The Name of the Picture The Experience of Poetry in Lyric Cinema

When asked in which language he thought and in which he dreamt, Joseph Brodsky replied that one thinks in thoughts and dreams in dreams.¹ To a filmmaker preoccupied with the limits of meaning in things made visible and specifically the role of words in cinema, Brodsky's clever riposte calls up the question of what unites vision and voice. Whatever the unknown processes of consciousness that give rise to interior monologues or mental pictures might be, and whether we actually hear thoughts or see dreams, is a separate matter—the question is how objects and names fit together—if not in thoughts and dreams, then the next best thing: cinematic art.

The poet's reply is the riddle at the root of my fascination with cinema: how does language function with images—the eternal contest between the spoken and the seen. I wager René Magritte understood it better than most when he began cleaving the union between things and their labels in his canvases. The work of lyrical-mode filmmaking is to unite the two in ways that transcend either; when I'm working on a picture, some of the questions I find myself asking come off obtuse: must the film actually possess any sound, let alone words?

What happens when you bestow a name to a vision or a title to a film, for that matter? How much text is an image able to support? What are the necessary criteria for combining them?

It's an old problem, this disjunction between the verbal and the visual—both at once immediately present and somehow each in its own dimension; always together but never quite in the same place. Most likely the first vocalized aesthetic reaction was a lyrical one, some pastoral hum imitating wildlife, birdsong, or the like, without any particular meaning other than an internal response to the external world. For me, the most difficult aspect of making a film is finding that internal resonance when it comes to the textual surface of the work. Until recently, I was content to use the term “essay-film” to describe the result. It seems to be a misnomer, at least as an all-encompassing category for a cinema that aims to create an amalgam between the same material we use for poetry—that “extraordinary accelerator of consciousness”—and its anti-matter, namely, the ineffable semblance of an image. The problem is almost always the text: the problem is “using the same material as poetry”—though a film's text cannot be poetry as such. Can it?

For poetry committed to paper or memory must never be illustrated, and, for that matter, museum wall labels—that is, unless you're staring at a Magritte—should generally be avoided. Lyric cinema, when one comes across it, manages to fuse text and image into the experience of poetry. But it's a dangerous business; they don't readily mix, and they're best handled separately. No wonder any good editing teacher will train his students to turn off either the sound or the image of a film to fully apprehend each mechanism at work. I don't mean to imply becoming deaf somehow enhanced Goya's later visual judgment or that Milton's blindness focused the power of his language—although one does suspect as much—but I really cannot imagine Stan Brakhage's The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes having any sound. It simply had to be a silent film.

Or a better way of putting it—it's a film in which one cannot adjust the volume.

And my suspicion is that it'd be a strangely weakened film otherwise, with a text or without. Strange on account of the audio-visual reflex telling you something's missing. The legendary sound designer Frank Warner called silence the richest sound he could offer. It goes without saying. Recounting dreams is dubious, too; it's the chasm of redundancy that's always looming.

What's the problem finally, where's the treachery? It seems to me that a key mode of lyric film text is that it must land or touch down, becoming somehow ordinary if not banal, and pretend that it's in the same weight class as those mute impressions the world reflects onto layers of silver crystals, electrified rust or sensors made of sand—whatever we call a camera. To me, the most aesthetically successful, if not transcendent, portions of certain acclaimed essay-films have little to do with argument, rationalism or even comprehensibility. Great cinema-texts are great only when they transmute their prose into something not altogether lucid, like a stone that flies, or skips as stones sometimes do, off the surface of the image, and there's a trajectory that's at once its own but conducted along the semantic field of the image below it.

I'm thinking of News from Home, Sans Soleil, Lost Book Found, among others—and, at least in artistic intention and strategy, the work of your humble servant, an excerpt of which I will show you shortly. The lyrical strength found in these films is achieved through a relative autonomy of the text's rhetorical envelope, attached to the image with the lightest bonds possible. News from Home, to me, is a near-perfect example of a film text that sends its roots into the images we see, and the resulting inflorescence is a sensation that's unachievable through either of its component halves. Together they create an awareness that is not existent if taken individually. The texture of the words is so ingrained in the image that Akerman lets the diegetic stuff—the very noise of New York City—drown out her letter reading.

Sans Soleil is full of such moments. When I think of it as an essay, I have difficulty remembering any actual point made despite the impression that many points were in fact made all along. Having translated its entire monologue into another language, I realized that the most difficult thing to render wasn't any one word or expression per se so much as dealing with the absence of its images. It's more than just arbitrary and personal. Marker's text is sublime because it's a lyrical one disguised as rational musings and investigations delivered obliquely through, to use the specialized term, an acousmêtre. Call it an “essay” if you must—at the end of the thirtieth viewing, I'm still left with the “bright confusion,” as Frank Kermode put it, of the experience of poetry—or, as certain poets have expressed it, having nothing to say and saying it.

The apex of the kind of art I'm after is to be found halfway through Jem Cohen's incandescent Lost Book Found. It's the series of 8mm shots of urban still lifes and views: shop windows, signs, streets and surfaces, accompanied by spoken captions, lyrically ideal and invisible titles that are invoked by a voice. They match the image, but in a way that renders the whole weightlessly profound and placelessly mysterious. The moments are supra-textual, supra-visual, and they hover around a purely lyrical register without getting too far out of reach of the image. This is much more difficult than it would appear: the facts, the information, are always getting in the way.

The excerpt I'm going to show you is from a recent film of mine that I found a great difficulty in naming—there's always a lot of anguish over the act of giving something a title. The name of the film is La Version nouvelle—an odd construction in French, but it's the order of the words, the prosody, that matters most—and the reason for which there is no translated title. The story is of a film editor who passes her days working for someone whom we never see directly in the picture, likely someone close to her.

This film is not experimental, just an outright experiment—I liken it to a game of Jenga, trying to take out as much contextual and narrative structure as possible and see if things remain standing.

As you may have noticed, there's a film in a film here. It's part travelogue, part lyric portrait, and from the outset there were formal problems about how to present each space inside the other. But the most difficult issue was the text. It attempts to distill a series of musings at the threshold of thought—that are of the scene but not about it. An attempt to evoke a state of mind linked to the visible protagonist. Is there such a thing as the threshold of thought? Or, once it's made flesh, so to speak, does it change into something else?

Thought being entirely protean, the work of poetry is to make its incarnation perfect. It's not for nothing the great poets have described the process of verse writing as replacing a kind of internal, amorphous rhythmic hum with—words. But this film started with images—a different kind of incarnation. The spoken content is what poses the problems, and put plainly it's a matter of weeding away—of reducing the weight of the text while attempting to simultaneously engage what Brodsky called the three modes of cognition: analytical, intuitive, and revelatory. One could say the process is something like hammering a metallic surface until it's almost transparent.

The real problem is the audible form of this internal text—it's one that I've come up against time and again. Here, for better or worse, what we arrived at was a range of intonations—sometimes at the edge of clarity, more a kind of murmur, something like talking in one's sleep—which runs the risk of angering an audience or perhaps putting them to sleep—the latter not such a bad thing according to the late Kiarostami.

The nineteenth-century Russian poet Fyodor Tyutchev expressed it best in the following lines from his Silentium, written in 1830, which in Nabokov's translation sounds like this:

How can a soul expression find?
How should another know your mind?
Will he discern what quickens you?
A thought once uttered is untrue.