Synopses & Reviews
Cinepoetry analyzes how French poets have remapped poetry through the lens of cinema for more than a century. In showing how poets have drawn on mass culture, technology, and material images to incorporate the idea, technique, and experience of cinema into writing, Wall-Romana documents the long history of cross-media concepts and practices often thought to emerge with the digital.
In showing the cinematic consciousness of Mallarmé and Breton and calling for a reappraisal of the influential poetry theory of the early filmmaker Jean Epstein, Cinepoetry reevaluates the bases of literary modernism. The book also explores the crucial link between trauma and trans-medium experiments in the wake of two world wars and highlights the marginal identity of cinepoets who were often Jewish, gay, foreign-born, or on the margins.
What results is a broad rethinking of the relationship between film and literature. The episteme of cinema, the book demonstates, reached the very core of its supposedly highbrow rival, while at the same time modern poetry cultivated the technocultural savvy that is found today in slams, e-poetry, and poetic-digital hybrids.
Review
"Discusses writers from Mallarme and Jean Epstein to Max Jeanne and Nelly Kaplan." -The Chronicle Review
"Wall-Romana uncovers a not previously recognized genre in French literature: cinepoetry: a modernist poem that responds to challenges the cinema posed to writing. This book traces the new genre from Mallarme's Une Coup de Des to contemporary work, revealing how poets have found inspiration in cinema's visuality, control of movement and projected light--and in the process discovered new forms for poetry."--Tom Gunning, University of Chicago
"This long-awaited book uncovers new territory for French literature and cultural studies, French film and intermedia, and poetics and new media, revealing the literary projects--cinematic avant la lettre--that shaped the early imagining of cinema and its French history."--Felicia McCarren, Tulane University
About the Author
Christophe Wall-Romana is Associate Professor of French at the University of Minnesota.