French Avant Garde and Chaplin

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American Film and the French Literary Avant-Garde (1914-1924)Author(s): Richard AbelReviewed work(s):Source: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Winter, 1976), pp. 84-109Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1207558 .

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AMERICAN FILM AND THE FRENCH LITERARY AVANT-GARDE (1914-1924)

Richard Abel

In the first few decades of this century, French avant-garde writers were susceptible to influences from a variety of quarters, especially those antithetical to accepted literary tradition.' "Literature alone," said Philippe Soupault, "does not suffice the new generation."2 By 1912, inspiration was coming from objects in the streets and cafes, newspapers, popular fiction, "prospectuses... catalogues, posters, advertisements of all sorts. Believe me," said Guillaume Apollinaire, "they contain the poetry of our epoch."3 World War I added to their number one of the most important of all-the new medium of film.

The film's influence on French avant-garde writers occurred so quickly and pervasively that it was acknowledged in criticism by the end of the silent film period. In 1928, Pierre-F. Quesnoy could already offer an historical sketch that included patterns of influence from Blaise Cendrars and Apollinaire to the surrealists.4 From the vantage point of the United States, Harry Alan Potamkin even concluded that "the cinema in France [had] influenced

1This essay is a companion piece to "The Contribution of the French

Literary Avant-Garde to Film Theory and Criticism (1907-1924)," Cinema Journal, 14, No. 3 (Spring 1975), 18-40.

2Philippe Soupault, The American Influence in France (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Chapbook, 1930), p. 10.

3Andre Billy, "Guillaume Apollinaire," Les Soirees de Paris, 17 (octobre 1913), quoted in Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 279.

4Pierre-F. Quesnoy, "Litterature et cinema," in Cinema (Paris: Editions "Le Rouge et le noir," 1928), pp. 85-104.


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French letters before it influenced itself."5 The chief source of that influence, however, was not French but American:

The 'U.S.A.' cinema [wrote Soupault] has thrown light on all the beauty of our time, all the mystery of moder mechanics....

The influence of this new power made itself felt immediately. I thoroughly believe that all French poetry underwent a profound transformation therefrom.6

Although some poets-such as Cendrars7 and Robert Desnos8-and at least one critic9 would like to deny it, Soupault's assertion has a good deal of substance.

Among the first generation of the French avant-garde, the most important poets-Apollinaire, Cendrars, and Max Jacob-already had shown an interest in the cinematographe before World War I. Cendrars was a friend of the film-maker Abel Gance and shared his vision of the cinema as an "admirable synthesis of movement in space and time" and, thus, a new form of total art.1? By 1914, this interest, coupled with his world travels, had brought him to assist in documentary film production for Pathe. Apollinaire, on assuming editorship of the literary monthly Les Soirees de Paris, had initiated one of the first regular columns of film reviews in France.ll In the journal's last issue he even published an essay by

s Harry Alan Potamkin, "Cinea-Cine," National Board of Review Maga- zine, 2, No. 10 (Oct. 1927), 4.

6Philippe Soupault, "The 'U.S.A.' Cinema," Broom, 5, No. 2 (Sept. 1923), 68-69.

7"In general, I don't believe in a special influence from the cinema...." Fran9ois et Andre Berge, "Interview de Blaise Cendrars sur le cinema," Les Cahiers du mois, 16/17 (Paris: Editions Emile-Paul freres, 1925), 142.

8 "I don't believe in the influence of one form of expression on another.... So don't speak to me of the influence of the cinema on writing." Robert Desnos, [untitled], Les Cahiers du mois, loc. cit., p. 148.

9"The poets were right to proclaim the betrothal of poetry to the cinema. But the cinema ravished them, it did not inspire them." Michel Decaudin, "Les Poetes decouvrent le cinema," Etudes cinematographiques, 38/39 (printemps 1965), 81.

10 Abel Gance, "Qu'est-ce que le cinematographe? un sixieme art," Cine-Journal (9 mars 1912), rpt. in Marcel L'Herbier, Intelligence du cinematographe (Paris: Editions Correa, 1946), pp. 91-92.

11 Maurice Raynal, "Chronique cinematographique," Les Soirees de Paris, 19 (decembre 1913), 6-8.









































































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the painter Leopold Survage advancing the idea of an abstract film.12 Jacob, according to his friends, frequented the cinemas more often than almost anyone else in the avant-garde circles. This interest in film is reflected in the three poets' literary activity during this period, but it is less pronounced and more diffuse than one might expect.

Probably the earliest reference to cinema in French literature occurs in Apollinaire's short story, "Un beau film," first published in 1907.13 An adventure narrated by the Baron of Ormesan, it chronicles the efforts of his "International Cinematographic Company" to achieve realism in film-making, efforts which culminate in the desire to record the performance of a crime: "Accustomed as we were to filming only reality, we could not be satisfied by a simple theatrical game, however perfect." So decided, one night they kidnap a young couple and then a gentleman who under threat of death is forced to struggle with the two and kill them with a dagger.

The crime receives great publicity because of the victims' social position, and the film enjoys a tremendous success; the Baron comments that "the police never believed for a moment that we were offering the real version of the murder of the day. We took care, however, to announce it prominently. And the public was not deceived." Stymied, the police finally arrest a man with- out an alibi, and he is sentenced to death; but as the Baron notes, "Our cameraman was able, by a rare chance, to be present at the execution, and we strengthened our program with a new scene well suited to draw a crowd." This simple shocking tale is well within the range of Apollinaire's fascination with the bizarre and his cultivation of a tone of nonchalant irony. It is remarkable, however, for his recognition and exploitation of the cinema's inherent ambiguity in being at once both realistic and illusory.

More representative of the cinema's influence during this period are several other stories and poems by Apollinaire and his

12Leopold Sturzwage, "Le Rythme colore," Les Soirees de Paris, 26/27 (juillet-aoft 1914), 426-29. Apollinaire himself apparently wrote a scenario during this period called "Le Brehatine," but it remains unpublished in the Bibliotheque Jacques Doucet.

13Guillaume Apollinaire, "Un beau film," Messidor (23 decembre 1907). Reprinted as the second tale of "L'Amphion faux-messie" in Apollinaire's collection of stories, L'Heresiarque et cie (Paris: Bourges, 1910). Trans. in Roger Shattuck, The Selected Writings of Guillaume Apollinaire (New York: New Directions, 1949), pp. 238-41.





































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friends. In a second tale in the L'Heresiarque et cie collection, "Le Toucher a distance" (1910), Apollinaire uses the film projector as a model for the machine he has his criminal character invent so he can project himself into several distant places at once and so create a personal empire. An evening at the cinema is the subject of a light poem, "Avant le cinema,"14 in which Apollinaire distin- guishes people as to whether they use the term cinema or cine or the old-fashioned cinematographe.

It is also the subject of a story by Charles Dormier-"Le Cinematographe" (1910).i5 Dormier describes in some detail the posters and acrobats that announce the current cinema programs and then focuses on an old woman in the street whose son has gone to America and not been heard from since. One night she joins the crowd at the cinema. The last film is about a man who steals some gold coins but is caught and executed. Only in the final scene is his face revealed; there is a cry from the audience, and the old woman collapses. She has recognized her son-as a real thief and not as an actor. For Dormier, the cinema's illusion of reality creates, not irony, but pathos.

The lives of fantastic criminals in fiction and film were popular among the avant-garde poets, and nowhere so much as in Apollinaire's issues of Les Soirees de Paris. Having praised the American serial novels of Nick Carter, Apollinaire and his friends greeted the appearance of Louis Feuillade's Fantbmas film series (1913-1914) with delight.16 They formed a special society to honor the arch-criminal (Societe des amis de Fant6mas) and wrote poems extolling his character and exploits. Cendrars contributed the first (March 1914) which was later collected as one of his Dix-neuf poemes elastiques (1919).17 By turns sarcastic and play- ful, his "Fant6mas" links the criminal with the poet as an outsider

14Guillaume Apollinaire, "Avant le cinema," Nord-Sud, 2 (15 avril 1917), 5.

15Charles Dormier, "Le Cinematographe," Le Penseur, 10, No. 2 (fevrier 1910), 56-60.

16Feuillade's five films were adapted from the thirty-two novels published monthly from February 1911, to September 1913, by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain. Each combined episodes and characters from several different novels. They included Fantbmas (mai 1913), Juve contre Fantbmas (septembre 1913), Le Mort qui tue (novembre 1913), Fantbmas contre Fantbmas (fevrier 1914), and Le faux magistrat (avril 1914).

17Blaise Cendrars, "Fant6mas," Les Soirees de Paris, 25 (juin 1914), 336-39.














































and adventurer on the margins of society. The most important poems, however, were written by Max Jacob.

The Fant6mas novels and films provided Jacob with apt material for the charming wordplays and whimsical connections and juxtapositions that so characterize his poetry. In "Fan- t6mas"'8 a dusty door-knocker shaped in the form of a Buddha suddenly is transformed into the arch-criminal poised anxiously before something just beyond his reach. In "Encore Fantomas" 19

a bourgeois couple dining in a hotel are questioned repeatedly by the chef to see if they are satisfied: "On en arriva a parler sport, politique, religion. C'est ce que voulait le chef des cuisines, qui n'etait autre que Fant6mas."

His most ambitious poem inspired by Fant6mas, however, was published during the height of the films' popularity. Dedicated to the wife of Francis Picabia, "Ecrit pour la S.A.F." appeared in the last issue of Les Soirees de Paris (juillet-aoit 1914). Each of its four parts is very different in subject and style. The first, in free verse, is a collage of actions both imagined and re-created from the novels and films during which Fant6mas explains his way of life while detective Juve keeps apprehending innocent people for his crimes. Two lines-"Pour eveiller nos joies un beau crime est bien fait/En voici treize a la douzaine commis devant des coffres-fort"- allude to the last lines of Cendrars' poem. The second part, in prose, analyzes the similarity of plots in all the Fant6mas stories and praises the characterization while condemning the style of the novels' writers. The third, in witty couplets, whimsically describes the character of Fant6mas and lets him address his audience:

Je parle pour tous ceux qui sont 'au jour le jour' sans autre grand souci que de manger et boire lisant plus le journal quotidien que l'histoire forces pour l'exploiter de connaitre leur temps; Pour eux, pour moi, pour vous, Fant6mas est vivant.

The fourth part is a single paragraph which concludes "que 'Fant6mas' est a la fois une oeuvre de synthese et une etude de details."

18Max Jacob, "Fant6mas," Le Cornet a des (1917; rpt. Paris: Librairie Stock, 1923), p. 68.

19Jacob, "Encore Fant6mas," op. cit., pp. 68-69.




















































In a slightly earlier poem,"Printemps et cinematographe meles (I),"20 Jacob tries to work his own kind of synthesis according to the collage aesthetic-but with little success. The blossomings of

spring alternate unevenly and merge almost purposelessly with an evening of film dramas and documentaries, or images and phrases they call up-all of which is reflected in an awkward conjunction of monologue and exposition conveyed in different verse forms. Much more successful is a slightly later prose-poem entitled simply "Poeme" (1917):

La grele est sur la mer; la nuit tombe: "Allumez le phare a boeufs!" La vieille courtisane est morte a l'auberge: il n'y a que des rires dans la maison. II

grele et le cinematographe fonctionne pour les marins a la maison d'ecole. L'instituteur a une belle figure. Me voici dans la campagne; il y a deux hommes qui regardent briller le phare a boeufs.

"Enfin, vous voila!" me dit l'instituteur. Allez-vous prendre des notes pendant le cin6matographe? le petit menage des adjoints vous c6dera la table.

"Des notes? quelles notes prendrais-je? les sujets des films?" "Non! vous condenserez la rythme du Cinema et celui de la grele et

aussi la rire de ceux qui assistent a la mort de la vieille courtisane pour avoir l'idee du Purgatoire."21

Jacob's tone and the appearance of the cinematographe in the schoolhouse turn this gloomy seacoast scene into a gently ironic fantasy. The teacher's words-which the poet responds to almost like a child-can be taken as simple instructions for a simultaneous poem, fusing the rhythms of three different actions occurring simultaneously. But Jacob is not interested in simultane-

ity for its own sake; what he writes while watching the cinema will become a vision of purgatory-which, with that last word, the

poem itself becomes. Charming, wistful, naive, and grave all at once, "Poeme" expresses all that is best in Jacob's poetry.

The first twenty years of the cinema's emergence as a popular form of entertainment had only a limited effect on the literary production of the French avant-garde. The effect of American films in particular was almost negligible. During World War I, however, this situation changed radically, especially as the second generation of avant-garde poets came of age.

20 Jacob, "Printemps et cinematographe meles (I),"Les Soirees de Paris, 23 (avril 1914), 219-22.

21 Jacob, "Poeme," Le Cornet a des, p. 34.


















































































With the theaters closed (for purposes of morale!) and French film production at a standstill, the American films that began to flood into the cinemas of Paris became the chief source of entertainment and artistic stimulus. Shortly after their arrival-in March, 1915-the films of Charlie Chaplin captivated all France, and especially the avant-garde. Rivalling them in popularity for a short while were the Mack Sennett Keystones featuring Fatty Arbuckle. Late in 1915 came the first of the serials starring Pearl White to infatuate those whose appetite had been whetted already by Fantomas and Les Vampires (starring the famous Musidora). Nineteen sixteen introduced The Cheat with Sessue Hayakawa, the first "Rio Jim" westerns of William S. Hart, and other "Triangle" films produced by Thomas Ince. By the end of the war, the young poets-Pierre Reverdy, Philippe Soupault, Louis Aragon, Andre Breton, Jean Cocteau-and film critics like Louis Delluc would consider the films of Chaplin (The Immigrant, A Dog's Life, Shoulder Arms), Hart (Blue Blazes Rawden, The Aryan), and Ince (Carmen of the Klondyke) among the best contemporary works of art.

A measure of the poets' enthusiasm for American films can be seen in the many references to them strewn throughout their poetry and even in individual poems devoted to a particular star or film. The most frequent reference, of course, is to Chaplin, who makes his first appearance in Cendrars' "Le Musickissme" (1916): 22

Theme: CHARLOT chef d'orchestre bat la mesure Devant L'europeen chapeaut6 et sa femme en corset.

Shortly thereafter, he appears in one of Paul Eluard's earliest poems, "Julot,"23 as a foil to a fat-cheeked friend, probably based on Mack Swain. His peculiar walk is imitated by the athletic American girl in Cocteau's ballet Parade (1917). And he brings up the rear of a religious procession in Cendrars' fantasy novel- scenario, La Fin du monde filmee par l'ange N.-D. (1919).

His most important influence, however, is on Aragon and Ivan Goll. Aragon's first published poem, "Charlot sentimental," is

22 Dated "novembre 1916" and dedicated to Erik Satie, it was published as one of three "Sonnets denatures" in L'Oeuf dur, 14 (automne 1923).

23Paul Eluard, "Julot," Projecteur (21 mai 1920), rpt. in Les Necessites de la vie et les consequences des reves (Paris: Gallimard, 1921).














































based on The Floorwalker (1917). Initially printed in Le Film (1 mars 1918), it was revised extensively for Nord-Sud (mai 1918) as "Charlot mystique."24 This second version is much the better of the two, more unified and more assured in its rhythm. It begins with the most important part of the film's "decor," the escalator, and then introduces the woman-with whom the poet wants to make love-and Charlie the salesman:

si comique avec sa moustaches et ses sourcils artificiels Ii a cri6 quand je les ai tires Etrange.

The two banter over handbags, and Aragon concludes that their actions have "pas de mesure/ni de logique"-which is exactly why he enjoys the films.

Chaplin plays an important role as well in Aragon's first novel, Anicet ou le panorama.25 This picaresque satire chronicles the adventures of a young poet who joins a secret society dedicated to the celebration of beauty in the figure of a woman named Mirabelle. The six members who initiate Anicet into the society represent the intellectual and artistic panorama of the modern world, and one of them, Pol, is modeled on Chaplin:26

En lutte continuelle avec les choses, aux prises avec tous les mecanismes sociaux ou physiques, confondant objets inanimes et etres animes et figurant lui-meme du "mecanique plaque sur du vivant," Pol est a la fois un comparse bouffon de comedie et un personnage angoisse qui incarne "le sens aigu du ridicule et l'impossibilite d'y echapper."27

24The first version is reprinted in Georges Sadoul, Le Cinema devient un art, II (Paris: Denoel, 1952), 253, n. 2. The second was published in Aragon's Feu de ioie (Paris: Au sans pareil, 1920), pp. 8-9.

25 Louis Aragon, Anicet ou le panorama (Paris: Gallimard, 1921). The first two chapters had been written in 1918 and published as "Toutes choses egales d'ailleurs" in Nouvelle revue franqaise (septembre 1920), pp. 346-82.

26 Roger Garaudy, L 'Itineraire d'Aragon (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), p. 107. The others are based on Alfred Jarry, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Max Jacob (with Pierre Reverdy), and Andre Breton.

27 Yvette Gindine, Aragon: prosateur surrealiste (Geneve: Librairie Droz, 1966), p. 6. It was precisely these qualities that Aragon admired in his important essay on the cinema, "Du decor," Le Film (septembre 1918), rpt. in Le Point, 59 (1962), 25-33.


























































Anicet himself has a great interest in the cinema, which gives Aragon a pretext for parodying documentaries and moralistic film dramas, while in the overall narrative he both celebrates and satirizes the action of film serials and serial novels. Indeed, he narrates quite a number of the novel's episodes as if they were being recorded by a camera-with precise descriptions of shot range and lighting, accelerated or slowed motion, and compressed or expanded time.

Perhaps the most ambitious work inspired by Chaplin was written by Goll. Newly arrived in Paris after the war, the Alsatian poet-dramatist was already deeply interested in film, as evidenced by an early prose-poem, "Nouvel Orphee" (1917),28 and by his friendship with the abstract film-maker Viking Eggeling.29 In 1920, Goll published "a film poem" in German entitled Die Chapliniade; a year later he translated it into French with illustra- tions by Fernand Leger.30 Die Chapliniade is composed of five parts, each with a different setting-drawn from such films as The Immigrant (1917), The Adventurer (1917), and Sunnyside (1919). The poem takes Chaplin as its main character throughout the world and into the center of the earth, to reveal his loneliness and sadness in the midst of the crowd's idolatry. Having escaped from a kiosk poster at the beginning, he is slapped back onto it at the end.

Other American stars also had their admirers. Pearl White inspired a long mediocre poem, "Par Amor," written by Rene Hillel-Erlanger for Litterature (decembre 1919). The criminal plottings in hers and other serials were the basis for another of Aragon's early poems, "Programme,"31 where the poet-persona in the end unlooses anarchy in the Paris bookstalls and train stations. The "Rio Jim" westerns of Hart, especially Les Loups (Between Men, 1915) and Revelation (The Narrow Trail, 1917) provided Aragon with the basic scenes and action for his second published

28Orpheus is an Everyman figure who at one point plays in a cinema orchestra and tries to reach the audience with visions on the screen: B. Tokine, "Ivan Goll," L'Esprit nouveau, 14 (janvier 1922), 1587.

29Francis Carmody, "L'Oeuvre d'Yvan Goll," Yvan Goll (Paris: Seghers, 1956), p. 31.

30Ivan Goll, Die Chapliniade, eine kinodichtung (Dresden: Rudolf Kaemmerer Verlag, 1920); trans. into French in La Vie des lettres et des arts (juillet 1921); trans. into English in Massachusetts Review (Spring-Summer 1965), pp. 497-514.

31 Louis Aragon, "Programme," Feu de joie, pp. 43-45.














































poem, "Soifs de l'ouest."32 Hart's L'Homme aux yeux clairs (Blue Blazes Rawden, 1917) was the subject of an enthusiastic review by Soupault which reads like a prose-poem on the heroic character of "Rio Jim."33 Finally, Chariot, Hayakawa, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charles Ray all inspired unexceptional portrait-poems by Jean Epstein,34 whose true metier would soon turn out to be film- making.

The poets' enthusiasm for American films was not completely uncritical, however, as Cendrars' La Fin du monde filme par l'ange N.-D.,35 perhaps the earliest published literary film scenario, illustrates. Composed of fifty-five one-paragraph scenes collected into seven chapters or sequences, La Fin du monde depicts the journey of "Dieu le Pere" to Mars where he views a procession of all the world's religions and the equivalent of a documentary film on Paris. When Notre Dame cathedral appears, the apocalypse begins and the world ends. In the sixth chapter, the world is re-created in great detail; but in the seventh, the action is reversed in fast-motion until "Dieu le Pere" is back at his desk as in the opening scene.

Although the idea of a journey to Mars came from Melies' satiric fantasy, Le Voyage dans la lune (1902),36 the character of "Dieu le Pere" was based on the image of the American capitalist found in American film serials and melodramas. He has an "American desk," wears shirt-sleeves and a shade over his eyes, smokes large cigars, walks nervously around his office, and talks often into the telephone. On Mars he is anxious to show "les plus beaux films de guerre" until he is reminded the Martians are pacifists. His re-creation of the world occurs in stages, of which some resemble both the documentaries of plant and animal life that so fascinated early cinema audiences, and films of exotic places on which Cendrars himself once worked as an assistant. The

32Louis Aragon, "Soifs de l'ouest," Nord-Sud, 13 (mars 1918), p. 11. 33Phillippe Soupault, "L'Homme aux yeux clairs-William Hart,"

Litterature, 9 (decembre 1919), 29. 34 Jean Epstein, Bonjour Cinema (Paris: Editions de la Sirene, 1921). 35Blaise Cendrars, La Fin du monde filme par l'ange N.-D., illustre de

Fernand Leger (Paris: Editions de la Sirene, 1919). This work first appeared as a short prose sketch called "La Fin du monde" for La Caravane (octobre 1916) and then was lengthened into a film scenario for Mercure de France (octobre 1918).

36FranCois et Andre Berge, "Interview de Blaise Cendrars sur le cinema," Les Cahiers du mois, p. 139.














































short chapter on life in Paris, on the other hand, clearly looks ahead to the great city documentaries of Alberto Cavalcanti (Rien que les heures, [Paris], 1926) and Walter Ruttman (Berlin: Symphony of a City, 1927). And the last chapter's fast-motion return to the beginning, although derived from the Keystone comedy chases, foreshadows the fast-motion chase and ending of Rene Clair's Entr'Acte (1924).

One last long poem making several references to the American cinema was Le Cap de Bonne-Esperance (1916-1919), the work of another poet who would later make films-Jean Cocteau. Composed of free associations in the form of a series of "poetic telegrams" that proliferate for some fifty pages, the poem is unusually prolix and diffuse. Not even the red scarf of "Rio Jim," "Indians on their little ponies," "a telephone operator from Los Angeles," and the name "AMERICAN VITAGRAPH," can save it from exhaustion, so misguided is its strategy of style and form. Yet one of the few striking moments in the poem comes from Cocteau's memory of the famous British film photographed by Herbert George Ponting, With Captain Scott, R.N., to the South Pole (1912):

Suis-je le mort dans ce fauteuil

La lente petite escorte un geste adieu final s'abime 6cran vide une trepidation blanche ou Scott et ses amis retournent mourir jadis chaque soir dans un linceul Veronique esquimau cinematographe

Ils arriverent a nos yeux comme une etoile deja morte.37

The influence of the American cinema, however, went much further than these tributes and transformations of individual

37 Jean Cocteau, Le Cap de Bonne-Esperance (1916-1919) in Oeuvres Completes de Jean Cocteau (Lausanne: Marguerat, 1947), III, 39, rpt. in The Little Review, trans. Jean Hugo, 8 (Autumn 1921), 43-96.











































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performers and characters. Cocteau's "hope of discoveries worthy" of the young poets' talent was soon fulfulled. For American films became a crucial factor in the change that occurred between the poetry and poetic theory of the first generation of avant-garde poets and that of the second. To better understand this influence, the general outline of that change briefly needs to be sketched.

In his "Manifesto of Futurism," F. T. Marinetti had announced "that the world's magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed."38 In France, this phenomenon was assimilated by Apollinaire and Cendrars into the concept of simultaneity. With them, speed and especially the destructiveness of speed was not an end in itself; it was rather an attribute of perception wherein separate images and phrases were fitted together or superimposed in staccato fashion to create a single simultaneous impression:

ici des poemes oiu cette simultaneite existait dans l'esprit et dans la lettre meme puisqu'il est impossible de les lire sans concevoir immediatement la simultaneite de ce qu'ils expriment, poemes-conversation ou le poete au centre de la vie enregistre en quelque sorte le lyrisme ambiant.39

In "Zone" and "Vendimiaire" (Apollinaire), and "Prose du Transsiberien" (Cendrars), such verbal patterns existed as a flux within the confines of a definite persona, the poet's consciousness. In "Les Fenetres" (Apollinaire), "Tour," "Crepitements," "Natures mortes," and "Titres" (Cendrars), the persona disappeared. Apparently disconnected images and phrases fused into object- poems or autonomous ensembles of perceptual and conceptual elements (cf. Cubist paintings and collages). Instead of developing a temporal progression, the poems approached a spatial organization. In Apollinaire's case, this led to calligrammes where the words fragmented and re-formed into graphic designs. In Cendrars, it led to "elastic poems" whose "apparently discontinuous [elements] stretch[ed] into a continuous surface"40 of simultaneous relations

38F. T. Marinetti, "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, 1909," Futurist Manifestoes, ed. Umbro Apollonio (New York: Viking, 1973), pp. 19-24. Rpt. from Le Figaro (20 fevrier 1909).

39Guillaume Apollinaire, "Simultanisme-Librettisme," Les Soirees de

Paris, 25 (juin 1914), 323. 40Mary Ann Caws, "Blaise Cendrars: A Cinema of Poetry," Kentucky

Romance Quarterly, 18, No. 4 (1970), 349. Unfortunately, Caws accepts an extremely vague definition of her central metaphor.




















































where mobility was implicit in the nature of the modernist objects enumerated and in the quickness of their enumeration.41

Among the second generation of avant-garde poets-Soupault, Aragon, Breton, Paul Eluard, and later Benjamin Peret and Desnos-this kind of spatial organization or ensemble of simultaneous relations largely disappeared. Replacing it was an interest in structures governed by mobility and metamorphosis or by discontinuous juxtapositions that provoked or surprised. Some of Jacob's prose-poems in Le Cornet a des, such as "Omnia Vanitas," had shown a similar interest in "a system of meta- morphosing one image into [another]," a kind of "kaleidoscopic reeling from focal plane to focal plane."42 Closer to the second generation poets, however, was the poetry and poetic theory of

Reverdy. As Robert Greene has demonstrated,43 Reverdy played a

crucial role in linking the aesthetics of the two generations of avant-garde poets. His stress on the image as the very stuff of poetry, especially its creation through the juxtaposition of distant

realities, influenced Breton-who assisted Reverdy in editing Nord-

Sud-along with Aragon and Soupault, all of whom published some of their earliest poems in the journal's pages.44 Furthermore, his own poetry had begun to create a uniquely personal world where

"l'espace a les attributs du temps: il passe, s'ecoule, se perd. Tout glisse, tout est mouvance, mer inquiUte. .. .45 What is less well- known is that Reverdy himself suggested, in 1918, that both these principles of his poetry could be found in the cinema.46 And what is more important, they were even more apparent to his young admirers, especially in the American films that flooded France

41Francis J. Carmody, Cubist Poetry: The School of Apollinaire, 1912-1919, [n.p., n.d.], p. 14 (Museum of Modern Art PQ 2601 Aj C2).

42 Gerald Kamber, Max Jacob and the Poetics of Cubism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), p. 9. Kamber's analysis is weakened by an overly broad definition of Cubism in poetry and by a refusal to situate Jacob among the other poets of the avant-garde.

43Robert Greene, The Poetic Theory of Pierre Reverdy (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1967), pp. 29-31.

44See the Pierre Reverdy issue of Mercure de France, 344 (janvier-avril 1962), especially Adrienne Monnier's "Pierre Reverdy en 1917," pp. 19-22; Louis Aragon's "Notes sur 'Les Ardoises du toit,'" pp. 23-25; and Philippe Soupault's "L'Epoque Nord-Sud," pp. 306-09.

45Pierre Scheider, "Le Gre du vent," Mercure de France, loc. cit., p. 249.

46 Pierre Reverdy, "Cinematographe," Nord-Sud, 16 (octobre 1918), 7.


















































































during the war.47 The influence of this discovery can be traced in the organization and ambience of a whole series of poems and related writings from 1917 to 1924.

Early in the century, a few writers had been impressed momentarily by the frequent scene changes in dramatic films and

by the ceaseless transformations in the animation films of Emile Cohl.48 This interest had no issue in literature until the arrival of the American films. In the Mack Sennett Keystones, in Chaplin's comedies, in White's serials, in Ince's westerns, and in George Herriman's "Krazy Kat" cartoons,49 the pace of the action and the speed of changes in place and time caught the young poets by surprise. They produced connections and juxtapositions so

unexpected-with "pas de mesure/ni de logique"-they marvelled in

delight. Here was the "esprit nouveau" of speed and mobility in an

entirely new form. Similar quick changes in action, setting, or time began to

appear in their own literary works. One of the earliest was Cocteau's Parade, first performed on May 18, 1917. In the second "act" of this short ballet, as the choreographer Leonide Massine describes it,

a dark-haired girl makes her way across the stage by means of a succession of convulsive bounds, her hands extended in front of her as if she were mounted on a nettlesome horse. She is attired in a sailor coat, white shirt, and short white stockings and black shoes; her hair is bound with a white ribbon a l'Amer- icaine.

The music changes to a syncopated melody and she assumes the curious stilted walk associated with Charlie Chaplin. The melody merges into a

plaintive chant and she pretends to cry. Now the music and her corresponding actions change with incredible rapidity and variety. She pretends to jump on a

moving train, drive a motor-car, swim a river, and for a few moments affords a glimpse of a film drama, in which she drives away a robber at the point of a

47Philippe Soupault, "Note I sur le cin6ma," Sic, 25 (janvier 1918), 3, Louis Aragon, "Du decor," op. cit.

48 Remy de Gourmont, "Epilogue," Mercure de France, 69 (1 septembre 1907), 124-27; Victor Litschfousse, "Cirques, foires, etc...." La Phalange (20 mars 1909), p. 850.

49"I also furnished them with a goodly store of recent 'Americana' in the form of 'Krazy Kat' cartoon serials by George Herriman.... These were exhibited to my French friends [Soupault, Aragon, Breton] as 'pure American Dada humor.'" Matthew Josephson, Life Among the Surrealists: A Memoir (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1962), p. 124.
























































































revolver. Again the music changes to a lilting rag-time tune to which she shrugs her shoulders and sways her body with undisguised zest.50

Cocteau himself says at one point she "se promene a bicyclette, trepide comme l'imagerie des films" and at another "prend un Kodak."s5 As Frederick Brown has stated, "It is as though the little American girl were racing through a stylized summary of The Perils of Pauline, though Massine claims Cocteau had Mary Pickford in mind."52

Cocteau's first play, Le Boeuf sur le toit (1920),53 also contains some contrasts and sudden changes drawn from the cinema. Based on a rondo composed by Darius Milhaud, who had

hoped that Chaplin might use it for a film, this short silent farce was set in a bar with seven characters who were directed to "behave in accordance with the style of the decor. They [were] moving decor. With the heaviness of deep-sea divers, each of them [was to move] in slow-motion, and in opposition to the music...."54 When a giant policeman suddenly appears, the

speakeasy is transformed into a milk bar. Then, while dancing under the influence of the "bucolic atmosphere," the policeman is

decapitated by the ceiling fan. In the end, propped in a chair with his head replaced, he comes to life and is presented with a bill three yards long.

A more fundamental use of this movement and meta-

morphosis began to appear, appropriately, in the work of Reverdy. The earliest and simplest occurs in a short story, "Une Nuit dans la plaine," published in Nord-Sud (15 mai 1917). It is a strange dream-story in which the main character is at first an Indian from

5OCyril W. Beaumont, Complete Book of Ballets (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1938), pp. 698-99.

51 Jean Cocteau, "La Collaboration de 'Parade,'" Nord-Sud, 4/5 (juin-juillet 1917), 4.

52Frederick Brown, An Impersonation of Angels: A Biography of Jean Cocteau (New York: Viking, 1968), p. 150n.

53Trans. as "The Ox on the Roof" in Margaret Crosland, Cocteau's World: An Anthology of Writings by Jean Cocteau (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1972), pp. 166-68.

54Ibid., p. 166. This concept of the actors as part of the decor stems from Cocteau's and others' perception of the cinema (Paris-midi, 23 avril 1919) while, according to Frederick Brown, the contrast of slow-motion and fast music was "learned from a film by James Williamson [British] in which actors performed an aquatic ballet under water as the orchestra plays a polka." Brown, op. cit., p. 210.


















































































a wild tribe studied by anthropologists, and next a painter who

espouses the Cubist theory of art. The location changes abruptly three times as in film, and in the last one the "actors" remain the same but "oubliaient leur role devant l'oeil curieux du spectateur." It would seem that the cinema provided Reverdy with an unusual means of expressing a key perspective on the origins of Cubist art.

In poems from this period such as "Cinema," "Ecran," and

"Drame," Reverdy finds a new world in the relationship between the screen images and the audience in the darkened cinema halls. The opening line of the first poem-"La ville est un trou"55 -turns the title into a metaphor for an entire town. The people are like

spectral figures on the screen, and the poet seeks out and

approaches only those he does not know. Their faces seem to speak, and he wishes they would understand him and all he loves. Cool and cryptic, "Cinema" still has the submerged tone of a personal plea. "Ecran" and "Drame" are more detached. The title of "Ecran" is also metaphorical, for the "shadow-play" of the cinema clarifies Reverdy's vision of life, especially in the ending lines where "Au bond contre de mur/Des silhouettes glissent."56 "Drame" is more direct in its fascination with the relationship between the audience and the screen, between illusion and reality. In it, Reverdy moves deftly through a series of juxtapositions and paradoxes:

Le rond qui s'agrandit Est-ce la guillotine

Realite du film Mystere dans le crime

II passait a ton cou une corde plus fine Les yeux sont plus vivante

Ton ame est etalee

Un coup de pistolet qui ne fait pas de bruit Comment pourra-t-il sortir

Mystere acrobatique Le pouvoir surhumaine du courant electrique

L'a fait partir Le policier dequ meurt devant le fenetre.57

ss Pierre Reverdy, "Cinema," Main d'oeuvres: poemes, 1913-1949 (Paris: Mercure de France, 1949), p. 213.

56Reverdy, "Ecran," Les Ardoises du toit (Paris: Birault, 1918), rpt. in Plupart du temps, poemes, 1915-1922 (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), p. 220

57 Reverdy, "Drame," Nord-Sud, 9 (novembre 1917), 10.










Ton ame est etalee
















Ton ame est etalee
















Ton ame est etalee
















Ton ame est etalee
















Ton ame est etalee
















Ton ame est etalee










Events both real and unreal unfold; unsuspectingly, the soul is revealed while gestures and people mysteriously disappear. And all is but darkness and electricity.

The most persistent exponent of metamorphosis derived from the cinema, however, was Soupault, who in his own life had consciously adopted the fast pace he regarded as the "American tempo."58 One of his earliest published poems, "Souffrance,"59 draws together scattered images from films by Melies and Cohl and from the Pearl White serials. Near the end the poet's brain becomes a praxinoscope where

les taxis les tramways les autobus les bateaux-mouches cherchent en vain se depasser.

But the light, disconnected flux of images within the context of a definite persona clearly recalls Apollinaire to whom it is dedicated. Similarly, "Cinema-Palace" "glues together" posters and film images in a simultaneous spatial collage that imitates Cendrars to whom it is dedicated.60 Both poems, however, suggest the vision of a new world which is foreshadowed in the last important poem by Apollinaire, "Les Collines."61 There, in the form of a revelation, the older poet sees "the deep secrets of reality" in a succession of images drawn from French and American movie serials and animation films:62

Une dame se tord le cou Aupres d'un monsieur qui s'avale

Le bal tournoie au fond du temps J'ai tue le beau chef d'orchestre

58 Matthew Josephson, op. cit., p. 123. 59Phillippe Soupault, "Souffrance," Nord-Sud, 9 (novembre 1917), 11. 60 Soupault, "Cinema-Palace," Rose des vents (Paris: Au sans pareil, 1920)

rpt. in Poesies completes, 1917-1939 (Paris: GLM, 1939), p. 45. This poem is dated from 1917 by Francis Carmody, op. cit., p. 36.

61Guillaume Apollinaire, "Les Collines," Calligrammes, ed. Michel Decaudin (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), pp. 15-16, trans. in Roger Shattuck, op. cit., pp. 144-51. "[Les Collines] a ete ecrit plus tard, sans doute en 1917....": Michel Decaudin, ed., Oeuvres completes de Guillaume Apollinaire, (Paris: Andre Balland et Jacques Lecat, 1966), III, 918.

62This observation was first made by Francis Carmody, op. cit., p. 25.
































































Tous sont morts le maftre d'h6tel Leur verse un champagne irreel Qui mousse comme un escargot Ou comme un cerveau de poete . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . .

Le chauffeur se tient au volant Et chaque fois que sur la route I1 come en passant le tournant II parfait a perte de vue Un univers encore vierge.

In the next few months, Soupault left Apollinaire behind and

gave himself over wholly to film as an inspiration for his poetry. Several poems published in Sic early in 1918 quickly developed the nature and extent of this new world discovered in the cinema. The brief poem "Cafe,"63 for instance, seems to convey the

atmosphere of an indoor cafe late in the afternoon. But a window becomes a screen through which the poet "regarde la film invariable" of life in the street. Suddenly, his vision vanishes as someone turns on the electricity.

Two months earlier, appended to a brief "Note I sur le

cinema," Soupault had published the first of several "poemes cinematographiques"-"Indifference."64 The poet follows a road to a garden of gigantic plants (a la Melies) where he sits and watches

strange comings and goings:

Apparalf brusquement a mon cote un homme qui se change en femme, puis en vieillard. A ce moment apparaft un autre vieillard qui se change en enfant puis en femme. Puis bient6t et peu a peu une foule disparate d'hommes, de femmes, etc.... gesticule, tandis que je demeure immobile. Je me leve et tous disparaissent .... [a la Cohl and Herriman] 65

In a sidewalk caf6 the chairs, table, and barrels of charcoal become animated (a la Cohl) and gather about to hem him in so the waiter must scurry around them "avec une rapidite uniformement acce- leree" (a la Sennett). Escaping easily by jumping to the rooftops, the

poet comes face-to-face with a clock that grows larger and larger

63Philippe Soupault, "Cafe," Sic, 27 (mars 1918), 4. 64 Soupault, "Indifference," Sic, 25 (janvier 1918), 4. 65 Buster Keaton uses this idea of setting or decor changes around a

continuous character in the famous montage sequence of Sherlock Jr. (1924).


















































































while its hands speed up. Jumping down to the sidewalk, he non- chalantly lights a cigarette (a la Chariot).

In his "Note" preceding this historic little poem, Soupault had said that the cinema endowed man with a new eye that resulted in the vision of a new world. The vision is clear in his poetry. Mobility and metamorphosis displace the assemblage of static images and fragmentary phrases as the poem's organizing principle: moving people, vehicles, and even inanimate objects; sudden appearances and disappearances, enlargenings and diminish- ings; abrupt changes in setting and disconnected actions. What Soupault has done is to subdue the wildly comic effects of speed and change and instead reveal the marvelous nature of metamorphosis itself. His poem really is a new form of playing, a celebration of the senses and the imagination, and the creation of a new world.

In the "poemes cinematographiques" that followed-but were not published until 192566-Soupault continued to explore this new way of seeing. In "Force" he finds himself growing larger as his room becomes smaller until the door enlarges and he can escape. On the street he walks slowly, yet rapidly passes moving cars and running children. A huge man approaches and seizes his hand only to suddenly disappear. Then as he leans against a wall, one sees his head in close-up and then only his smiling mouth. In "Adieu," in a garden again, the poet and his companions meet a man twice their size. Suddenly alone, he walks through wooded country that changes into a plain. Sitting under a poplar whose leaves quickly fall, he slowly disappears. Even in more conventional poems the movement and changes are prominent. In "Horizon,"

Toute la ville est entree dans ma chambre les arbres disparaissaient et le soir s'attache a mes doights Les maisons deviennent des transatlantiques le bruit de la mer est monte jusqu'a moi nous arriverons dans deux jours au Congo.67

Of the five "poemes cinematographiques" from Les Cahiers du mois, no less than three introduce a form of circularity. In

66Philippe Soupault, [five "poemes cinematographiques"] Les Cahiers du mois, 16/17 (1925), 179-82.

67Soupault, "Horizon," Rose des vents, rpt. in The Little Review, 7, No. 4 (Jan.-March 1921), 20.














































"Regret," for example, the persona sits smoking in a rocking chair; noticing a map of navigation routes, he leaves his room and sits on a park bench where "unes a unes les choses qui m'entourant disparaissent." He boards an ocean liner which immediately drops anchor and threads his way through hundreds of black porters to a hotel where he finds a rocking chair and sits, smoking slowly. Despite all the action and change, the world does not really change; one remains the same.68 This attitude can be found also in the poem "Attestation" published in Litterature (juin 1920) by Eluard. The main character is Soupault; its theme, his ceaseless movement and mocking invitation to suicide:

On sort, a dit Philippe Soupault. Scene dans la salle, scene dans la rue et quel pont alors pour passer le temps? Plusieurs fagons d'inviter: le jeu, la danse, la parole, la fusee-meditation, le language du coeur et des fleurs, le cinema, la vitesse, la lutte,-d'inviter au suicide.

Le m6me jour, voici, nous etions LES MEMES....

Soupault's decision not to publish these "poemes cinematographiques"-until 1925-may reflect some inner dis- satisfaction. In their place, late in 1918, he chose a series of five short poems he called "Photographies animees."69 Though less daring than "Indiff6rence" and the others, they are more accomplished in their unity of tone and in their deft succinctness. The photographed scenes come to life with a minimum of movement, sometimes in close-up:

Elle penche la tete. Le monsieur maigre cille et bat des mains. Les

tableaux sont inclines et le lustre tremblote.

Changes pass swiftly and smoothly:

La procession s'avance majestueusement. Voici les chants et la pluie rapide. Les photographes disparaissent. A quoi bon.

68 A similar "tedium of the same" is present earlier in Cendrars' long poems, according to Caws, op. cit., p. 347.

69 Philippe Soupault, "Photographies animees, I-III," Sic, 32 (octobre 1918, 4; "Photographies animees, IV-V," Sic, 33 (novembre 1918), 3.
































































All is of a transparent, gentle resignation. None of these poems, however, is collected in Soupault's second volume of poetry, Rose des vents (1920). And his next volumes, Westwego, 1917-1922 (1922) and Georgia (1926), represent a return to the kind of poetic journey of a definite persona he had so admired in the work of Apollinaire.

While Soupault was writing his "poemes cinematographiques," Breton was frequenting the cinema halls with his friend Jacques Vache. The American films of Sennett, Chaplin, White, and Hart most caught their attention;70 but the two had developed their own peculiar way of viewing them. Vache had convinced Breton that the best way to experience the cinema was to drop in "at a movie house when what was playing was playing, at any point in the show [and] at the first sign of boredom ... to rush off to another movie house ... and so on .... 71 Breton was impressed by the cinema's power to disorient, to displace one from natural surroundings; and his practice of film-hopping led him into a strange dream-like world of unexpectedly juxtaposed images and actions. "I have never known anything so magnetizing," he later wrote; the experience would leave him and Vache "charged" for days. It was perhaps his first taste of what he would soon call the surreal.

In 1919, he and Soupault joined forces in a literary experiment Breton later would regard as the first truly surrealist work- Les Champs magnetiques.72 The experiment involved periods of writing by each poet separately in a state of abstraction so divorced from the outside world, that each perhaps could write directly from his unconscious. Deliberately, they tried to provoke intensely new conjunctions and juxtapositions in an uninterrupted flow of words marked by mobility and sudden change. Their interest in film very likely served, along with Breton's interest in dreams73 and automatic writing, as a stimulus and model for

7oAndre Breton, "Lettres de Jacques Vache," Litterature, 7 (septembre 1919), 14; Andre Breton, "Comme dans un bois," L'Age du cinema, 4/5 (aoft-septembre 1951), 27.

71 Ibid. 72Andre Breton et Philippe Soupault, Les Champs magnetiques (Paris:

Au sans pareil, 1920). Excerpts were first published in their journal, Litterature, in 1919.

73Breton had become interested in Freud between 1916 and 1919, but Freud's works were not translated into French until 1920: Anna Balakian, Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute, rev. ed. (New York: Dutton, 1970), pp. 125-26.














































releasing the unexpected and the marvelous in the act of creation.

Early in part one, "La glace sans tain," there is a clear allusion to Breton's film-going practices in Paris:

On nous a fait visiter des manufactures de reves a bon marche et les magasins remplis de drames obscurs. C'etait un cinema magnifique ou les roles etaient tenus par d'anciens amis. Nous les perdions de vue et nous allions les retrouver toujours a cette meme place. Ils nous donnaient des friandises pourries et nous leur racontions nos bonheurs ebauches. Leurs yeux fixes sur nous, ils parlaient: peut-on vraiment se souvenir de ces paroles ignobles, de leurs chants endormis?

Nous leur avons donne notre coeur que n'etait qu'une chanson pile.

Near the end, in "Gants blancs," there is a degree of metamorphosis and bizarre imagery strongly reminiscent of Soupault's "poemes cinematographiques":

Les couloirs des grands h6tels sont deserts et la fumee des cigares se cache. Un homme descend les marches du sommeil et s'apergoit qu'il pleut: les vitres sont blanches....

Vers quatre heures ce jour-la un homme tres grand passait sur le pont qui unit les differentes iles. Les cloches ou les arbres sonnaient.

Even the title itself suggests that in the force field of attractions and repulsions that is Les Champs magnetiques the two poets were

trying to achieve the same kind of magnetizing power Breton had

experienced in the cinema.74 The influence of the cinema is less crucial to Breton's own

poetry than it is to his theory of poetry which was to dominate the Surrealist movement of the 1920s. His concept of the surrealist

image-which destroys the conventional relationships of the

ordinary world and fuses disparate elements into a new "sur-

reality"-is drawn equally from Reverdy's definition of the poetic image, his own study of Freud and dreams, and his experiences in the cinema.75 It is through the cinema that he came to see that

74Manuel Grossman and others are right in seeing the spirit of Dada in Les Champs magnetiques, but neither Breton nor Soupault were yet under the influence of Tzara or Picabia when they began their experiment as Grossman argues in Dada (New York: Pegasus, 1971), p. 143.

75 One of the first to note this connection was Marguerite Bonnet, "L'Aube de surrealisme et le cinema: attente et rencontre," Etudes cinematographiques, 38/39 (printemps 1965), 95.

































































































FRENCH AVANT-GARDE 1 105 FRENCH AVANT-GARDE 1 105 FRENCH AVANT-GARDE 1 105 FRENCH AVANT-GARDE 1 105 FRENCH AVANT-GARDE 1 105 FRENCH AVANT-GARDE 1 105 FRENCH AVANT-GARDE 1 105



"the free and unlimited play of analogies" implied extreme mobility and ceaseless transmutation. Poetry was an extension of life in being dynamic and always in transition, "an ever restless aspiration toward transformation."76 It is also probably from the cinema that he took the metaphor of light and electricity which

frequently appears in his theoretical writings77 as a means of

describing surrealist poetry:

It is, as it were, from the fortuitous juxtaposition of the two terms that a particular light has sprung, the light of the image, to which we are infinitely sensitive. The value of the image depends upon the beauty of the spark obtained; it is, consequently, a function of the difference of potential between the two conductors.78

Breton's theory of poetry as play is most evident in the early work of two other major poets and film enthusiasts of the Sur- realist movement-Peret and Desnos. Peret had joined the Litterature group in 1920, and his interest in film can be gathered from a scenario he wrote two years later, "Pulcherie veut une auto," probably the first such surrealist work to be published:79

attempting to escape from a burning building, Glouglou jumps on the belly of one of the kidnappers he has killed. As the man's body is swollen with the heat, it bursts, permitting the hero to use his intestines ("There are yards and yards of them and they stretch like rubber") to let the children down to the ground, through an open window. True, one of the children falls, and has to be dug out piece by piece from the hole he makes in the ground. But this being one of the "fairy-tales for grown-ups" Breton advocated, the pieces can be stuck together again with glue, just as the parts of Glouglou's body can be joined again when it breaks in two.80

A year earlier, in first announcing this hunger for meta-

morphosis, Peret had acknowledged its source in the cinema with

76Anna Balakian, "Metaphor and Metamorphosis in Andre Breton's Poetics," French Studies, 19, No. 1 (January 1965), 37.

77Mary Ann Caws, The Poetry of Dada and Surrealism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970), p. 70.

78Andre Breton, Manifeste du surrealisme (Paris: Editions Kra, 1924), trans. in Andre Breton: Manifestoes of Surrealism (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michi- gan Press, 1969), p. 37.

79Benjamin Peret, "Pulcherie veut une auto," Litterature, 10 (mai 1923), 17-23.

80J. H. Matthews, Surrealism and Film (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1971), p. 54.


















































































allusions to Aragon's 1918 essay on film decor and Soupault's "poemes cinematographiques":

Couper quatre cheveux en un Reflechissez-y bien reflechissez-y bien et sans

logique de crainte d'accidents Alors vous allez voir que tout sera change les objets animes auront des mouvements convulsifs votre fourchette dansera devant vos yeux le fox-trott du jour.81

It was to become the chief characteristic of his poetry:

As-tu senti la seve jaillir hors des arbres de paille et se repandant sur les fleuves les couvrir de canards Les canards des astres ne sont pas ceux de ma soeur car ma soeur est noire comme une huftre et de sa voix sortent des taupes et les taupes de ma soeur gardent leur secret.82

-and also his prose:

le toit de la grange se fendit sur toute sa longueur. Un drap blanc passa par l'ouverture et claqua au souffle d'un vent que je ne ressentais pas. Puis, lentement, il descendit jusqu'a terre. La terre a son tour s'ouvrit. Et je vis, suivant une ligne rigoureusement perpendiculaire, un petit poisson rouge descendre du toit en glissant le long du drap et s'enfoncer dans le sol. I1 fut suivi d'un second puis d'un troisieme. Enfin, leur nombre s'accrut aussi vite que leur permettait leur dimension et la rarefaction de l'air dans les hautes couches atmospheriques. Le vent s'enfla et la grange glissa sur le sol.83

More than any other surrealist poet, Peret realized Breton's concept of poetry as "free and unlimited play."

Through Peret, Desnos joined the Surrealist group in 1922 just as Fant6mas was chosen their number-one hero, the Hernani of the new movement.84 Their passion for the cinema was quickly shared by the young poet, and he would honor Fantomas and other

81 Benjamin Peret, "Bar pour bar fumoir pour fumoir," in Oeuvres completes (Paris: Le Terrain vague, 1969), I, 31, trans. in J. H. Matthews, Surrealist Poetry (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1969), p. 43.

82 Peret, "De la corne du sommeil," in Oeuvres completes, I, 48-49, trans. in Matthews, p. 45.

83Peret, La Brebis galante (Paris: Le Terrain vague, 1959), pp. 22-23, trans. in Balakian, Surrealism, op. cit., p. 154.

84Pierre Berger, Robert Desnos, nouv. ed. (Paris: Seghers, 1970), p. 26.


















































































film serials a year later in his first essay on the cinema85 and again ten years later in a radio-recitation, "Complainte de Fantomas."86 His first text written for the group's journal, Litterature, entitled "Penalites de l'enfer," revealed how rapidly Desnos assimilated the cinema's influence, especially through Soupault and Peret:

Je penetre [la chambre de Breton], la tete de Benjamin Peret est dans la glace. Je cours a l'ile deserte, une eruption volcanique l'a detruite et Benjamin Peret sur un petit mole me fait des signes et il lui pousse une barbe immense dans laquelle je m'embarrasse en essuyant mes pieds.... ... Benjamin Peret sur la route des floraisons chimiques. Pas assez vite cependant car un de ses bras, le gauche, resta dans l'espace audessus du quai. A cinq-cents kilometres Benjamin m'appelait encore pour que je le lui envoyasse.87

As Rosa Buchole has suggested, "Ce long recit se deroule comme un notation de reve, comme un scenario de film surrealiste: les mots s'enchainent aux mots, les episodes burlesques aux episodes fantasmagoriques, les images troublantes aux images insensees."88

A similar fluidity of images and actions marks the best of his poems written during this period. In "Rencontre" (1922), changes as sudden as those in Peret occur even within single lines:

Minuit ajoute une perle de fraise au collier de Madeleine et puis on ferme a deux battants les portes de la gare. Madeleine, Madeleine, ne me regarde pas ainsi; un paon sort de chacun de tes yeux. La cendre de la vie seche mon poeme. Sur la place deserte l'invisible folie imprime son pied dans le

sable humide. Le second boxeur se reveille et dit "J'ai eu bien froid."89

85Robert Desnos, [untitled], Paris-Journal (6 avril 1923), rpt. in Desnos, Cinema (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), pp. 95-97.

86"Donne en audition le 3 novembre 1933 ... (musique de Kurt Weill), au cours de 'Fantomas,' realisation radiophonique de Paul DeHarme." Berger, op. cit., pp. 137-46.

87 Desnos, "Penalites de l'enfer," Litterature, nouvelle serie, 4 (septembre 1922), 7-12.

88Rosa Buchole, L'Evolution poetique de Robert Desnos (Bruxelles: Palais des academies, 1956), pp. 37-38.

89Robert Desnos, "Rencontre," in Wallace Fowlie, ed., Mid-Century French Poets: Selections, Translations and Critical Notices (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1955), p. 206, trans. William Kulik in The Voice: Selected Poems of Robert Desnos (New York: Grossman, 1972), p. 20.






































































In "Destinee arbitraire" (1923), Desnos revels in the mirages and marvels of metamorphosis:

Bonheur tu n'es que cire a cacheter et je passe tel un feu follet. Un grand nombre de gardiens poursuivent un inoffensif papillon echappe de l'asile. II devient sous mes mains pantalon de dentelle et ta chair d'aigle 6 mon reve quand je vous caresse! 90

With Rrose Selavy (1923),91 Desnos began practicing the art of transformation on language itself.

During these few years following World War I, the cinema exerted a strong influence on the initial explorations and formula- tions of surrealism. Because of its unique features of mobility and

metamorphosis, the American cinema in particular became as important to the young poets as their interest in popular tales of fantasy and adventure, automatic writing, and dreams. All of these led to a new vision of the world they would label "surrealist." In their

poetry, it quickly manifested itself in "the creation of a whole universe of relationships between seemingly opposed objects and ideas...." 92 This theory of linking-by chance or provocation- aimed "at a revolution against things as we ordinarily see them."

Soupault, Aragon, Breton, even Cocteau-all agreed that the American cinema was a prime source of this revolution because it had made them look at things as if they were seeing them for the first time. Its influence gave their vision and that of their followers a degree of concreteness and fluidity it may not have had otherwise.

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90 Desnos, "Destinee arbitraire," in An Anthology of French Surrealist

Poetry, ed., J. H. Matthews (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1966), p. 85, trans. Kulik in The Voice, p. 23.

91 The first selection of these epigrammatic statements appeared in Litterature (decembre 1922).

92 Caws, op. cit., p. 30.








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French Avant Garde and Chaplin

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