Elizabeth McKinney

Dr. Babbitt
Engl 2091
3-6-12
Mallarm and the Lumire Brothers:
From Poetry to Film and Back AgainCombining the Arts
The art of writing is underappreciated by many. Thus, poets like Stphane Mallarm go
unnoticed by most of the population. Similarly, film is often seen as only entertainment; the
majority of film watchers see no significance other than what is right in front of them. This is
especially true for the early, silent films, such as the films by brothers Auguste and Louis
Lumire. When poetry and film are combined, however, a whole new style is developed, and it
begs study. Christophe Wall-Romana was one of the first to acknowledge this topic, and he
insists that there is a tie between Mallarms Un coup de ds and the Lumire brothers films,
and this relationship shows a connection between early film and modernism: Mallarm took the
goals that the Lumires films were trying to reach and put them in his poetry just as the
modernists combined their ideas with filmmakers in order to make art that was the best of both
worlds.
The Modernist era began as a response to the oppression of the Victorian ageartists
were tired of the formality required by the Victorian tradition. Modernist poetry combined
looking back at previous poetry style and looking forward past Victorianism. Some of the most
influential later modernist poets include Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Pound, in fact, incorporated
cubist and imagist beliefs into the modernist beliefs, making modernism a very new and unique
kind of movement. Early modernist poets also had a lot of influence on the style, however. For

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example, Gerard Manley Hopkins had a theory that became widely accepted by modernists:
sound should be the driving force of poetry. Therefore, the modernist poetry standards became
focused on the word, and how it worked in poetry.
Mallarm, though before the radical upswing of modernism, definitely held modernist
standards and beliefs. Wall-Romana called Mallarms poem Un coup de ds a work without
precedentthe hallmark of radical modernist experimentalism (132). Mallarm wrote or
planned experimental poems as cinematic sublations of the page and the book, such as in Un
coup de des, which he wrote as one long strip of visually montaged text (Wall-Romana 129).
Mallarm believed photographs should not be used to illustrate books because the images should
come from the readers mind alone. He said: if you [use] photography, why not go straight to
the cinematograph, whose unreeling [unfolding] will replace, images and text, many a volume,
advantageously (Wall-Romana 132). This belief in the power of film led him to the idea of
integration as droulementunfolding, uncoiling, unreeling, or unscrolling: a new topology
for text and images, and he incorporated many film styles into his work.
Mallarm often wrote so that his readers could find multiple meanings in his works
(Wall-Romana 129). He devised Un coup de ds so that it would have several different story
lines that could stand alone but would also make a complete poem when put together, just as the
color of the womans dress changed throughout the film. Mallarm did this by using different
types of font effects, such as bold, italics, and capital letters, as well as the layout of the poem
itself: the reader could potentially read the poem both left to right and up and down by page. If
the reader takes apart the poem by separating it according to font type, he or she can find seven
different poems of varying lengths and then two more from the different layouts.

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Mallarm tried to make the images in his poetry electric and revealing, like the electric
lights in film. For The Serpentine Dance, the brothers colored the slides of the film so that the
actresss dress changes color as she dances, but it is the lighting in the film that reveals the
movement. This is what Mallarm tried to do in his poetry, especially in Un coup de ds: create a
bright, clear image of flowing movement. He succeeded in this with his diction and the layout of
the poem, with the lines spread out across the pages, as if the poem itself is moving down a river
or path.
Although Mallarm combined the arts of film and poetry, poetry has long been aligned
with music and considered a model for the music of each specific time period. Mallarm
believed opera, which was what he considered the music of his time, was dependent on
language and thus on poetry, so poetry could not be a new model for opera. Instead, he turned to
film and dance in order to renew poetry (Wall-Romana 135) and thus he began to write
cinepoetry. One of the questions that prompted Mallarm to do so was whether the visual
poems alternating blanks and text mimic, or at least give a sense of, this mesmerizing fiction of
continuity (Wall-Romana 133). This question was further encouraged when he saw Loe Fuller
dancing in the Lumire brothers film The Serpentine Dance. In the dance, Loe wore
oversized robes and veils (Wall-Romana 135) to give an illusion of profluent motion, or a
mesmerizing fiction of continuity (133). This visual of continual, flowing movement inspired
him to try to create poetry in that same style.
The earliest known attempt to combine poetry and screen was in 1894, when Aurlien
Lugn-Poe directed a poem by Henri de Rgnier. The actors were behind a veil of gauze acting
as ghosts mimicking the words pronounced by the actors (Wall-Romana 131). Mallarm
wanted to do better than this. He wanted the film to be on the paper. He wanted his readers to

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watch a film in their heads while they read. Early film wanted the audience to watch the actors,
not listen to the words, in order for the viewers to feel, to understand, to empathize with what
was happening, instead of being told what was going on, the same as Mallarm wanted readers to
find their best meaning in his poems. It found inspiration in dance and daily life, as is evident in
the Lumire brothers works. The first films were silent and in black and white, but directors
soon found ways around those. Just like in The Serpentine Dance, directors would hand-color
each of the slides in their film to make it more life-like, and most films have music playing in the
background to set the mood. They worked hard to make it easier for the audience to feel what
they as directors were trying to portray. The Lumires very first film was a short recording of
workers leaving a factory. They took a normal, mundane occurrence and recorded it, almost
casually, thus ensuring it would be remembered in the years to come.
Although these films, Workers Leaving the Lumire Factory and The Serpentine
Dance, may seem like simple pieces, they actually had a lot of work put in to them. Both of the
films take a normal eventpeople leaving their jobs at the end of the day, a woman dancing
and make it memorable. They used film to [push] back the boundary of death (Wall-Romana
129). They immortalized it by turning this normal, trivial circumstance into a work of art. They
directed Loe Fuller to wear a robe that was too big for her in order to have more movement,
more flow, more passion and life in her dance. They filmed the workers leaving the factory over
and over again, trying to make it perfect. They had to deliberately arrange every detail in order
for them to consider it a piece of art. Mallarm, too, painstakingly put every word into his poem,
making sure there were no extra words and no word, space, or character was out of place. The
Lumires and Mallarm wanted their audience to get the full effect of their work.

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The same can be said for modernism: every word was consciously put on the paper.
Modernists believed in the power of words. They were very conservative in their diction, and
wrote only words that would help provide meaning for their work, nothing more, and they
generally used words that were well-known. This idea comes straight from film. No director will
use a prop or character that is not needed, nothing can be out of place for a film to be successful,
and images are understood everywhere, words are not needed. In early films, which were silent,
the directors often had slides that were just words, because they were trying to better explain
what was happening or what a character was feeling, but they were often unnecessary, and
modernists did away with that practice in their poems.
An example of a modernist poem is T.S. Eliots The Waste Land. This poem represents
modernist beliefs very well with its use of montage in the many images that come to have one
significance. Ezra Pound was another poet whose work, The Cantos, specifically, was
considered an influential modernist poem. This poem also used montage throughout, which gave
the poem, which focused on telling history, new meaning as a way of explaining life in the
twentieth century. Montage was used in many early films, because it shocked and surprised the
viewer enough to provide meaning and emotions for the plot; this reaction is why modernists
faithfully incorporated montage into their poems.
In his article, Wall-Romana states cinema may have evoked for Mallarm a potential
integration of the artwork with sensorial experience and performance, across page (2-D), folio
(3-D), and reading time (4-D) (Wall-Romana 130). Mallarm, as well as modernist poets,
strived to make their poems have all of the feelings and sensations one would find in early film,
as well as going further than that by letting the reader see the poems story unfold in their minds.

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Poetry and film, but especially film, have slipped away from the great power they once
had. Early film provided a better look at daily life or told an emotional story through montage
and wordless music. Now, directors use films to retell stories found in books, instead of letting
the reader watch their own story as the read. It was once considered a normal pastime to read
poetry, today it is widely considered boring or difficult, and most people dont enjoy it. The
worlds cultures have lost a lot of great experiences with this shift. People today want everything
laid out plainly before them so they dont have to think too hard about what it is trying to say or
do. Not only have they lost their imaginations by taking the easy way out, they have lost an
incredible art form that needs to be reintegrated into society. Only once these styles, modernism
and cinepoetry and the standards of early film, have been revived can the world truly know what
the artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were trying to do when they combined poetry
and film.

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Works Consulted
Mallarm, Stphane. Un coup de ds. 124-144.
The Serpentine Dance. Dir. Auguste Lumiere and Louis Fuller. Perf. Loie Fuller. 1899.
Wall-Romana, Christophe. "Mallarme's Cinepoetics: The Poem Uncoiled by the
Cinematographe, 1893-98." Modern Language Association 120.1 (2005): 128-47. Web.
Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory. Dir. Auguste Lumiere and Louis Lumiere. 1895.