The Film Poem: Lyric Poetry and the Origins of Documentary Film

Abstract

This dissertation considers the use of lyric poetry and lyricism as one of the originary frameworks of early documentary cinema. Through close analysis of both public and archival materials, I demonstrate how an array of influential filmmakers—among them Paul Strand, Charles Sheeler, John Grierson, Pare Lorentz, and Dziga Vertov—recognized lyric poetry as nonmimetic and nonnarrative—a form of epideictic encounter and display that (1) makes direct claims about the world as it (2) foregrounds the ethos and agency of the speaker. These filmmakers, active during the 1920s and 1930s, paired “actuality footage” with lyric intertitles that demonstrated to audiences the epideictic force of their images. In Manhatta (1921), Strand and Sheeler self-consciously matched images of downtown New York City with excerpts from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, an act that belies the influence of William Carlos Williams in light of the film’s overlapping channels of lyricized evidence and commentary. Grierson, a pioneering force in the British documentary movement, was himself an amateur poet whose lyrics and writings on poetry prefigure his documentary productions and later collaborations with W. H. Auden. Similarly, the poets and critics writing for the modernist magazine Close Up, among them Roger Burford and H.D., theorized a number of early documentary films as the first “film poems.” Each chapter considers the particular lyric traditions that influenced these early conceptions of documentary media. Although previous scholarship has theorized forms of “poetic documentary,” the present study considers some of the ways in which lyric poetry shaped the development of different modes, including more “expository” forms that are typically considered to be antithetical to lyric expression. As such, I argue that the epideictic force of documentary film is a likely product of the nascent genre’s early engagement with lyric poetry