“Poi, come s’uno schermo”: Modernist Poetry and Cinema

Adorno, Kracauer, Ortega y Gasset: these are just a few of the thinkers who, at the turn of the 20th Century, expressed critical views on cinema and the way it affects its audience. Most poets of the same period were equally skeptical about the new media and, above all, about the model of mass liberal education that was held responsible for its success. Caught between fascination and revulsion, they nevertheless seemed unable to avoid adding some elements taken from the collective and supposedly hypnotising experience of watching a movie to their texts, often with the aim of contrasting it with the solitary and controlled experience of reading a poem.

Two of the most representative authors of European and Anglo-American modernism, Eugenio Montale and Wallace Stevens, can shed new light on the complex intermedial relationship between cinema and poetry. The analysis of their poems as well as the reading of their notes on cinema reveal the multifaceted relationship of modernist poetry (a supposedly conservative and elitist movement) with mass culture. Indeed, this relationships much more ambivalent than is usually thought.

In her 1926 essay, The Cinema, Virginia Woolf claims that ‘some residue of visual emotion which is of no use either to painter or to poet may still await the cinema’ (381). Similarly, Montale and Stevens seem to understand that new media can shape new imaginaries and therefore modify the ones built with already existent techniques. Although the relationship between Modernist poetry and cinema has become a central topic in the last few decades of literary debate, we still seem unable to grasp something: that is, the emergence of a new medium does not always result in a polarised reception of the latter (i.e. avant-garde vs arrière-garde, futurism vs modernism).

The two authors’ concern for the effects cinema has over its spectatorship allows their reader to appreciate the way new cultural environments affect one’s poetics. ‘Once irrational vitalism and the new technique of communication will have reached the highest level of their development’, writes Montale in 1956, ‘art will be arranged on two levels: a utilitarian and almost sporty art for the great masses; and a true art, not too different from the one of the past […]. Only those who are isolated will be able to speak, only they will be able to communicate. The others – the men of mass communication – will repeat, echo, vulgarize the words of the poets. (1996b: 56). In a similar way to Woolf’s “common reader”, Montale and Stevens ask their audiences to both unravel the complexity, if not the difficulty, of their poems and to participate in preserving it. While these authors formally refuse that they are courting an élite of highbrow readers, they nevertheless show great contempt towards larger, middlebrow audiences. They do not ignore, however, that it is mostly modern mass audiences that are responsible for deciding the evolution of a medium and not the other way round: poetry, just as cinema, can thus be seen as a moment in the ever-changing process of organising the imagination of its own audience.

Is this modern mass audiences?

Hartford’s Motion Picture Palace (Hartford Collection, Hartford Public Library)