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On Some Limitations of the Definition of the Dispositive “Cinema”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 February 2021

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Summary

If we were Artists

We would not say the cinema

We would say the cine

But if we were old professors

from the provinces

We would say neither cinema nor cine

But cinematograph

Guillaume Apollinaire, excerpt from “Avant le cinéma,” 1917

At the conference at which this paper was presented, two participants made a reference to Guillaume Apollinaire without consulting each other beforehand. François Albera first pointed out that, according to the author of “The New Spirit and the Poets,” poets wanted to be able some day “to mechanize poetry as the world has been mechanized.” For my part, I projected an excerpt of the poem used here as an epigraph and straightforwardly titled “Before the Cinema.” No intention or planning, no machination should be read into this coincidence, which is first and foremost the result of chance.

Still, the coincidence has a certain necessity to it. Indeed, the cinema holds an essential place in the work of the French poet, as Francis Ramirez has shown in a particularly inspired article on the question:

Cinema long behaved like an illegitimate child, looking for fathers, finding godfathers. Among them, Guillaume Apollinaire. At a time when dominant artists, particularly in France, showed contempt for cinema, the poet adopted it and emphatically greeted the art of movement in what he called “the new spirit.”

In his poem (the one ending with the famous “My glass broke like a burst of laughter”), Apollinaire lists the variety of terms used during the period to refer to the cinema. In 1917, the vulgum pecus would have said “the cinema” whereas artists (the particular kind that are actors and actresses) would have preferred “the cine,” and “old professors from the provinces,” “the cinematograph.” For the record, here is the complete poem:

And tonight we will go

To the cinema

Artists who are they then

They are no longer the ones who cultivate the Fine Arts

They are not the ones who take care of Art

Poetic Art or music as well

The Artists are actors and actresses

Type
Chapter
Information
Cine-Dispositives
Essays in Epistemology Across Media
, pp. 161 - 178
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2015

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