What is Poetry Film?
Who is asking? Who is holding the reigns? Filmmakers or poets?
Filmmakers
In its earliest form, poetry film used the poem’s original text in the form of intertitles. Examples are D.W. Griffith, who based his films on poems by Browning and Tennyson. Sheeler and Strand’s film Manhatta used superimposed text, from Walt Whitman.
By the mid 1920’s, avant-garde filmmakers began to recognize the artistic potential of the medium, moving away from the text, in effect distancing their work from literature. The ‘poetry of film’ was an artistic expression, using perspective, lighting and rhythm, and so on.
Poetry film was in the hands of the filmmakers – they had the tools and the craft was theirs.
Poets
Filmmakers had the tools to make film. But poets have a long tradition of emphasising non-linguistic elements in poetry, such as George Herbert, Guillaume Apollinaire, the Dadas, the Futurists, and the Concrete Poets of the 1950s, who all produced new visual forms of poetry.
Poetry film as a form of poetry
There is a combination of words, images, and sound that can intrinsically be described as a ‘form of poetry’ itself.
– Helen Dewbery
Other Perspectives on Poetry Film
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The intersection of poetry and film.
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The relation between film and written poetry.
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The convergence of filmmaking, video, digital, and media art .
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Transmedia - opening up the possibility to free the artwork from the media.
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The Term Poetry Film is often used generically to include any of the following:
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Poetry films, filmpoems, digital-poetry, poetry video, choreopoems, Cin(E)-Poetry, spoken word videos, videopoems, visual poetry, media poetry, poetry using onscreen text.