| Major French poets have considered cinema a model for poetry since its beginnings. “We all have some kind of definition of what poetry is: each poet has one, and each definition is different,” says Christophe Wall-Romana. “If for so many modern poets, poetry has something to do with the cinematographic imagination, it means above all that poetry is alive, adaptable, changing!”
Wall-Romana, McKnight Land-Grant Professor of French and Italian, is redefining poetry with what he calls “cinepoetry” — poetry integrating esthetic elements of film.
His book project, Cinepoetry: The Cinematographic Imaginary in French Poetry 1897-2007, offers the first comprehensive examination of the ways poets have used cinema to reshape the poetic tradition. The book develops cinepoetry to theorize poetic features derived from cinema, by re-evaluating poetry movements in twentieth-century France and showing their reliance on film.
Wall-Romana also aims to clarify the meaning of the word “cinematic” when it is attached to writing, since no systematic theory of the place of cinema in texts exists. His book Filmwriting: How Cinema Transforms Texts, will define across French and American print cultures what constitutes cinematic writing.
To further explore how poetry writing has become what Wall-Romana calls “a form of imaginary exploration of our social-technological environment,” he has created a film clip database of digitized shots from key French movies. Funded by the College of Liberal Arts’ Infotech Fees Committee and part of the new Digital Image Database, it will provide a new visual tool for teaching film on campus.
From the 2007 edition of Research, an annual publication of the OVPR.
|
