FROM FILMPOEMS TO VIDEOPOEMS: THE TRANSFORMATION OF POETRY IN THE AGE OF THE IMAGE

TOM KONYVES, UNIVERSITY OF THE FRASER VALLEY, CANADA

By the time Man Ray dubbed his 1926 film Emak-Bakia a cinpome, French critics and filmmakers
were already advancing the idea of cinema as poetry. (At stake was the autonomy of film and its
legitimate place alongside other art forms.) What essentially was a poetic declaration, offered up the
thesis that one form of artistic expression using words had been successfully translated into a
different art form using film. Proponents of this new hybrid form of the film-as-poem, who deemed it
paramount to distance themselves from the narrative language of traditional literature and by
extension, theatre, aligned themselves with and aspired to the art of modernist poetry while largely
rejecting its physical property, its material form, the succession of words on a page. As a result, it was
the methodology of poetry and its effects on the reader or listener that became interpreted and equated
with films specific methodologies. For its audiences, the pleasure of recognition that the art of
imitation (film as a mimetic art form) and the object of imitation (poetry) were identical, that a particular
film was, in fact, poetry could be said to substantiate these claims for a successful translation. It was
only 50 years later, when the access to the means of production passed from filmmakers to poets with
that now-ubiquitous technological innovation, video, that the material form of poetry reappeared,
gained momentum and evolved into the now familiar genre of videopoetry.
Tracing the process of that becoming, two divergent approaches should be noted. To revitalize poetry
(as we know it) and to address the increasing domination of the visual image through technologyassisted communication and reproduction systems, the majority of poetry-films today are being
produced to promote and disseminate a particular, pre-existing poem to a wider audience. The other
approach seeks to redefine poetry as the viewers experience at the intersection of the word and the
image: meaning-production is always situated in inter-relationships; the poem is not in the words or
images per se; the word-component (in juxtaposition with the selected images) acquires a new
meaning, a change of meaning demanded by the hybrid form.
Despite Robert Frosts famous statement that poetry is what gets lost in translation, some of the
videopoems to be presented are in French, Spanish, German and Russian, testifying to the
contributions made by translators to reproduce a linguistic utterance in context, thus directly enabling
the prodigious global growth and dissemination of videopoetry and filmpoems since the turn of our
century. (These are presented with English subtitles, which is the way I first encountered them.) But for
a few significant exceptions, wherein subtitles are used to deliberately subvert the language on the
soundtrack (for comedic or dissonant effect), focus that is redirected to the bottom of the screen has
the single purpose of facilitating access to the word-component of the work. Attention is diverted from
the entire content of the original image to the locus of the added text; one is compelled to read where
no displayed words were intended. While the viewer is brought closer into the meaning of the work
interpreting the inter-relationships between text and image reading subtitles does inadvertently
diminish the integrity of the projected image. For the entire frame is essential to the videopoem, as is
the page to the concrete poem, the canvas to the painting, the stage to the play, etc. (I have suggested
that subtitles be positioned below the frame.) Alternatively, dubbing the soundtrack with the target
language sacrifices the auditory qualities of the original speech in favour of refraining from
compromising the integrity of the frame.
Notwithstanding these and many other challenges to unifying poetry and film into a hybrid form, the
works to be presented will demonstrate that not only has poetry not been lost in translation but has, in
fact, reinvented itself; it is the story of a much-anticipated arrival of a new art form we should feel
privileged to witness.