Customer Reviews

Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film

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This exciting book explains so much about how we think and feel, see and hear. It articules the mysterious relationship between the most precise language, poetry, and silent films, pure image. It makes thrilling original and provoking connections between them which lie in the mechanisms of bodies, the poets', the films' and our own, their lost control, hysteria, automationism, and sexuality. We see Chaplin and Stein, Williams and the Surrealist films of Bunel and others, H.D. and her film Borderline as well as Marianne Moore and the documentary films in a new light. The poet's body and the film's body inform each in both techniquie and the cutting/editing upon the body. A great book that looks at reading film, poetry and reality in a groundbreaking way.

I think this is one of the first books to really link the practices of avant-garde silent film as well as popular cinema to specific modern poets, and their very particular aesthetic goals. In this way this book is an intervention in the field, and I can never read a poem the same anymore--modern or otherwise.
I recommend this to anyone who wants to really understand the period of modernism as well as some of its more inscrutable as well as disappearing figures.....