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Benoît Turquety

“ Our St. Matthew Passion:”
Louis Zukofsky & Film

A work “highly original and yet disjunct”, with “a verbal and conceptual fineness too kaleidoscopic and yet of its time.” These quotations could qualify Zukofsky’s work: they are in fact his own words, describing, in the novella “Ferdinand[1]“, some imaginary film. Louis Zukofsky has been very interested in the cinema, at least for a period. And I would like to say: he was interested in the cinema for technical, poetic reasons. In fact, I would like to argue here that film has been, at a certain time, an important tool for Zukofsky’s development as a poet and a critic.

For Zukofsky was one of the very rare artists of the time who tried to take the cinema into account, to learn something out of it. In that he differed radically from most other artists from the left, as Mark Scroggins developed in his essay “‘The Revolutionary Word’.[2]“ Maybe only Walter Benjamin, Henri Bergson, and very few more intellectuals, have been as ambitious for the cinema.

But what does it mean for a poet to be interested in film? or, more precisely: what exactly can a poet interested in the technique of his own art, take from another art, so different from his?

From the very beginning, film and music seem closely connected in his mind. My title is taken from a letter Zukofsky wrote to William Carlos Williams at 1 a.m. on October 22, 1928, coming home from the movies:

I think we can call this enthusiasm; but he goes as far as relating immediately what he saw with his own work and researches. And knowing of the role of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion as a pattern for “A,” we can perceive the importance of those movies to him.

“A,” the “poem of a life,” had to include the movies: they are mentioned every now and then, from “A”-6, written in 1930, to “A”-12 (1950-1). Zukofsky describes in that movement a novel he would “have done in [his] twenties/At the slightest encouragement” (“A,” p. 252):

A real attention to film appears in these lines, a subtle perception of even the most popular of movies that he takes seriously, in their aesthetic as well as political dimensions—seriously enough to consider them as models for his own work. In 1941, he had written a short story entitled “A Keystone Comedy[5]“—about which he wrote to Williams on November 10, 1942: “The title literally meant to indicate the pace of some of the old slapstick movies of 1910 or thereabouts. I recall it began very sad and slow & speeded up when it got to the mud-slinging.[6]“

He even went further than a “simple” spectator’s position, to the point of participating, with his friend Jerry Reisman, to the writing of a screenplay from Joyce’s Ulysses, circa 1935. There exist at least three letters by Zukofsky about this project: one to Joyce, of July 18, 1935, asking him for support; another to his secretary Paul Leon of Aug. 12, 1935; and another to… John Ford, of February 17, 1941:

So there appears to be more at stake than isolated, more or less inevitable, with such an inclusive poet as Zukofsky, evocations of “signs of the times.” Two particularly interesting mentions of the cinema are to be found in his correspondence with Pound, both by Zukofsky: the first in a letter of December 7, 1931, in a passage where he discusses the contrasts between the two poets’ major works as they were then (Cantos 1-30 and “A” 1-7):

See footnote [8].

Music, cinema--a symmetry between two principles: the fugal, and the cinematic. The second mention, in a letter of December 14, 1931, arises rather surprisingly (the “editing” is a bit abrupt, but then that is one of Zukofsky’s charms) when Zukofsky, having just explicited one of his poems at Pound’s request, asserts the importance of polysemy (“Any other 14 ‘ambiguous’ readings permitted”) and continues:

Advertising & montage, Mr. E.,—Eisenstein has nothing on us[9].

Which would, incidentally, tend to confirm Robert Duncan’s intuition, that “the art of Eisenstein must have been a conscious resource for Zukofsky[10].”

So Zukofsky sees the cinema at work at the very heart of their poetry, in their structure principles, and in aspects which were fundamental to him: the relation to music, the “fugal principle,” on the one hand; polysemy on the other. And his notion of some sort of dialectical competition between montage and narration gives us an insight into what use cinema was to him. Montage seems to offer to the poet an example of a mode of development of the work that would not be narrative, or not directly so, even if in the end the two modes remain (or become?) impossible to distinguish.

Even though Pound’s ideogrammic method already had something to do with montage, he himself never mentioned it. However, Laszlo Géfin argued that “The montage technique of the cinema is the purest visual realization of the ideogrammic form[11].”
And indeed, the closeness is striking: the components of the ideogram are juxtaposed without transitions (edited), so that a new meaning, completely different (in content, but also in nature) from that of its constituents, appears. As a matter of fact, the aforementioned S. M. Eisenstein had written, in 1929, an essay entitled “The Cinematic Principle and the Ideogram.” As it was translated in English and published in Transition in 1930[12], the probability is rather high that Zukofsky had read it when he wrote to Pound. In this article, after describing how the ideogram works in Asian languages, in a manner strikingly close to the Fenollosa/Pound approach in The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (1918), Eisenstein exclaims:

But this is—montage!
Yes. It is exactly what we do in the cinema, combining shots that are depictive, single in meaning, neutral in content—into intellectual contexts and series[13].

The basic idea is clearly quite close to Pound’s, and that is probably what Zukofsky means by “cinematic principle.” But using the word “montage” instead of “ideogram,” seeing cinema where Pound saw calligraphy, still makes a difference—a difference that corresponds to a divergence between the two men’s directions of research. Calligraphy is not an art of time. It can’t approach music.

Pound has shown very little interest in the movies. But he still wrote a few texts about them: Zukofsky noticed them, and used them in his important 1929 essay on The Cantos. Zukofsky quotes Pound having said (in Exile 4):

Zukofsky then quotes a long passage from Canto 16, dealing with the Russian revolution, of which here is an excerpt:

And then a lieutenant of infantry
Ordered ‘em to fire into the crowd,
          in the square at the end of the Nevsky,
In front of the Moscow station,
And they wouldn’t,
And he pulled his sword on a student for laughing,
And killed him,
And a cossack rode out of his squad
On the other side of the square,
And cut down the lieutenant of infantry
And that was the revolution…
          as soon as they named it.
(Prep., p. 70 ; The Cantos, New York: New Directions, 1998, p. 75)

If Zukofsky feels something cinematic here, it surely has to do with similarities with Soviet film in the presented situations. But it goes further: actions, brief “shots,” are strung together without comments nor links, the eyes only able to catch glimpses of the terrifying/exhilarating situation. There is a link though: that “And” whose obsessive repetition punctuates the passage, and produces, for the reader, “jolts” similar, for the spectator’s perception, to cinematic cutting. This discontinuous, syncopated way of proceeding was then felt, notably by Walter Benjamin—but also by Russian formalist Iouri Tynianov, for whom this connected film with poetry—as a major innovation of film[16]. The “And”s force us to question articulation, and rhythm: how can one go from one line to the next, from one “Image” to the next. That is (also) a cinematic question. And as a matter of fact, when in “A”-8, Zukofsky describes the reactions of the spectators of an early film, he (consciously?) uses this procedure again (it “ Sobered and horrified the gentlemen / And made small children gasp / And hide their faces in their mother’s shawls / And the women softly weep.”, “A” p. 54)

Zukofsky’s perception of the evolution of modern American poetry, from Pound on, would find itself formulated several times in cinematic terms:

Parts of “A” then will be describable as sequences, not as one extended image. Here, Zukofsky’s project turns into something different, which implies another conception of time, or of the development of a poem (in time), another way of thinking the motion of history. Considering poetry in terms of cinema may end up in observing how a poet starts understanding poetry as an art of time, too—starts sensing its development as an alternation of movements and interruptions, of various speeds:

I could almost say that for Zukofsky, extending Imagism into Objectivism was imposed by the necessity for poetry to keep up with the cinema. Or maybe: for his poetry to become able to attain music.

And then there is “Modern Times.” Written when Chaplin’s movie was released (1936), and thus straight after his work with Jerry Reisman on the Ulysses screenplay, this very important essay wasn’t published before its inclusion in Prepositions in 1967. It shows a considerable knowledge of film history, from D. W. Griffith to Thomas Ince, Pudovkin, Jean Cocteau or René Clair.

The essay can be read as some kind of vast rephrasing of the “objectivist” project, a few years after the original texts had appeared, and, well, disappeared: as if the Chaplin movie proved the validity of the “objectivist” view, proved that it was possible for a work of art to answer Zukofsky’s—tremendous—demands, as Diogenes the Cynic proved movement by getting up and walking. Chaplin is thus placed here in a history that includes no less than Dante (through quotations from De Vulgari Eloquio and the letter to Can Grande, dealing with “adornment,” i.e. for Zukofsky “technics,” and movement), and Joyce. / But we also come across a certain animal:

There exists probably in the labors of any valid artist the sadness of the horse plodding with blinkers and his direction is for all we don’t know filled with the difficulty of keeping a pace. (Prep., p. 63).

Everywhere in “A,” “horse” is another name for Zukofsky, or a poet. So here’s one among many other definitions: a valid artist (Chaplin, Zukofsky) is someone who tries to keep a pace. And as we saw, some movies, Tumbleweeds for instance, or Keystone comedies, can help to that.
An essay beginning “Impersonal, faster:”

Those two linked themes, impersonality and swiftness, are the heart of the article. In no other text by Zukofsky is this aspect of objectivity—refusal to build a work on the author’s “ideology”—aspect which was so important to him—more explicitly formulated. An anonymous art, as his quotation from Pound had suggested[18]—and as Zukofsky favoured, as he wrote to Pound on June 30, 1931: “Literature is best when anonymous[19].” Zukofsky clearly links this with technical achievement: what he thinks René Clair and the surrealists didn’t understand, is that wanting to convey a moral or political judgment directly through a movie implies that the filmed events, the particulars, are simplified, turned into abstractions, illustrations, only a matter of “pleasurably stratigraphic registration” (Prep., p. 59):

René Clair’s attitude was predatory. Film (poetry) can be of any importance only if it registers historical events in all their complexity; and this involves giving up judgments (remaining “objective”), to focus exclusively on technical questions (on “objectification”):

This doesn’t mean that art can’t have political efficiency, on the contrary: it has more when it is objectified.
Rapidity seems an efficient way to obtain that objectivity. At the end of the movie and the essay, the two heroes, in love, walk away and:

Here, the poet asks his readers to open themselves to what, concretely, is the object that stands in front of them; to see it for what it is, to let it work, perform in them.

Fastness is another word for Pound’s condensare, but it is another word: there may be discovered, as I proposed, poetry (reading?) as an art of time, an art of modelling time. Here, cinema may be the secret link between Imagism (where Zukofsky began) and music (where he wants to end). Go faster than the reader, lose him not in some obscure forest of symbols, but in the movement of the poem itself, the haste of its thinking, the plays on rhythms, accelerandi and ralentendi of its syntax. And let this speed dispose of all false questions (what Mr. Zukofsky thinks, etc.) to leave the text naked, all power (all music). Jean-François Lyotard wrote that “Reality is that which escapes”. A work of art is objectified only when it escapes—its author, its reader/spectator, its meaning.

Speed and objectification are, for Zukofsky, closely akin to film’s capacity to register, while filming only concrete objects (particulars), much wider (historical) situations, without turning to abstraction, metaphor, or symbol—when technique is up to it. This ability makes it a model for poetry.

Zukofsky insists throughout his text on that necessity, which film can fulfil, to see particulars “in free relation:”

This “free relation” can seem contradictory—something like Williams’ “variable foot” perhaps. But the very feeling of a possible “free” mode of relation between the components of the work may ultimately come from the cinema. A film presents a whole set of events (gestures, movements, sound or light events) in a very singular way: they are either simultaneously juxtaposed in the same frame, or shown successively. But—if the director’s technique exceeds ideological judgment—their bounds are simple modes of co-presence. They are not organized into a hierarchy through any syntax or grammar (cinema is not a language). Thus, each of these events keeps all its freedom of interplay, all its polysemy, without being reduced to what would be the “message” of the work. The particulars’ relation isn’t nonexistent, nor even loose (Zukofsky’s very high conception of form wouldn’t let this happen): it’s “free.” And the multiplicity of the mechanisms of meaning production that it launches drowns “the director’s ‘real’ intention” in an abundance which is also a rapidity.

Robert Duncan, then, saw Eisenstein in “Poem beginning ‘The’,” “with its lines presented by the number, its constructed line-movement events, not as a stream but as a sequence of line-shots or frames making a motion picture film-strip[20].” Numbering can be perceived as an intensification of the “And” effect of Canto 16, involving a partial fragmentation of reading (should numbers be spoken?). It emphasizes the shock in the passage from one line to the next, the (dialectic) play on continuities and caesuras that constitutes poetry (and on the page, the poem appears like a list of titles for sequences to be dreamt). These shocks and dialectics were also what made cinema outstanding: why Walter Benjamin saw in film a model for a dialectic thinking of continuum, as based on discontinuity (the photogram) and producing it in return (the cut), therefore a model for a dialectic thinking of history, and finally a (concrete) model for dialectic thought. For Benjamin as well as Zukofsky, film, and Chaplin in particular, has been, at a certain moment, the proof that it was possible.
Chaplin reappears in “Ferdinand” (1940-42), which I have already quoted, where cinema plays a central part, forming the very core where Zukofsky concentrates Ferdinand’s story, life and dreams, to the point of implosion. This is a strange cinema, radically discontinuous (“. . . disjunct . . . kaleidoscopic . . .”[21]), abstract or just about, whose dream quality stems also from the reemerging of the repressed: the material film itself, streaky, breaking all the time.

Montage can also be seen at work in, for example, the beginning of “A”-1, 1928 (which makes it contemporary of the Williams letter):

And the whole of the movement should be quoted.—But: this is montage! on several interrelated levels: parallel editing of two situations: Carnegie Hall 1928 / Leipzig 1729 (or three: / Jerusalem, 30 A.D.); and textual parallel editing of Zukofsky’s “original” lines, with lines from the first chorus of Bach’s Matthew Passion. We can also discern on the one hand a visual strip, very precisely framed—with a series of close-ups showing us arms, dresses, legs, tendons, and first of all fiddles playing Bach on their own, with no one to manipulate them, the musicians or interpreters being left out of frame: impersonality again. When the voice asks: “See Him! Whom?” – it’s hard to answer. And on the other hand we have a musical soundtrack: Bach’s work[22].

This form of montage as a contrapuntal interlacing of themes is no extension of the ideogrammic form: it is a deep disruption of it. And counterpoint is one of the Chaplin essay’s themes:

Zukofsky’s conception of fugue has something cinematic: motifs developing in time, in free relation with one another, entire systems of recurrences modulating the cadence of reading as the very matter of the work (something like chronopoeia?). And that’s what the poem conveys: not primarily a significance (message, intentions, ideology), but the sensuality of a dance, too fast for interpretation. The dance of the two bread rolls in The Gold Rush “was the perfection of dancing shoes, without interpretive feeling throttling the lilt” (Prep., p. 58). “Thinking with the things as they exist” doesn’t mean giving oneself up to interpretation: it means first letting oneself be led, for the pleasure (as sight, sound, and intellection: all sensuous activities), and for the impulse it gives.—”An impulse to action” perhaps.

Dealing with the things as they exist, trying to think with them, and to direct them along a line of melody—or lines of melodies developping contrapuntally in time—, that is exactly what film—at its best—can do, and that is probably what aroused Louis Zukofsky’s interest. The nature and the extent of the consequences it had on his poetry are really still to be appreciated. And maybe, also, by filmmakers themselves, as experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage wrote about Bottom, in 1964:

For film-makers who see and who edit what they’ve taken from eye’s sight, it may be the most important book written since the invention of the motion picture medium[23].