NADJA COHEN, MODERN POETS AND CINEMA (1910-1930)

Recension par Léa Buisson

August 5, 2015

Resulting from a doctoral thesis 1 directed by Jean-Pierre Bobillot at the University of Stendhal-Grenoble 3, Nadja Cohen's work constitutes a precious document enlightening us on the role that cinema could play – "stupefying image 2" bearer of a mythology proper to the blossoming of the 20th century – in the poetic discourse of modernity. A specialist in the relationships between poetry and media 3, the author places from the outset her study "under the sign of Apollinaire, 'mediological prophet (p. 9)'" who already predicted, in June 1917, the end of the printed book, doomed, according to him, to be quickly competed with by phonographic and cinematographic productions. "Man-era" (p. 10, Nadja Cohen here takes up an expression used by Savinio in a 1916 letter to Apollinaire), Apollinaire serves as a milestone for the analysis of a French poetic corpus extending from 1910 to 1930, which is that of a generation literally under the sway of the cinema medium, and belonging to what François Albera designates as "cinema episteme", that is a "new paradigm of thought and representation that innervates the entire space of communication and expression and of which cinema is not the whole but the most accomplished concretization, which enlightens it better than anyone 4". Starting from the observation that to date there are very few works devoted to the relationships maintained by modern poets with cinema, Nadja Cohen offers us a work that is not limited to the analysis of works belonging to the surrealist movement – whose passion for the seventh art is known, and this from its beginnings –, but which attempts to "clear a critical terrain still almost virgin while highlighting both the phenomena of continuity and divergences between pre and post-war, but also pre and post-1924 Manifesto" (p. 20). Choosing a "generational perspective" (p. 20), rather than a particular literary movement, this work highlights both certain protagonists of surrealism – with the analysis of texts by Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, Antonin Artaud and Philippe Soupault – and modernist poets of varied horizons but who manifested a deep attachment to cinema – like Max Jacob, Blaise Cendrars, Henri Michaux and Pierre Reverdy –, or others, less known, like Benjamin Fondane and Pierre Albert-Birot.

Poetry and Cinema: A Meeting

Wishing to cover a phenomenon of great scope, both aesthetic and historical and cultural – even anthropological –, Modern Poets and Cinema is composed of three major parts which have the quality of articulating theoretical reflections and case studies cleverly. The first of these, entitled "Poetry and Cinema at the Beginning of the 20th Century: The Reasons for a Meeting", focuses on explaining what could so irresistibly magnetize modern poets to the cinematograph, initially popular and anti-intellectual entertainment, but testifying to a perpetuation "of the romantic taste for so-called primitive arts and, more directly, in the line of Rimbaud's provocative claims (p. 29)". After having surveyed the genealogy of a modern poetic tradition captivated by the triviality of popular arts and "silly refrains 5", Nadja Cohen devotes a subsection to Baudelairean poetics and the phenomenon of "prosaization" of poetry, a term which "presents [...] the interest of making heard both the word 'prose' and the adjective 'prosaic' (p. 34)", and which designates the contamination of verse by prose, but also the renewal of poetic subjects, lexicon and language level, opening onto a poetry of the everyday. Baudelaire was thus the initiator of a poetry of (the) circumstance, but his project differed greatly from that of the avant-gardes of 1910, in that he still thought he could extract from his scriptural practice a form of eternity.

Furthermore, the relationships between poetry and journalism constitute an important milestone in the genesis of modernism, with poets like Apollinaire or Cendrars considering the "visual lyricism" of advertising posters as a "means of expanding the field of action of poetry (p. 52)", joining in this the futurist manifestos, as well as cubist pictorial experiments. Although "[t]he valorization of popular culture and the praise of the banal [are] one of the meeting points between modernism and early surrealism (p. 61)", a different use will be made of advertising by future surrealists, who will consider it above all as a "power of death" from which results a "poetry-activity of the mind (p. 57. The second expression is by Tristan Tzara.)". Moreover, one of the most notable characteristics of modernist poetry consists in the questioning of personal lyricism, the poetic subject being called to dissolve into the anonymity of the crowd "with which it vibrates in unison (p. 70)". Hence, the problem of simultaneity torments poets – as evidenced by Apollinaire's "conversation-poems" –, along with a desire to produce an objective poetry that would seem to spring naturally from the immanence of things and the world, and not from a lyrical "I". And it is here that the cinema medium comes into play, which, at the time of its birth, is "[p]erceived not as an art but as a machine to record reality", and thus reveals itself "a dreamed aesthetic model within the framework of the claim for an objective poetry, where the lyrical subject would fade to give way to facts and images (p. 86)".

After having drawn a panorama of the different pre-cinematographic technologies, Nadja Cohen enters headlong into the history of early cinema, beginning by opposing two very different conceptions, namely the "documentary and realistic film of Lumière 'views'" and the "dreamlike and illusionist film, rich in special effects, of Georges Méliès" (p. 110), then analyzing various layers of discourse on cinema at this beginning of the century. Entertainment par excellence, the cinematograph is first disdained by the bourgeoisie, among other reasons because it would be, and this since its birth, associated with a form of physical and/or psychic violence. Little socially valued, this new type of spectacle also suffers from the weakness of the films produced, which, given a still faltering technique, more closely resemble filmed theater. Although the gradual appearance of an aesthete public will contribute to the emergence of cinephilia in the 1920s, the detractors of this "school of vice 6" will not cease to invade newspapers with their "edifying" discourses, mostly pejorative. Finally, concluding this first chapter, the author examines the modalities of modern vision, notably highlighting the crucial role played by Bergsonian theories in the elaboration of several philosophical and artistic conceptions: Bergson thus "contributed to imposing the photographic and cinematographic paradigms as privileged analogies with the process of memory" (p. 141).

"Projection and Projectile: Cinema and Modern Man. Speed, Violence and Subversion"

The second major part of this work, entitled "Projection and Projectile: Cinema and Modern Man. Speed, Violence and Subversion", focuses on the very conjunction of cinema and modern man. It gives pride of place to Walter Benjamin, for whom the seventh art was at the origin of an "aesthetics of shock", although the philosopher never condemned this medium, because, according to him, as dadaist work had already done, film implemented a "traumatic shock" (p. 177), but this time on a perceptual and not moral level, cinema having the goal of "delivering the physical shock effect from the moral gangue where dadaism had somehow imprisoned it 7". In perfect adequacy with the modern experience of urban life, cinema thus acted as a revealer of its attributes, first and foremost speed:

"Cinema, born into the world with these machines, machine itself and one of the most beautiful, mechanically perceives mechanical photogeny. A curious fraternity brings together the prodigious invention of the reproduction of movement with these other inventions that have carried movement to its most intense limit 8."

The French filmmaker and critic Jean Tedesco analyzes with accuracy what will participate in the enthusiasm of many artists and poets for a medium that seemed to take charge and anticipate the evolution of the human sensory apparatus required by the mechanical and urban era. A great admirer of the cinematograph, Aragon already emphasized, in The Peasant of Paris, the extent of the adaptive constraint imposed on the human being by modern fulgurance: "[The effects of speed] modify to such an extent the one who experiences them that one can hardly say [...] that he is the same who lived in slowness 9". The praise of energy thus lies at the very heart of the polarization of poets towards the cinema medium, certain mythical characters, such as Charlot or Fantômas, embodying – each in their own way – an ideal of speed and efficiency proper to action films. And it is timely that Nadja Cohen sheds light on the little-known works of Jean Epstein on cinema and poetry, two essays 10 that seek to demonstrate that modernist poets have given preeminence to sensation rather than idea, "emotion being a lever for setting the brain in motion with a yield far superior to intelligence" (p. 186). Although his theories lack precision and sometimes prove somewhat fanciful, the future filmmaker is convinced that modern poetry and cinema are made to get along perfectly, and, consequently, dreams of a fruitful collaboration between these two arts "where the notions of speed, shock, and sensuality predominate" (p. 187). But speed is not the only vector of enthusiasm between poetry and cinema, this entertainment largely absorbing its audience thanks to the subversive climate that surrounds it from its beginnings. Violence and eroticism are consequently at the rendezvous of the last part closing the second major section of the work, the author examining several specific cases, journeying from the sensual – even obscene – imaginary of dark rooms to Musidora's mythical black tights.

Poetry and Cinema: Sparks or Effectiveness?

The last major section of this study, titled "Cinema: Polemical Tool or Instrument of Aesthetic Renewal?", proposes to analyze the effective results of a poetry/cinema meeting, circumscribed and analyzed with precision in the two previous sections – mainly on historiographic and anthropological levels. Beyond the elective affinities that are those of these two media, it is now a question of understanding what are the real stakes and aesthetic repercussions of this artistic confluence. To do this, the author chooses to proceed with a three-step analysis, dwelling first on the ambivalence of poetic discourse about cinema. Indeed, avant-garde poets – such as Aragon, Cendrars, or even the dadaists –, have always expressed their preference for popular cinema, ending up cultivating an "anti-culture dandyism (p. 262)" that will take on particular scope among the surrealists:

"So why go to the cinema if not to discover there, as in landscapes, signs, posters, houses under demolition, the big headlines of newspapers, things (or films) that are surrealist, but without the authors ever having heard of our movement 11."

No matter, therefore, the quality of the film, cinema plays the role of a cornucopia providing matter likely to metamorphose into surrealist marvelous. But Breton will go even further, since he will display on several occasions a marked contempt for cinema, the praise of its "idiocy" not being, at first glance, a panacea that would legitimize the seventh art: "I must confess my weakness for the most completely idiotic French films. I understand, moreover, quite badly, I am too vaguely. Sometimes it ends up bothering me, then I question my neighbors 12." It must be recognized that the use made here of cinema relates more to a taste for scandal than to a real cinematographic bias. Subsequently, it will moreover be reproached to the surrealists to have completely ignored the technical and material reality of this new medium, to have contented themselves with daydreaming by "consuming" film without precise purpose.

In a second step, Nadja Cohen takes stock of this rather ambiguous relationship and lists the major theoretical and aesthetic reflections engendered by several poets who have temporarily turned into thinkers of the cinematograph. It emerges above all a significant interest in the visuality of cinema, and, symmetrically, a massive rejection of the narrative element, from which follows, very logically, a refusal of any form of filmed theater. This critical aspect of cinema, coming from the poetic field, often pleads for a "lyricism of matter" (p. 311), paying a certain cult to the technique of the close-up, because "[t]his new life of objects opens the way to a new aesthetics of the fragment, where hyperrealism engenders abstraction. Indeed, the mediation of the machine allows access to the depth of the object, to its intimacy" (p. 309). An eminently visual medium, the cinema that poets extol must be silent, muteness opening more easily the doors of the marvelous and the unconscious, it follows an emancipation from logos and the correlative constraints to logic and reason.

Polysemy of Cinema

Object of reflection devoted to the poetic avant-garde 13, cinema, reservoir of images with "alogical and impulsive character" (p. 325), has fascinated without however ever becoming a real threat to language and writing, the surrealists having notably made of this art an "adjuvant of renewal" (p. 326) that they so ardently wished for. This is why Nadja Cohen, when the hour of assessments sounds, prefers to speak of confluence rather than influence, concerning cinema and poetry. And, finally, in order to highlight the tangible artistic production resulting from this singular meeting, the author undertakes the detailed analysis of a selection of scenarios, "cinematographic poems" and "cine-poems 14", which constitute perhaps the only residual traces of a passion after all aborted. Concluding her work with a series of very subtle textual and transmedial studies 15, Nadja Cohen seeks to emphasize the terminological ambiguity of the noun "cinema" in the mind of the different modern poets belonging to her corpus, "the term rarely designat[ing] the visual art as we know it (p. 399)". At the dawn of the 20th century, the appearance of such an innovative optical device, capable both of capturing animated views and then projecting them onto a screen, considerably disrupts the place and role of the artist. Popular entertainment elected by a fringe of intellectuals, poets and visual artists, the arrival of this unprecedented visual medium has made it possible to relaunch, then nourish the questions about the effectiveness or possible failings of language, coming to compete with the "imaging function (p. 399)" of poetry, and thus inviting it to surpass itself. However, not limiting themselves to theoretical reflection, the poets visited in this work abound in inventiveness and create new poetic forms – often inspired by the scenario –, these hybrid texts now representing an archive of size to measure the scope of a phenomenon proper to a given era, where cinema becomes "the cognitive framework through which the 20th century thinks its own culture 16."

1 Nadja Cohen, "Place and Effects of Cinema in the Poetic Discourse of Modernity", doctoral thesis defended on December 1, 2010. 2 Expression cited on the back cover and coming from Louis Aragon's The Peasant of Paris, Gallimard, coll. "Folio", 2007 1926, p. 82. 3 See on this subject the proceedings of the colloquium she co-organized in 2008 at the Sorbonne: Poetry and Media: 20th-21st Centuries, Paris, Nouveau monde éditions, coll. "Culture-médias", 2012. 4 François Albera, The Avant-garde in Cinema, Paris, Armand Colin, coll. "Armand Colin cinéma", 2005. Cited by Nadja Cohen, op. cit., p. 23. 5 Arthur Rimbaud, "Alchemy of the Verb", A Season in Hell, Gallimard, coll. "Poetry", 1999, p. 139. Cited by Nadja Cohen, op. cit., p. 33. 6 Édouard Poulain, "Against Cinema, School of Vice and Crime. For Cinema, School of Education, Moralization and Popularization", Imprimerie de l'Est, Besançon, 1918. Cited by Nadja Cohen, op. cit., p. 136. 7 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility, in Works III, Gallimard, Paris, coll. "Folio essais", 2000 1935, p. 97. Cited by Nadja Cohen, op. cit., p. 177. 8 Jean Tedesco, "Cinema, Expression of the Modern Spirit", Cinéma-Ciné pour tous, n° 82, April 1927. Cited by Nadja Cohen, op. cit., p. 179. 9 Louis Aragon, op. cit., p. 146. Cited by Nadja Cohen, op. cit., p. 181. 10 Bonjour cinéma and Today's Poetry, a New State of Intelligence, both published in 1921 [reissued in 1974-1975 and 2014]. 11 Georges Sadoul, "Memories of a Witness", Cinematographic Studies, n° 38-39, 1965, p. 10. Cited by Nadja Cohen, op. cit., p. 263. 12 André Breton, Nadja, in Complete Works, t. 1, Paris, Gallimard, coll. "Bibliothèque de la Pléiade", 1988 1928, p. 663. Breton's emphasis. Cited by Nadja Cohen, op. cit., p. 264. 13 Among others Pierre Albert-Birot, Blaise Cendrars, Pierre Reverdy, Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, Antonin Artaud, or even Benjamin Fondane. 14 Desnos/Man Ray's The Starfish, Artaud/Dulac's The Seashell and the Clergyman, Apollinaire's La Bréhatine, Cendrars' The Feverish Pearl, Artaud's The Eighteen Seconds, etc. 15 In this regard, the beautiful find of "the homophony between 'verre' and 'vers' which relates the material components of the film and those of the poem" The Starfish is exemplary (cf. p. 335). 16 Philippe Ortel, "The Reverse of Cinema in Pierre Reverdy's Poetry", Poetry and Media, op. cit., p. 33. Cited by Nadja Cohen, op. cit., p. 400.