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Embodied Cinematics & Poetry Susan McCabe. Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. x + 284 pp. $75.00
THE NEXUS between writings of certain modernist poets and the advent of cinema has attracted various angles of scholarly focus, such as the anthology titled Close Up 1927-1933: Cinema and Modernism, edited by James Donald, Anne Friedberg and Laura Marcus (see ELT, 43:4,2000,480-85). Susan McCabe now opens a further field of connection. Her ambitious, innovative study, Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film, discovers a range of analogies: literary, film, and psychoanalytic theory are brought to bear in expository analyses of poems together with consonant silent films. The grand shifts of earlytwentieth-century literary style and sensibility catalogued as "modernist" are predicated by McCabe to be artistically organic with the impact of cinema. Four poets are studied in detail, a chapter each given to Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, H.D., and Marianne Moore; Eliot and Pound enter the introductory picture. McCabe's bold juxtapositions of ideas, such as some of the films she examines in conjunction with the poets' textual processes, may startle the viewer/reader into unexpected insights.
McCabe emphasizes that Eliot's "dissociation of sensibility" integral to early-twentieth-century modernism is tied to the onset of the technological era designated by Walter Benjamin as "the age of mechanical reproduction."The human body is depicted in modernist poetry and in experimental film within a recurrent artistic theme of disjointednessof the body seemingly divided from will-comparable to repetitive movements seen in patients suffering from hysteria; such uncontrollable gestures often reveal an unconscious agenda of repressed forms of sexuality.
An overwhelming sense of fracture characterizes post-World War I culture. Newspapers and newsreels underscored physical and psychological disruption with photographic and filmic...