The Cinema of Poetry emphasizes the vibrant world of European cinema in addition to incorporating the author's long abiding concerns on American avant-garde cinema.

A Cinema of Poetry brings Italian film studies into dialogue with fields outside its usual purview by showing how films can contribute to our understanding of aesthetic questions that stretch back to Homer. Joseph Luzzi considers the relation between film and literature, especially the cinematic adaptation of literary sources and, more generally, the fields of rhetoric, media studies, and modern Italian culture. The book balances theoretical inquiry with close readings of films by the masters of Italian cinema: Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci, and others. Luzzi's study is the first to show how Italian filmmakers address such crucial aesthetic issues as the nature of the chorus, the relation between symbol and allegory, the literary prehistory of montage, and the place of poetry in cinematic expression—what Pasolini called the "cinema of poetry." While Luzzi establishes how certain qualities of film—its link with technological processes, capacity for mass distribution, synthetic virtues (and vices) as the so-called total art—have reshaped centuries-long debates, A Cinema of Poetry also explores what is specific to the Italian art film and, more broadly, Italian cinematic history. In other words, what makes this version of the art film recognizably "Italian"? "A thought-provoking and well-written investigation of the role of history and realism in Italian cinema and the role played by the centuries-long tradition of poetry (or more precisely, poesis) in this quest."—H-Italy "Ambitious, inventive, learned . . . A Cinema of Poetry . . . brilliantly analyzes the art in the art film by showing how Italian cinema uses a chorus or expresses itself through allegory . . . This impressively intelligent re-description of the tradition surely takes its place alongside other necessary histories of Italian cinema."—Choice Joseph Luzzi is a professor of comparative literature at Bard College. He is the author of Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy, which received the MLA’s Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies; My Two Italies, a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice; and In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me about Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love.

Set to generate future discussions in the field for years to come, The Poetics of Poetry Film is an encyclopaedic work on the ever-evolving genre of poetry film. Tremlett provides an introduction to the emergence and history of poetry film in a global context, defining and debating terms both philosophically and materially. Including over 40 contributors and showcasing the work of an international array of practitioners, this is an industry bible for anyone interested in poetry, digital media, filmmaking, art and creative writing, as well as poetry filmmakers. Poetry films are a genre of short film, usually combining the three main elements of the poem as: verbal message; the moving film image and diegetic sounds; and additional non-diegetic sounds or music, which create a soundscape. In this book, Tremlett examines the formal characteristics of the poetic in poetry film, film poetry and videopoetry, particularly in relation to lyric voice and time. The volume includes interviews, analysis and a rigorous and thorough investigation of the poetry film, from its origins to the present.

Attempting to convey the cultural milieu from which Tarkovsky comes, the author of this book, a Russian film critic, had personally known Tarkovsky since the very beginning of his career. She has had access to the archives of Mosfilm Studios where the early drafts and notes on his films are kept.

Cinepoetry analyzes how French poets have remapped poetry through the lens of cinema for more than a century. In showing how poets have drawn on mass culture, technology, and material images to incorporate the idea, technique, and experience of cinema into writing, Wall-Romana documents the long history of cross-media concepts and practices often thought to emerge with the digital.In showing the cinematic consciousness of Mallarm? and Breton and calling for a reappraisal of the influential poetry theory of the early filmmaker Jean Epstein, Cinepoetry reevaluates the bases of literary modernism. The book also explores the crucial link between trauma and trans-medium experiments in the wake of two world wars and highlights the marginal identity of cinepoets who were often Jewish, gay, foreign-born, or on the margins.What results is a broad rethinking of the relationship between film and literature. The episteme of cinema, the book demonstates, reached the very core of its supposedly highbrow rival, while at the same time modern poetry cultivated the technocultural savvy that is found today in slams, e-poetry, and poetic-digital hybrids.

Publisher Description

By the mid-1960s, New American poets and Underground filmmakers had established a vibrant community in which they collaborated to produce a profusion of poetry/film hybrids. Drawing on unpublished correspondence and interviews, the author provides a fresh look at avant-garde poetry and film in the 1960s and their future influences.