# La Poésie d'aujourd'hui, un nouvel état d'intelligence

## Introduction

Epstein wrote his first book, *La Poésie d'Aujourd'hui*, in the summer of 1920, and it was published just after he arrived in Paris in 1921. Focusing mainly on aesthetic and literary concerns (it was well received as a statement on modern poetry), it also sketches out several of the issues Epstein would develop over the course of his writings, including intellectual attention and fatigue; the role of reverie, affect, synesthesia and coenaesthesia in comprehending one's relationship to the visible world; and how literature and cinema mobilize these concepts. He turns explicitly to the cinema in a late chapter, excerpted here, to demonstrate affinities between poetic strategies and cinematic ones.

– Sarah Keller

* * *

## Cinema and Modern Literature [1921]

Translated by Audrey Brunetaux and Sarah Keller

[Jean Epstein, "Le cinéma et les lettres modernes," *La Poésie d'aujourd'hui, un nouvel état d'intelligence* (Paris: Éditions de la Sirène, 1921), pp. 169-180.]

Cinema saturates modern literature. And inversely, this mysterious art is imbued with a great amount of literature. It is true that, to date, the cine-literary collaboration has mostly produced filmic adaptations such as *Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard* [director unknown, 1919] and *Au Travail* [Henri Pouctal, 1919], films which would be impossible to criticize too harshly and which have led astray this emerging, still-hesitant mode of expression that nonetheless stands as the most subtle one we have ever known, the most attuned to the moment.
If viewing a second-rate film made by some mindless director who only knows
about literature from the French Academy and its cohorts makes us think of mod-
ern literature in spite of him, or rather without his being aware of it, that's be-
cause there exists a natural interplay between this new form of literature and ci-
nema that functions on several levels.

First of all:

Modern literature and cinema are equally enemies of theater. Any attempt to reconcile them is pointless. Like two different religions, two aesthetics cannot live side by side without coming into conflict. Under attack from both modern literature and cinema, theater, if not already at the point of death, will progressively grow weaker. It is a foregone conclusion. When even a good stage actor has to struggle just to exist with the excess verbiage of a forty-line monologue in verse so regular as to ring false, how can theater hope to compete with the screen, where every fibril of movement is visible and where I'm delighted to see a man who does not need to act because, simply human, most beautiful animal on earth, he walks, runs, comes to a halt, and sometimes turns his face to the voracious audience.

Cinema and the new approach to literature need to support each other by
superimposing their aesthetics.

a) Aesthetic of Proximity

The succession of details with which modern authors have replaced narrative de-
velopment and the first close-ups generally attributed to Griffith are part of this
aesthetic of proximity.

Between the spectacle and the spectator, no barrier.

One doesn't look at life, one penetrates it.

This penetration allows every intimacy.

A face is seen under a magnifying glass, exhibiting itself; it flaunts its fervent
geography.

Electric waterfalls cascade into the fault lines of this relief, and collect under
the 3000 degrees of the arc lamps.

This is the miracle of real presence,
life made manifest,
opened like a beautiful pomegranate
and stripped of its covering,
easily absorbed,
barbaric.

A theater of flesh.

No vibration escapes me.

A shift in shots upsets my equilibrium.

Projected onto the screen, I land on the line between the lips.
What a valley of tears, and how silent!

The lips become agitated and begin to quaver. They tremble, part, slip away, and flee:

Splendid warning for a mouth set to open.

Compared to the drama of muscles moving in close-up, how paltry a theatrical performance made of words!

## b) Aesthetic of Suggestion

One no longer tells; one shows. This allows the pleasure of discovery and creation. More personally and without restrictions, the image comes together.

On the screen, the essential quality of a gesture is that it does not come to an end. The face doesn't mimic expressions, but, better, it suggests. When laughter is interrupted, we imagine it from our glimpse of its advent. And in Hayakawa's palm, just barely beginning to open, upon such a broad path of gestures, our thoughts find their bearings.

Why?

Developing an action that begins so skillfully adds nothing to it. We can anticipate; we can already foresee the rest.

For anyone who knows their arithmetic, the givens of a problem suffice.

How tedious to read all the way through a simple solution which we could have discovered more quickly on our own.

And above all, there is the unfilled space of a gesture that the mind, which is quicker, plucks from its cradle and then races ahead of.

## c) Aesthetic of succession

In calling them “movies,” the British have understood that remaining faithful to what comprises life lies in the representation of its incessant movement. A rush of details constitutes a poem; and the editing of a film gradually intertwines and combines shots. The centrifugal process comes later, and from the base we extract the general impression. Cinema and literature, everything moves. The rapid angular succession approaches the perfect circle of impossible simultaneous action. The physiological utopia of seeing things “together” is replaced by an approximation: seeing them quickly.

## d) Aesthetic of Mental Quickness

It is at least possible that the speed with which we think might increase over the course of a lifetime or over successive generations. No two people think at the same speed. Thus the slowness that bothers us in Italian films, where gestures drag out across the screen like slugs, testifies to Italians' slowness of thought. The time spent figuring things out is longer for the Italian brain than for the French. That which mysteriously interests and deceives the Italian spectator, we, the French, catch onto in a matter of seconds.
For this and many other reasons, there will never be an international cinema for the elite.

Fast-paced films lead us to think quickly. It's a kind of training, if you will.

In the aftermath of some Douglas Fairbanks films, I may have experienced some stiffness, but never boredom.

This speed of thought, which the cinema records and measures, and which in part explains the aesthetic of suggestion and succession, can also be found in literature. In just a few seconds we have to decipher ten metaphors, and if we fail, comprehension founders. Not everyone can keep up; slower minds are as delayed in literature as they are in cinema, and they end up getting on the nerves of their neighbor with their string of constant questions.

When reading Rimbaud's *Illuminations* aloud, there is on average one image per second.

They come at the same pace in Blaise Cendrars' *Nineteen Elastic Poems*, at certain points a bit slower.

Elsewhere, in Marinetti (in Italian), you hardly come upon even one image every five seconds.

This is the same difference that exists in films.

### e) Aesthetic of sensuality

In literature: "no sentimentality!" – not visibly.

In cinema, sentimentality is impossible.

Impossible because of extreme close-ups and of photographic precision.

What is the point of having platonic flowers when the audience is looking at a face illuminated by forty arc lamps?

Americans, who have understood certain aspects of cinema relatively well, have not always understood this one.

### f) Aesthetic of metaphors

The poem: a cavalcade of metaphors that rear up.

Mr. Abel Gance was the first to create visual metaphors. If you make allowances for their being distorted by slowness and disguised by symbolism, this was a major discovery.

The principle of the visual metaphor is adaptable in dreams and normal life; on the screen, it is a fixed given.

On screen, a crowd. A car pushes its way slowly through. Ovation. Hats off. White splashes of hands and handkerchiefs dance above heads. An indisputable analogy recalls these lines by Apollinaire:

"When human hands were all in leaf"¹

and these others:

"The sky was filled with lakes of light.

And human hands flew up like milk-white birds."²
I immediately imagine a superimposition that emerges from the fade-in, then jumps into focus and stops abruptly:

dead leaves falling down and swirling, then a flock of birds.

But:

QUICKLY (2 meters)

WITHOUT SYMBOLISM

(the birds should be neither doves nor crows, but simply birds)

Within five years we will write cinematographic poems: 150 meters of film with a string of 100 images that minds will follow.

### g) Momentary aesthetic

Not many literary critics have failed to claim that a beautiful poetic image must be eternal. This is silly. First of all, “eternal” does not mean anything. Let us say: long-lasting. But an image cannot last long. Scientifically speaking, reflected beauty wears thin: the image becomes cliché when it ages. Racine, in his time, had to offer his audience numerous and quite stunning images. What remains of them today? Platitudes. Whereas the success of a performance once depended on the text, now it is the performance that saves the text. How can a work of literature withstand such a reversal? All that is left of Racine’s work is its rhythm, half of what it used to be. An image can emerge from a cliché, provided that it has been forgotten first. Let’s forget about Racine. Let’s not talk about him for three hundred years. A new audience will rediscover him and, sincere at last, will take pleasure in his works.

The written word always ages, but more or less rapidly. Today’s written word will age very quickly. This is not intended as a criticism. I know that some people gauge the value of works of art by the duration of their success. They return their verdict: “This will be a classic,” or “This will soon fade from memory.” They speak of posterity, of centuries, of millennia, and of eternity as mentioned above. They despise passing trends. They no more know how to measure their pleasure than the faded games of generations gone by.

All the same, we should be spared this sentimental blackmail. My great-grand-father might have loved Lamartine and worn pants with foot straps. Filial affection doesn't oblige me to take up foot straps, but am I supposed to love Jocelyn? Masterpieces aren't read much anymore, and when they are – oh, tombs! What a dance on your gravestones! A page from a classic isn't always a complete page: it is too general. Certain works are so closely bound to a certain period that once that time has gone by, there is nothing left but an empty husk. But for fellow travelers, what a mirror they provide! Same thing in the classroom: that which the pedant enjoys in Corneille, Corneille justifiably held in contempt. I would not wish upon my worst enemy to produce a classic and therefore the future makings of a bunch of hogwash.
Literary movements hasten their own replacement. Those that are closely tied to human sentiments observe that, in ten years, both humans and their senti-ments change. Its very exactitude quickly turns literature into impenetrable brush.Symbolism has already begun to degenerate into foolishness, but it did offer gen-uine pleasures. One style doesn't suffice for a whole generation. In the last twenty years the path of beauty has reached a new turning point. The quickness with which we think has increased; fatigue rushes in. That things one wrongly calls Cubism only last for months, not years, shouldn't be held against them. People who came of age fifty years ago sometimes run out of breath trying to keep up. Most of them criticize. It is the old quarrel of the ancients and moderns, which the moderns have always won.

Like contemporary literature, film hastens volatile metamorphoses. From autumn to spring, aesthetics change. One speaks of eternal canons of beauty whereas any two successive catalogues from Bon Marché give the lie to such nonsense. Nothing appeals to our sensuality with as keen a sense of the times and as fine an ability to adapt as fashion. From here, film adopts some of the same magnetic charms, and it is such a faithful image of our childlike infatuations that five years later, it is only suitable for the fairground lantern.

## Notes

1. Guillaume Apollinaire, "L'émigrant de Landor Road/The Emigrant from Landor Road," in *Alcools*, trans. Donald Revell (Hanover, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1995), p. 103.

2. Apollinaire, "L'émigrant de Landor Road/The Emigrant from Landor Road," p. 101.