Literatura Y Cine

The Influence of Experimental film in Literature; Cinematographic Techniques in Ezra Pound’s Poetry.
The beginning of the 20th century was a time of huge changes in Europe. Political, social revolts and particularly, a technological revolution which radically transformed the view of the world. Regarding visual arts, the avant-garde started to flourish in Europe; especially Surrealism beganto have an enormous influence in cinema. In 1929, Dziga Vertov directed the experimental film “A man with the movie camera”, a portrait of Moscow in an era of technological advances and very intense political changes in Russia. In here, we can observe several cinematographic techniques that Vertov developed, without any previous references, for example, fast motion and slow motion, close ups orjump cuts. The film presents a lot of images of Moscow in the passing of a working day, juxtaposing images and using the cinematic technique of montage, which is used for editing short shots into sequences, condensing space, time and information. Montage leads us to a concreteness of the subject, making us stay with an idea created from several abstract images. As he states at the beginning of thefilm:
"The film Man with a Movie Camera represents
AN EXPERIMENTATION IN THE CINEMATIC COMMUNICATION
Of visual phenomena
WITHOUT THE USE OF INTERTITLES
(a film without intertitles)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF A SCENARIO
(a film without a scenario)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF THEATRE
(a film without actors, without sets, etc.)
This new experimentation work by Kino-Eye is directed towards the creationof an authentically international absolute language of cinema – ABSOLUTE KINOGRAPHY – on the basis of its complete separation from the language of theatre and literature." (Vertov “A man with the moving camera”)
Another vital example of experimental film is the Surrealist film “Un chien andalou”, directed by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. The basis of this movement corresponds to the use ofjuxtaposed and non sequitur images, which creates a sense of abstraction, but leads to some concrete ideas. Here, the directors used broken chronology, irrational succession of subjects, some of them taken from dreams they have had (the cut in the eye, and the appearance of the ants in the hand), fragmentation, and collage. Fragmentation was quite often used in experimental films, to represent abreaking of information which creates a structure that would have a hidden message, for example, in “Un chien andalou”, the hand in the road, which a woman picks up, and after is ran over a car, may represent death.
These cinematographic features served as an inspiration to develop new literary techniques, more abstract than any before, and which could make the reader create mental imageswhile reading a text. There it emerges a movement called “Imagism”, and one of its precursors was our Poet; Ezra Pound. Imagism called for abstraction, one image may have different meanings, it is “which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” (Pound 50). Pound defends here the being of the image as the speech itself, not a tool which is used as an ornament. He waswidely influenced by Japanese and Chinese literature, for example Haikus, which he used to see them as “a knowledge of self-exploration” (53). Pound saw cinematography as a state of mind, which could be directly applied to literature.
Therefore, these new devices served modernist writers to create a new style, more focused on mental images and concreteness of subject than the previous literaryornamentation. This visual consciousness lead to juxtaposition of images, sharp and clear language with a particular musical rhythm, and usually, a breaking of time, conflating past and present. As Clark Emery presents in his book “A study of Pound’s Cantos” in 1958, he clarifies that “Pound’s primary pigment will be an image from which a prose statement can be inferred. Another image, whole or...