Schizo/graphie

While pondering the poetics of new media space, I stumbled across Christophe Réprimel’s remarkable short film Schizo/graphie (2007, France, 8:15). It is a 21st century kind of “silent” film, developing parallel narratives launched from the same experience. Through the use of such devices as variable split screens, grainy video, deliberate diegetic “silence,” and, importantly, a nondiegetic music track, Mr. Réprimel’s film significantly perturbs our sense of time. The multichannel presentation keeps the viewer constantly reassessing the status of “now.” When, for a time late in the film, part of the screen goes dark, the viewer may find himself or herself communicating to the film about that which is not seen.

At this level of perceptual engagement, it seems to me there is little difference between a good film and a good poem. If so, what poetic devices correspond to montage–traditional and vertical–and the stabilizing/destabilizing potential for nondiegetic sound? Eisenstein’s characterization of montage as collision brings some poems to mind, which I’ll need to re-explore soon.

Mr. Réprimel cites the help of friends, a paucity of means, and the influences of films by David Lynch, Mike Figgis, and Virgil Waldrich. His Schizo/graphie is receiving some rave reviews and he is currently working on another story which may be ready later this year. Bonne chance–we’ll be watching.

 

Enjambing With the Gods

Enjambment is a distinguishing characteristic of poetry, not because every poem has enjambing lines–it need not–but because the line is what distinguishes poems from prose and enjambment directly operates on the line.

The poet’s bible provides a clinically correct definition of enjambment (p. 359): Nonalignment of (end of) metrical frame and syntactic period at line-end: the overflow into the following poetic line of a syntactic phrase (with its intonational contour) begun in the preceding line without a major pause or juncture. The opposite of end-stopped.

In other words, enjambment is a line break that interrupts the “intonational contour” of the poem for some (presumably) important aesthetic end. Whether the effect is or is not important will, of course, be subjective. But, in most cases, it’s fairly easy to spot it when it fails or when it works. I’ll illustrate that point with two examples of enjambment.

First example (complete):
I bought some shoes and then I put them on
My feet and took a walk and they felt good.

Second example (excerpt):
… now conscience wakes despair
That slumbered, wakes the bitter memory
Of what he was, what is, and what must be
Worse; of worse deeds worse sufferings must ensue.

In each of the examples, the enjambed line satisfies the technical requirement. Each provokes a kind of surprise, a recognition of having been tricked by the poet. What of it?

In the first example, “I put them on” would be enough for surface meaning, and the suddenly subsequent “My feet” does create a surprise. Does it work? Not really. Leaning in to the enjambment is the monotonous (but correct) iambic pentameter, and, after the enjambment, merely more the same. No follow through, and the enjambment hardly seems worth it. The poem does not seem to be affected in any way by the enjambment, and the device affects nothing. In this case, the enjambment disrupts nothing.

The second example has each line enjambed, but culminates in the stunning break between lines 3 and 4. Also supporting the effect are the lines’ alliterations and repetitions: wakes-wakes, what-what-what, then worse-worse-worse. The enjambment produces not just a surprise, but the sense that the ground has fallen away from under our feet, and the final word “ensue” seems to increase the velocity. There is no turning back.

The trick in the second example here is surely the poet’s subtle dropping of the subject “he” in the enjambing line which we only seem to pick up after the break, and, by then, it’s too late.

If you’re thinking “straw poem” you’re right. The first example is from the Ciardi’s and Williams’ book on poetry where it is appears as an illustration of lame enjambment. The second example is selected from early in Book IV of Milton’s Paradise Lost (ll. 23-26). If you’re jazzed by that second example, you might want to read the text from the start of Book IV. There, Milton uses a series of enjambments (no one of them as spectacular as the selection) to create a texture which allows the lines cited here to explode off the page. Indeed, Paradise Lost is a paradise of enjambed blank verse lines.

So, enjambment is not necessary to make a poem, nor is it sufficient. The well-placed enjambment works with other elements of a poem and can, as in PL, produce the lift we call art.

Enjambment seems like an “off the page” phenomenon. It’s not clear that is the case. For example, enjambment appears in Homeric and early Latin verse which was more likely to have been heard, than read. Ultimately, enjambment is a sound effect.

How should representations of poems in the new media convey the enjambing lines? The cinematic analogue to poetic enjambment might be classic (or horizontal) montage. We’ll look at some examples in coming posts. Meanwhile, I’d love to hear about your most memorable moments of divine enjambment.

Soft Cinema and the Soft Cinephiliac

How to assess the potential audience for an exciting recent development in cinema? The development is already here and is called Soft Cinema. The audience of interest to me, does not yet exist, or, at least, is not evident. That audience is typified by the Soft Cinephiliac.

Soft Cinema (SC) is a collection of three films created by Lev Manovich and Andreas Kratky, shown as loop installations and later released on DVD in 2005 for viewing on personal computers. The films exemplify concepts for cinema in the new media that Manovich had presented in his 2001 book The Language of New Media and in a variety of papers he’s written since. Each film constructs a fictional narrative out of modules (e.g. graphic images, animation, video streams, and scrolling text) collected from a database termed the Global User Interface (GUI). The modules are presented inside (and between) smaller frames that partition the screen in a way similar to Mondrian’s partitioning of the canvas. The selection and juxtaposition of those modules on the screen can be random, though Manovich and Kratky tend to synchronize sequences of randomly assembled montage in a nonrandom way, linking subsets of the GUI to synch points in a generally fixed narrative (voiceover or scrolling text).

What can we say about the audience for SC? Certainly, the kind of vertical/spatial (or within-frame) montage implemented in SC acknowledges the pervasive shifts in visual habits and norms as well as the changes in perceptual filtering and remixing of information that have occurred in recent decades. The visual norm for computer screens and the world news is decidedly compartmental and modular. Though we often think of technical innovation as reshaping our visual norms, excellent arguments have been made that the process may work the other way around—that changes in technology reflect prior changes in visual norms.

Cinema scholars and critics have been slow to weigh in on the merits of SC. Even the more enthusiastic reviewers are cautious, tending to treat SC as a curiosum and tempering their response with skepticism about the viability of SC’s relatively fixed narrative structure. In particular, Carlota Larrea, concludes her review: “There are some exciting and even impressive elements in this project…However, one wonders how many times one would want to watch the shorts … before getting bored, in view of the repeated storyline.”

What an interesting criterion for metering audience response to cinema—a film’s effects on repeat viewings. While I disagree with Dr. Larrea’s particular assessment of SC (I watched the films a number of times and, in each case, my urge to see the film again was undiminished by repeat viewing), I want to outline a segment of the potential audience for SC in particular, and, more generally, new media cinema that acknowledges changing visual norms.

 

How do we get to the Soft Cinephiliac? If we extrapolate the activity of repeat viewing to a kind of “fetishization” of cinema—repeat viewings, harvesting perceptions from repeated viewings, collecting and classifiying those subjective “moments”, and curating and exhibiting those “moments” to others in blogs, websites, and journals–we are nearing the province of the Soft Cinephiliac.

 

For the soft cinema, this province is uncharted territory. But the cinephiliac is already well documented in standard cinema histories, and contrasting soft cinema with traditional film may help identify overlaps between the traditional (hard) cinephiliac and the future soft cinephiliac. To the extent we can implicate shifts in visuality and mass culture with the historical appearance (and gradual disappearance) of the hard cinephiliac, we might extrapolate from those relations and imagine a soft cinephiliac associated with our new multi-channel and simultaneous visuality and our new remix urges and social norms.

 

I’ll close with a conceptual exercise built around a single widely-held distinction between traditional film and soft cinema and its possible implications for cinephilia. Traditional film is indexical (an imprint of physical presence) while the digital “live action” elements of soft cinema are not. Indexicality is central to an understanding of the hard cinephiliac: he/she collects apparently aleatory elements from the periphery of the frame, and identifies subjectively with the indexical traits of those elements. Those “collectibles” are extremely important to the cinephiliac because he/she has “seen something” that, as Paul Willemen put it, was not intended to be seen.

 

The distinctively indexical nature of traditional film underlies the criticism by traditional cinema theorists of “new” media like TV, the videocassette, the DVD, and certainly now soft cinema. Taken literally, for hard cinephiliacs and their theorists, the emergence of new media has meant the death of cinephilia.

The death of the hard cinephiliac may yet facilitate the birth of the soft cinephiliac. The vertical montage of the soft cinema, the multi-media face of TV news, websites and blogs as well as the arrangement of our personal tasks across the screens of our personal computers has implications for indexicality. It is not the imprint of presence of something past (photography) but perhaps the presence of something that is very much here and now. Repeat viewing of SC, for example, refreshes memories of previous viewings. There are no peripheral or unintended details to collect in the traditional sense. However, the aleatory perceptual effects of the randomly reassigned modules as well as adherence to (that is, respect for) the visual norm of vertical montage and all the “here and now”-ness is no less a discovery (and perhaps no less collectible) for the soft cinephiliac than her 20^th century predecessor.