People often ask me why I think poetry and film go together like peanut butter and jelly, and I say, “Well, it’s kind of like that Videodrome interview,” and they look puzzled. So here’s my official attempt to explain.
In an interview with Tim Lucas, director David Cronenberg compares the process of making his film Videodrome to “one of the ideas advanced by John Donne and the metaphysical poets.” Yet a director known for his “body horror” movies connecting his work to that of a poet and cleric is not as absurd as it may seem.
The concept Cronenberg refers to is Samuel Johnson’s; of metaphysical poetry, Johnson writes, “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” but “the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.” This sense of divergent and perhaps even oppositional fragments of idea brought together by force and producing a conflicted response in their audience is reminiscent of the film technique montage.
Foundational montage theorist Sergei Eisenstein links the oppositional structure of montage to verse himself: “It is from this principle that the whole charm of poetry derives. Its rhythm arises as a conflict between the metric measure employed and the distribution of accents over-riding this measure.” Although painting and poetry have long been sister arts, and much poetry criticism reflects anxiety surrounding the mechanical image, film— with its reliance on corporeality, movement, and montage, or what Eisenstein defines as “an idea that arises from the collision of independent shots–shots even opposite to one another”—provides an excellent modern sibling for verse.
Painting and poem have been interwoven in diverse ways for centuries, ranging from Horace’s dictum “Ut Pictura Poesis” in his Ars Poetica to Schlegel’s saying in his 1849 Description of Paintings in Paris and the Netherlands 1802-1804 that the painter “must be a poet” in “exemplifying the poetic idea of things.” But there is a locomotive limitation to this sisterhood.
Ekphrastic theorist Murray Krieger frames ekphrasis as artistic representation that employs “a plastic object as a symbol of the frozen, stilled world of plastic relationships which must be superimposed upon literature’s turning world to ‘still’ it.” He concludes that, as a result, “the poem takes on the ‘still’ elements of plastic form which we normally attribute to the spatial arts.” That is, the influence on (and discussion of) a verbal work of art by a visual medium that does not move, such as a painting, freezes the mobile work of writing. In this sense, moving (or at least giving the appearance of moving) film emerges as a more dynamic sibling for poetry.
Put another way, while examining film and poetry together does not mean that every poem refers to a film, it points to a more important question that arises when the visual comes into contact with the verbal and vice versa: what does this do to the time and space of the artwork? Even though a poem influenced by montage or containing elements of it, for example, is not ekphrastic in the conventional sense, it enacts some of the same temporal-spatial transactions.
The difference between the interactions in which the visual comes into contact with the verbal in the instance of painting and poem and film and poem is that the latter allows the poem to keep moving. Thus, when L. J. Starzyk comments on what M. H. Abrams has identified as a late eighteenth century ideological movement away from mimesis and towards expressivism that resulted in “the demotion of painting from poetry’s sister to its distant cousin,” I would argue that, far from the aesthetic crisis it initially appears to be, this opens up the way in the twentieth century and beyond for film to enter the scene as poetry’s motile sister art. Hence, peanut butter and jelly.