25486149

Mallarm's Cinepoetics: The Poem Uncoiled by the Cinmatographe, 1893-98
Author(s): Christophe Wall-Romana

Source: PMLA, Vol. 120, No. 1, Special Topic: On Poetry (Jan., 2005), pp. 128-147
Published by: Modern Language Association
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f PMLA
Mallarme's Cinepoetics: The Poem Uncoiled

by the Cinematographe, 1893-98
CHRISTOPHE WALL-ROMANA
ON 28 DECEMBER 1895, THE LUMIERE CINEMATOGRAPHE

opened commercially in Paris.1 As expected, the new spectacle
of animated photography projected by the reversible Lumiere
camera proved perceptually entrancing and thus financially enticing.
A journalist taken by black-and-white footage of "[la] mer ... si re

muante" '[the] sea... so agitated' wrote that he saw it "coloree" 'in color'
(Rittaud-Hutinet and Rittaud-Hutinet 350). Georges Melies and two

other spectators each tried to buy the Cinematographe on the spot.
A month later, on 27 January 1896, seemingly unconnected to

this event, Stephane Mallarme could be found nailing up electoral
posters in the editorial offices of poetry journals, in literary cafes,
and at the Odeon theater. His friend Paul Verlaine had died on 8 Jan
CHRISTOPHE WALL-ROMANA is complet
ing a dissertation, entitled "French Cine
poetry: Unmaking and Remaking the

Poem in the Age of Cinema," in the De
partment of French at the University of
California, Berkeley. His work has ap
uary, leaving the honorific position of Prince of Poets vacant. Al

though this title had always been bestowed by acclamation, the circle
of Parisian poets to which they belonged decided?in support of the

"Third Republic of Letters" (Compagnon)?to stage an election in
stead. The platform posted by the front-runner, Mallarme, began:
peared in Le courrier du Centre Interna
Poetes,
tional d'Etudes Poetiques, Sites, Samuel
Dun geste, se concoit, a Theure?ou prestige materiel evanoui, helas!?
Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, and French

Studies Bulletin. He has translated works
by John Berger, Norbert Wiener, and

Philip K. Dick into French. His projects
include editing a collection on literary
criticism reconsidered through moving
image media and studies on French

impressionist cinema and on televisual
culture in new writing in French.
en lumiere pure se resout le fantome humain, autrefois leve sur le pavois,
de l'aede designe quel, dune presence reclamee des lors, doit primer
dans le respect et ladmiration, son front barre des unanimes palmes.
(Mondor, Vie 723)
Poets,
By a gesture, it may be conceived, at this hour?when, material pres
tige having vanished, alas!?in pure light is resolved the human ghost,
formerly lifted on the shield, of the designated bard who, his presence
128 ? 2005 BY THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA
i2o.i Christophe Wall-Romana 129

thereupon called for, must prevail in respect
and admiration, his forehead lined with unan
imous palms.
The translation is approximate because Mal

larme makes a show of his elliptical writing,
in which clauses can be arranged in several
configurations to allow for what he called

"la comprehension multiple" (CEuvres [1945]
283). By leaving it up to the reader to parse the
text, ironically in this case the electoral pro

gram, Mallarme intimates that virtual syn
tax?his poetic signature, that alone on which
he should "prevail"?is coextensive with the

reader. He thus defines his poetic economy
not as the private property of a prince (e.g.,
the pavois used to hoist a new Frank king),
but as respublica, public worth acknowledged
by the republican award of palms.2
What informs this subtext of poetic suf
frage is the virulent attack launched against
the symbolists around Mallarme in 1895-96

for their alleged obscurity, degeneration, and
decadent artificiality. Such accusations were is
sued from various quarters by the likes of Lev
Tolstoy, young Marcel Proust (a Mallarme ad

mirer nonetheless), and life-force enthusiasts
who partially read or misread Friedrich Nietz
sche, Walt Whitman, and Henri Bergson (De
caudin 29-57). Opposing what they perceived
as elitist decadence, they loudly propounded
an optimistic and populist vitalism. Mal

larme bridges this aesthetico-political divide
in the platform's most arresting image, "in
itself; it is motion recorded in the quick'; "la
mort cessera d'etre absolue ... la vie laissera

une marque indelebile" 'death will cease to be
absolute ... life will leave an indelible trace';
"on reproduit la vie" 'life is reproduced,'

they exulted (Rittaud-Hutinet and Rittaud
Hutinet 349-50). Their excitement sprang
from the same realization Mallarme insists
on, that the "material prestige" of reality is
now supplemented by film. Quite suddenly,
lifelike, animated projections rendered hu
man life posthuman.3 Cinema thereby imple
mented the lifelong obsession of Mallarme's
two masters, Edgar Allan Poe and Villiers de
ITsle-Adam: the dissolution of the material
barrier between life and death. Moreover, cin
ema enacted modernity's resolve to embrace

technology, and as a new mediation between
artifice and life it presented an unexpected so
lution to symbolism's resistance to mimesis.4
This essay documents the claim that Mal
larme, a keener observer of the technosocial
field than he has been given credit for,5 wrote
or planned experimental poems as cinematic

sublations of the page and the book, both in
Un coup de des (1897), one long strip of visu
ally montaged text, and in the project around
the notes for Le Livre (1895- ), a commercial
reading performance using electrical projec

tions. This statement may appear paradoxical:
Mallarme, the absolutist of pure verse, seeking
a prosthesis for poem, page, and book? Putting
metaphor for the soul but a multiple formula

tion referring also to the new age of cinema.
aside this absolutist myth, cogently debunked

by Henri Meschonnic, we may bring to bear
on the discussion the two poles of specularity
at play in Mallarme, according to Leo Bersani.
One pole is synoptic immobility, as a Hegelian
While clearly pointing to the afterlife of Ver
and orphic summation of the world; the other
pure light is resolved the human ghost."
The "pure light," I argue, is not only a
laine, Mallarme also wants to speak more
engages the flowing present of desire in the
generally of the "human," a term that was
"mobility of its images" (Bersani 11), as in La
now in need of redefinition. The two jour
derniere mode, the fashion magazine written

by Mallarme in 1874 ((Euvres [1945] 705-847).
nalists present at the 28 December inaugural

projection emphasized how film pushes back
the boundary of death. "C'est la vie meme,
c'est le mouvement pris sur le vif" Tt is life
This dualism betrays not so much a highbrow
lowbrow dialectic as the quest for a capa

cious and synthetic work that combines "la
130 Mallarme's Cinepoetics: The Poem Uncoiled by the Cinematographe, 1893-98 PMLA
comprehension multiple" and a direct engage
exemplifies precinema for our purposes, since
ment with material experience. With the advent
her choreographic innovations play an im
of free verse in the mid-1880s, new rhythmic

and visual patterns on the page tended to fore
portant role in Mallarme's theorizing poetry

as cinematic (Shaw 52-68; McCarren 113-71).
ground the corporeal, spatial, and temporal

Her dancing, imitated in early films, has re
immediacy of the poem.6 Cinema may have
cently been placed at the juncture of precin
evoked for Mallarme a potential integration of ema and early cinema (Iampolski; Gunning,
the artwork with sensorial experience and per
"Loie Fuller" and "New Thresholds"; Lista
formance, across page (2-D), folio (3-D), and
638-48 [filmography]).
reading time (4-D).7 In his single reference to
Mallarme learned of cinema from an
cinema, Mallarme characterized this principle
1893 article about Thomas Edison's Kineto
of integration as "deroulement"?unfolding,
uncoiling, unreeling, or unscrolling: a new to
page "Une visite chez Edison" 'Visiting Ed
pology for text and images.
After a detailed analysis of Mallarme's

cinema-like poetics, I briefly look at Walter
Benjamin's "moving script" and Jacques Der
rida's "spacing," both of which come tanta
scope. On 8 May, Le Figaro ran on the front

ison's Laboratory,' the earliest account of a
picture show in a leading French newspaper.
The author, Octave Uzanne, recounts how,

"sans voix, sans expression possible, presque
noncanonical poets), at a tangent to orga
sans croyances" 'voiceless, incapable of the

slightest expression, in sheer disbelief,' he
viewed the short movie of a Tyrolian male
dancer through the peephole of a Kineto
scope box (with a rotating cylinder). Uzanne
adds that these shots "reproduisent, avec
nized groups and avant-garde aesthetics. This

corpus is sufficiently extended and diverse to
toute l'expression de la vie et de l'acceleration

du mouvement, le geste humain methodique
warrant the name of cinepoetry.
ment enregistre" 'reproduce, with all the

expression of life and the acceleration of
lizingly close to a cinematic reading of Un

coup de des. In conclusion, I point to the large
corpus of experimental writings permeated

by the film apparatus (among canonical and
Mallarme and Early Cinema

Much has been written about Mallarme's fas
movement, the human gesture methodically

recorded.' We can be sure Mallarme read this
article, for three reasons. First, he was a regu
cination for the stage (dance, theater, mime;
lar subscriber and contributor to Le Figaro,
see Shaw), and recent work in early film
the main center-left, prosymbolist, and, later,
studies suggests that we may place his inter
Dreyfusard newspaper. Second, Uzanne was a

correspondent and close friend of Mallarme s;
est squarely in the heuristic perspective of

precinema. Precinema refers to the devices
and epistemological conditions of postpho

tographic vision and motion research that
converged with mass media expectations be
tween 1870 and 1900, resulting in new prod
ucts, practices, and spectacles as diverse as
along with Octave Mirbeau and Edouard

Manet, both men attended small mysterious
"diners de l'occulte" 'dinners of the occult'
held in 1890 (Mallarme, Correspondance 4:

94). Third, and crucially, Edison's laboratory
is the locus of Villiers de l'lsle-Adam's sym
(Schwartz; Mannoni, Great Art 320-415).
bolist novel-manifesto L'Eve future (1886), in

which Edison uses chemistry, chronophotog
raphy, and a "quatrieme etat de la ?Matiere?,
l'etat radiant" 'fourth state of "Matter," the
Loi'e Fuller's "serpentine dance," after 1892,
radiant state' (307) to instill life in a female
international fairs, Richard Wagner's operatic
light shows, comic strips, moving dioramas,

and celluloid and short-exposure film stock

automaton (or cyborg).8 Villiers, who died
of Reynaud's animated projections such as
Uzanne's closest friends and inspirers; Mal

larme and Uzanne exchanged letters about
(see "Mimique" [CEuvres (1945) 310]). In Au
in 1889, was among Mallarme's and also Pauvre Pierrot?a figure dear to Mallarme
the welfare of Villiers's widow.
gust 1894, a poem by Henri de Regnier, a

close friend and disciple of Mallarme's, was
Uzanne could hardly have visited Edison's
staged by Aurelien Lugne-Poe at the Theatre
laboratory without thinking of Villiers; he

probably made the visit because Villiers's fic
de l'CEuvre, with "fantocini" 'ghosts' mov
tion was about to become reality. Around the
of gauze' and "mimant les paroles pronon
time of his 1893 trip to New Jersey, Uzanne

may have discussed this invention with Mal
larme, who would have begun thinking about
how the cinema to come would affect litera
cees par les acteurs" 'mimicking the words

pronounced by actors' ("Theatre" 381). This
encounter of poetry and screen may be the
earliest attempt to remediate the poem with
ture; Uzanne quotes Edison's correct estimate
the cinematic apparatus, if shadow puppetry
that production was "dix-huit mois a deux

ans" 'eighteen months to two years' away.
With Verlaine's death so close on the heels
ing "derriere un voile de gaze" 'behind a veil
is not the sole influence.9
Mallarme and cinema cross paths on

23 April 1896, three months after his elec
tion as Prince of Poets. The back page of Le
of the inauguration of the Cinematographe,

Villiers's poetic prefiguration of cinema may
have assumed a new relevance for Mallarme.
Figaro of that day reads, "Grand succes hier,
Uzanne's shock at the cinematic "human ges
larme et pour Charles Morice. Dans sa serie:
ture" may be directly cited in the "gesture" that
au Theatre Mondain, pour Stephane Mal

Les Poetes francais, Charles Morice donnait
opens Mallarme's declaration that the "human
une lecture consacree au nouveau ?Prince
ghost" is transubstantiated into "pure light."
des Poetes?" 'Great success yesterday, at the
Cinema's transition from peephole (Ki
Theatre Mondain, for Stephane Mallarme
netoscope) to screen projection took shape the
and Charles Morice. In his series French Po
following year, in 1894. In November, articles

in La nature and Le monde illustre indicated
ets, Charles Morice gave a lecture on the new
Edison's plan to use "un grand ecran blanc" 'a
author of the column, Jules Huret, writes that
large white screen' with "un appareil de pro

jection" 'a projection apparatus' and even "un
the "Cinematographe-Lumiere" recorded "de

2 a 6 heures . . . plus de douze cents entrees"
'between two and six o'clock ... over twelve
phonographe" 'a phonograph' (Meusy 20).
"Prince of Poets."' Four paragraphs later, the
Emile Reynaud, the inventor of the Praxino

scope in 1877, pioneered the electrical projec
tion of hand-drawn, painted, and animated
images on the back of a transparent screen
at the Musee Grevin in October 1892. In No
hundred admissions' ("Courrier"). Huret

was also a correspondent and close friend
vember 1894, Arthur Meyer, the owner of the
me's transcribed interview (CEuvres [1945]
Musee Grevin and the newspaper Le gaulois,

asked Reynaud to start using "des projections
neous photography projections' (Meusy 39).
Mallarme met Meyer in December 1895 at the
866-72). In 1896 Huret gave regular news of

the Lumieres' cinema, its expanding venues,
and its competitors: the Kinetograph of Me
lies, the Isolatographe of the Isola brothers
(whose hall Camille Mauclair had tried to rent
latest (Mallarme, Correspondance 7: 311-12;
for a lecture on Mallarme in 1893 [Mallarme,
de la photographie instantanee" 'instanta
of Mallarme's and the author of an influen

tial literary survey in 1891 that helped define
symbolism, in no small part through Mallar
8: 140, 145), and Meyer may have told him Correspondance 6: 37-38]), and others.10 In a
May 1896 letter, Mallarme chides his friend

Paul Nadar, the son of Felix Nadar, for over
exerting himself (Correspondance 8:153): on
24 June 1896, Paul Nadar took a patent for
a reversible camera whose prototype he had
been feverishly constructing.11
We have no direct evidence that Mal
statement on cinema. In response to a sur

vey by Andre Ibels asking prominent writers
whether they favored illustrating books with
photography, Mallarme answered:

Je suis pour?aucune illustration, tout ce que
voque un livre devant se passer dans Pesprit du
lecteur; mais, si vous [employez] la photogra
larme ever went to the movies, although the

cinematic inspiration behind Un coup de des,
phic que n'allez-vous droit au cinematographe,
this poem of a radically new genre begun in

earnest in 1896, strongly invites us to think
texte, maint volume, avantageusement.15
dont le deroulement remplacera, images et
he did.12 A work without precedent?the
I am in favor of?no illustration, since all that
hallmark of radical modernist experimental
a book evokes must take place in the readers
ism?it was published in April 1897, in the

new trilingual journal Cosmopolis. In late
April and early May, several notices about
Cosmopolis and Mallarme's poem came out
in the press,13 including one in Le journal on
4 May 1897 (Marchal 447-52)?a fateful day

in the history of early cinema.
On that day, the film projector in a tent

of the Bazar de la Charite ignited into a fire
ball, killing 128 spectators in a few minutes,
mostly women of high society (Meusy 53-62).
Commentators wondered whether this disaster
would bring about the end of cinema. Indeed,
sales plummeted, but in part they did because
programs stayed the same too long (60). Be
tween 5 May and 14 May, Mallarme wrote two
sets of letters: to several friends (Jean-Francois
Raffaelli, Jose-Maria de Heredia, Regnier)

whose wives or daughters were injured in the
fire14 and to journalists and friends who re
acted to and publicized Un coup de des (Paul

Megnin, Andre Gide). The poem was then be
mind; but, if you [use] photography, why not
go straight to the cinematograph, whose un

reeling [unfolding] will replace, images and
text, many a volume, advantageously.
Alone among the twenty-four writers sur
veyed (including Emile Zola, Rachilde,
Georges Rodenbach, Uzanne), Mallarme men

tions cinema?then certainly at its most un
popular. Ibels finds this mention sufficiently
noteworthy in the 1898 introduction to the
published survey to draw a pointed compari
son between the "cinematographe" and "le

Livre" 'the Book' (101).16
The term deroulement denotes the tempo
ral unfolding of events, as well as a mechanical
operation of circular unrolling. This dual de

notation, abstract and concrete, temporal and
technological, is crucial for Mallarme's cine
poetics.17 The Cosmopolis editor's preface to
Un coup de des, actually written by Mallarme,
informs the reader, "Une espece de leitmotiv ge
neral qui se deroule constitue l'unite du poeme:
ing printed by Didot for the edition planned by
des motifs accessoires viennent se grouper au
the publisher Vollard. On 10 June, Mallarme
tour de lui" 'A sort of general leitmotiv that

unfolds constitutes the poem's unity: accessory
wrote two more letters, to his disciples Regnier
and Robert de Montesquiou, who fought a duel

motifs are grouped around it' (CEuvres [1998]
over false (and homophobic) allegations that
392). In directly pitting cinematic "unfolding"
Montesquiou had escaped the fire by wielding against Wagner's cultic exploitation of the leit
his cane (Correspondance 9: 224-25).
motiv ("Richard Wagner" [CEuvres (1945) 541,
On 31 June 1897, on the heels of this
loaded intertwining of cinema with his pri

vate and literary life, Mallarme wrote his sole
546]), Mallarme appeals to the fin de siecle epis

temology of deroulement as a new dimension of
multiplicity and virtuality for his poetics.
12 o. i Christophe Wall-Romana 133

Unfolding, Unfurling, Uncoiling,
Unrolling, Unreeling, Unscrolling

The terms in French equivalent to those in the
heading?deroulement, dtpliement, deploie

ment, developpement, debobinage?denote
centrifugal motion and connote technological
advances culminating in the 1890s. Rotational

motion is the basic translation offeree in ro
tors and motors of trains, trams, automobiles,
and plants powering such electrical devices that
implement modernization as the telegraph,

cinema, and telephone. As Mary Ann Doane
reminds us in The Emergence of Cinematic
Time, according to the second law of thermo
dynamics, entropy (lit. "turn inward") increases
with the radiating propagation of equilib

rium?that is, the centrifugal dissipation of
energy or the flattening of difference (115-17).
Mechanical and theoretical rotation is thus co
tion restreinte" 'Restricted Action' (1895),

for instance, Mallarme muses on whether
words could rival the bicycle in satisfying the
younger generation's "souci d'extravaguer du

corps" 'yearning to evade the body.' He pre
sents the bicycle as an entrancing device offer
ing "la monotonie, certes, d'enrouler, entre les
jarrets, sur la chaussee, selon l'instrument en

faveur, la fiction d'un eblouissant rail continu"
'the monotony of reeling, between one's calves,
on the roadway, according to the instrument

in favor, the fiction of a blindingly continuous
rail' (CEuvres [1945] 369). How does writing

measure up ii eblouissant means "blinding" or
"mesmerizing" but also "beautiful" and "re
vealing"? Does the blindness and insight of de
roulement create a new sense of continuity? Is
not cinematic intermittence just such a fiction
of continuity? Can the visual poem's alternat
extensive with modernization and modernist
ing blanks and text mimic, or at least give a
epistemology, binding together a "hybrid net

work" (Latour 6-11) of relations among
sense of, this mesmerizing fiction of continu
forms of energy: steam, gas combustion,
electricity, X-ray, human muscle

locomotion and reproduction devices: train,
phonograph, camera, radio, typewriter,
bicycle, automobile, cinema, airplane

mechanical motions and patterns: rotation,
cam ellipsis, spiral, vortex, helix,
electrical circuitry
psychological and corporeal states: fatigue,
neurosis, bodily proximity, sexual
orientation, hypnosis, attention and
distraction, depression, shock18
The question for Mallarme's experimental
poetics is partly where to locate writing, po
etry, and the Book in this new continuum of
force, apparatus, form, and affect. Friedrich
Kittler's Gramophone, Film, Typewriter dem
onstrates the broad entanglements of mod

ernist writers with emerging technologies.
Mallarme's technological interests, which

Kittler addresses unevenly,19 appear to reach
the foundations of poetry and poetics. In "L'ac
ity? These are Mallarme's tacit probings.
From various horizons of the 1890s, other
precinema thinkers also sought to graph?

write, draw, or trace?this new continuous
materiality through the notion of deroulement:
Henri Bergson with the analysis of duration,
Etienne-Jules Marey with chronophotogra

phy, and Lo'ie Fuller with choreography. Let us
briefly examine how each can help us under

stand Mallarme's cinematic experimentation.
With Essai sur les donnees immediates de
la conscience (Time and Free Will: An Essay on
the Immediate Data of Consciousness [1889])
and Matiere et memoire 'Matter and Mem

ory' (1896), Bergson launched a Copernican
revolution by exposing qualitative duration
as the irreducible ground of any unification
of apperception. In the concluding words of
the Essai, psychological states "se deroulent
dans le temps, ils constituent la duree" 'unfold
in time; they constitute duration' (146). The
point is that these states are coextensive with
one another and dynamic, thus unquantifi

able. Rather than nondiscrete concepts, they
are intensities akin to "un fil enroule, comme
With Marey it is the opposite: he values
un ressort" 'a wire coiled up like a spring' (7),
mechanical process over agency. Marey's
a feel more than an image. Later he defined in

tuition as "comme la tension d'un ressort" Tike
1891 innovation over Eadweard Muybridge's

multiple cameras and Pierre Janssen's photo
graphic gun was the use of a continuous film
the tension of a spring,' in the penultimate sen
tence oiLapensee et le mouvant 'Thought and
Mobility' (1432). Kinesthetic coiling and un

coiling inform numerous key notions in Berg
son, including the exceptionality of human life
in L'evolution creatrice 'Creative Evolution':
[L]a vie apparait globalement comme une

onde immense qui se propage a partir d'un
centre et qui, sur la presque totalite de sa cir
conference, s'arrete et se convertit en oscil
lation sur place: en un seul point l'obstacle a

ete force, 1'impulsion a passe librement. C'est
cette liberte qu'enregistre la forme humaine.
[L]ife appears on the whole as an immense
wave that is propagated from a center and

that, on the quasi-totality of its circumfer
ence, stops and converts itself into static os
cillations: at only one point was the obstacle
breached and the impulsion allowed to pass
freely through. The human form registers
strip that recorded, separately but on the same
medium and thus with quantifiable time in

tervals, "une serie d'images photographiques
pour representer les phases successives d'un
phenomene" 'a series of photographic im

ages representing the successive phases of a
phenomenon' (123), his definition of chrono
photography. Marey's mechanical talent lay
in making compatible two opposite motions
of the film. On the one hand, he needed to en
sure "la regularity de l'enroulement et du de
roulement" 'the regularity of the rolling and
unrolling' of the off reel and on reel (137). On
the other hand, it was imperative that "la pel
licule se deroule d'un mouvement saccade"

'the film unrolls with an intermittent mo
tion,' so that it stops when taking the shot,
moving only in between takes (135). This in

termittence allowed not only the stroboscopic
recording
of motion but also, crucially, its
this freedom. (720)
synthesis?that is, its projection in real time.
The central intuition of duration as freedom The two-stroke uncoiling of the filmstrip for
both recording and projecting is the sine qua
involves a modern (and modernist) primacy
non condition for Edison's 1894 Kinetograph
of the active present, as temporal synthesis,
and the Lumieres' 1895 Cinematographe
over the past. Matiere et memoire indicates
(Mannoni, Great Art 320-63, 395).
this idea painstakingly: "1 'orientation meme
de notre vie psychologique [est un] veritable
deroulement d'etats ou nous avons interet a
regarder ce qui se deroule, et non pas ce qui
est entierement deroule" 'the very orienta
tion of our psychological life [is a] veritable
unfolding of states amid which our interest
focuses on what actually unfolds and not on
what is entirely unfolded' (291). The subtle
contrast between the present reflexive (se
derouler) of process and agency?the hu
Marey was motivated by a broader
project, according to Francois Dagognet's

Etienne-Jules Marey: La passion de la trace
'Etienne-Jules Marey: A Passion for Tracing':
rendering motion visible and legible?that is,
quantifiable (62-73). From graphing blood

and pulmonary pressure to finding the precise
pattern of horse or human steps or of wing

beats in birds or flies, Marey developed appa
ratuses tracing organic motion, according to a
man?and the transitive past (est deroule) of method he theorized in La methode graphique
dans les sciences experiment ales et princi
reified result shows the crucial nuance Berg
son invested in the contrastive senses of the
palement en physiologie et en medecine 'The
word deroulement.
Graphic Method in Experimental Sciences

What is intriguing in Marey's and Berg
and Principally in Physiology and Medicine'

(1878). Trained as a doctor, he saw corporeal
motion as inherently discontinuous, a series
ure to stay on either side of the divide between
of jerks, falls, and breaks of different cadences
human and mechanical. Bergson discounts
in "1 animal-machine" (Dagognet 37), in di

rect contrast, according to Dagognet, to vi
talists such as Bergson, who insisted on the
unanalyzability of life as elan vital. Dagognet
interprets Marey as producing a representa
tion of the neuromotor unconscious, "fait de
cinema's inhuman unreeling only to appeal to
rythmes, de pulsions sourdes et de flux qui
erless biped" quip, defines the human.21 The
parcourent la machine corporelle ... bref

l'ecriture automatique de la Nature meme"
'made of rhythms, of inchoate pulsions and
fluxes that traverse the corporeal machine
... in short, the automatic writing of nature
itself (102). For Bergson, however, any repre
sentation of life as a discontinuous mechani
cal process is a simulation and a falsification,
especially cinema's chronophotography:

C'est parce que la bande cinematographique
se deroule, amenant, tour a tour, les diverses
son's use of deroulement is their common fail
the uncoiling of intuition, while Marey, reject
ing elan vital, finds the technical inspiration

for rolling and unrolling the filmstrip in an el
lipsoid cam whose two-stroke motion mimics

the human gait, which, since Aristotle's "feath
synthesis of human and mechanical deroule

ment was achieved or, rather, performed by a
third innovator, Loi'e Fuller.
Mallarme saw Fuller's celebrated serpen

tine dance during the 1892-93 season of the
Folies-Bergeres. Hiding her body under over
size robes and veils and using prosthetic arm

extenders,22 Fuller invented a dance whose
aesthetic pleasure devolves from the dissolu
tion of the human body?and its gait?into

pure kinetic patterns of light and color. Mal
photographies de la scene a se continuer les
larme was fascinated by dance and pantomine,
unes les autres, que chaque acteur de cette

scene reconquiert sa mobilite_Le procede
both of them temporal rather than spatial art
a done consiste, en somme, a extraire de tous
omy of the arts. Traditionally, poetry was

associated with music, thought to be the para
les mouvements propres a toutes les figures un
mouvement impersonnel, abstrait et simple.

... Tel est l'artifice du cinematographe. Et tel
est aussi celui de notre connaissance. (753)
forms in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's dichot
digmatic temporal art. But Mallarme claimed

that the music of his time was Wagnerian and
that Wagner's operas relied on language and
Because the cinematographic strip unfolds,
myth deriving from poetry and thus could not
causing the different photographs of the
represent a new paradigm for it. Dance, pan

tomime, and very early cinema, on the other
hand, were wordless arts of time with a po
scene to prolong one another in succession,

each actor in the scene reconquers his or her
mobility.... The process thus consists, in

short, in extracting from all the movements
that are specific to all the figures an imper
sonal motion, abstract and simple_This is

the artifice of the cinematograph. And so too
is it that of our cognition.
tential to renew poetry. Devoid of narration,

melodrama, supporting cast, or decor but us
ing complex arrangements of mirrors, electri
cal lighting, and even a radium-tipped dress,

Fuller's dance exemplified in his eyes not just
kinesthetic artistry but also the spectacle of the
Neuro- optical synthesis studies having only

just begun, Bergson is unable to read cinema as
other than a mechanical instance of Zeno's par
human in the new materiality, what he called
"un accomplissement industriel" 'an indus
adox (spatializing movement), thus a false no
trial accomplishment,' fusing "[des] nuances

veloces" 'nuances of velocity' and "passions...
tion of duration invented by our cognition.20
prismatiques" 'prismatic ... passions' into a
"fantasmagorie oxyhydrique" 'oxyhydric phan
oddly sibilant alexandrine of Un coup de des:
tasmagoria' ("Les fonds dans le ballet" 'Foun

dations in Ballet' [CEuvres (1945) 307,308]).
"insinuation simple / au silence enroulee"
Already in the 1887 "Crayonne au thea

tre," Mallarme had reflected on the projec
tive corporeality of dancing. The dancer,
he wrote, retains her "feminine apparence"
'feminine appearance,' while also disappear
ing into a kind of "impersonnalite" 'imper
sonality' when embodying the "objet mime"
This kinesthetic image lying at the geometric
'mimed subject matter' of her dance. Between
the corporeal woman and the incorporeal

mime lies the crux or "point philosophique"
'philosophical point' of the dance, at which
she "deroule notre conviction en le chiffre
de pirouettes prolonge vers un autre motif"
'unfolds our conviction in a cipher of pirou
ettes prolonged toward another motif.' The
ballet, which Mallarme termed "allegorique,"
relies on the efficacy of kinesthetic transfer
ence: the dancer's body evinces a sense of

movement in the spectator, whose own em
bodiment is revealed?moved (296). In the
1893 "Les fonds dans le ballet," about Fuller,
Mallarme similarly celebrates "la solution

qu['elle] deploie avec l'emoi seul de sa robe"
'the solution [she] unfurls with the sole emo
tion of her dress' (308). Again, the solution
is a dissolution through movement. In both

cases, the female dancer instills in Mallarme
a sensorial uncoiling experienced as both in
ner body feeling and outer visual movement.
This projection through deroulement suggests
to him a "poeme degage de tout appareil du

scribe" 'poem free of any scribal apparatus'
yet not a disembodied poetics, since it pro
ceeds through "une ecriture corporelle" 'cor
poreal writing' (304). A similar kinesthesis is
found in the 1895 "Le mystere dans les lettres"
'Mystery in Literature,' where the Book is an

imated by "enroulements transitoires ... en
argumentation de lumiere" 'transitory coils
... in argumentation of light' (385). The ara
besques of "corporeal writing" uncoil visually
and aurally?as in the subtly redundant and
'simple insinuation / coiled around silence.'

center of the poem acts as its motor, bracketed
between "comme si /... / comme si" 'as if /
... / as if' (466-67)?two electrodes generat

ing its alternating current of text and blanks.
The deroulement of dance like music in
"Crayonne au theatre" suggests that Mallar

me's poetics already functions in the (meta
phoric) model of chronophotography:
Seul principe! et ainsi que resplendit le lustre,
c est-a-dire lui-meme, Texhibition prompte,

sous toutes les facettes, de quoi que ce soit et
notre vue adamantine, une ceuvre dramatique
montre la succession des exteriorites de Facte
sans quaucun moment garde de realite et quil
se passe, en fin de compte, rien. (296)
Unique principle! and as the chandelier

shines, that is to say itself, the quick display,
under all its facets, of anything whatsoever
and our diamond-like vision, a dramatic
work shows the succession of an act's exteri

orities so that no moment remains real and
nothing, in the end, happens.
This 1887 formulation of dance as glass op

tics ("luster" [lustre], "facets," "diamond-like
vision"), optical motion ("shines," "quick dis

play," "succession of an act's exteriorities"),
and performance ("display," "dramatic work,"
"act," "happens") anticipates the preface of Un
coup de des, which develops this chronopho
tographic model into a fully cinematic theory
of poetic composition.
We can now turn to the preface's key sen
tence (I italicize the most likely main clause
for clarity):
Le papier intervient chaquefois quune image,
d elle-meme, cesse ou rentre, acceptant la suc
cession d'autres et, puisqu'il ne sagit pas,

ainsi que toujours, de traits sonores reguliers
ou vers?plutot, de subdivisions prismatique
de l'idee, Vinstant deparaitre et que dure leur

concours, dans quelque mise en scene spiritu
elle exacte, cest a des places variables, pres ou
loin du fil conducteur latent, en raison de la
vraisemblance, que s'impose le texte.
(CEuvres [1945] 455)
Paper intervenes each time an image, of its

own accord, ceases or withdraws, accepting
the succession of others and, since it is a mat
ter not, as usual, of regular sound features or
verse?rather, of prismatic subdivisions of the

idea, in the instant of appearing and so long as
their concourse lasts, in some exact spiritual

staging, it is at variable places, near to or far
from the latent conducting wire, because of

verisimilitude, that the text imposes itself.
The "succession" combined with "prismatic

subdivisions of the idea" corresponds to
chronophotography's "successive phases of
a phenomenon" and to the musical-balletic
"succession of an act's exteriorities." More
over, the play of "image" and "text" directed
by "some exact spiritual staging" at "variable
places" recalls rather pointedly Mallarme's

statement on cinema. In it, we will recall, the
book's virtuality ("all... must take place in

the reader's mind") is as if sublated by the
play of images and text in cinema.23 The re
semblance between the preface of Un coup de
des and the declaration on cinema is not for
tuitous. Two recently published drafts of the
preface suggest that Mallarme conceived it in
close parallel with his statement on cinema.
On cinema, he writes, in June 1897:
... mais, si vous employez la photographic que
n'allez-vous droit au cinematographe, dont le
deroulement remplacera, images et texte, maint
volume, avantageusement. (emphasis added)
... mais si, pour quelque motif elle [la parole]
requiert le papier, depossede de sa fonction

originelle de presenter des images, alors ne
doit-elle pas remplacer celles-ci a sa facon,
idealement etfictivement.
... or que dans un cas elle [la parole] requiere
la blancheur du papier, depossede celui-ci de
sa fonction de surface ou presenter unique
ment a l'oeil des images, alors la parole ne doit
elle pas remplacer celles-ci a sa facon, moins
tangiblement par un texte ou litter airement.
(CEuvres [1998] 403; emphasis added)

... but if, for some reason it [speech] requires
paper, devoid of its original function of show
ing images, then should it not replace them in
its own way, ideally and fictionally.
... whereas it [speech] might require the pa

per's whiteness, itself devoid of its function of
surface or presenting solely to the eye images,
then should not speech replace them in its

own way, less tangibly by a text or literarily.
With the mention, elsewhere in the preface,
of the "avantage ... litteraire" 'literary ...

advantage' of this new poetics of Un coup de
des (CEuvres [1945] 455), there is little doubt
that deroulement in the manner of the cin
ematograph constitutes a new literary advan
tage Mallarme was experimenting with in Un
coup de des and even more performatively in
his notes on Le Livre, a sketchy project of po
etic spectacle left unfinished at his death.
Cinepoetics of Le Livre
For deroulement to remediate in Mallarme's
poetics not just the cinematic but cinema per
se, it must apply to the projection of text. We
need not wait for 1892 for Mallarme to discover
... but, if you use photography, why not go
screen projection (at the Musee Grevin, as men
straight to the cinematograph, whose unfold

ing will replace, images and text, many a vol
tioned earlier), since in 1882 Villiers published

his Contes cruels 'Cruel Tales,' which Mallarme
ume, advantageously.
admired (Villiers de l'lsle-Adam, Contes 8) and
In two drafts of the preface of Un coup de

des, he writes, early in 1897:
which includes a tale titled "L'affichage celeste"

'Celestial Billboard.' It is a futuristic satire about
night-sky advertising with a powerful electrical
lamposcope, "le projet lumineux d'utiliser les

vastes etendues de la nuit, et d'elever, en un mot,
le ciel a la hauteur de l'epoque" 'a luminous proj

ect of using the vast expanses of the night, and
raising, to coin a phrase, the sky to the height
of the era' (91).24 Curiously, when describing

his first impression of Un coup de des in 1897,
Paul Valery echoes Villiers's projective fancy

almost term for term: "il me semblait mainte
nant d'etre pris dans le texte meme de l'univers
silencieux_Ou Kant, assez naivement, peut
performative and mechanical: "II faut que d'un

coup d'oeil par la succession des phrases... tout
apparaisse" 'In one glance through the succes
sion of sentences ... everything must appear'
(CEuvres [1998] 562 ["Livre" 47B]). Words are
no longer simulacral projections of archetypes;
instead, contra Plato's idealism, projected

words give the Book its substance of light:
Defaire idee en livre

son mecanisme operateur la
etre avait cru voir la Loi Morale... [Mallarme]
lTdee y est visible la cest net
a essaye, pensai-je, d'elever enfin une page a la

puissance du ciel etoile" 'it seemed to me now
lueur en titres transparence (595 [141])
that I was caught in the very text of the silent
universe-Where Kant, rather naively, per
Undoing idea as book

its operating mechanism there
haps, thought he saw the Moral Law ... [Mal
the Idea in it is visible there it is clear
larme] tried, I thought to myself, to raise at last
glow within titles transparence
apage to the power of the star-studded sky (626).
It is worth noting that 1898 marks the debut of
It is possible that the last line refers directly to
outdoor film shows: a screen was placed at the
cinematographic titles.
ice rink of the Palais des Glaces for night projec

tion, while the Lumiere brothers and Melies be
The notes for Le Livre, a project Mal
gan projecting advertisements on street screens
larme began in 1893 and worked on earnestly

in 1895, amount to a detailed if sketchy re
(Crafton 244; Meusy 72-73; Sadoul 256).
configuration of the book through a read
Although the preface of Un coup de des
and synoptic whole, the spectatorial exegesis
ing performance that, unnoticed by Jacques

Scherer and other commentators, closely re
sembles a cinematographic projection.25 The
similarities are striking.
First, the performance is structured as a
"seance," which is double and directed by an
"operateur" 'operator' (618-19 [192A]). Seance
and operateur are the exact terms used for,
respectively, the cinematographic projection
takes place. In 1895, in "Le mystere dans les

lettres," Mallarme wrote of "[l]es mots ... a
dual, reversible function of a camera-projector
proposes "une vision simultanee de la Page" 'a

simultaneous vision of the Page' as a kind of
projective background for the poem, the po

em's central inspiration is "l'espacement de la
lecture" 'the spacing of reading,' reflecting "la
mobilite de l'ecrit" 'the mobility of writing'

(CEuvres [1945] 455). Between motile words
mainte facette" 'words ... with many a facet'
and the projectionist or camera operator.26 The
perceived by "l'esprit, centre de suspens vibra
brings a crucial technological implication to

"la double seance" (559,614,619 [132A, 184A,
toire" 'the spirit, center of vibratory suspen
192A]), which Derrida famously read as a met
sion,' as "projetes, en parois de grotte, tant que
onym of deconstruction in La dissemination.
dure leur mobilite avant extinction" 'projected,
Second, the seance relies explicitly on elec
on cave walls, as long as their mobility lasts ...

before extinction' (386). The reference to Plato's
trically projected images. Electricity, used by

Wagner and Fuller, materializes for Mallarme
the new condition of poetry as fictive sub
cave is citational and metaphoric. In the notes

on Le Livre, the projective poetics is by contrast
stance.27 In "Ballets," he calls for

je ne sais quel impersonnel ou fulgurant regard
absolu, comme l'eclair qui enveloppe... la dan
seuse d'Edens, fondant une erudite electrique
a des blancheurs extra-charnelles de fards, et
et deux etres a la fois oiseau
et parfum ? semblable aux deux d'en
haut... (956 [21A])
en fait bien Letre prestigieux recule au-dela de
the electrical arabesque
toute vie possible. (CEuvres [1945] 306-07)

I know not what impersonal or fulgurant
absolute gaze, such as the flash that envelops
... the Edens dancer, infusing an electrical

starkness into the extracarnal whites of face
powder, and makes her indeed the prestigious
being receding beyond any possible life.
lights up behind ? and the two
veils
? a kind of sacred tearing of the
veil, orchestra ? or tears ?

and the two beings at once bird
and perfume ? akin to the two from
Mallarme sees electricity as the ideal lighting

for performance because it preserves the het
erogeneity of its artifice. In Le Livre, he writes
of the operator that "il a vu clair, la lueur electr.
a ete son esprit" 'he saw clearly, the electr. glow
was his spirit' (CEuvres [1998] 582 ["Livre"

110A]). The preface of Un coup de des mentions
a "fil conducteur latent" 'latent conducting

wire.' Third, in this electrical poetic sentience,
Mallarme's claims are rigorously indistin

guishable from those of Edison, the Lumiere
brothers, or early film critics (such as Uzanne).
up there ...
The context of this passage is neither a play
set nor a screen projection exactly; rather, it
is a theatrical stage with mobile veils used as

screens: "rideau dioramique s'est ap[p]rofondi
? ombre de plus en plus forte" 'dioramic

curtain deepened ? stronger and stronger
shadow' (554 [24A]). Mallarme is thinking
of the use of an image-projection device to
gether with a dance or pantomime perfor
mance. In 1896 cinematographic projections

His performance, like cinema, brings life back
combined with still shots were used onstage
to the frozen punctum of photography:
for the first time, in La biche au bois 'A Doe
purete lumiere electr ?
? le volume, malgre 1'im
in the Woods.'28 Fifth, early films were hand

cranked, and operators utilized this feature to
pression fixe, devient par ce jeu, mobi
heighten dramatic effect by starting the pro

jection slowly, so that a still seemed to come
le ? de mort il devient vie (1046 [191 A])

purity electr light ?
? the volume, despite the fixed im

pression, becomes with this play, mo
bile ? from death it becomes life
Fourth, the projection constitutes a screen in

the most cinematic passages of the notes:
to life, and by slowing down or accelerat

ing?even reversing?the film antirealistically
(Gunning, "New Thresholds" 95). The preface
to Un coup de des appeals to the same visual
mobility "d'accelerer tantot et de ralentir le
mouvement" 'to accelerate at times and to

slow down the movement' of reading (CEuvres
[1945] 455). Among films shown backward was
l'arabesque electrique
s'allume derriere ? et les deux
Ecriture a Venvers 'Reverse Writing' (Lumiere
no. 42, 1896 [Sadoul 126]), a single shot of

writing erasing itself?a filmic double seance
voiles
? sorte de dechirure sacree du
voile, orchestre ?ou dechire ?
of sorts, since the filming of the act of writing

is shown only as the writing trace is undone.29
Sixth and finally, Mallarme conceived of the
140 Mallarme'sCinepoetics: The Poem Uncoiled by the Cinematographe, 1893-98 PMLA
performance of Le Livre as public, commercial,
repetitive, highly profitable, and containing

advertisements?which are mentioned three
times (CEuvres [1998] 606, 612, 622 ["Livre"

169A, 182, 201A]). His entrepreneurial drive
is unambiguous: "operation financiere pure a
travers le livre sinon mil" 'pure financial opera
tion through the book otherwise nothing' (594
[139A]). Moreover, his predicted receipts from
the seances compare in magnitude with the

staggering revenues of cinema's first year.30
I believe that in the project of Le Livre
Mallarme contemplated basing a popular

spectacle on mechanized reproducibility,
reaping large financial benefits, and putting a
Cinematographe-like apparatus at the service

of poetry. I extrapolate from Jacques Ranciere's
reading of Mallarme's late politico-aesthetic

project in Mallarme: La politique de la sirene.
For Ranciere, Mallarme envisaged the poem's
performance as a rebirth of social participa
tion, the poem performing nothing but its own
production, in a Hegelian fusion of the real

and the ideal. Nothing would result from the
performance?no social mystification, no new
Wagnerian myth?but a new collective origin
countersigned by the power of poetry, a power
desacralized with money and thus able to mobi
lize without danger mass economic realities and
dreams (62,98-108). Cinepoetics, however, pre

cludes a Hegelian "poem about nothing" (106),
since the materiality of the apparatus and the
technological contamination of the sensorial

experience of viewing or reading remain inte
gral to cinepoetics. Mallarme would have found
in cinema's sensorial attraction and electrically
has been so thoroughly missed by critics and

whether that oeuvre led to cinepoetic experi
ments by other poets. As to our first question,
the journal Cosmopolis had a small circula

tion, and the Vollard edition of Un coup de
des never saw the light of day?although

Valery, Gustave Kahn, and others received
full sets of proofs (Mallarme, Correspondance
9: 172). Only in 1912 was any part of Un coup
de des published in a book: a page appeared

in Albert Thibaudet's volume on Mallarme
(Boschetti 178), at about the time Apollinaire
began to think of his "ideogrammes lyriques"
'lyrical ideograms' (qtd. in Boschetti 176),

later renamed Calligrammes. The reception
of Un coup de des between 1897 and 1912 re
mains a complete puzzle. As for cinema, only
around 1910-11 did it take on again for writ
ers some of the artistic promise Mallarme had
divined in it.31
One critic came close to intuiting Mallar

me's cinepoetics: Walter Benjamin. Without
knowing the financial calculations of Le Livre
(published in 1957), Benjamin punned on Mal
larme as an accountant. By titling a section in
One-Way Street "Bucherrevisor," or "auditor
of [accounting] books" (Missac 30), Benja
min makes of Mallarme a reenvisioner of the

Book, thereby explicitly granting him a place
among thinkers of mass media: Mallarme

"was in the 'Coup de des' the first to incorpo
rate the graphic tensions of the advertisement
in the printed page," his innovations being in

"pre-established harmony with all the decisive
events of our times in economics, technology,
page into a public performance of the deroule
and public life" (Benjamin 77). For Benjamin,

nonetheless, Mallarme's vanguardism in the
technosphere stops short of remediating in
dustrial practices or devices into a subversive
ment of modernity's new materiality.
art form. Yet when Benjamin suggests as an ex
Cinepoetics after Mallarme
of three-dimensional writing" (78), a textual

equivalent of photo flip-books, he stumbles on
animated projection, as I reconstruct them, an
apparatus uniquely capable of translating po

etry's virtual syntax and the blank space of the
ample that "the card index marks the conquest
If cinepoetics is so central to Mallarme's late
a connection made by Mallarme, for whom the
experimental oeuvre, we might wonder why it
Book functions three-dimensionally:

Oui, le Livre ou cette monographic qu'il de
vient d'un type (superposition des pages

comme un coffret, defendant contre le brutal
espace une delicatesse reployee infinie et in

time de l'etre en soi-meme) suffit avec maints
proc^des si neufs analogues en rarefaction a

ce qua de subtil la vie. (CEuvres [1945] 318)
Yes, the Book or this monograph [y] of a type
that it becomes (stack of pages like a case, de
that subtends writing. Benjamin writes of

"rune and knot notation," suggesting forms
of "picture writing" ("Bilderschrift"), espe
cially a new dynamic kind he calls a "moving
script" ("Wandelschrift"): "With the founda
tion of an international moving script they
[the poets] will renew their authority in the
life of peoples, and find a role awaiting them
in comparison to which all the innovative
fending against the brutal space a folded-up, in
aspirations of rhetoric will reveal themselves
finite, and intimate gentleness of being [with] in
as antiquated daydreams" (77). This passage

is close to the reading of Mallarme proposed
by Ranciere (see also Miriam Hansen 63).
Prophesizing Wandelschrift as a new poetic
writing where kinetics overtakes rhetoric?
on the very page where he mentions also Un
coup de des?Benjamin appears to draw from
Mallarme's cinepoetics while strategically
itself) suffices with many brand-new devices

analogous in rarefaction to the subtlety of life.
The Book's voluminosity manifests itself as a

kind of virtual gestural motion in an exoskele
tal "coffret" 'case' protecting a sentience specif
ically winglike, as denotes the root -ployer. The
Book has an animate soul whose "gentleness"

and "intimate" character have the "subtlety of
life." More animal or gestural than Benjamin's
Rolodex, Mallarme's Book in "Le mystere dans
les lettres" becomes in Le Livre a more me
chanical "meuble de laque" 'lacquered chest'
with "casiers" 'slots,' publicly composing and
decomposing the volume of the book under
"la lampe electrique unique" 'a single electri
cal lamp,' "la double seance ... ayant montre
l'identite de ce volume avec / lui-meme" 'the
twin performance ... having shown the iden
tity of the volume / with itself (CEuvres [1998]
617-19 ["Livre" 192-95]). Among the "brand

new devices" capable of folding up the "sub
tlety of life," there is of course the amazingly
compact wood-frame Lumiere camera?the

size of a coffret or easier or thick volume (10 x
10 x 6 in.). As for Benjamin's flip-books, they

too intersect cinema, like the 1894 La danse
serpentine de Lo'ie Fuller, containing seventy

hand-colored cells, or the 1895 Lumiere film
distancing himself from it.

The other critic who appears to have rec
ognized and avoided Mallarme's cinepoetics

is Derrida. Not only does his essay "La double
seance" cite practically all the kinesthetic

passages in Mallarme, it also reproduces in a
footnote Mallarme's full statement on cinema,
without directly commenting on it (257n20).

Derrida, a precise metaphorist, qualifies the
balletic passage of the dancer who "unfolds
our conviction" as a "cinematographique

voltige" 'cinematographic acrobatics' (294). In
"La double seance," Derrida deconstructs Mal
larme's Le Livre and Philippe Sollers's Nom
bres, by reading their difference as reciprocal
inscriptions. Mallarme also provides the ap

paratus of mobile spacing (espacement) that
illustrates Derrida's main thesis: to represent
nature (mimesis), the poetic or philosophical
Book must solicit nature's powers (physis),
thereby supplementing and fictionalizing
La danse serpentine (no. 765), with seven
nature (70). What separates Derrida's dyadic
hundred paper-printed frames mounted on a
differance?dyadic as both a spacing and a
metal core (Lista 638-39).
timing?from Mallarme's cinepoetic deroule

ment, which also operates both in space and
For Benjamin as for Mallarme, such in

dustrially derived devices have the potential
to reconnect modernity to the mimetic force
in time, is the place of technology. While Mal
larme opens the figural to a technologically
mediated principle, deroulement, to create a
during and after the 1920s. Cinepoetic exper
form (Un coup de des) ostensibly mimicking

nature more closely,32 Derrida's espacement
evacuates the technological the better to show
imentation has a second?equally unstudied

and varied?flowering in France and French
the irreducible play of textual relations. What
lying the poststructural textual revolution.35
from 1947 to the late 1970s, critically under
is left out?and leaves cinepoetics out?of
Cinepoetic experimentation alters cur
writing is the new prediscursive materiality
rent genealogies of avant-garde movements
of technologized experience.33
Benjamin's meditations on Mallarme and
in French poetry and aesthetic theory. For in

stance, one of the main theoreticians of cine
Wandelschrift took place around 1928-29,
poetics, Epstein?a writer, philosopher, and
during the massive adoption of synchronous

sound by commercial cinema. In a turn not
avant-garde filmmaker who apprenticed with
unique in his oeuvre, Benjamin thus an

nounced a cinematic future for poetry at the
very moment that, in large part because of

the arrival of the talkies, French cinepoetic
practices receded. Coining the term cine

poeme in 1928, the Romanian poet, philos
opher, and filmmaker Benjamin Fondane
transformed cinepoetry into a virtual genre
with the invitation "ouvrons done l'ere des
scenarii intournables" 'let us open the era of
unfilmable scenarios' (19; see also Janicot).
Still, between Mallarme's death (1898) and

the end of mainstream silent films (1929),
French experimental poets explored cinepo
Abel Gance and trained Luis Bufiuel?might

be compared with Tristan Tzara and Andre
Breton. Epstein propounded a nondadaist,
nonsurrealist filmic poetics reflecting the
practices of a number of French and Euro
pean poet experimenters, including all the
major surrealist dissidents.36 Cinepoetic ex
perimentation calls into question the reduc
tion and canonization of a variety of oeuvres,
poems and aesthetic events into homogeneous
movements with stars. As Anna Boschetti,

Etienne-Alain Hubert (287-90), and Willard
Bohn (129-39) have recently documented,
Apollinaire and Breton were strategic reduc
ers of poetry's manifold trends. In November
etic aesthetics en masse, probably so long as
1917, Apollinaire delivered his lecture "L'esprit
the possibility of the adaptation of their texts
nouveau et les poetes" 'The New Spirit and
to nondramatic or nonnarrative cinema was
Poets' (CEuvres 943-54), the first manifesto
not foreclosed. Blaise Cendrars, Guillaume
explicitly enjoining poets to utilize cinema as

the most promising new medium among the
"nouveaux moyens d'expression qui ajoutent
a l'art le mouvement" 'new means of expres
Apollinaire, Pierre Albert-Birot, Jean Coc

teau, Pierre Reverdy, Ivan Goll, Philippe Sou
pault, Louis Aragon, Saint-Pol-Roux, Henri

Michaux, Benjamin Peret, Antonin Artaud,
Robert Desnos, Benjamin Fondane, Jules
Romains, Irene Hillel-Erlanger, Romain Rol
land?each wrote at least one poem-scenario,
filmic poem, or cinematic text between 1917
and 1928. Only two of these works were ever
filmed: Artaud's La coquille et le clergyman,
sion adding motion to art' in order to create

"le livre vu et entendu de l'avenir" 'the seeable
and hearable book of the future' (954, 945).

This goal is precisely what Wandelschrift was
meant to incarnate, yet when citing this lec
ture in his 1929 text "Surrealism: The Last
directed by Germaine Dulac, and Desnos's
Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,"

Benjamin (then close to surrealist circles)
Vetoile de mer, directed by Man Ray, both in
cuts the citation short to omit any reference
1927.34 Better known is the fact that Cendrars,
to cinema (184). After this lecture, Breton
Fondane, Cocteau, Artaud, Jean Epstein, and

Prevert collaborated on or directed movies
distanced himself theoretically from Apol

linaire, displeased by Apollinaire's wartime

Germanophobia and frowning on techno
philic experimentation as necessarily tainted
by the culture industry. In 1929 Breton com
mended Bunuel and Salvador Dali's Un chien
andalou, and he himself worked on a sce

nario from Les diaboliques, by Jules Barbey
d'Aurevilly (Prieur and Morel 117). Breton's
extraordinarily contested relation to cinema
has certainly contributed to the occultation
of post-Apollinaire cinepoetics.37
Cinepoetry as an interartistic field cen
tral to poetry avant-gardism?from Mallarme
through unanimism, surrealism, lettrism,
and COBRA to the Situationist International
and Tel quel, and not limited to French litera
ture38?confronts recent critical notions such
as multimedia, the posthuman, and the virtual,
with linkage to over a century of experimenta

tion in writing. A strong case for cinepoetry's
conversancy in and especially lucidity about
media technology can be made, since Mal

larme, as pioneering cinepoet, warned that
one "does not with impunity come close to a
mechanism and get involved with it without
some loss." This media savviness of experi

mental cinepoetry may enrich and demar
ginalize poetry studies in an era increasingly
and understandably shaped by visual culture.
2 Blanchot sees Mallarme's virtual syntax in Un coup

de des as going against the 'logic of subordination' (346).
See also Bowie (5,142) and Richard (22).

3 The posthuman is an episteme privileging informa
tion over substrate, prosthesis over embodiment, and me
chanical simulation over consciousness (Hayles, How 2-3,

160-91). In May 1896, Mallarme suggested that the bicycle
disorders gender (pants giving female bicyclists "un sexe
douteux" 'a dubious gender') and humanness: "l'etre hu

main n'approche pas impunement d'un mecanisme et ne
s'y mele pas sans perte" 'the human being does not with
impunity come close to a mechanism and get involved
with it without some loss' (Mondor, Autres precisions

214). In March 1897, Robert de Souza countered accusa
tions against Mallarme's "syntaxe personnelle" 'personal
syntax' by arguing that the poet must make "une impro
visation incessante" 'incessant improvisation' against

"des moyens mecaniques (machines a ecrire, etc.), des
necessites de communications rapides (telegraphe, tele
phone, etc...)" 'mechanical media (typewriter, etc.), rapid
communication needs (telegraph, telephone, etc.),' which
threaten to transform language into "un phenomene me
canique" 'a mechanical phenomenon' (Marchal 441).

4 Mallarme's three homages to Verlaine taken together
point tantalizingly to a future of humanity that, if not
posthuman, at least links Verlaine's posterity to changes
in vision and motion: "humaine figure souveraine" 'sover
eign human figure,' "son genie enfui au temps futur" 'his

genius having fled to the future' (CEuvres [1945] 510-11;
9 Jan. 1896); "que la bise le roule" 'may the wind roll him,'
"l'astre muri des lendemains / Dont un scintillement ar
gentera la foule" 'the ripened star of tomorrows / Whose

silver flickering will tint the crowd' (71; Jan. 1897).
5 Kittler rightly points out (152) that Mallarme (CEu
vres [1945] 880) describes the automobile as a moving

optical device, announcing the dolly shot in cinema.
6 Kahn's 1897 "Essai sur le vers libre," inspired by Mal
larme, invoked one's "rythme propre et individuel" 'own
Notes
Suzanne Guerlac's 2001 seminar "Poetic Seeing" triggered
my first inklings about cinepoetry. I thank Guerlac, Ann
Smock, Michael Lucey, Ulysse Dutoit, Lynn Hejinian,

Julio Ramos, and the Townsend Center's reading group
Contemporary Poetry in French (all of the University of
California, Berkeley). My English and my thinking would
both have remained clunky without the attentiveness of

my wife, Margaret. Unless otherwise indicated, the En
glish translations in this essay are mine.
1 Max Skladanowski pioneered cinema in Berlin on

1 November 1895, showing a nine-film paying program
with his Bioskop camera-projector (Mannoni, Great

Art 457-58); the camera-projectors of Thomas Edison,
George William de Bedts, Georges Melies, and Georges
Demeny followed in early 1896.
and individual rhythm' as a truer unit than "le nombre

conventionnel du vers" 'the conventional quantity of a
verse' because it proceeds as "un arret simultane du sens
et du rythme sur toute la fraction organique du vers et de
la pensee" 'a simultaneous seizure by sense and rhythm of

the entire organic fraction of verse and thought' (26,28).
The fourth dimension links textual and cinematic

spaces: see Bohn 7-27 ("Probing the Fourth Dimension:
Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Weber"); Eisenstein

111-23 ("The Fourth Dimension in Cinema").
8 Radiation is injected directly in the "yeux fictifs"
'fictive eyes,' which shine with "le neant vivant" 'the live
void' (314). For the female body and the origin of cinema
in this novel, see Michelson.
9 Media scholars use remediation to refer to "the cy
cling of different media through one another" (Hayles,
Writing Machines 5). In 1914, with Francis Picabia,
Marvis de Zayas, and Alberto Savinio, Guillaume Apol

linaire planned a pantomime (A quelle heure un train
partira-t-il pour Paris?) with "un ecran ... lumineux" 'a
luminous screen' veiling the stage and film "projections"
shown against a "rideau" 'curtain' (6, 21).
19 Kittler's pioneering work uncovers rhizomatic links
among politics, technology, and modernist literature. His

study maps the development of the phonograph, cinema,
and the typewriter on Lacan's triad: phonograph = real,

film = imaginary, typewriter = symbolic (16, 119). Al
10 The first report of the Cinematographe in Le Figaro,
though Kittler makes a surprisingly strong case overall,
in Huret's column (11 Feb. 1896), is ex post facto: "Don
he places excessive torque on details. Filtering Mallarme's
ner la liste des notabilites qui se sont extasiees devant

l'invention de MM. Lumiere est impossible, autant re
produce le Tout-Paris" 'Giving the list of society figures
who have been astonished by the Lumieres' invention
is impossible: it would amount to reciting Paris's who's
who' ("Concerts"). Other reports followed on 23 Febru
ary, 6 March, 15 March, 22 March, 31 March, and so on.
11 Mannoni, Great Art 466. In May 1897, Paul Nadar
demonstrated his camera to the Musee Grevin board,

which deemed it too noisy (Meusy 48, 74).
12 A movie theater, the Pirou-Normandin, opened in
mid-1896 at 86, rue de Clichy (Meusy 530), across place

Clichy from Mallarme's house, at 87, rue de Rome (Mal
larme, CEuvres [1945] xxiv).
13 The Cosmopolis editorial notes on Un coup de des are
reproduced in Berr and Mallarme, CEuvres (1998) 392.
14 Correspondance 9: 159-60, 173, 233. Remy de
technological acumen through Lacan's scheme, Kittler

deems Mallarme a "letter fetishist" whose "only 'innova
tion' was that for the first time, the empty spaces between
words or letters were granted typographical 'weight'?

typewriter poetics" (80), a reductive statement Kittler
qualifies by adding that Mallarme was aware of the ar
bitrary signifier in a way similar to Freud's hermeneu
tics of latency in the manifest text (90). While astutely
noting that Mallarme views the automobile as a mov

ing optical device (152), Kittler is intent on making him
fit the typewriter-symbolic order. Thus, in the section
"Typewriter," Mallarme's "elocutionary disappearance
of the poet" is cited in support of the modern subject's
inscription into the symbolic order of information (228).
A page later, Kittler writes of "Mallarme's 'Coup de des'
and Apollinaire's 'Calligrammes,' those typographical

poems that attempt to bring writers on par with film and
15 CEuvres (1945) 878. This statement was originally
phonography ..." (229), but the references are to Apol

linaire's 1917 manifesto and to Walter J. Ong, and the
allusion to Mallarme remains frustratingly unelucidated
(279nl20). While Kittler seems to intuit Mallarme's cine
published in January 1898 in the Mercure de France (Ibels
poetics, like Benjamin and Derrida before him he stops
110). Both sources have "remplacez la photographie" in
short of thematizing or theorizing it as such.
Gourmont wrote the first literary essay on cinema at this
occasion.
cure typesetter was corrected with the publication of the
20 On Zeno's paradox, see Doane 172-205; on visuo

motor perception in film viewing, see Hochberg and
original letter (Mallarme, Correspondance 9: 236). Ortel
Brooks. For Bergson and cinema, see Deleuze, esp. 1-11.
is the only critic I know to have commented on Mallar

me's (uncorrected) statement on cinema (137-39).
16 Ibels indicates that "le Livre aura meme du relief
21 See Frizot for the human gait in the cinematic ap

paratus. Hubert points out that Apollinaire and Breton
metaphorized the shift to a new literature as that from
leg to wheel.
22 For Fuller's contested rapport with her body as a
lesbian, see Lista 53, 296, 300-02.
stead of "employez la photographie." This typo by the Mer
au stereoscope" 'the Book will even have stereoscopic re

lief (100). Readers of the Mercure were likely to identify
Ibels's Book with Mallarme's "Livre," which is similarly
capitalized in the text (but admittedly not the title) of
"Quant au livre" 'Regarding the Book,' published in the

1896 Divagations {CEuvres [1945] 372-73). Finally, Mal
larme in fact used photography "with" text when he
23 Carroll emphasizes spectatorial activity, citing Ei

senstein's statement that with montage "the spectator is
drawn into a creative act of a kind in which his individual
nature is not only not enslaved to the individuality of the
authorized the photolithographic reproduction of his
author but is deployed to the full by a fusion with the au
handwritten manuscripts for the 1887 limited edition Les
thor's purpose ..." (145).
poesies de Stephane Mallarme {"Livre" 20).

17 In 1923 Jean Cocteau wrote, "Le cinematographe
devrait derouler une psychologie sans texte. J'essaye,
avec Thomas, de derouler un texte sans psychologie ..."
'Cinema should unfold as a psychology without text. I try
with Thomas [the novel Thomas I'imposteur] to unfold a
text without psychology...' (10).
24 In "La machine a gloire" 'The Glory Machine,' dedi
cated to Mallarme, Villiers invents "une pure machine

proposee comme moyen d'atteindre, infailliblement, un but
purement intellectueFla pure machine proposed as a means

to attain infallibly a purely intellectualgoaV (Contes 104).
25 See Mallarme, "Livre" 151 for dates and 46-107 for
the "physics" of the Book's performance.
forces, cinematic devices, and somatic bodies, see Didi
26 Filmic "seance" contrasts with live theater "repre

sentation" (Rittaud-Hutinet and Rittaud-Hutinet 350).
Huberman; Gordon; Kittler; Massumi; Rutsky; Sicard;

and Singer.
27 Richard summarizes Mallarmean light as "modes

d'apparition de la clarte ... qui... visent a installer sur
18 On epistemological intersections of artificial

les aires visibles de l'objet la danse d'une lumiere insta
ble" 'modes of apparition of brightness ... that... aim at
installing on the visible surfaces of the object the dance
tian Dotremont, Nelly Kaplan, Raymond Queneau, Mau

rice Roche, Danielle Collobert, Jacques Roubaud, Max
Jeanne, Franketienne, Marcel Marien. In 1977 Jean-Marie
Straub and Daniele Huillet adapted Un coup de des as
of an unstable lighting" (482). For Wagner, see Crary

233-34. For Fuller, see Lista 156-59,259; McCarren 157
Toute revolution est un coup de des (Byg 18-19, 296).
59; and Iampolski. For Mallarme and electricity, which

Richard mentions reluctantly (521), see Ranciere 82-83.
vey. For selected writings by Epstein, see Epstein, Ecrits
28 Meusy 42. The hand-painted film used in the show
was rediscovered in 1996 (Mannoni, "Une feerie"). Le Fi

garo mentions that some of the show's thirty-two tableaus
are "transformations"?i.e., films (Fouquier).

29 Self-erasure appears in an 1897 passage of Mallar
me's on viewing inane spectacles for "le charme peut

etre inconnu, en litterature, d'eteindre strictement une
a une toute vue qui eclaterait avec purete; ainsi que de

raturer jusqu'a de certains mots ..." 'the charm, perhaps
unknown in literature, of extinguishing strictly one by
36 For recent introductions to Epstein, see Moore; Tur
and Poesie; in English, see Abel, "Exploring" and French

Film Theory. For amnesia about Epstein, see Ray 3-12.
Epstein's key cinepoetic work is La poesie d'aujourd'hui:
Un nouvel etat d'intelligence 'The Poetry of Today: A New
State of Intelligence' (1921).

37 See Polizzotti 44, 49, 69, 151; Breton's 1951 state
ment "Comme dans un bois" (trans, as "As in a Wood");

Virmaux and Virmaux 12-95; Abel, "Exploring."
38 See McCabe; Prado Feliu; and Siissekind for Anglo
American, Spanish, and Brazilian literatures, respectively.
one any sight that would burst out with purity; much like
crossing out certain words ...' {CEuvres [1945] 298,1562).
It is tempting to read the word "vue"?the industry's

term for a single-shot film?as evidence that Mallarme
sneaked visits to the Pirou-Normandin.
30 The four-year seances at one franc per page per seat
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Mallarm's Cinepoetics: The Poem Uncoiled by the Cinmatographe, 1893-98

Author(s): Christophe Wall-Romana

Mallarme's Cinepoetics: The Poem Uncoiled

ON 28 DECEMBER 1895, THE LUMIERE CINEMATOGRAPHE

A journalist taken by black-and-white footage of "[la] mer ... si re

(Rittaud-Hutinet and Rittaud-Hutinet 350). Georges Melies and two

A month later, on 27 January 1896, seemingly unconnected to

poetry: Unmaking and Remaking the

California, Berkeley. His work has ap

uary, leaving the honorific position of Prince of Poets vacant. Al

of Parisian poets to which they belonged decided?in support of the

peared in Le courrier du Centre Interna

tional d'Etudes Poetiques, Sites, Samuel

Dun geste, se concoit, a Theure?ou prestige materiel evanoui, helas!?

Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, and French

by John Berger, Norbert Wiener, and

image media and studies on French

en lumiere pure se resout le fantome humain, autrefois leve sur le pavois,

128 ? 2005 BY THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA

i2o.i Christophe Wall-Romana 129

The translation is approximate because Mal

configurations to allow for what he called

text, ironically in this case the electoral pro

he should "prevail"?is coextensive with the

the symbolists around Mallarme in 1895-96

Tolstoy, young Marcel Proust (a Mallarme ad

as elitist decadence, they loudly propounded

an optimistic and populist vitalism. Mal

itself; it is motion recorded in the quick'; "la

mort cessera d'etre absolue ... la vie laissera

"on reproduit la vie" 'life is reproduced,'

ema enacted modernity's resolve to embrace

or planned experimental poems as cinematic

reading performance using electrical projec

metaphor for the soul but a multiple formula

aside this absolutist myth, cogently debunked

While clearly pointing to the afterlife of Ver

and orphic summation of the world; the other

pure light is resolved the human ghost."

The "pure light," I argue, is not only a

laine, Mallarme also wants to speak more

engages the flowing present of desire in the

generally of the "human," a term that was

"mobility of its images" (Bersani 11), as in La

now in need of redefinition. The two jour

derniere mode, the fashion magazine written

nalists present at the 28 December inaugural

This dualism betrays not so much a highbrow

lowbrow dialectic as the quest for a capa

comprehension multiple" and a direct engage

exemplifies precinema for our purposes, since

ment with material experience. With the advent

her choreographic innovations play an im

of free verse in the mid-1880s, new rhythmic

portant role in Mallarme's theorizing poetry

ground the corporeal, spatial, and temporal

"Loie Fuller" and "New Thresholds"; Lista

formance, across page (2-D), folio (3-D), and

reading time (4-D).7 In his single reference to

Mallarme learned of cinema from an

cinema, Mallarme characterized this principle

1893 article about Thomas Edison's Kineto

page "Une visite chez Edison" 'Visiting Ed

pology for text and images.