To fill a gap: Cinema and poetry

A significant gap in our understanding of cinema's genesis—both theoretically and historically—is the role poetry has played in shaping the aesthetic history of cinema. This dissertation therefore examines the intersection between cinema and poetry and argues for restoring this undervalued genealogy of cinema's history to a more central position. Mobilizing discourses about poetry and poetic theory—focusing mainly on issues of distraction, rhythm, form, abstraction, image and temporality—it identifies consistent tendencies in film practice to veer toward poetic paradigms and argues that these paradigms are of great value as descriptive and theoretic models for specific filmmakers and films. To this end, in addition to analyzing specific "poetic" films, it examines the writings of poets, filmmakers and theorists who relate the cinema to poetry, addressing the various niches wherein poetry and cinema intersect.;The chapters of the dissertation detail particular moments in cinema's history when poetry proved especially influential to a significant segment of film production. The first chapter contends with D.W. Griffith's adaptation of poetry for the cinema; chapter two details the impact of art movements and crossmedial influence in the 1920s in Paris; chapter three outlines engagements with poetry in Britain through the British Film Society and the film journal Close Up, and in Russia through the lens of Formalism; and in the fourth and final chapter, the focus falls upon Maya Deren's re-thinking of the ontology of cinema in terms of an emerging American avant-garde cinema. The conclusion then brings together a range of different types of intersections between poetry and cinema and makes suggestions for further work in filling out the important details of this poetic trajectory in the history of cinema.