The Cinema of Poetry - Softcover

passionate, deeply informed ... Sitney's style is at once erudite and accessible, and his insights into the works of these gifted artists are continually illuminating ... an elegantly crafted and carefully considered book. (W. W. Dixon, Choice)

P. Adams Sitney offers a monumental, enchanting account of poetry as cinema, turning the analogy upside-down, vividly and deftly tracing nuanced concepts of narrative versus lyric film, psychoanalysis, dreams, and social realities in European filmmakers as well as in cinema of the American avant-garde. Those familiar with Sitney's earlier 'visionary' scholarship will exult in the coming together of multiple strands; those unfamiliar, will be treated to a distilled, layered overview of a significant nexus in the history of film. (Susan McCabe, author of Cinematic Modernism)

The Cinema of Poetry probes the vital questions of poetic narrative and lyric filmmaking in Europe and the United States. Sitney holds film theory and biographical detail in eloquent balance and lets the films & filmmakers speak for themselves. It is as rare in film studies as in filmmaking to encounter the flame of early enthusiasms sustained and matured over decades as it is found in The Cinema of Poetry.-Robert Beavers, filmmaker

There is no other book that I know of that treats the cinema of poetry in both its European and American manifestations, and no other work that has offered the depth of insight into the European cinema of poetry that Sitney has. The Cinema of PoetryR is simply an outstanding piece of work-it is elegant, lucid, taut, and penetrating. (R. Bruce Elder, author of Harmony and Dissent: Film and Avant-garde Art Movements in the Early Twentieth Century)

Informed by the criticism of iconic filmmaker Pier Pasolini, The Cinema of Poetry offers spirited explorations of poetry's influence on classic films by Dimitri Kirsanoff, Ingmar Bergman, and Andrey Tarkovsky. It also highlights how avant-garde films made by Joseph Cornell, Lawrence Jordan, Jerome Hiler, Gregory Markopoulos, and others found rich, unexpected sources of inspiration in a diverse group of poets that includes Stephane Mallarme, Emily Dickinson, H.D., Ezra Pound, Robert Duncan, John Ashbery, and Aeschylus. Written with verve and panache, it represents the culmination of P. Adams Sitney's career-long fascination with the intersection of poetry, film, and the avant-garde.