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| copyright ©Carol Beaulieu |
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From the start film is poetry. At the beginning of the twentieth century Russian and French filmmakers work their medium like poets work theirs; poetry rises from the interstice between one shot and the next. When the space in between is filled with cement, we force disparate elements to follow logically. The holes covered, poetry is squashed flat.
Much like a poem, imagery happens between the lines, in the whiteness or blackness of ambiguity. What differentiates a film from a poem, at least before the advent of video cassettes and DVDs, is the unstoppable movement forward linking one image to the next, which brings about a semblance of realism. One cannot freeze frame a film without affecting its essence. A poem can be read inside out, upside down; film cannot. However, poetry is not only media, and it is not about content, but it is an inexplicable expression of form.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, writer and filmmaker, considered the sequence as the main component of film; what starts and concludes a shot and what binds one shot to the next composes a single entity. Everything should detract us from the inevitability of make-believe; yet something bridges individual segments into a single unit of meaning.
The correlation between an image (a shot or a scene or a sequence) and reality is never one. For example, the shot of a glass of water on a table is neither the real glass of water nor the photograph of a glass of water. Film slips in between reality and photography and pushes the glass of water on a table to a new level of experience. It is movement demarcating the realness of an object and its representation. Even the photogram (the smallest element of film), which Roland Barthes analyzed quite effectively, cannot be counted as a photograph. (By photogram I do not mean the photographic image achieved, without a camera, by placing a object directly onto the surface of a photo-sensitive material.)
There is in the filmic photogram an element too many that distinguishes it from a photograph; its “blur” is never present in a still photograph, even when the photographer purposely distorts an image with a simulation of movement (as in some sport photographs). The simulation of movement in a photograph is false when compared to the authentic blur of a photogram. A blurry photograph is an ornament; the blur in a photogram is part of its essence. Movement is not essential to photography; it is an affectation added to a still shot. Film records objects in motion, whereas a photograph stops motion. The filmic blur occurs in poetry too; it is what occurs when the poet breaks the artificial flow of linear narration.
Inevitably movement in film comes to an end; but movement is the essence of a poem. It is not words that are poetic, but the movement created by the combination of words. In other words, a poem is, like film, dependent on the amalgam of units in order to rise to the status of poetry. This means that poetry is not an accessory but an essence, an action in the making. An apple, in a shot or in a poem, is not a poem. However, an apple aligned with a second element can be lifted to a second level. A half-bitten apple suddenly becomes an image. The act of biting into an apple alters the alliance – neither the shot, nor the word, but the sequence.
Poetry is a mathematical equation whose outcome is imagination. Disparate elements once merged transform the nature of both the individual elements, taken one at a time, and the association of these objects. In cinema, G.W. Griffith revolutionized the nature of film by imposing a linear narrative to montage; he was one of the first to combine units and sequences in a linear manner. By respecting the chronology of events, he managed to transmit a semblance of realism which obliged the viewer to think logically: A + B + C, that is C after B after A. Chronology and linearity constrict the sequence to be interpreted in one and one manner alone (we can’t have C before A and eliminate B altogether). To deviate from this narrative norm is to condemn one’s work to non-comprehension, at least in a contiguous way. In other words, what we often consider poetic in linear narrative is the stereotypical demonstration of what poetry supposedly means.
Whenever a poet or a filmmaker refuses to emulate this standard form of narrative, he and she is quickly tossed aside as being too intellectual. Many have become unreceptive to the complex exercise of the non-linear poetics. Poetry resides in what is not given as immediate tangible. Pushing poetry into movement enables the invisible to emerge, for the poetic lies on another plane, not so much in a third dimension, but elsewhere, in what lies beyond the assembling of logically bound segments. More than lazily lying on the X axis, poetry vigorously climbs up and down the Y axis.
Non-linear narration encourages the eyes to move all over and back again. The mind is freed from the logical momentum and wanders off into the space of ambiguity and imagination. Instead of the blocks of a story tumbling like a stack of dominoes, connections happen on multiple facets, much like in a mosaic: simultaneity, parallelism, contradiction, convergence and divergence.
Poetry that relies on mental activity is promptly castigated. Hundreds of years of linear narration make anything else less desirable. How to honor what has been for so long chastised? Who wants to stroll down a dark alley of the innercity? Avoiding the drill of the imagination entails a price to pay though; the gradual shift from the vertical to the horizontal, the obsession for a single object of desire, erases the baroque pleasure for ambiguity.
Teachers remind us that stylistic significance must be encapsulated by blandness. One style, one meaning. To aim for the bull’s eye necessarily leads to craftsmanship; the target must be hit or you lose. Yet poetry floats from one vanishing point to another.
Technical agility fosters the adjective, which is camouflaged violence. Gluing qualifiers onto nouns and verbs facilitates moral platitudes which make it difficult for poets to release poetry. Poetic works demand a certain apprenticeship to jump over the holes that one finds between any two sequences. Technicians amassing adjectives and adverbs are incomparable to the poet who decides, voluntarily or involuntarily, to dig pitholes in the narrative pavement which requires the audience to participate in the making of narration. A true poem, written or visual, is always poetry in the making; poetry brings into focus what is blurry and equivocal. It requires a certain getting used to grasp works that do not indulge in obviousness of purpose.
Narration acquires supplementary layers of significance that pull meaning into the realm of allegory. What is presented is not an icon or a symbol but a multitude of images that bring about archetypes. More than a reflection in a simple mirror what is thrown back to us unfolds like a trip into the other side of recognition and a plunge into self-analysis. The lake is no longer an excuse for Narcissus to admire his own image, but an invitation au voyage (Baudelaire). Later, Jean Cocteau introduces us to Orpheus who is our guide into the otherworld. Not a spectacle (as Guy Debord defined it), but a medium of total surrendering. How else to label this act of bridging what was not meant to be spliced together? Putting holes in the narrative promotes mental and physical participation. Poetry is never easy to define. It is not petrolium jelly smeared on a lens or on words imprisoned by adjectives. Paradoxically poetry blossoms from the seeds of its own silence. Whatever is found between words and sequences. The further the distance is between one element and the next, the greater the chances for poetry to arise. Poetry is a consequence. The craft of controlling this articulation of the uncertain or the dance of silences is what poetry might be about.
More than blocks of images (tableau [ ] tableau) themselves, it is the space (or lack of) that cements bricks that fascinates the mind. What is not there tickles the imagination. The absence of what is expected creates a need for presence. One can never truly break away from the gravity of reality; so we might as well learn to swim in and out of the mass of energy that inescapably pulls us inward. The composition must be altered. If linearity returns, don’t let it prevent poetry from flourishing. The unceasing strobe effect between appearance and disappearance allows us to invent unexpected meaning.
The possibilities for invention are infinite, and so are the invitations to play with what is within and without us. The fields of knowledge are rich, however small the pouch of seeds. The unfortunate thing about much of poetry is the industry packaging it comes with; often the sales pitch is not as open nor as generous as the essences displayed. Cultural and national traditions are wicked and graceless in their treatment of difference. Each wishes its particular bed of specific roses. One the red; the other the yellow. There are nevertheless many beds where the entire gamut of roses can be found, from the white to the black rose. And there is the bed with no roses at all. Poetry is everywhere, and nowhere. Its being omniscient makes it a rarity.
Antonio D’Alfonso was born in Montreal, and studied at Loyola College from 1970 to 1975, where he earned his B.A. in Communication Arts. !n 1979, he completed an M.A. in Communication Studies (specializing in Semiology) at the Université de Montréal; his thesis was on Mouchette, a film by Robert Bresson. He has produced a few independent films, and has collaborated as scriptwriter, camera-person, or as editor on other films. He has regularly given conferences on questions of literature, film and multiculturalism in Canada, in the USA, and in Europe.
In 1978, he founded Guernica Editions, and has edited over 450 hundred titles by authors from around the world. A photographer and published author himself, he has published a number of books in French and in English.
In 1982, he co-founded the trilingual magazine, Vice Versa; in 1986, he co-founded the Association of Italian-Canadian writers.
