
James writes ‘The installation of the filmmaker as a poet had, then, both theoretical and practical components. It bespeaks a cultural practice that, in being economically insignificant, remains economically unincorporated, and so retains the possibility of cultural resistance.’ Of Stan Brakhage, David E. James writes of the idea of the poet ‘In the modern world, poet designates a preferred medium but the word also implies a mode of social (un)insertion. James and Sarah Neely are two academics who have sought to explore the relationship between poetry and film. Peterson said, "The viewer's cycles of anticipation and satisfaction derive primarily from the film's intrinsic structure." The film-poems are personal as well as private: "Many film poems document intimate moments of the filmmaker's life." ĭavid E. They are "an open, unpredictable experience" due to eschewing extrinsic expectations based on commercial films. Film-poems are considered "personal films" and are seen "as autonomous, standing apart from traditions and genres". By the 1990s, the avant-garde cinema encompassed the term "film-poem" in addition to different strains of filmmaking. James Peterson in Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order said, "In practice, the film poem label was primarily an emblem of the avant-garde's difference from the commercial narrative film." Peterson reported that in the 1950s, overviews of avant-garde films "generally identified two genres: the film poem and the graphic cinema". During this time, the relationship between film and poetry was debated. The film-poem (also called the poetic avant-garde film, verse-film or verse-documentary or film poem without the hyphen) is a label first applied to American avant-garde films released after World War II.
