor for the act of remembrance, this vision of the spiral re-imagines the function of memory, not as a simple return of past images or events, but rather a recreation and perhaps even redemption of the past.

The clearest example of the film's negotiation of the spiral of memory through montage concerns Krasna's "image of happiness." At the very beginning of the film, following an epigraph and over a black screen, the woman says "The

339 first image that he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland in

1965." The film then cuts to the image of the children itself, and then back to black as the woman says, "He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images," and then a cut to a image of fighter jets and the dialogue, "but it never worked." When the film cuts again to black, she says, "He wrote me, 'One day I'll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader. If they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black." The reflexive gesture of this opening sequence not only recalls the editing and raw materials of film, but it sets up the reappearance of the footage later in the film, when Krasna can finally link the image of the children to other images. The footage returns following shots from a

Dondo yaki ceremony, in which the debris of the Japanese New Year celebrations is burned and honoured. This ritual of loss inspires the revisiting of the Icelandic children footage and its placement before Haroun Tazieff s footage of Iceland after the volcano mentioned above. Here the film literally gets caught in the spiral of time, as both the Icelandic children and the cat shrine footage reemerge from their first appearances early in the film. But in the case of the Icelandic footage especially, this reappearance alters the images themselves.

When Krasna repeats the shot of the children a second time, he adds to it the "hazy end" of the original footage, holding the shot until its "last twenty- fourth of a second." The Dondo yaki ceremony provides Krasna with an example of reverence for loss and ritual recognition of the passage of time and things that recontextualizes the Icelandic footage. Lupton notes that Sans Soleil also

340 highlights "another ritual activity: that of shooting film, creating a stockpile of memory-images of the world as a bulwark against the losses imposed by the passing of time" (Chris Marker 161). Moreover, by placing the footage of the children between the Dondo yaki ceremony and Tazieff s images, Marker reconstitutes the meaning of this image. What was once an image of happiness becomes an image of loss. Tazieff s footage affirms that the volcano has altered the landscape and the lives that were the subject of Krasna's earlier filming, and thus the image of happiness is irrevocably an image of memory, of the past, and especially loss. But further still, the earlier images of the Dondo yaki realigns this sense of loss so that rather than bearing negative associations (the Western tendency to "privilege being over non-being"), it carries with it a "poignancy of things" associated with the "things than quicken the heart" from Shonagon's list.

If Krasna has lost the moment of happiness and the possibility of its return, at least its image, its memory still remains to quicken the heart as an image of happiness. Like Deleuze's noosign of the time-image, the irrational cut between the children and the black leader that might have been thought of as 'happiness' or 'black' takes on other dimensions of thought when 're-linked' with other images. So, in its later incarnation the image of happiness becomes an image honouring loss. Indeed, it is this remaking of images by way of editing that leads to Marker's other reflexive recreation of memory in Sans Soleil: "the Zone."

The Zone, so-called in homage to Tarkovsky, entails the electronic manipulation of images via an image-synthesizer by Krasna's friend Hayao. With his synthesizers, Hayao transforms cinematic and photographic images into near-

341 abstractions: high-contrast, multi-colour and pixelated shadows of the images they alter. Krasna says that Hayao "claims that electronic texture is the only one that can deal with sentiment, memory, imagination." In remaking images, Hayao's machine turns them into "non-images" that, as Krasna notes, "proclaim themselves to be what they are: images, not the portable and compact form of an already inaccessible reality." Images are then no longer tied indexically to past moments. Thus, Bellour says, Hayao "transforms the images of the past in order to give them over to their contemporary present... as new images" (191).

Subjecting images to the Zone performs another version of the repairing of time that Marker's editing enacts. But with its refuting of the illusion of reality between the image and what it represents, the image in the Zone becomes something other than a sign of loss. If, as Krasna asserts, "memories must make do with their delirium, their drift" and "A moment stopped would burn like a frame of film blocked before the furnace of the projector," the Zone offers one way to reconstitute memory-images, to hold them and to reexamine them both critically and poetically.

Distorting images in the Zone does not strip them of meaning or affect.

Instead, as in the case of the images of the protests against the construction of

Narita airport in Japan in the 1960s, there is a political and personal expediency to making present images of the past. When Hayao treats the images of the protest with his machine and Marker places these images alongside renewed demonstrations at Narita in the 1980s, the images of the past are not laden with nostalgia, with the failures of the past, but instead resonate and even rhyme with

342 the images of the present. The abstracted images of '60s protesters raising their fists in the air becomes simply gesture, a pure motion that Marker relinks to the same gesture made by protesters in the '80s. Together these images move

Krasna, as he notes that while the protests "had failed, at the same time, all they

[the protesters] had won with their understanding of the world could only have been won through the struggle." The present-ness of the images from the Zone reminds one that this struggle does not belong to the past, but continues.

In this sense, the possibility of remaking and repurposing images that the

Zone presents is at once an affirmation and a refutation of the epigraph from T.S.

Eliot's "Ash Wednesday" that opens Sans Soleil : "Because I know that time is always time/ And place is always and only place" (Eliot 89). On the one hand, the film acknowledges the break between time and space, as in the Narita sequence where the space of the site of the Narita airport can be revisited, but the protests of the '60s are locked in the past. On the other hand, Krasna's meditations on memory and the possibilities of the Zone question not only the lines of the epigraph but also Eliot's lines that follow: "And what is actual is actual only for one time/ And only for one place" (Eliot 89). Perhaps in the Zone and in memory the actual can be repeated in another time, another place, not unlike in Vertigo, or in the spiral of time and memory.

The French language version of the film begins with an epigraph from Jean Racine: "L'eloignement de pays repare en quelque sorte la trop grande proximite des temps" (the distance between countries somewhat repairs the excessive nearness of time). This epigraph speaks to a similar negotiation of time and space, but with greater emphasis on Sans Soleil as travelogue.

343 Another coil of the spiral revolves around Krasna's proposed 'imaginary film' and suggests further implications of memory and the cinematic procedures

Marker employs to recreate and understand it. In Marker's imaginary film, a man from the future, "from 4001 ... who has lost forgetting," comes to the twentieth- century only to marvel at the people of the past who experience memory. Krasna initiates this discussion of an 'imaginary film' by describing the image of the

Icelandic children, and then showing images of Iceland following the '66 volcanic eruption. Krasna plans out his film that begins with the time-traveler walking on the Icelandic landscape covered by volcanic ash and rock, until "all of a sudden he stumbles, and the next step it's a year later. He's walking on a small path near the Dutch border along a seabird sanctuary." Here Marker cuts from an image from Iceland to an image of the path, and in doing so presents another reframing of distance and perspective: the metaphoric 'seeing as' that links time, space, memory, travel, and the cinema. Krasna rhetorically asks, "Why this cut in time, this connection of memories?" but the answer lies in the imaginary film itself.

Like the time-traveler, Krasna seeks to understand memory and he does so by traveling to other countries, which is a voyage through space and time.

But Krasna also travels via cinema, via images, via 'documents,' and via fictions. To see such travels as connected metaphorically is one means of reframing distance and perspective, of negotiating a position between criticism and lyric. Both positions are necessary. The time-traveler hopes to understand memory, the ability "to call forth a vision, to be moved by a portrait, to tremble at the sound of music," but can only begin to grasp this experience through

344 Mussorgsky's song-cycle, Sunless. Memory, then, is the capacity for the quickening of the heart. Without this lyrical and affective capacity, one cannot fully engage in the critical consideration of memory and its application to the political events at Narita, the deconstruction of ethnographic documentary.

Indeed, the narrative fiction of Krasna's imaginary film offers a reflexive turn of the spiral as it remakes Sans Soleil itself, a mise-en-abyme within the film.

When Krasna says, "of course I'll never make that film. Nonetheless, I'm collecting the sets, inventing the twists, putting in my favourite creatures. I've even given it a title; indeed the title of those Mussorgsky songs: Sunless" he references the very film the viewer is watching and Marker's own approach, as

Lupton says, as an "image-scavenger" {Chris Marker 11). To see Sans Soleil within the imaginary film Sunless is to consider the poetic and essayistic elements of the former through the narrative fiction of the latter. Doing so highlights the

Active personae Marker adopts, as well as the shifting modes of discourse that organize Sans Soleil, and the assumptions and "textual productions" (Barr 181) behind these discourses. Seeing memory as travel through time and space affords

Marker the opportunity to deconstruct ethnographic documentary. Seeing memory as cinema allows Marker to meditate on how images are related and edited together and their relation to fiction and narrative. These metaphoric connections emerge from the collision of lyrical and critical discourses in the film. Both Bellour (190-191) and Barr (186-188) speak of the presence of lyricism in Sans Soleil as an interruption, but an interruption that "unsettles" (Barr

188) that very lyricism. Thus, seeing critical discourse lyrically also entails

345 seeing lyric discourse critically. The spiral of Sans SoleWs discursive

negotiations turns back onto itself, and like an infinite version of Benjamin's

'sock' continually reveals the 'present' of insight while unveiling its form.

This critical and poetical reexamination of images made possible by the

Zone, Marker's editing, and the deconstruction of documentary objectivity, allow

Marker to achieve the critical-lyrical distance and perspective of the Denkbild.

The various personae, the various voices, and the various incarnations of the

image, exemplifying the kind of multiplicity Perloff finds in the postmodern lyric

and the free indirect subjectivity Pasolini associates with the cinema of poetry,

allow Marker to continually reframe his discourse. If one wishes to look for

Marker as an T in this multiplicity, then one must begin by looking at the

negotiation between the critical and the lyrical that frames and reframes. This

critical-lyricism does not deny or erase affect, sentiment, or memory. Rather, it provides a new critical context within which to consider things that quicken the

heart, and how and why they do so. Conversely, this critical-lyricism demands

that alongside critical distance and perspective one must recognize the importance

of experience and subjectivity - the sources of this quickening of the heart.

In the closing moments of Sans Soleil, when images from the film are replayed through the distortions of Hayao's Zone, Krasna says:

Finally his language touches me because he talks to that part of us which

insists on drawing profiles on prison walls. A piece of chalk to follow the

contours of what is not, or is no longer, or is not yet. The handwriting

each one of us will use to compose his own list of things that quicken the

346 heart: to offer, to erase. In that moment, poetry will be made by everyone,

and there will be emus in the Zone.

These words from Krasna imagine the Zone as a space in which the capacity to

engage in critical-lyrical discourse, to write both poetically and essayistically like

Shonagon,90 becomes both a possibility and a necessity. Moreover, the

penultimate image of the film that follows this statement about poetry returns to

the image of the Cape Verdean woman with whom Krasna exchanged glances.

This time subjected to the manipulations of the Zone, the woman's gaze - straight

ahead and penetrating - can be held, frozen in time and abstracted so that the

image that "lasted only the length of a film frame" can be contemplated critically

and lyrically. This image is a final distance, a final perspective that brings

together the critique of the ethnographic and documentary gaze, the reflexive play

of the use of editing and freeze frames, and the lyrical transformations made

possible by the Zone. And yet, the final words of the film - "Will there be

another letter?" - spoken by the woman, and this time not reciting Krasna, seems

to demand or remind one that this distance and perspective is not fixed, that there

could and perhaps must be another refraining, another turn of the spiral.

Lyric Perspectives, Lyric Passages

The model of the Denkbild offers one path by which to move through the

intersecting essayistic and poetic streets in Le Tombeau d'Alexandre and Une

Journee d'Andrei Arsenevitch, and Sans Soleil. Or one might say, this model runs

90 Lopate, for instance, includes Shonagon's list of "Hateful Things" in his collection The Art of the Personal Essay, but her list of "Things That Quicken the Heart" and others from the Pillow Book carry with them a lyricism that one might associate with the list poem genre, as in Allan Ginsberg's "Howl (I&II)."

347 a poetic course up a one-way essayistic street (or vice versa) ignoring signs to the

contrary. The metaphors, reflexivity, and subjectivity of Marker's engagement

with images reflect the reflexivity and subjectivity of the language of the

Denkbild. As in Benjamin's Denkbild, it is Marker's negotiation of distance and perspective, his personal investment in his subjects, and his subjective presence

behind his critiques that drive the poetic in these films and suggest a desire to

reconcile the personal and the political, art and history, time and space, memory

and the image. Set alongside Zero for Conduct, Window Water Baby Moving,

Brand Upon the Brain!, and Mirror, Marker's films suggest a category of poetic

film that lies not in opposition to these other lyrical possibilities, but is instead

one pole of a lyrical spectrum, one iteration of lyric muthos. But the distance between these poles is not so vast and it is not difficult to connect Marker's

lyricism to that of Brakhage, Maddin, or Tarkovsky. Indeed, there is certainly a

sense of exchanges, of lyric passages among these filmmakers and their films, passages not limited to Marker's portrait of Tarkovsky or Maddin's references to

Vigo. Marker's poetic-essayistic films engage in a critical consideration of

memory and loss that is not so far removed from the narrative explorations of memory and nostalgia in Zero for Conduct and Brand Upon the Brain! Likewise, though subjective experience is inflected with critical insight in Marker's films, it

carries with it lyrical expressions of consciousness, perception, and affect that

characterize Window Water Baby Moving, Brand Upon the Brain!, and Mirror.

Though they pursue their lyrical possibilities through different means, whether by way of narrative fiction, experimental documentary, or poetic-essay, each of these

348 films shares the narrative poeticization, reflexivity, intertextuality, and metaphoricity that define the contours of the lyric. Though they do so from different perspectives, different lyrical distances, these films and others considered in previous chapters offer exemplary manifestations of the poetic in film.

349 Conclusion:

Kino-Poiesis: Poetic Film, Moving-Poetry

The poetics of poetic film that the preceding chapters have built towards has ultimately pointed to a mode of poetic film rooted in lyricism. Moreover, chapter four has suggested a range of possible forms that this lyricism can take - from the poetic narrative lyricism of Zero for Conduct to the phenomenological lyricism of Window Water Baby Moving to the critical-lyricism of Le Tombeau d'Alexandre, Une Journee d'Andrei Arsenevitch, and Sans Soleil. In this poetics I have focused on the formal and structural qualities - narrative poeticization, intertextuality, reflexivity, and metaphorical organization - that contribute to the lyricism of poetic film. This lyricism and critical-lyricism of poetic film might be summed up as a mode of discourse that deploys various permutations and negotiations of subjectivities, inflected by reflexive or transtextual gestures, and organized by counter- or poeticized narrative procedures and the metaphoric

"seeing as" that proceeds along lines of correspondence and relation.

This poetics has worked towards describing the basic qualities and elements of the discourse of poetic film. Doing so, however, has made it necessary for me to sideline other concerns that lie outside the scope of this dissertation, notably, the historical dimensions of poetic film and the role of affect in understanding film as poetic. In the following concluding remarks I will touch on these two concerns to suggest further possibilities for the study of poetic film - ways of opening this poetics to other considerations. Indeed, this poetics is

350 merely a first step towards a better understanding of poetic film. As Tzvetan

Todorov indicates, a poetics in general plays "an eminently transitional role" and should serve "as an 'indicator' of discourse ... but this discovery having been made ... its own role will be reduced to little enough: to the investigation of the reasons that caused us to consider certain texts, or certain periods" {Introduction

72).

Returning to Chris Marker's Sans Soleil, two images hint at ways of exploring these other dimensions of poetic film - history and affect - and point to two poetic films. The first image appears three times in Sans Soleil: the rotating wire sculpture head, a mobile, that intertextually cites Jean Cocteau's Blood of a

Poet. This head-mobile first appears in Hayao's studio, hanging above his image synthesizer. Krasna speaks of how Hayao "plays with the signs of his memory.

He pins them down and decorates them like insects that would have flowed beyond time and which he can contemplate from a point outside of time." The head-mobile appears a second time as Krasna refers to Vertigo as a film that portrays "impossible memory, insane memory." And the head-mobile appears a third time as Krasna reflects on Madeleine's hair and the spiral of time, this time with a visual rhyming of the twist in the bun of Carlotta Valdez, Madeleine and the back of the wire head.

Citing Cocteau's head-mobile during this sequence of Sans Soleil serves two purposes. First, this intertextual reference points back towards a moment in film history. The mobile refers to both a specific film that declares itself as poetic and a period in film history - the European avant-garde - during which a host of

351 films such as Blood of a Poet directly engaged in poetic filmmaking and have been critically received as poetic. Second, alongside Krasna's comments on time and memory, this historically charged reference links memory and history as

"points outside of time." In this regard, one could read this citation of Cocteau as a nod to the historical precedents for Marker's approach to filmmaking. The mobile, then, is an homage to the poetic influence of Cocteau who in the second title card of Blood of a Poet declares, "Free to choose the faces, the shapes, the gestures, the tones, the acts, the places that please him, he composes with them a realistic documentary of unreal events," a statement that is neatly echoed

Marker's own filmmaking practice.

The citation of Cocteau's work also suggests wider historical influences on Marker's work. By way of Cocteau's association with the Surrealist movement, the mobile citation provides a further link for Sans Soleil to the modernist avant-garde of the 1920s and '30s. Other intertextual citations - the

Appolinaire and Cocteau quotations in Sij 'avals 4 dromedaires, the Eliot quotation in Sans Soleil, the invocation of Rene Magritte in the first words "Ceci n'est pas un film" of The Embassy (Alter Chris Marker 98), the references to

Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, and Andre Breton in Remembrance of Things to

Come, and the image from Fantomas that opens he Joli Mai - situate Marker's films in direct relation to modernism and the avant-garde, and especially the poetry of this period. Marker's habit of subtly acknowledging the significance of film history highlights the continuing importance of an awareness of history in understanding his poetic films.

352 It is for this reason that my future research emerging from this poetics will be directed towards incorporating history and historically based inquiry into my work on poetic film. This poetics has put forward an account of what formally constitutes poetic film, but as films from as diverse periods as Man with a Movie

Camera, Mirror, and Brand Upon the Brain! suggest, there remains the question as to the historical origins of and influences on poetic film. To explore these historical dimensions of poetic film is of course outside the scope of this brief conclusion, but I would like to offer a few questions that will guide my future research. Firstly, do poetic films emerge in particular periods and not others, and if so, what is the influence of literary poetry on films during these periods?

Secondly, how does critical reception during these periods influence the understanding of specific films as poetic? Thirdly, is the recognition of certain films as poetic transhistorical or are some understandings of the poetic historically situated?

Addressing these questions requires further research and exploration into particular periods and movements in film history. For instance, where does the term poetic fit in relation to 'poetic realism'? Is poetic realism a period, genre, or style? Is poetic realism a matter of an "optique ... a sensibility, a function, and a mode of address ... rather than a genre or a style" as Dudley Andrew suggests in his book Mists of Regret (25)? Or are there other factors at play in the 'poetic' of poetic realism, such as the strong influence of screenwriter and poet Jacques

Prevert or the influence of avant-garde movements such as Surrealism and

Impressionism (Andrew Mists 26). Andrew notes that critics have tended to

353 emphasize the 'poetic' of poetic realism as a matter of introspective style while

neglecting other influences, such as melodrama and romantic poetry (Mists 233;

241). Further, how might the sense of poetic in poetic realism bear on other

movements or periods? Poetic realism is just one example of a period in film

history whose relation to poetic film deserves additional critical attention.

Methodologically, this historical approach will focus on reviews and other

critical writing on film that discusses certain films or cinema in general as poetic.

Andre Bazin's essay "De Sica: metteur en scene," which I discussed in the

introduction, is one example of a critical work that engages with the idea of

poetry in film that could be considered historically. Such a critical history might

explore further Bazin's use of the term poetic, as well as other references to

poetry and the poetic by other critics and reviewers writing on De Sica's films or

Italian Neorealism in general. I will focus particularly on reviews written within

the specific historical period under consideration. But, since excellent work has

already been done on key historical periods in relation to poetic film, like

Andrew's book on poetic realism for example, part of this historical research

would involve finding connections between different periods and movements by

comparing existing historical research on poetic film movements or periods. As

the citation of Blood of a Poet in Sans Soleil suggests, one avenue that this

research could follow would be to consider the poetic continuities between

Surrealism and the avant-garde of the 1930s and the French New Wave,

especially the work of Left Bank filmmakers like Marker, Alain Resnais, and

Agnes Varda. Such explorations into the historical dimensions of poetic film will

354 necessarily draw on the work of this poetics and in turn will expand the possibilities for a poetics of poetic film.

The second image from Sans Soleil looks back to Marker's La Jetee.

During the Vertigo sequence, Krasna makes a pilgrimage to the sequoia cut of

Muir Woods, provoking the comment "he remembered another film in which this passage was quoted. The sequoia was the one in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and the hand pointed to a place outside the tree, outside of time." This self- referential citation of course serves to evoke the earlier film's concerns with time and memory, but it also embeds La Jetee into the familiar viewer's consciousness.

With La Jetee in mind while viewing Sans Soleil, it is difficult not to remember the image of the blond child with the line "real children" or the lines "Sometimes he reaches a day of happiness, but another one" during the sequence with the

Icelandic children and Krasna's "image of happiness." And when Krasna speaks of Shonagon's "things that quicken the heart" one is reminded of the experience of viewing La Jetee for the first time and the quickening of the heart in the moment when the film's still images suddenly and briefly move.

The experience of that sudden appearance of movement that seemed so shocking and revelatory the first time I saw La Jetee, still quickens my heart with each re-viewing of the film, and it is this affective quality that leads me to the second areas of future research. While one can attribute certain formal qualities to poetic film and interpret it through the poetics of the previous chapters, the concept 'poetic' still carries with it affective possibilities. Whether referring to an emotional quality or an aesthetic quality, the experience of affect remains an

355 important facet of understanding poetic film. The question, then, is how can one critically engage with affect in relation to poetic film? One way might be to propose a sort of 'viewer response' model, similar to the "aesthetic of reception" proposed by Hans Robert Jauss in relation to poetic literature.

Jauss divides reception into two hermeneutic acts, the understanding involved in the aesthetic perception of the first act of reading, and the act of reflective interpretation that comes with the second and subsequent readings

(141). According to Jauss:

"In the poetic text, aesthetic understanding is primarily directed at the

process of perception; therefore it is hermeneutically related to the horizon

of expectations of the first reading - which often ... can only be made

visible in its shaped coherence and its fullness of significance through

repeated readings. The explicit interpretation in the second and in each

further reading also remains related to the horizon of expectations of the

first, i.e. perceptual reading." (141-142)

For Jauss, this primary perceptual act of understanding involved in the first reading, forms the basis for all engagement with and the aesthetic experience of the poetic text (142). Future readings and rereadings are then based on this initial aesthetic experience, and this tension and interplay between first and subsequent constitutes Jauss's approach to reception.

To carry out this aesthetic of reception of poetic texts, Jauss proposes the necessity of creating a model of readership. Jauss says,

356 I have not fabricated something like a 'naive reader,' but rather have

transposed myself into the role of the reader with the educational horizon

of our contemporary present. The role of this historical reader should

presuppose that one is experienced in one's associations with lyrics, but

that one can initially suspend one's literary historical or linguistic

competence, and put in its place the capacity to occasionally wonder in the

form of questions. (144)

By inserting himself into his aesthetic of reception, rather than imagining an ideal or naive reader or devising some empirical measure of reception, Jauss can trace the movement from his initial aesthetic experience to subsequent re-readings of the poetic text. In the case of La Jetee, I might explore a similar trajectory, from my initial shock at the appearance of movement to subsequent viewings of the film in which I have had a better understanding of the reflexivity of this moment, and yet am still struck by its beauty and ingenuity. This reading and rereading of my own experience and reception of La Jetee and other films could form the basis of further interpretation of the affective qualities of poetic film.

Another approach to the affective qualities of poetic film could involve other theoretical insights, such as those provided by Walter Benjamin's sense of the 'shock' produced by film. Benjamin describes this shock in the second version of his "Artwork" essay as "the dynamite of the split second" ("Work" 117).

According to Benjamin, "The most important social function of film is to establish equilibrium between human beings and the apparatus" by way of its shock to perception ("Work" 117). Film, Benjamin says, "furthers insights into the

357 necessities governing our lives by its use of close-ups, by its accentuation of hidden details in familiar objects, and by is exploration of the commonplace milieux through the ingenious guidance of the camera" ("Work" 117). Thus, for

Benjamin,

"The function of film is to train human beings in the apperceptions and

reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is

expanding almost daily. Dealing with this apparatus also teaches them

that technology will release them from their enslavement to the powers of

the apparatus only when humanity's whole constitution has adapted itself

to the new productive forces which the second technology has set free"

O'Work" 108).

Here Benjamin presents the revolutionary goals of his view of film technology and its reordering of perception, as film serves to allow the individual and the masses to adapt to technology - both the first technology which masters nature, and the second technology directed at social forces ("Work" 124). In his note on this statement, Benjamin says, "The aim of revolutions is to accelerate this adaptation. Revolutions are innervations of the collective - or, more precisely, efforts at innervations on the part of the new, historically unique collective which has its organs in the new technology" ("Work" 124). It is this term, 'innervation,' that guides Benjamin's concept of the shock of cinema, and suggests further possibilities for considering the affective qualities of poetic film.

358 While Benjamin only uses the term innervation in a handful of instances,

Miriam Bratu Hansen claims it is a key term in Benjamin's understanding of film and technology (313). Drawing from Susan Buck-Morris's work on Benjamin,

Hansen defines innervation as "Benjamin's term for a mimetic reception of the external world, one that is empowering" (317). According to Hansen, there are two currents of understanding in Benjamin's use of innervation, first "a conversion of mental, affective energy into somatic, motoric form," and second

"the possibility of reconverting, and recovering, split-off psychic energy through motoric stimulation" (317). In this sense, innervation is a mode of "interplay" between human emotion, sensation, and thought with technology, which film manifests (Hansen 321).

The concept of innervation, therefore, might be a means through which to consider the affective qualities of poetic film not simply as an emotional or aesthetic experience of (following Benjamin) auratic beauty. Innervation could describe an affective experience that constellates aesthetic, sensory, psychological, and even somatic experience through the formal and technological elements that poetic film engages. Though considering innervation in this sense divorces it from Benjamin's understanding of the term as presenting collective affect within the context of a proletarian revolution, the concept might help clarify

91 As Hansen notes, Benjamin refers to innervation directly in the second version of the 'Artwork' essay, in his essay "Surrealism," and in the Denkbild"Prayer Wheel" in One-Way Street (313; 318). Hansen suggests, however, that the concept of innervation pervades other versions of the 'Artwork' essay, and various other writings on technology and especially film, including his writing on Mickey Mouse and Charlie Chaplin, and the Denkbild "To the Planetarium" from One-Way Street (3\S).

359 the collective or at least critical reception of certain films as poetic. To return to

LaJetee, the 'shock' of movement marries aesthetic beauty with filmic technology. Chapter three discussed how this reflexive gesture encourages contemplation of film in relation to memory, but this contemplation is in part also a product of the affective shock that this image produces. In fact, it is perhaps impossible to deny that the affective experience of this moment is inextricable from the insight into the film medium, memory, and time it provides. Examining how affect negotiates an engagement with other poetic aspects in film then is a further avenue for future research on poetic film.

If I am more hesitant in outlining the methods that such research would follow, it is because speaking of poetic film in terms of affect has been a matter that this project has tried to avoid or hold off in order to clarify its poetics in predominantly formal terms. Yet, that I encounter such difficulties suggests the necessity of further research into this aspect of poetic film, an approach that I believe will complement further research on the historical dimensions of poetic film. But it is important to reiterate that this future research will depend on the poetics that this dissertation has established. Though future research, as Todorov says, may make necessary certain adjustments of this poetics, the foundation it provides works as a guide to how one might approach poetic film.

Finally, to return to the title of this dissertation, Kino-Poiesis, which, as the introduction stated, for the purposes of this project suggests poetic film, or perhaps the poetry of the moving-image. This conclusion and my future research in this area, therefore, seek to multiply the meaning of this title. Kino-Poiesis,

360 then, might also refer to images that are emotionally moving and thereby poetically moving. Or, Kino-Poiesis could also suggest historical dimensions, the various poetic movements in film history and even the shifting definitions of poetic that poetic film demands. Regardless of how one interprets Kino-Poiesis, however, this dissertation makes the claim for considering poetic film as a mode independent of other modes of filmmaking. Whether in terms of its poetics, its history, or its reception, poetic film demands critical attention, not simply as a genre with connections to poetic literature through adaptation, or as an empty analogy. Poetic film is an approach to making films - as Perloff reminds, poetry comes from the Greek poien, "a making" ("After" 21) - but also a way of making sense of films. Poetic film is a mode of discourse that with its lyrical and critical- lyrical possibilities offers new ways of understanding how film means, how film engages with other arts, and how viewers engage with film.

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