Cinema and Poetry: Expressive Alternatives for the Moving Image critically examines a variety of cinematic traditions and histories and reveals how poetic form opens up new identifications and communities, critical positions, and possibilities for personal expression, while remaining conscious of film's imbrication in systems of signification.
The idea of poetry has continually afforded filmmakers a way to think about cinematic form outside of novelistic storytelling or other prose forms. This book argues that references to poetry in cinema signal a set of profound challenges, resistances, and alternatives to the dominant ways that moving-image media are understood as modes of cultural expression at any given time and place. Divided into four sections that align with conceptual structures taken from poetry - Voice, Rhythm, Syntax, and Rhyme - the categories reflect the importance of form to poetic meaning as it crosses medial boundaries to inflect moving images. The contributors to this book analyze a variety of cinematic traditions and histories from across world cinema as specific examples of a type of media dialectics, where poetry inflects cinema in order to open up ways to express ideas: new identifications and communities, critical positions, and possibilities for personal expression.
Revealing the extent of poetry's reach within cinema, and how poetry responds to myriad expressive needs across cultures, geographic areas, and political systems, the book offers a comprehensive understanding of how poetry functions as a critical alternative to conventional film language across world cinema. It will be of interest to researchers and students of film studies, film theory, world cinema, and experimental film, as well as those examining non-narrative approaches to moving-image media and filmmakers seeking theoretical frameworks for understanding poetic cinema.
